Spheres

[Balder]

I'm thinking Sloterdijk's work on "spherology" might make for an interesting interface with OOO ( <-- haha, look at those spheres!).

 

Here's an interview with him where he reviews his Spheres trilogy.

 

Bettina Funcke: Until the publication of your trilogy, the image of the sphere was hardly present in contemporary theoretical discourse. I'm wondering how you came across this metaphor, which has gained such importance for your thinking in recent years. Which authors or texts do you refer to?

Peter Sloterdijk: A given culture never possesses a complete vocabulary for itself. The current language games only ever emphasize select topics and leave other phenomena unaddressed. This applies as well to the vocabulary of theory in the late twentieth century. In past decades, one could speak elaborately and with great nuance about everything that had to do with the temporal structure of the modern world. Tons of books on the historicization, futurization, and processing of everything were published�most of which are completely unreadable today. By contrast, it was still comparatively difficult ten years ago to comment sensibly on the spatialization of existence in the modern world; a thick haze still covered the theory landscape. Until recently, there was a voluntary spatial blindness�because to the extent that temporal problems were seen as progressive and cool, the questions of space were thought to be old-fashioned and conservative, a matter for old men and shabby imperialists. Even the fascinating, novel chapters on space in Deleuze and Guattari's Thousand Plateaus couldn't change the situation, since they arrived too early for the chronophilic, or time-worshipping, zeitgeist of those days. The same goes for programmatic propositions in late Foucault�according to whom we again enter an age of space�which in their time were still unable to usher in a transition.

My Spheres trilogy obviously belongs to a widespread reversal among philosophical and cultural-theoretical discourses that has taken place in the strongholds of contemporary reflection over the course of the past decade. As I began in 1990, while a fellow at Bard College, in New York, I had only a vague premonition of this topological turn within cultural theory. Only now, after the completion of the trilogy, do I see more clearly how my work is connected with that of numerous colleagues around the world, such as Homi Bhabha, Arjun Appadurai, and Edward S. Casey. Even Ilya Kabakov's installation art and the work of architects like Frei Otto, Grimshaw and Partners, or Rem Koolhaas, belong to the circle of theoretical relations. At the time, I wanted to work with the figures of the circle and arrow in order to offer my students in Vienna and New York, who were mainly young artists, an introduction to philosophical thinking. I thought that graphic figures would be useful in that context.

I was also fascinated by a chalkboard drawing Martin Heidegger made around 1960, in a seminar in Switzerland, in order to help psychiatrists better understand his ontological theses. As far as I know, this is the only time that Heidegger made use of visual means to illustrate logical facts; he otherwise rejected such antiphilosophical aids. In the drawing, one can see five arrows, each of which is rushing toward a single semicircular horizon�a magnificently abstract symbolization of the term Dasein as the state of being cast in the direction of an always-receding world horizon (unfortunately, it's not known how the psychiatrists reacted to it). But I still recall how my antenna began to buzz back then, and during the following years a veritable archaeology of spatial thought emerged from this impulse. The main focus may have been Eurocentric, but there was a constant consideration of non-European cultures, in particular India and China. Incidentally, I also owe something to Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space, although later I quite stubbornly departed from his promptings.

BF: But in your work the term sphere plays such a crucial role, whereas in the other new discourses of space one encounters terms like place, dwelling, territory, local, global, and other words ending with the suffix �scape.

PS: There are different reasons for this, partly linguistic and partly factual. Particularly crucial here is that below the thin layer of modern language games, in which the word sphere plays only a marginal role, lies a very powerful old layer�one could call it the two-thousand-year domain of old-European "sphere thinking." As modern intellectuals, we have simply forgotten that in the era between Plato and Leibniz almost everything to be said about God and the world was expressed in terms of a spherology. Think about the magical basic principle of medieval theosophy, which says, God is a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. One could almost claim that the individualism of the modern era signifies an unconscious realization of this dogma. Even German semantics plays a role in my choice of terms, since between Goethe and Heidegger the word sphere is employed as an approximate synonym for the circle of life or world of meaning�and of course this already goes a ways toward accommodating my search for a language appropriate to animated, interpersonal, or surreal space.

BF: The subtitles of the three volumes of Spheres�Bubbles, Globes, and Foam�are similarly unusual, as if they were created in a linguistic realm that seems closer to everyday speech.

PS: The term metaphor that you used earlier makes me hesitate a bit because, in my opinion, words like sphere or globe are not metaphors but rather thought-images or, even better, thought-figures. After all, they first came out of geometry and had, beginning with Greek antiquity, a clear morphological sense, which turned into a cosmological sense after Plato. It is different with the titles of the first and third volumes, Bubbles and Foam. Here we are truly concerned with metaphors, at least on an initial reading. With Bubbles I tried to describe the dyadic space of resonance between people as we find it in symbiotic relations�mother and child, Philemon and Baucis, psychoanalyst and analysand, mystics and God, etc. By contrast, in addition to its metaphorical meaning, foam�I use it instead of the completely exhausted term society�has of course also a literal sense. From a physical perspective, it describes multichamber systems consisting of spaces formed by gas pressure and surface tensions, which restrict and deform one another according to fairly strict geometric laws. It seemed to me that modern urban systems could be easily understood with analogy to these exact, technical foam analyses. Spheres III emerged out of this intuition. One finds in this hybrid book a great deal of commentary on the transformation of sociology into a general theory of "air conditioning." Foam: That is, modern people live in "connected isolations," as the US architectural group Morphosis put it thirty years ago. In social foam there is no "communication"�this is also one of the words facing an apocalypse�but instead only inter-autistic and mimetic relations.

BF: While reading the books, it occurred to me that there are three different, successive points of orientation or even methods in each respective volume. Could one describe the first volume as esoteric, the second as exoteric, and the third as a Zeitdiagnostik, a diagnosis of the present moment?

PS: This question affects me in a very personal way because it's connected with a disturbingly deep diagnosis. It is true that the three volumes of Spheres don't follow one other in a singular trajectory; each has its own direction and its own climate. One could even wonder whether they really derive from the same author. The question is of course sophistical, since I know definitively that I wrote all three myself. However, this doesn't prove that I was always the same person in the seven years it took to write them. What guarantees that multiple personality disorder, an invention of postmodern doctors, doesn't simply represent the transition of modern literary criticism into the clinic, by which the disappearance of the author returns as the disintegration of the everyday personality?

As you know, I've always allowed myself as much freedom as possible in leaving the question open as to whether I'm a philosopher or a writer, but now you're forcing me into a corner. Since I ultimately speak as a philosopher and cannot envelop myself in artistic silence, I'll thus have to admit it: You're right. The beginning of the trilogy has an esoteric aspect, assuming that we understand the expression correctly. With its nearly seven hundred pages, Bubbles provides an excessive theory of pairs, a theory based on a fundamental irony. While everyday thought is firmly convinced it knows everything about pairs�namely, that they are the result of adding one plus one (biographically speaking, this means the effect of an "encounter")�I undertake the experiment to demonstrate to what extent the "being-a-pair" [Paar-Sein] precedes all encounters. In my pair analysis, the number two, or the dyad, appears as the absolute figure, the pure bipolar form. Accordingly, it always takes precedence over the two single units of which it seems to be "put together." This can be most easily demonstrated in the relationship between mother and child�or, even better, between fetus and placenta. With this we enter the terrain of a radicalized philosophical psychology that departs from the general faith in the priority of individuality. The truly esoteric is not found in the books on sale at the airport bookstore; it is depth psychology, which reminds us of pre-individual, pre-subjective, pre-egoistical conditions. This brings me very close to Lacan, who spoke occasionally of the "democratic esotericism" of psychoanalysis. And you can see what zones we enter in my book's relatively scandalous chapters on "negative gynecology" and prenatal existence in the womb�I completely understand why some readers have perceived this as macabre.

The second volume develops the public and political consequences of these basic assumptions; in this sense, it could be described as the exoteric component of the project. It examines the notion that older cultures have imagined the world primarily as a spirit-infused circle. I tried to show in Globes how the geometricization of the cosmos was first carried out by the Greeks; after that I reconstructed the geometricization of God under the neo-Platonic philosophers, which gave me the feeling of reopening one of the most exciting chapters in the history of ideas. Out of all this resulted, as if by itself, a philosophical history of globalization: First the universe was globalized with the help of geometry, then the earth was globalized with the help of capital.

Finally, in the third volume of Spheres, I have thematized the modern world in terms of a theory of spatial multiplicities. I begin with the idea that the world is not structured monospherically and all-communicatively, as the classical holists thought, but rather polyspherically and interidiotically. At the center of this volume is an immunological theory of architecture, because I maintain that houses are built immune systems. I thus provide on the one hand an interpretation of modern habitat, and on the other a new view of the mass container. But when I highlight the apartment and the sports stadium as the most important architectural innovations of the modern, it isn't out of art- or cultural-historical interest. Instead my aim is to give a new account of the history of atmospheres, and in my view, the apartment and the sports stadium are important primarily as atmospheric installations. They play a central role in the development of abundance, which defines the open secret of the modern. The praise of luxury with which the book ends is, in my opinion, the decisive act in terms of diagnosing the present.

BF: Especially in the third volume, you develop nothing less than a new, up-to-date terminology of critical theory by which you historically contextualize and delimit terms from the Frankfurt School. A far-reaching critique of the contemporary reception of critical theory's inheritance runs through the book. In particular, you criticize what you view as the misleading interpretation of this tradition by the American academy, leading you to rehearse the conceptual history and historical situating of terms such as revolution and society. Can you summarize what this critique consists of and why you think that an entirely new vocabulary needs to be invented?

PS: The reason a new vocabulary is necessary in the cultural sciences can be explained in seven simple words: because the old one is basically useless. And why? Because all previous natural languages, including theoretical discourse, were developed for a world of weight and solid substances. They are thus incapable of expressing the experiences of a world of lightness and relations. Consequently they are not suited to articulate the basic experiences of the modern and the postmodern, which construct a world based on mobilization and the easing of burdens. This already allows me to explain why, in my view, the critical theory of the Frankfurt School is outdated and must be replaced by a completely different discourse: Because of their Marxist heritage, critical theorists succumb to the realistic temptation of interpreting the light as appearance and the heavy as essence. Therefore they practice criticism in the old style in that they "expose" the lightness of appearance in the name of the heaviness of the real. In reality, I think that it is through the occurrence of abundance in the modern that the heavy has turned into appearance�and the "essential" now dwells in lightness, in the air, in the atmosphere. As soon as this is understood, the conditions of "criticism" change dramatically. Marx argued that all criticism begins with the critique of religion; I would say instead that all criticism begins with the critique of gravity. In addition, we can recognize that European "critical theory" did not survive the trip across the Atlantic unscathed. The authentic critical theory "at home" was, above all, a kind of secret theology: It treated the failures of creation (aka society) and criticized reality in the (unnamed) name of the infinite. This approach was so cleverly encoded that American sociologists and literary critics could argue unchallenged that they were reading a plea for a multicultural society.

BF: Your use of images, idiosyncratic for books of philosophy, recalls contemporaries in the German-speaking realm such as Alexander Kluge, Klaus Theweleit, and to a certain extent W.G. Sebald. The images are used not as illustrations but as parallel narratives. Could one also consider Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project as a historical model that likewise includes an extensive image section? The question of your reference to The Arcades Project suggests itself because this book also presents a widely diverse examination of spaces and atmospheres that have marked the contemporary moment. Is it fair to say that, in a way, your examinations of the stadium and the apartment house of the twentieth century are continuing Benjamin's studies of the emerging modern era's spatial conception and the arcades?

PS: The inclusion of images in the flow of the text is my answer to the transformation of spatial consciousness in modern theory. Considered in terms of media history, I no longer write my philosophical prose on the page of a book but on a monitor page�that is, virtually, in hypertext space. The monitor space is a close relation of the modern exhibition space, a kind of electronic white cube. When you work there, it is logical that you imagine a second and third text "next to" the verbal text, and this is exactly what authors who work with visual parallel-narratives are doing.

The reference to Walter Benjamin is absolutely necessary in this context, and I'm pleased that you've brought up his name. However, I must admit that my relationship to Benjamin is not simple. On the one hand, his Arcades Project is utterly exemplary for today's cultural theory because it already anticipates almost everything that was to become important later�the passion for the archive; the "micrological" examination of the detail; media theory; discourse analysis; and the search for a sovereign viewpoint from which one can grasp the capitalistic totality. On the other hand, I'm convinced that Benjamin's work reaches a dead end and that he failed as a theorist. In my forthcoming book, Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals: FY�r eine philosophische Theorie der Globalisierung (Inside the Internal Space of World Capital: For a Philosophical Theory of Globalization, 2005), you'll find a critique of Benjaminism that leads to a pretty devastating result. I accuse Benjamin of not really understanding, and thus only halfheartedly following, his own superb ideas around the creation of new interiors through capitalism. Even worse for me is the fact that he placed the historically outdated architectural type of the arcade at the center of this analysis, although already by his time it couldn't be ignored that the capitalistic interior had long since moved beyond the arcade stage. Sports stadiums, convention centers, large hotels, and resorts would have been far more worthy of Benjamin's attention. The whole idea of wanting to write an "ur-history of the nineteenth century" rests on a misconception. Thus I suggest examining the capitalistic interiors on their own relevant terms, which leads, consequently, to a theory of foam. What we need today is an "air-conditioning project" for large social entities or a generalized "greenhouse project." I think that in Spheres III one can already partly recognize what the beginnings of such a post-Benjaminian treatment of the pluralized spatial creations of the modern and postmodern might look like.

BF: Another post-Benjaminian book is Negri and Hardt's Empire. In the third volume of Spheres, you criticize these authors' approach, which rests on the term multitude. To what extent, in your opinion, is their investigation a failed effort?

PS: Let's first talk about Negri and Hardt's success: They have managed to give the current desire for radicality a novum organum, an accomplishment that deserves admiration. At the same time, I suspect that the secret behind the book's great success can be ascribed to its thinly veiled religious tones. At first one doesn't easily recognize the good old-left radicalism when Saint Francis takes the stage next to Marx and Deleuze. But this new alliance with the saints is instructive for the position of left radicalism in the post-Marxist situation. Whoever wants to practice fundamental opposition today needs allies who are not entirely of this world. In order to grasp the awkward situation of left radicalism, one should recall Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance. According to Festinger, ideologies that no longer match circumstances are reinterpreted by their believers until they appear to match them again�with the unavoidable result that theories become increasingly bizarre. Gershom Scholem clarified something similar in relation to the fate of Jewish prophetism. The gist of what he says is this: When prophetism fails, apocalypticism emerges; when apocalypticism fails, gnosis emerges. An analogous escalation can be observed in the political opposition movements since 1789: When the bourgeois revolution fails or is insufficient, left radicalism emerges; when left radicalism fails or is insufficient, the mystique of protest emerges. It seems to me that Negri has arrived at exactly this point. His "multitude" calls forth a community of angry saints in which the fire of pure opposition burns�yet it no longer offers a revolutionary project, instead testifying by its mere existence to a world counter to universal capitalism. Thus one cannot simply say that Negri's framework failed�it has already incorporated his failure. Perhaps it would be more accurate to claim that the political revolutionary has become transformed into a spiritual teacher. This is the price to be paid by anyone who seriously tries to develop a language of the left beyond resentment.

 

[Edward theurj Berge]

For example, from Honneth's response:

"At no point does he make clear why fortunes acquired by inheritance or financial speculation are justly 'earned' in the sense of involving any sort of notable achievement."

Not only that, such wealth is not only not justly earned but stolen from societal coffers.

This tangent does not prevent me from appreciating Slot's spherical philosophy, since his recent political views are a separate matter. Until and unless, of course, I see such political implications within his philosophy, which I'll address at that time.

[Balder]

I agree with your points, Ed, and agree with Honneth that it would be both important and helpful for him to situate his views on this vis-a-vis the ill-gotten gains of many speculators and other financial elites (and cooperating government players) who are gaming the system at our, and our future generations', expense.  My only caveat is that we should probably read his comments in the context of the German situation, where (I believe, based on a Wikipedia search) the taxation rate of the wealthiest members is at 45%.  The critique of 'resentment' as an informing mood in (Green) cynicism is also a legitimate one, I expect, at least for certain prominent thinkers and schools of thought, so I would not want to summarize 'liberal'/left views as being uniformly and universally in line with the sentiments you express (since 'the left' includes a broad range of people across cultures and across several developmental stages).

[Balder]

Although not on the topic of Spheres (directly), this looks interesting (re: Slot's political views): Thymotic Left.

[Edward theurj Berge]

Thymotic Left.

It is by the same author that wrote chapter 4 of IMR. I tried reading it but like IMR it didn't hold my interest and I gave up.

As to your point about liberal views covering a wide range of specific locations (addresses), I agree.* My response was specific to US corporate capitalism and its liberal criticism, which was missing from Slot's analysis. One of Latour's (re)definitions of design has to do with such specificity, with the fine details, with craft. This expresses in Slot's metaphor of spheres, as each is an autonomous unit while nonetheless being in relation (plurisingular). Slot's critique, at least in Forbes, was so general as to be contrary to his own philosophy. Granted he delimits his critique to Europe but he sweeps all European social democracy under the same rug, denouncing it as moribund due to State kleptocracy.

He correctly notes that direct and selfish exploitation (aka laissez-faire capitalism) was feudal but generalizes about social democracy, presumably Germany's, as indicative of Europe. It seems he recognizes that it was an improvement (development) to capitalism and suggests there is a stage beyond that now too, with which I agree. But that stage, like the notion of designed spheres, will be specific to the milieu to which it is applied. Slot's critique of monospheric, European social democracy though is not apt, nor would such an overriding narrative be applicable for a new stage's specific expressions. His spherological metaphor though is consistent with the next stage of distributed networks, and in that I'm in agreement. It's now a matter of applying such an orienting generalization to specific countries, regions and economies, for each “sphere,” though connected to the network, will have unique characteristics.

In the meantime, critiques such as Honneth's are effective, since in his struggle to apply his principles Slot has not yet found an adequate language or exemplar with which to express it. Hence he regresses to conservative language and ideas to criticize social democracy which come off sounding like, and in many ways are, still conservative. We find the same with kennilingus in its promotion of an integral, conscious capitalism. Perhaps we have to move beyond social democracy, and there is no doubt that in its extreme manifestations the State is a bit totalitarian, but in its rush to get to this new address much is being missed with such sweeping generalizations, like countries and regional economies (Mondragon?) that are already well on the way to transitioning into this new era. And specific initiatives like Rifkin's, who I believe is working with Germany on this?

* For example, Slot uses the term liberalism to denote neo-liberalism, aka corporate capitalism, whereas in the US we might call it neo-conservatism. Also, the views I expressed are fairly consistent with what I call the progressives. I imbibe quite a bit of liberal media, like Rhodes, Olbermann, Maddow, Krugman, Sachs, Sanders** etc. and they agree on the points I made. Granted this is a small faction represented in the US Congress by the progressive caucus of the Democrat Party, most Democrats being as corporately influenced as the conservatives. So it is to this specific address that I refer when I call something liberal.

** Sanders, Democrat Senator of Vermont, by the way is a democratic socialist. And it is his unique brand of such that I find not only not dead but indicative of the move to this new level of social organization.

[Edward theurj Berge]

Speaking of spheres and networks, this is Bruno Latour's home page. At some point we might give him a thread but for now I point out his article on the correspondences between his and Slot's ideas, "Spheres and networks: Two ways to reinterpret globalization." Also of interest might be "The whole is always smaller than its parts."

[Balder]

Latour: Imagine that—the real world confused with the white expanse of a piece of paper!

 

Makes me think of Wilber's "paper on which the quadrants are drawn"... :-)

[Balder]

 

This related essay from Latour's website looks good (discussing networks and spheres, and referencing Avatar and Pandora as well...)

theurj said:

Speaking of spheres and networks, this is Bruno Latour's home page. At some point we might give him a thread but for now I point out his article on the correspondences between his and Slot's ideas, "Spheres and networks: Two ways to reinterpret globalization." Also of interest might be "The whole is always smaller than its parts."

[Balder]

I read ahead in Bubbles this weekend, as I was looking for the index and came across a brief concluding chapter on the Trinitarian metaphysics of perichoresis.  I'm going to look at it again, but my initial impression was of disappointment with how he handled it -- perhaps since I see some romantic promise in it, but he identified its modern expression as an utterly banal, "grey perichoresis" of modern social subjects.  I mentioned that I am going to go back to it, though, because he does point out an alternative, which I didn't quite follow; but, also, because his description of the "falling" of Trinitarian being (in)to the mundane reminds me of some of the discussions in Polydoxy of "ruined" and "dirtied" distinctions between God and world (where perichoretic and kenotic dynamics also are immanently reimagined).  So, there may be some resonance here that is worth exploring.

[Edward theurj Berge]

From "The whole is always smaller than the parts":

"We will claim that there is more complexity in the elements than in the aggregates....it might now be possible to account for longer lasting features of social order by learning to navigate through overlapping ‘monads’ instead of alternating between the two levels of individual and aggregate....our approach is different from the idea of structures emerging out of atomistic agents in interaction...the notion of structure should be replaced by the circulation of differently conceived wholes" (2-3).

[Balder]

I had a brief exchange with Joel about this text on FB, which I'm copying here.  It started out with a quote which I took from David Loy's Dead Words, Living Words, and Healing Words, incidentally, but took a turn in this other direction...

"Language and symbols circumscribe; but, as living forces, they are dynamic enough to open up, constantly re-expressing, renewing, and casting-off, so as to unfold new horizons of their own life. In this way language and symbols know no limits with respect to how far they can penetrate both conceptually and symbolically." ~ Hee-jim Kim (as quoted in DWLWHW)

Joel:  Nice image of what Lebau called "needles and noodles," I like the image of the crustacean who gains solidity and growth from its shell, but has to crawl out of it slowly, lest it crush him.

Balder:  Ah, I like the crustacean metaphor -- which reminds me of Sloterdijk's spheres (intrauterine, interfacial, linguistic, etc...)

Joel:  Oooh, that sounds interesting!  Intrauterine, sounds gigeroid.  Gotta look that one up.  Might this be near the core? 

Balder:  Yes, that's it. I'm reading Bubbles now, and in fact am currently in the midst of his chapter on interfacial relations (spheres) and interfacial philosophy, which of course reminded me of your "interface philosophy...    Here, he's literally meditating on facial relations as exemplars of one of his spherological models (microspherology). One example, Giotto's "Legend of Saint Joachim":

 

(The halo depicts the interfacial sphere that envelops the couple; and of course you see the yet-to-come "mediating third" face manifesting in the midst of their kiss...)

Joel:  Nice!

Balder:  You may recall in my paper (where I used your graphic), I played with the notions of generative enclosure and dis-enclosure. I'm now exploring Sloterdijk's spherology as a possible way of extending and developing that (in which case I'll revise my paper)...

Joel:  i like that, yes, it's a distinction that I've been trying to pin down as well. There are two different types of involution, that need to be disambiguated, and which seem to fit the generative aspect nicely. Namely involution as intrinsic to a natural evolutionary progression toward a new whole, and involution in digging deeper into already involuted wholes. So it/s a function of where you are in this transvolutionary process, and in which direction the lines of flight or whatever are moving, either immanent or transcendent, of transitive or whatever. It helps me to talk about it anyway. ;)

[Edward theurj Berge]

My last comment in the enactive realism thread relates here as well. I don't pretend to understand what Joel means by his types of involution. When he talks of the "natural evolutionary process" for me it has connotations of an inherent teleos akin to Wilber's involutionary, morphogentic gradient. And the likes of Bryant (not sure about Takaki) seems to indicate that while there is a tendency toward ever-greater and more complex wholes it is completely contingent to forces "on the ground," as it were, that (in)form in creative and heretofore unknown ways; not from some implicit and pre-existing Whole or gradient.

Granted, we might say that this tendency to ever more complex wholes is in fact such a gradient, but it doesn't appear to be going to some particular (pun intended) end. And then there are specific examples of evolution that become less complex to survive in their particular environments (contexts), so I'm still not sure about this notion that complexity equals evolution.*

* For example, see Visser's paper "Some paradoxes of evolution."

[Edward theurj Berge]

Also consider Latour's article above, "the whole is always smaller that its parts." I've yet to read it thoroughly but it seems to indicate that wholes are not more but less complex than the parts. It seems wholes are redefined as overlaps between parts in a network, with the network being more of a diffuse rhizomatic, rather than integrated hierarchic, whole. It also seems this is indicative of Slot's work as well, given Latour's sympathy with it, but not sure about that at this point. More later.