Woe to the avant-gardes who are followed by the masses.
The key terms ‘boredom’, ‘hothouse existence’ and ‘psychopolitical rearrangement’ of the part of humanity possessing spending power require additional explanations. They must begin from the observation that among the populations of the comfort sphere, a far-reaching shift is currently taking place from conventional thinking in terms of need and lack to a largely unaccustomed thinking in options.1 The significance of this transition goes far beyond what can be expressed by a phrase such as ‘change of mentality’. These collectives have experienced such a deep caesura that one could be tempted to articulate their meaning with recourse to an exuberant philosophical concept: the realm of necessity, it would seem, has given way to the realm of freedom, however numerous the partisans of necessity who doggedly resist the altered conditions from an underground of old and new conservatism. These include romantic and religious temperaments who react with outrage to the discovery that banality and freedom are converging – which is not how the goal of human endeavour had been envisaged. Indeed, after the shift, weak reasons such as mere moods and personal taste must take over the role of strong reasons, previously embodied by commanding need and its translation into figures of the fundamental, the dominant, the glorious and the inescapable. In a world defined by means of relief, the old imperatives are losing their justifications. Where there was necessity, there can now be mood.
The theoretical reconstruction of the great turn is made easier by the fact that the idolatry of labour which dominated throughout modernity – economically, physically and psychologically – was sufficiently eroded by the postmodernization of consciousness to give a clearer view of living conditions in our poly-dimensionally relieved ‘society’. Now we can calmly retrace the outlines of existential sensibilities in the post-necessitary space, without fear of any significant distortion of the picture through the propaganda of the parties representing need and seriousness. This situation is unmistakably characterized by a historically singular wave of pampering that includes the great majority of populations from zones of affluence in its increases.
Reference to pampering does not, of course, imply any concessions to conservative pedagogy, which clings stubbornly to the view that humans always depend on being led by a firm hand. Pampering, as a term from historical anthropology, denotes the psychophysical and semantic reflexes of the relieving process that was inherent in the civilizatory process from the start, but could only become fully visible in the age of a radical de-scarcification of goods. In the light of these assumptions (which further develop some of Louis Bolk's and Arnold Gehlen's insights), it can be made clear that the experiment of the modern economic and welfare state constituted a leap in the pampering history of Homo sapiens – a leap that opened up an enormously expanded space of existential opportunities for all those who participated in it. For the sake of caution, it should be noted that the anthropologically oriented theory of pampering does not aim for a reversal of relieving effects enabled by civilization; it seeks to optimize the ability for cultural navigation among the subjects of pampering in their hazardous and largely uncomprehended milieu by offering conceptual orientations for existence in heavily relief-defined situations.
The psychosemantic consequences of the stay in the comfort ether of the great hothouse are concisely expressed in the term ‘boredom’ as expounded by Dostoyevsky and Heidegger. Its nebulous omnipresence shows the mood reflex of an existence that finds constant peace, constant sustenance and constant entertainment in its milieu – though an opposing constant agitation provides a certain balance with themes of stress and competition that tonicize the collective. Even if traditional milieus of socio-critical radicalism cultivate Gothic disaster theories which focus the view immovably on past and present scenes of violence and lack, the pampering tendency is undoubtedly ahead of re-burdening efforts. The effective powers of pampering form an immersion space that calibrates its inhabitants with the atmospheric dictates of a fundamentally advanced existential assurance.
In this space of generalized relief the discovery of stress phenomena was inevitable, as the formulation of a general concept of stress only became possible once the complementary concept of relief had been established in theory and practice. Against the background of the relieving tendency, stress took on the degree of conspicuousness that is indispensable for both the development of a new level of sensitization and the growth of an explicit theory. Because stress constitutes the disappointment of an expectation of relief, its explication belongs to the workload of a theoretical engagement with living conditions in the crystal palace. Diffuse boredom on the one hand and aspecific stress on the other are the atmospheric universals of hothouse existence. Just as boredom means relief as such, relief sans phrase, so too stress means irritation as such, irritation sans phrase. These two fundamentals of existence in the crystal palace create a chronically ambivalent atmosphere in which the alarm and the all-clear are in constant alternation. Irritations are perceived as stressory figures against a foundation of relief; they all have the form of re-burdenings that counteract a tendency towards relief. Means of relief, in turn, all take the form of stress-reducing measures. Once this is accepted, it is not difficult to show how, after the establishment of the relief system, stress too enters the age of its artificial production.
An architectural image can assist in grasping the new conditions: the interior of the postmodern crystal palace contains an elevator that transports residents to the five expansively constructed floors of relief. Naturally, one should not assume that all passengers are able to alight on whatever floor they like and make use of its specific offers. As significant numbers of beneficiaries are currently present on each level, however, knowledge of the pampering that is possible elsewhere affects all other palace-dwellers. In time, most palace-dwellers walk through all the floors, though they do not all have the same experiences. The first floor is for those who have succeeded in partially or completely fulfilling the dream of income without performance; the second is frequented by an audience of relaxed citizens who profit from political security without themselves having any readiness to fight; the third is where those meet who participate in general provisions of immunity without having their own history of suffering; on the fourth, consumers of a knowledge whose acquisition requires no experience spread themselves out; and on the fifth one finds those who, through direct publication of their own person, have succeeded in becoming famous without presenting any achievement or publishing any work.
We enter the first level of the pampering space when we examine a value aspect of money that is virtually absent from conventional theories of money. I shall call it the ‘pampering value’, thus referring to two related, albeit clearly distinct phenomena. Both are overlooked if one cannot break with the prejudice that money is a fundamentally scarce commodity and its lack is synonymous with material need. The first aspect of the pampering value of money manifests itself as the fact that the world of objects, in so far as they can be purchased, has become accessible and available to a historically unprecedented degree. By its nature, spending power facilitates access to all commodity-shaped things, and thus has the quasi-magical merit of opening the gate to the world with a gentle movement. The contemporary semantic content of the action we call ‘buying’ can only be adequately articulated if one takes into account the pampering value of the fundamentally facilitated access to objects. This facilitation, furthermore, comes from the modern transport system, where the universal agent of relief and pampering – petroleum – celebrates one of its most important successes. Thanks to greatly cheapened transport services, the ubiquity of commodities in the vicinity of buyers is ensured almost everywhere. Thus buying also means performing magic by monetary means; and performing magic in turn means – as shown elsewhere2 – achieving a surplus of effect in relation to cause. The response to this is the amazement of the audience at inexplicable, sudden effects. The amazement does not arise when such surpluses are to be expected and are produced at a constant rate – and the regularity of these effects is the secret of labour division and its market-based synthesis. The great majority of the crystal palace's residents profit from the magical context of the monetary sphere, which, through the immeasurable heightening of possible self-sustenance performance, equips each individual agent with an unprecedented wealth of options, summed up in the formula shopping and fucking – as long as they meet the requirement for residence in the space of affluence, namely the possession of spending power.
The pampering value of money manifests itself even more openly as soon as one examines the most fascinating view of modern money ownership: this is evident in great fortunes entirely based on chance acquisition. With a fortune of this kind, it is logical that its accumulation will not be in any measurable proportion to the efforts undertaken to amass it. Consequently, money is perceived here as the ultimate means of relief. To older ears, the word ‘millionaire’ still expresses something of the formerly widespread amazement that a single person can own more than an individual can ‘really’ ever earn – unless they draw on the numinous money source whose outflows have, since the start of the Modern Age, been termed ‘fortunes’. The greatest pampering value thus comes from undeserved possession of money in which the connection between personal performance and wealth seems completely severed. In such cases, there is no longer a path from what someone does to what someone has: the owning subject, whether as an heir, treasure-finder, fortunate stock exchange speculator or manager who awards himself gratuities of an undisguised looting character, profits from an absolutely disproportionate relief: one simply has it, and does not know how it happened.
It cannot be by chance that the inception of the capitalist economy in Western Europe coincided with the triumphal march of the modern economic fairy tale – the myth of the self-filling purse – through the imaginations of those people who were having their first experiences of the generalized use of money. In the central scene of Fortunatus, the chapbook that was published anonymously in Augsburg in 1509 and appeared in numerous editions over the centuries, Lady Luck gives the eponymous hero a purse that will contain forty gold pieces in the relevant currency whenever it is opened – a gift that leads to the endless stalking of its owner Fortunatus and his son until the latter finally withdraws to a monastery, having gained wisdom in the realization that possessions of this kind hold no blessings. This fable of value creation marks the beginning of a long series of fantasies dealing with nothing other than the vertical irruption of relief into effortful life; constantly moving with the fashions, technologies and zeitgeists, they continue into the present, where, thanks to their mass media reinforcement, they have climbed to excessive heights. With each new generation, they proclaim – under different auspices – the good news of the affluence that suddenly appears. A favourable marriage, a large inheritance, a miraculous business deal, an irresistible trick, a valuable piece of inside information, an unexpected bestseller, a successful patent, exaggeratedly high compensation, a gambling jackpot – in these forms and others, any given individual can encounter the great money-making event that catapults them out of their burdened existence and into a more relaxed climate.
The modern welfare state is based on the effect of replicating Fortunatus's purse on a grand scale as a treasury, though the conditions under which one can dip into it must be far more formal than in the fairy tale, where it was enough for the beneficiary to have lost his way in the right forest at the right time. The conditions under which the purse fills itself were likewise developed more soberly in the modern national economy – the fifth book of Adam Smith's Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) can still be considered a central source of state finance theory. This much is certain: the treasury can only carry out its primary functions of financing state tasks and ensuring the redistribution of income if it is connected to a successfully installed system of profits. The present condition of the great comfort hothouse indicates that there is a firm, albeit increasingly nervous bond between capital economy and public funds – with a public spending ratio of over 50 per cent of the national product, one does not have to look far to find the main winner of the game known as capitalism. Once this bond has become stable, the fairy-tale motif of the undeserved fortune can trickle into the most lowly of households and be consolidated as a formally approved claim. Whoever is in need must be given a hand by a legal Fortuna; whoever is not in need is free to dream of higher Fortunas. What Ernst Bloch called the principle of hope has been operationalized by the modern social state to the extent that the principle of relief ensured the elimination of emergencies throughout the system.
The establishment of the ‘social safety net’ provided the first level of the pampering space with a solid foundation. Consequently, the great majority of the population develops forms of partly atmospheric, partly material participation in any given manifestations of the motif of income without performance. It is against this background that the second universally effective pampering dimension can be discussed. One can still assume that the welfare system is based on procedures for eliminating economic emergency (specifically acute poverty and mortal danger through accidents). If the tendency to reject emergency is extended to foreign policy, the result is a shift of state activity from war preparation to conflict management. The psychopolitical consequence is the ‘pacifying’ transformation of mentalities in the comfort zone, with the explicit pacifism that became valid as a confession in the nineteenth century constituting a virtually obsolete intensification thereof.
The most visible trace of the change in mentality is the rapid disintegration of historical masculinity. The reason is clear enough: during the last fifty years, the social design of the ‘man’ became subject to overall relief from war. Specifically, it was liberated from the categorical prohibition on cowardice that applied in traditional cultures. As a result, the ‘new man’ established himself as a socio-psychological success figure in post-polemogenic culture – with the sole exception of the zone influenced by a military romanticism that continues to enjoy political support and mass media celebration in the imperial front nation on duty, the USA. The new man is the civilly relaxed man, that is to say the consumer in the genus masculinum. Where unease in relaxation appears,3 it is compensated for with symbolic gestures that provide suggestions for the production of designer masculinity. Thanks to such offers, those interested can buy back some of the more robust hallmarks of virility. In the light of this, it is easy to see how far the recently revived friction between pacifists and bellicists is a journalistic phenomenon. It receives further impetus through the politicization of neo-masculinist attitudes – for example, in the context of fighting terrorism and the deployment of Western intervention troops abroad. In truth, warmongering editorialists and young conservative essayists could not transform back into warriors even if they wanted to – warrior existences in the manner of older traditions are now only possible outside the great comfort zone. The authors of neo-realist battle discourses can at least remind us that even for the populations of the space of affluence, security cannot be had entirely for free. Warnings of such tendencies must be voiced whenever there is occasion to consider that the courage to be neutral does not solve all security questions.
In terms of the universal significance of its offers, the second level of the great relief system is every bit the equal of the first – not least because the far-reaching metamorphoses in gender relationships in the twentieth century, including feminism and homoeroticism, would have been unthinkable without the erosion of historical masculinity. This is ultimately responsible if that hallmark of pampering, the unthinking expectation of security without struggle, has infused almost every individual existence today, regardless of gender. The fact that these tendencies currently define the European state of relief from military obligations should be mentioned very explicitly, not least in public discourse, otherwise people will predictably fall prey to the hysteria that will spread once the memory of certain not fully evadable contributions made for the sake of one's own security suddenly re-enters the consciousness of the over-relieved.
On the third floor of the relief system, high security expectations are generalized and expanded to include disturbances and risks in private life such as accidents, illnesses, involvement in natural disasters and the like. This extension of individual security expectations reveals the pampering purpose of the insurance system, whose Modern Age-constituting significance we have already pointed out: insurances can be described as pragmatic immune systems whose function is to institutionalize measures against vaguely expectable, unwelcome burdens. Where hazardous practices generalize, there must be risk compensation procedures – that is why this field (leaving aside the deeply ironic life insurances) is dominated by automobile insurances. These systems must be understood in terms of their relief character, as they protect the insured from the imposition of preparing themselves individually to avoid or cope with unwelcome disturbances. Where the insurance and solidarity systems are as expansive as they are in the European wing of the crystal palace, one can expect a strong surge of frivolity, as thoroughly insured populations inevitably participate in the shift from individual caution to systemic caution – despite the cyclically recurring appeals from reform politicians of all stripes to the spirit of self-provision. The consequence of systemic caution is that individuals profit from expanded margins of immunity. Thus stabilized, anonymous care releases private carefreeness – a classic pampering effect. It should hardly be necessary to demonstrate how much this disposition is connected to the stepping-up of the capitalist markets from the consumption of goods to a consumerism of experiences and risks. In a complementary development, the services for processing accidents and instances of self-harm have ballooned into a multitude of variants unknown in any earlier social formation. They constitute a luxury sector in which one can study the main hallmark of wealth management in the great hothouse – the subjugation of the necessary by the superfluous – more clearly than anywhere else. The sociology of accidents and statistics for illness offers, for the time being, the best introduction to a theory of the present age. The concept of the ‘luxury of morbidity’, which serves this purpose, has been explained elsewhere.4
On the fourth level of the relief system, we address the pampering purpose of the new media. It must be shown how it sets the cognitive economy of relieved populations in motion. Just as the Gutenberg effect set off a strong wave of access facilitations in its time vis-à-vis written knowledge, the popularization of electronic media is currently tied to an unprecedented surge in the availabilization of any given content. It is no coincidence that the concept of information established itself at the same time as the new media. It was not until the age of media abstraction that the homogenization of knowledge, in the sense of uniformly shaped information, could reach technical perfection – via the transcendental-philosophical equalization of all content of consciousness, leading to ‘representations’ [Vorstellungen]. Just as post-Cartesian philosophy presupposed that the printed book and the subject were of the same age, contemporary thought makes the same assumption about information and users of electronic media.
The irruption of the new media into the comfort sphere is of eminent relevance to pampering – not only because they ensure that the so-called worldwide network also becomes practicable for individual users in simple technical routines, but more still because the use of digital media builds a fundamentally new relationship between the content and its users. The tendency is probably best described as externalization, provided one keeps the term free of moral value judgements. Externalization means that a lighter form of subjectivity, let us say the postmodern ‘user self’, is beginning to replace the more ponderous form of subjectivity, the ‘educated self’ of the Modern Age.
The technological turn relieves individuals of the impositions of the integral personality formation that exemplified existence in the universe of a knowledge that was read and transmitted through one's own life. The concept of education, which should by no means be taken merely for a German quirk, a luxury variety of apolitical inwardness, referred throughout the European Modern Age to the expectation that each individual should embody the living book of their own life history and reading history; it urged its addressees to hold together the sum of what, not without a certain pathos, they called their experience. However much the book itself constitutes a means of de-contextualization, it remains a model of collectedness as realized in the convergence of being a reader and being an individual. Such collectedness gave the educated individual of the bourgeois period existential weight, provided they distinguished themselves as the living depot of their experiential history.
It is precisely this gravitas of the education-oriented person that the wave of relief triggered by the new media opposes. Their pampering purpose becomes evident to the extent that reader subjectivity dissolves into user subjectivity. The user is the agent who no longer needs to become an educatedly formed subject, as they can ransom themselves from the burden of gathering experiences. The word ‘ransom’ refers to the relieving effect which homogeneous forms of content – items of information – grant their user as soon as they no longer need to be acquired through time-consuming training, but can simply be ‘retrieved’ after a brief introduction to the corresponding techniques. The user does not stop collecting – as they must do justice, in their way, to the cumulative quality of successive cognitive events – but what they collect are not experiences, in the sense of personally integrated, narratively and conceptually ordered complexes of knowledge; they are addresses where knowledge aggregates formed to varying extents can be found, should one wish to access them for whatever reason.
The decisive relieving effect in the cognitive realm, then, concerns what one could call the infrastructure costs of education. Whereas the ‘whole human being’ once had to set off to gain access to scattered, esoteric and expensive sources of education, it is now increasingly adequate to acquire efficient access techniques in order to bring the desired content to one's exact location. Easy fetching develops into a universally available anti-extraversion procedure that shoots down the principle of experience.5 While the subject of historical experience was necessarily a searching, indeed a living collecting point for experience, the current search engines and storage methods now give it a sign that it can rest from its time-honoured labours. The present gesture which expresses the transition into the post-experiential age most perfectly is that of downloading. It exemplifies liberation from the imposition of gathering experience. Accompanying it, a post-personal, post-literary, post-academic cognition regime casts its shadow ahead.
On the fifth floor of the great comfort system, we become aware of the pampering value of the medially constructed great public sphere, manifested in the inception of a new category of celebrities. With these, the question of why they are known or famous has become practically unanswerable. The traditional meritocracy, as we know, was based on the willingness of historical ‘societies’ to reward those members for outstanding achievements by taking them up into the small circle of fame. By granting its achievers a celebrity premium, it indirectly applauded its own willingness to achieve. Recently, with the establishment of self-referential media worlds in the interior of the crystal palace, a relieving effect has also become evident with the phenomenon of celebrity, severing the earlier connection between achievement and prestige. Ever more people in the comfort system have registered, whether atmospherically or pragmatically, the fact that being-in-the-media is an effective equivalent to the usual being-known-because-of-achievements, which could lead them to believe – and not without reason – that they are better off avoiding the detour of work and achievement and heading directly for the studios. The media act on this attraction of easy prominence, providing an increasing number of platforms on which non-achievers come into view. This opens up an incalculable market for methods of achievement evasion that can, however, usually be professionalized before long as secondary achievements. At the centre of the trend stands the figure of the presenter, who scales the heights of celebrity by introducing celebrities. The moment of truth about the medial pampering spiral comes when presenters present one another before a large audience; in such moments, they prove that the stock exchange of fame has also reached the level of derivative trading. The postmodern art system has reacted with its own means to the tendency towards relief from the imposition of creating a work, developing strategies to breed workless artistic fame. This approach is further popularized in mass culture until one arrives at a purely tautological form of celebrity. At their radiant events, all those meet who are known for being known for nothing in particular. Needless to say, a postmodern Fortuna no longer offers her protégé a purse full of gold, but rather the question of whether he would rather be an achiever or become groundlessly famous over night.
In view of the great pampering hothouse as a whole, one is inclined to wonder whether the boredom diagnoses of Dostoyevsky and Heidegger were not simply philosophically and psychologically coded prognoses of decadence. Nietzsche's synonymous vision of the last human being, in this light, would also be nothing other than the anticipation of the consumer who is unspeakably bored and brilliantly entertained at the same time. It consequently addressed the relieved and bored individual who, being equipped with the conveniences of the great capitalist interior, had sufficient resources to praise the attained condition as fulfilment. The concept of decadence would lose its conventional meaning if applied to the new pampering phenomena, however, as those currently pampered are simultaneously participants in ongoing fitness increases. The apparent decadence would then consist in the diligence of the relieved. Its leading figure would be the athlete who cultivates an absurd level of fitness during their period of high performance, usually sacrificing all other aspects of their ‘human potential’: to be considered the most diligent, they resort without hesitation to doping agents, as everyone else does the same, making doping inevitable in the interests of a level playing field. In such a situation, there is no need to ‘wait for the barbarians’, as was once the case in declining aristocratic cultures. When the new beneficiaries of relief take over control from their more civilized predecessors, they are identical to the encroaching barbarians. Conventional cultural criticism leads nowhere when confronted with such a situation. It is no great feat to observe that the inhabitants of the crystal palace are growing older, while symptoms of infantilization spread; it is unclear for the time being, however, how such tendencies are to be viewed. There will always be clever apologists for the last human beings who offer proof that they are not only not barbaric, but actually extremely civilized – albeit in a different register.
A far more urgent question is how, in the climate of irrefutable demands for a constant increase of relief, the periodically recurring imperative of re-burdening can be processed without political regressions. In reflections of this kind, one should take Mussolini's dictum that Fascism is a horror of the comfortable life as a reference value. This statement, never taken entirely seriously, is clear enough to elucidate the self-endangerment of the advanced comfort system through protest phenomena that romanticize burdening. The twentieth century amply demonstrated the crass acts to which a taste for the return to harsh realities can lead. If there is a specific risk among the beneficiaries of high relief levels, it can be identified as an inclination towards a second cruelty. This was examined in the discourses that diagnosed an inconceivable ‘regression to barbarism’ after 1918, and all the more so after 1945. Many like to overlook the fact that these were desired regressions. The chronic unease in culture is accompanied by an acutely erupting aversion to civilized restraint. Anyone wishing to protect themselves from uncontrolled re-burdening movements, from neo-heroism, neo-frugality and a politics of new harshness,6 should soon begin thinking about how to develop democracy-compatible concepts of burdening.