Spheres: Towards a Techno-Social Ontology of Place/s

Bubbles

The first book of the trilogy – micro spherology – is a phenomenology of intimacy and needs to be understood as a critique of the ‘individual’, i.e. the modern calculable space that is set before [vor-gestellt], in Heidegger’s words. Via the foetal situation [Befindlichkeit] in the womb, i.e. the mother/child relation, Sloterdijk develops this ‘first history’ as the anthropogenesis. The birth of the human grounds, i.e. is the possibility for, the macro spherology – the socio-political history of spheres. The primal dimensionality of interiority is ‘prior’ to exteriority – Being-in is prior to Being-in-the-world, as Heidegger already explicated in Being and Time. ⁵ This evolution is not entirely linear, but relative and necessary for the sake of explication.

Bubbles, i.e. ‘wombs’, are always a unity of (at least) two poles that form a resonance. This resonance is the ‘origin’ – radical openness – which does not constitute an object yet, but a pre-object, or ‘nobject’, as Sloterdijk develops via Thomas Macho (1998: 275–327; 2011: 269–321). It is an originary Being-with. Nobjects are small interior comings-towards-the-world, which cannot conceive of themselves as objects since they have no other/s to oppose to yet. The proximity to the other pole/s is only real if the ‘relation’ to it/them is negated. The first ‘where’ has no walls; no present-at-hand [Vor-handenes] is ‘here’ yet. Nobjects are simply a form [Art] of non-duality and hence ‘in-ek-sistent’.

By aiming to ‘take depth psychology even deeper’, Sloterdijk develops a ‘negative gynaecology’ with the help of Macho’s theory of pre-objective psychosomatic mediality, as a critique of Sigmund Freud. In a pre-objective universe, no mirroring, narcissism or libidinal desires can occur as yet.

A gynaecology is negative or philosophical if it maintains a double renunciation: of the obvious possibility to look at the vulva from the outside and conceive it as an object (gynaecological and pornographic vulvograms); and of the temptation, never entirely out of date, to initiatively pass through the vulva again as gate to the interior world (para-metaphysics and mystical holism). […] [The female non-opening] is the non-thing experienced by every naturally born individual in a single sequence of events; it is the narrow primal something that only ‘exists’ once in an unrepeatable, dramatically extended scene. […] Thought as a medium, the birth canal or vulva convey the present experience that an impenetrable wall exists, which must at once also be an opening; the opening is a function of running against the wall. For the new arrival, the hopelessness of standing-before-the-wall turns directly into the compulsion to break through the wall. As nobject, the vulva is the mother of granite. At the moment of struggle, it is evidently impossible to penetrate the wall, but by nonetheless passing through it somehow, in extremis, the initiate who exits experiences himself as the harder stone, the stone that breaks stone. For most of the born, being born means to triumph over a wall. (1998: 307–8; 2011: 301–2) ⁶

Thus, in contrast to ‘western’ metaphysical conceptions, ‘mother’ and ‘child’ for Sloterdijk are not ob-jects, but poles of a dynamic in-between that increasingly gains complexity with the child’s growing into a cultural system. The triadic character of this bipolar milieu can be explained as such (1998: 326; 2011: 319): 1 foetus – 2 (placental blood/mother’s blood) – 3 mother; 1 newborn – 2 (own voice/mother’s voice/mother’s milk) – 3 mother; 1 child – 2 (language/father/mother’s partner) – 3 mother. Coming-towards-the-world, i.e. the formation [Bildung] of the human, is thus not a movement from the ego to the ‘we’, but the decomposition of the archaic biune ‘we’ into the ego and its second element by simultaneously crystallizing out the third. Due to its mediality, biunity is always already triadic – a dyadic triad that is constantly reset, concretized and expanded in the course of history, i.e. the ‘revolution’ of being born is continuously repeated throughout life: it is a continuum of continuum and non-continuum.

This dynamic in-between, increasingly gaining complexity, Sloterdijk calls the ‘with’ – the living id; the virtual; the yonder-in-proximity. The ‘genius’ is the most silent some‘thing’ that, as soon as I want to locate it, withdraws itself. It enables infinite reconnaissance of proximity, i.e. of the first place, which is only mine – it is the ‘with-me’. In this sense, Sloterdijk sees devotion, i.e. going-outside-of-oneself, as the subject-forming act. In (post-)modernity, he argues, the ‘with’ has been lost due to the wide disappearance of cultural relations replacing it, i.e. remembering it, after birth (for example the abandonment of afterbirth rituals or the belief in God), leading to melancholia, individualism and totalitarianism. Without one’s genius, one cannot go outside of oneself anymore; one cannot become. All individuals now immediately become ‘mothers’ – we are living in an age of false alternatives where the only choice individuals seem to have is to either dwell solitarily or ‘to embark on potentially lethal power adventures in collective fusions with their peoples’ (1998: 388–9; 2011: 384). The solitary modern subject is the fission product of the formless separation of birth and afterbirth, rather than the product of its own choice: it is the ego without double. For Sloterdijk, modern individualism is placental nihilism (1998: 391; 2011: 387).

To sum up: Micro spheres are constituted by five structural moments: (1) the self (the ‘here’), (2) the with-self (the latent ‘yonder’), (3) the ‘container’ form in which the ‘here’-‘yonder’-field is embedded, (4) the a priori resonance between the two (or more) poles, i.e. the ecstasy in the interior of the bubble, and (5) the membrane functions:

The degree of [the membrane’s] opening decides over dehydration or flooding. If the companion’s membrane is not sufficiently porous to let through increasing volumes of world, it can develop into a prison of the subject […]. If however the companion is lost prematurely through a traumatic incident or remains indifferent or absent for a long time, the subject will suffer from an openness shock, tumbling ‘out’ into the bad ecstasy of the fear of destruction; it becomes acquainted with an exospheric outside in which it cannot bear itself. (1998: 447; 2011: 439–40) ⁸

Since bubbles live towards their bursting, one cannot talk about micro spheres without mentioning how new, bigger ones are being formed. When individuals-in-becoming leave their biune milieus, they step ‘out’ into multi-polar adult worlds. This emergence [Auf-bruch] into history Sloterdijk calls ‘world poeticization process’ [Weltdichtungsprozess], ⁹ which increasingly turns the outside, i.e. the other, into an extended interior. It bears the question of death.

Globes

In the second book of Spheres, Sloterdijk develops his macro spherology, which raises [auf-hebt], ¹⁰ the theory of intimate places, onto a theory of large places: cities, states, empires, religions, ‘worlds’. In the transition from micro to macro, the primal resonances of the bubble are increasingly becoming a subject, which puts itself into an ever more constructive relation with ‘the world’ by setting it before [vor-stellen] as picture. Sloterdijk here looks at theology, the political ontologies of (pre-/post-) modern empires and urbanization as well as a changing affect ecology and onto-semiology. Globes is mainly a history of globalization: from the cosmic globalization of ancient physics and the philosophical globalization of classic ontology, to terrestrial globalization, to cybernetic globalization.

In Globes, macro spheres are explicated as thanatological places, constituting the ‘next’ dimension in the maturation process of the human, which is a ‘serious’ process. As the individual is growing up, it has to learn to master death, i.e. deal with loss and open oneself up to the other. Strictly speaking, it has to ‘die’ into the other, to which it transfers its volume. The process of dying is thus at once a process of being born, by which the individual remembers, and in this way repeats, its first place, i.e. the primary ‘solidarity’ in the bubble. Spheres are inherently evolving through the ‘vaccination’ with death since only through death, i.e. finitization (of the infinite), can a place emerge and an individual be formed. By more or less opposing oneself against externals, the individual is increasingly taking a position.

In Globes, the ‘mausoleum of all-unitary thought’ (1999: 139; 2014: 133), Sloterdijk considers monospherism as the project of metaphysics – the geometricization, or ‘theometricization’, of the immeasurable. When, in Platonic times, mere surroundings started to be represented by the geometric globe, i.e. ‘world’ started to become graspable ‘idea’, human Being increasingly became the placing of spheres and knowledge became separated from ‘society’.

The true sky wants to be held in encompassing reflections. Its bearer or its ‘Gestell’ is thought itself. The logos has become accomplice, indeed authentic fundamentum of that which encompasses once it has grasped what encompasses us. The periéchon [that which encompasses] is the spirit whose lightness sets the gravity universe into levitation. (1999: 69; 2014: 66) ¹¹

From Sloterdijk’s point of view, what many people today call ‘globalization’ is a process that has been developing for a very long time: it is the history of the transition from a meditative speculation of the globe from ‘the outside’ to the practice of act-ually, immediately grasping it, i.e. the world is increasingly becoming ready-to-hand [zuhanden].

For it will be technology that becomes predominant when the bearer of the world puts down its image burden and conquers the world which is set before [vor-gestellt] and set down [ab-gestellt] through work [Bearbeitung] (Heidegger would formulate: when the what-lies-aground [Zugrunde-Liegende] is laid out as subject and the subject as what-dominates-over-it [Darüber-Herrschendes]). (1999: 85; 2014: 81/2) ¹²

In classic ontology, Being and fullness are the same: the complete; the enclosing; the overflowing; the unsevered. This universal über-object – nothing else than God; the origin; the primal form of all things which contains them; cause for itself and its contents – is the oldest; the most beautiful; the greatest, the wisest; the fastest; the heaviest; the most powerful; the optimum. It is the coherent that contains everything and is contained by nothing but itself, so that no other can be imagined outside. This centre has the ability to emanate into the infinite distance – i.e. it is immediately present everywhere. Thus, in order to ‘telecommunicate’ its power, the sovereign generates media out of itself that represent it as if they were the sovereign themselves – the logics of apostolicism and emperorism for example, and the reason why one encounters ‘the second’ before ‘the first’. The medium is the message: ‘Especially where [power] is absent, it has to be as if it was there in abundance’ (1999: 669; 2014: 640). For the centre to be omnipresent, the media representing it have to be as pure and neutral as possible, i.e. without ego, so that they can be immediately replaced by the subjectivity of the master – if the representatives were too self-referential, the power transmission would be disturbed. The signs of Being participate in Being itself, i.e. are representative and presentative at the same time.

Classic philosophy’s epicentrism means that even though humans are seen as being contained in the epicentre, they are not the epicentre themselves, but merely an opaque fragment of it: ‘episubjects’ are the local function of the global optimum. Humans thus already started to establish a conscious relation with God/Nature and therefore slowly started to become subjects.

Not only is this picture [of the sphaira] adequate to the original in the highest sense, it moreover draws the observer into the depicted [Dar-gestell-te]. The orb proves to be the dynamic true icon of being: for by informing and encompassing the observer, it starts to live in him as effective idea. It brings the human eye into the eccentric position that could seemingly only be a detached God’s own; consequently, it deifies the human intellect, which has grasped the rule of orb creation. (1999: 81; 2014: 78)

In the age of pre-modern empires (such as China, India and Greece, considered to be the birth places of philosophy), globes tried to expand themselves to the limit in order to widen their internal security and form themselves superior to the smaller ones – whereby the will to power had to correspond to the will to animate the entire sphere. The difference between interior and exterior thereby had a moral reason: it creates the separation of ‘good’ (interior/pure) and ‘evil’ (exterior/impure). The socio-ecological processes of (pre-)modern cultures were hence based on removing all evil from the interior and separating it from everything that was not themselves – homogenization is the concept of xenophobia. The main function of the empire is to explicitly make its walls visible and sensible in order to demonstrate its power – the dialectic of the border sets in: ‘stop’ or ‘transgress’.

The development of empires was simultaneously the development of macro architectures, in a literal sense: the city is a form [Art] of God. For Sloterdijk, early urbanization was the first instantiation of what was going to become the transcendental subject, which acts in a grasped, self-reigned world – the building of cities becomes a ‘way of revealing’, in Heidegger’s words. Sloterdijk here references examples such as Uruk (‘the first metropole of world history’), Babylon, Jerusalem, Nineveh (capital of the ancient Assyrian empire), Rome (including the Pantheon, Colosseum and St. Peter’s Basilica) and, later, Wyld’s Great Globe and the Russian Kinopanorama.

In the same vein, Sloterdijk explicates the development of empires in an ‘aroma-architectural’ way – i.e. the modernization process understood on the basis that different peoples proximately [zunächst] experience themselves as different odorates. The transition from the micro climates of living environments to the active political and juridical making of macro atmospheres has created the fundamental attunement [Stimmung] of a modern human ensemble, i.e. its (cultural) identity. Old local aromas were increasingly neutralized by the ‘hygiene revolution’ of the 18th century and later substituted by the mass media functioning as ‘transporters for symbolically coded secondary odours’ (1999: 349; 2014: 330). Playing on the relation between odour [Geruch] and rumour [Gerücht] – ‘rumour is the spoken odour’ (1999: 349; 2014: 330) – Sloterdijk characterizes the mass media as influential co-creators of the modern social synthesis, i.e. a ‘national informatic air conditioner that has to ensure the affective, thematic, toxic and in this sense domestic political self-ventilation of the large society’ (1999: 350; 2014: 330).

As Sloterdijk agrees with Heidegger, even though the ‘conquest of the world as picture [Bild]’ already started with the beginnings of metaphysics, the fundamental project of the modern age is based on ‘the formation [Ge-bild] of the setting-forth [Her-stellen] that sets before [vor-stellt]’ (in Sloterdijk, 1999: 822; 2014: 785), ¹³ characteristic of terrestrial globalization. In modernity ‘proper’, by further conceptualizing the figure of the globe, humans started to put themselves into an ever more constructive relation with ‘the world’ and occupied an increasingly specific place within it. As people now act-ually travelled and dis-covered [ent-deckten] the globe (horizontally), ‘the world’ started to be produced through the making of its image (main motif of terrestrial globalization for Sloterdijk: the atlas/map). The globe was now not just a figure standing before the observer anymore (symmetrical, ‘beautiful’ aesthetics), but became a strong relation between them, therefore increasingly breaking down the metaphysical divide – it is now a human pro-ject (asymmetrical, ‘ugly’/‘interesting’ aesthetics).

The sentence ‘God is dead’ signifies in the first place a morphological tragedy – the annihilation of the imaginarily satisfying, tangible immunity orb through inexorable infinitisation. Now God wholly becomes the intangible, dissimilar, formless – a monstrosity for the human ability to perceive, a non-container, an absolute hole and non-ground. Suddenly, one can no longer recognise the advantage of being in this God of infinity since the barrier between interior and exterior has fallen. (1999: 131–2; 2014: 125)

Foams

The third volume of Spheres is the plural spherology and aims, at the same time, to be a most intimate and most general theory of our current age. It conceives of globalization not as the globalization, but of globalization as an ‘enfoaming’. As such, Foams wants to deal with the (post-) modern ‘catastrophe’: the loss of the centre. Since human subjects have, throughout the evolution process, increasingly set forth [her-gestellt] ‘the world’ and therefore blown up globes to pieces, foams are now developing as ‘un-round’ formations constituting centres everywhere. In the technological epoch, ‘the whole’ cannot simply be set before [vor-gestellt] as a globe anymore – it has become nothing more than a ‘labile moment-synthesis of a swarming agglomeration’ (2004: 303; 2016: 281).

Foams are the merging of oppositional substances – the soft elements are penetrating the hard ones; the instable the stable; the cognitive the material; the hollow the dense. By borrowing a term from Gerhard Gamm (2000), Sloterdijk describes foams as ‘not-nothings’, i.e. form processes in which fragile bubbles are at the core. This fragility is not a deficiency, however, but a strength – the strength of being able to create spheres in (a) world/s continuously re-forming. Foams thus only keep a relative unity – ‘connected isolation’, as Sloterdijk references US architecture group Morphosis (1993). A new organization of density is created: a being-with-each-other-in-each-other-against-each-other. ‘Societies’ are now magnitudes that ‘can only be described through an appropriate analysis of extension, a topology, a dimension theory and a “network” analysis (if one prefers the net metaphor to that of foam)’ (2004: 298; 2016: 276). Foams is a theory of co-fragile, amorphous systems: a medial philosophy of place/s.

In this third epoch, enlightenment becomes ‘atmotechnology’: ‘As soon as air supply ceases to be an unproblematic premise of life processes and enters the technical stage […], air mixtures and atmospheres become objects of explicit productions’ (1999: 1008–10; 2014: 964–5). Now, even the ‘backgrounds’, i.e. bubbles, are (systematically) produced: shopping atmospheres, (gas/atomic) war environments, the weather, ¹⁶ administrative systems, the earth itself. Creativity has now become of prime importance since it opens up spheres, closes one off from the other/s and keeps local improvisations ‘in form’. Through creativity, foam cells are able to become foam cells, i.e. emancipate themselves into a singular. Foams are the matrices for the (‘auto’-)production of foams. Now, society ‘is its room temperature, it is the quality of its atmosphere; it is its depression, it is its clearing-up; it is its fragmentation into innumerable local micro climates’ (1999: 1011; 2014: 966). In this way, cultural studies has become not just a study of technics [Technikwissenschaft], but also a ‘curatorial practicum for the work in cultural hothouses’ (2004: 68; 2016: 65): an ‘interior design’. Knowledge is now the ability to explicate, i.e. the ability to ek-shibit.

In the age of foams, humans make their own ‘climates’, however not through their ‘free will’, but through the circumstances, i.e. places, they find themselves in. For Sloterdijk, the self-determination of spheres is more than what used to be considered politics. Spheres are set up through

common inhabitation within them. They are the first product of human co-operations; they form the insubstantial and yet most real result of a primal work that only takes place in resonances. Not the division of labour has advanced the process of civilisation, but the division of spheres; it is the primal vote of the community in itself and on itself. That is why political parties, indeed politics generally as focus of public interest, could exist in the first place […]. (1999: 1011/12, emphasis added; 2014: 1011) ¹⁷

In order to develop a theory of ‘atmotopic hothouses’, Sloterdijk revisits Robinson Crusoe and Deleuze’s conception of the ‘island’ (2004). While ‘mainland’ and ‘island’ are generally thought to have an asymmetric relation towards each other – ‘norm’ versus ‘exception’ – Sloterdijk argues that the exception is increasingly becoming the norm. In this way, he wants to overcome the dialectic of thesis and antithesis, and raise them up [auf-heben] to a synthesis. Through a spherological theory of islands, he aims to show the possibility of forming animated indoor spaces in the ‘monstrous’ [ungeheuren] exterior and how multiplicities of worlds amalgamate into ‘rhizomes of the sea’ (2004: 310; 2016: 288). ¹⁸

There are three forms [Arten] of islands: (a) absolute islands, (b) atmospheric islands and (c) anthropogenic (natural) islands.

a. Absolute islands, such as airplanes, space stations and even the earth itself, are the radicalization of the enclave formation principle. Here, the sea as isolator is replaced by other milieus, for example air or the vacuum. In contrast to natural and atmospheric islands, which are isolated only relatively, absolute islands are isolated completely – i.e. they are capsules. Absolute islands do not stay fixed in their environment, but navigate freely and flexibly therein, to a large extent. Here, complete insulation is only achieved when the environment is replaced, i.e. when the surrounding element of the relative island becomes the interior of the absolute island. The building of absolute islands is hence the inversion of dwelling. It is not about building a dwelling into an environment anymore, but installing an environment into a dwelling: ‘Being-in-the-world 2’. Since absolute islands have perfectly impermeable walls, as they navigate within an unliveable milieu for the beings that live on them, the creation of spheres does not work through suppression anymore, but through the implantation of an expanding body that has to carry itself alone. The absolute island is an immanence machine without a region: ‘In the vacuum, the bodies freed from all competition are exactly as big as their own will to expansion allows – and this will is identical with the building plan’ (2004: 319; 2016: 297). Since the condition of astronauts is almost 100% dependent on externalities, i.e. the technical ‘air supply systems’ on earth, explicated through the permanent ‘revolution’ of R&D initiatives, space stations represent the concept of ‘connected isolation’ in its purest form: opening and closing of the system coincide. Thus, for Sloterdijk, space travel is, ‘from the philosophical point of view, by far the most important undertaking of modernity since it demonstrates, like a generally relevant experiment about immanence, what the being-together of someone with someone and something in a commons [Gemeinsamen] means’ (2004: 333; 2016: 310).

b. Atmospheric islands are relative and replace natural islands through technical imitation. They are not located in the air or vacuum, but on the surface of the earth or water. Artificially floating islands suppress the surrounding seawater through implantation of a mass, which is achieved through semi-permeable walls that relatively separate the interior from its environment. In contrast to floating islands, earth-based islands mainly suppress air and, to a minor extent, also the root medium, i.e. flora and fauna. Earth-based islands form an enclave out of the surrounding air and stabilize a permanent atmospheric difference. This form [Art] of island is a rough definition of a house since houses, apart from functioning as shelters, workplaces, meeting rooms, etc., are also climate regulators. For Sloterdijk, the hothouse was the most important architectural innovation since antiquity, as the building of houses has since then become an explicit climate construction – a bio-cultural ‘revolution’. Atmospheric islands have become the ‘reality principle’ since they started to surround Nature, i.e. surround that which surrounds. As early visitors of London’s Crystal Palace ¹⁹ recalled: ‘There was something liberating about this enormous space. One felt secure in it and yet uninhibited. One lost consciousness of gravity, of one’s own bodily confinement’ (in Sloterdijk, 2004: 345; 2016: 322). By referring to Walter Benjamin, Sloterdijk describes ‘hothouses’ (i.e. modern arcades) as the historical projection of the primal interior – a paradoxical synthesis of intimacy and the public world of consumer goods (2004: 541, 628; 2016: 865, 586).

c. Anthropogenic islands are the places of human becoming, i.e. they explain how living beings become humans through a retroactive incubation effect. Since the hominization of monkeys was located in the African savannah, according to current paleontological research, Sloterdijk describes this region as the suppressed surrounding element of the anthropogenic islands nomadizing on it – the steppe is the sea out of which the human emerged. Insulation on anthropogenic islands does not just occur through emergence from an environment, however, but at the same time through group inclusion, i.e. differentiating self-enclosing. For Sloterdijk, the human act-uality [Tatsache] is derived from a spontaneous being-together of hominids with themselves and other beings, which creates a self-isolation effect, which in turn functions as the background of human becoming. Through their specific ways of dwelling, humans create their own places, which results in an ever-increasing hothouse effect. Primary anthropic hothouses – ‘ontological islands’ or ‘islands of Being’ – do not have physical walls and roofs yet, but only ‘walls of distance’ and ‘roofs of solidarity’, which become increasingly concretized, i.e. poeticized, throughout history. Anthropogenic islands are workshops of complex creations of place.

The insulation movements that space in and arrange merge into one another by means of manifold feedbacks, so that the human group sphere forms a cybernetic space from the outset. […] The human island is a space station that surrounds us as our first ‘lifeworld’. (2004: 361; 2016: 338)

Sloterdijk understands the anthropogenic island as a nine-dimensional sphere, a minimum complexity without which the place of the human cannot be sufficiently grasped. Each dimension thereby has a different tension of explication, including evolutionary history (2004: 362–490; 2016: 338–456): (1) the chirotope (zone of the ready-to-hand, in a more biological sense), (2) phonotope (topos of psycho-acoustic immune systems), (3) uterotope (world incubator referring to ‘woman’/‘mother’ in site-theoretical terms), (4) thermotope (sphere for the distribution of comfort and ‘pampering advantages’), (5) erototope (organization of desire), (6) ergotope (labour collective, where groups become communes through social responsibilities), (7) alethotope (republic of knowledge, i.e. ‘horizon’ of truth [alétheia]), (8) thanatotope (zone of death, i.e. search for the origin/‘home’ through lived life), and (9) the nomotope (province of the self-insulation of cultures through their normative constitutions). ²⁰

To conclude the theory of islands: The three forms [Arten] – absolute, atmospheric and anthropogenic islands – correlate to the three epochs (foams, globes, bubbles), whereby absolute and atmospheric islands are mere self-representations of the last, i.e. the first, in simplified modes. ‘From the ersatz form, one eventually grasps what the first form is about’ (2004: 316–17; 2016: 295). The anthropogenic island is the base from which the human appears as superstructure. Base and superstructure hence cannot be absolutely separated but, in a circular-causal way, the epiphenomenon of one dimension has to be seen as the basis of the other, and vice versa. The relation between explicit and implicit can only be grasped through explication.

In order to reformulate social theory into a theory of foams, Sloterdijk considers every cell of the anthropogenic island as a micro insulation that carries the complete (at least) nine-dimensional pattern in itself. This ‘multi-dimensional cellular sociology’ repeats Gabriel Tarde’s thesis that ‘chaque chose est une société’, however without simply seeing chaque chose and société as a collection of individual entities. Instead, Sloterdijk describes individuals and societies as collections of (at least) dyadic bubbles, whose elements are not individuals but poles that form strong relations with their other/s. In this way, every single formation spans into multi-dimensionality, i.e. every cell in the foam is a miniature version of the entire anthropotope. Thus, neither any collection of cells nor any single cell can ever be a homogenous figure, but only be a hybrid. Since humans perceive the inner tensions and blurring of multi-dimensionalities all at once, the value of implicit knowledge becomes clear. The transition into the manifest is normally pointless, as being located on the anthropogenic island necessarily includes a more or less developed ability to navigate the world through mere participation in it, ‘like most children inconspicuously grow into the complexities of the syntax of their mother tongue […]. Dasein means to understand the entire syntax of the anthropotope – to understand this understanding is another matter’ (2004: 499; 2016: 464). ²¹ Thus, most people content themselves with taking on conventional points of view – this shortfall of attaining the sapiens niveau, however, demands a theory of self-undercutting (2004: 500; 2016: 465).

The anthropo-topology of islands grounds Sloterdijk’s theory of (post-)modern foam architectures. For him, the simplest explanation for how human Being-in-the-world has changed throughout the 20th century is that it has made dwelling ek-splicit – i.e. Being(-in-the-world) becomes its own re-presentation. The ‘House of Nature’ has been deconstructed and transformed into multiplicities of foam explications. What Heidegger interpreted as the ‘homelessness’ of the industrialized world, Sloterdijk describes as the move from the natural milieu into designed places. Dwellings now have to be explicitly formulated as if they were relatives of the space station – i.e. as transitions from atmospheric towards absolute islands. As Vilém Flusser, a Jewish migrant, already stated in his Wohnung beziehen in der Heimatlosigkeit [Taking residence in homelessness] in Von der Freiheit des Migranten [Of the Freedom of the Migrant]:

One considers home [Heimat] as the relatively permanent place, the dwelling [Wohnung] as the exchangeable, relocatable one. The opposite is right: One can exchange home or not have one, but always has to dwell, regardless of where. (in Sloterdijk, 2004: 519; 2016: 485) ²²

Sloterdijk considers the most important architectural innovations of the 20th century as the apartment, on the one hand, and the sports stadium, on the other. The apartment is the architectonic analogon of the individual, i.e. the elementary egospherical form: ‘the studio flat with the single inhabitant as cell core of his private world bubble’ (2004: 573; 2016: 534). The single inhabitant must, however, not be understood as having no partner/s – the ‘non-symbiosis’ practised in the studio is actually an ‘auto’-symbiosis, whereby the form of the couple is fulfilled through the individual itself who self-differentially refers to its other/s, i.e. to its various sub-egos. This self-coupling is facilitated via contemporary media functioning as ego techniques, enabling the single soul to communicate with distant others. And only if these mechanisms are practised as routines, individualization [Vereinzelung] is not experienced as isolation [Vereinsamung].

The sports stadium, on the other hand, is a (post-)modern macro interior. As an ensemble, it explicates the symbiotic situation of the masses with a relative density of co-isolating ‘life conglomerates’ or ‘life alliances’ – a density which, for Sloterdijk, will always be higher than the one of the archipelago (insulated multiplicities) and lower than the one of ‘the mass’ (collective unity). ²³ By comparing the situation of the sports stadium to The Festival of the Federation of 14 July 1790 in Paris (one year after the storming of the Bastille), Sloterdijk explicates modern ‘mass’ culture as an event-staging which describes the relation between audience, spectacle and assembly container. With around 400,000 people congregating, the festival was the largest ‘mass’ event of European history since the Roman Circus Maximus. The modernity of this cult spectacle thereby consisted in its explicit formation of a ‘mass’ as architectonic, organizational and ritual-technical (later also assembly-judicial) task. Modern totalitarianism (e.g. Olympic Games, Russian Revolution, fascism, concert halls, airports, train stations, museums) has been spawned by the ‘mass’ performance, whereby the receptiveness of the mobilized ‘people’ is economized through staged illusions of a centre. The macro collector here functions as a psycho-political machine whose central sacrament is to produce winners (‘the first’) and not-winners (‘the rest’), while making the audience into witnesses of this division – with a ‘certain consideration for the runners-up, insofar as the process of civilisation obliges’ (2004: 635; 2016: 592). However, for the ‘mass’ spectacle to really become one, it is necessary for the collector to be synthesized with a connector – ‘be it as combination of bureaucracy and postal service, be it as print or broadcast mass medium, so that the fiction of the integral social synthesis through staged events becomes operative’ (2004: 644; 2016: 601).

In order to develop a culture of differentiated [aus-differenzierten] collectors, one would have to avoid the over-interpretation of ‘the mass’, which religious communities and nationalistic collectives, including their assembly ideologies, tend to subscribe to. ‘Society as a whole’, whether thought in the singular as world society or in the plural as the population of nation-states, is, in any case, a non-homogenous magnitude and can only be totalized medially and imaginarily. As the organization of political parties, clubs, associations, unions and so on shows, assembly is only possible periodically in order to represent unity: Everything is able to congregate, apart from the whole (2004: 652; 2016: 608). Hence, foam cities can only be understood as meta-collectors, which assemble places of assembly and non-assembly; centres and non-centres – not as a super centre, but as an agglomeration of discrete platial potencies. Meta-collectors do not collect individuals who are either assembled or isolated, but places through which people realize possibilities to assemble, co-operate and communicate – or not. Places are not wholes, but small singular versions of ‘the whole’. By rephrasing Marshall McLuhan: ‘The format is the message, the excerpt from the real is the real’ (2004: 742, my emphasis; 2016: 691).

Conclusion

This essay has presented a systematic reading of Peter Sloterdijk’s Spheres trilogy, conceived through the framework of place. By working through the three volumes – Bubbles, Globes and Foams – particular emphasis was placed on the plural spherology, which converges the former two in multi-dimensional forms. As mentioned earlier, I am now concluding with a critique of Spheres as (philosophical) anthropology, i.e. Sloterdijk’s limit on the place of the human. As he explains in the third volume, every foam cell is a multi-dimensional pattern that spans into the complexities of the whole anthropotope; at the same time, however, ‘the whole’ has become an impossible format and can only be understood as a hybrid. The anthropotope must hence also be an ‘impossible’ format, i.e. a hybrid, and needs to be seen in relation with other Being/s it is placed through, with, in and against. Of course, and this is one of the main arguments of Spheres, Sloterdijk already thinks in this way to a degree; however, in his media theory the singular ontology of the ‘technotope’, if one can call it that, has not been considered. Sloterdijk does not think enough how technics itself – historically and, to certain extents, autonomously – mediates (power) relations between humans and other Being/s. In the technological epoch, an anthropo-logy needs to be thought together with a techno-logy, as Bernard Stiegler (via Gilbert Simondon) has already pointed out (1998) – not through the framework of universalizing space (or time), but through place/s.