Foams: Spheres Volume III: Plural Spherology 9781584351870, 158435187X

Citation preview

SPHERES SEMIOTEXT(E) FOREIGN AGENTS SERIES Originally published as Sphiiren III. Schiiume by Edicions Suhrkamp, Frankfurt. © Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 2004. Ali rights reserved This edition Semiotext(e) © 2016

VOLUME 3: FOAMS PLURAL SPHEROLOGY

All rights reserved. No pan of this book may be reproduced, srnred in a retrieval system, or transmined by any mea.ns, elecrronic, mechanical, photo­ copying, recording, or orherwise, withour prior permi sían of che publisher.

Peter Sloterdijk

Published by Semiotexr(e) PO BOX 629, South Pasadena, CA 91031 www.semiocexce.com

Translated by Wieland Hoban

Special chanks ro Jolrn Ebert. Cover phorograph by Balrhasar Burkhard, Normandie 1995. © Estate Balrhasar Bmkhard. Design: Hedi El Kl1olci ISBN: 978-1-58435-187-0 Discributed by The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, England Prinred in che United Sta.tes of America

Contents Note

13

Prologue: Foam-Bornness

27

Air in Unexpected Places lnterpretation of Foam Fertile Foams-Mythological lnterlude Natural Foams, Aphrospheres Human Foams Foams in the Time of Knowledge Revolution, Rotation, lnvasion When the lmplicit Becomes Explicit: Phenomenology The Monstrous Appears We Have Never Been Revolutionary lntroduction: Airquake

27 32 39 46 52 61 66 70 75 82 85

85 Gas Wariare, or: The Atmoterrorist Pattern 119 lncreasing Explicitness 144 Air/Condition 179 World Soul in Agony, or: The Emergence of lmmune Systems Parenthetic Observation: Forced Light and the Advance to í93 the Articulated World 231 5. Program

1. 2. 3. 4.

Transition: Neither Contract Nor Growth Approaching Spatial Pluralities, Which Are Regrettably Termed Societies

243

Chapter 1. lnsulations: For a Theory of Capsules, lslands and Hothouses

287

A. Absolute lslands B. Atmospheric lslands

296 315

C. Anthropogenic lslands i. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

The Chirotope- The Ready-to-Hand World The Phonotope-Being in Earshot The Uterotope-We-Caves, World lncubators The Thermotope-The Pamperíng Space The Erototope-Jealousy Fields, Levels of Desire The Ergotope-Effort Communities and Fighting Empires The Alethotope-The Knowledge Republics The Thanatotope-The Province of the Divine The Nomotope-First Constitutional Doctrine

333 340 353 361 370 378 384 398 411 436

Résumé

457

Chapter 2. lndoors: Architectures of Foam

467

A. Where We Uve, Move and Have Our Being: On Modern Architecture as an Explication of the Sojourn

467

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Being-Held-Up; The Station and the Store Receivers, Habituation Facilities Embedding and lmmersion Dwellings as lmmune Systems The Dwelling Machine, or: The Mobilized Spatial Self Address Management, End User Location, Climate Regulation

472 481 488 498 508 522

B. Cell-Building Egospheres, Self-Containers: The Explication 529 of Co-lsolated Existence via the Apartment 1. Cell and World Bubble 2. Self-Couplings in the Habitat

529 542

C. Foam City: Macro-lnteriors and Urban Assembly Buildings 564 Explicate the Symbiotic Situations of the Masses 1. National Assembly 2. The Collectors: On the History of the Stadium Renaissance 3. Discreet Synods: On the Theory of Congresses 4. Foam City-About Urban Spatial Multiplicities

567 584 602 610

Chapter 3. Uplift and Pampering: On the Critique of Pure Whim 627 1. Beyond Hardship 2. The Fiction of the Deficient Beíng 3. Frivolity and Boredom 4. "Your Prívate Sky" -ThinlII1nesE

psychological symptoms as legible as texts, Freud was able ro become a "Galilei of the inoer world of facts," as Arnold Gehlen put ir. What had been a quantité négligeabfe became a focus of attention and someth.ing capable of gaining significance. Freud's early decision to discinguish dreams as the royal road to the unconscious displayed the "revolutionary" exchange of emphasis berween che cenual and the peripheral. But the publication of The lntevpretation ofDremns in 1900, as was recently evidenc in retrospectives of the last century, not only marked the epistemic­ propagandist founding act of the psychoanalytical movement, for it was also one of rhe starting points for the subversion of the tradicional syscem of seriousness and for che consciousness of the weighty as such. Someth.ing that shifts seriousness and revises decorum changes culture as a whole. Through its participation in the rehabilitation of rhe dream dimension, for which Roman­ ticism. had paved che way, Viennese psychoanalysis entered a context in which no less was ar stake than a redistribution of emphases in the field of the primary, rhe validari.ng and the meaning-giving-a process of cu.l turally revol utionary seope: here che shockwaves from Nietzsche's inrervention in meca­ physical idealism carne togecher with che confosions resulting from both the Marxist and positivist critiques of superstructure. The new are of reading for barely noticed signs of intimate and public comexcs of rneaning integrated the most privare choughrs, tics, rashes and slips of che tengue in subversively expanded suppositions of significance. By re-drawing the boundaries berween meaning and non-meaning, the serious and the unserious, chis revision decisively altered rhe formatting of che cultural space. Now the .insignificant could settle old seores with the significanc. Since rhen, drearns have no longer been

1nrem1H.':ilk•1·, ur Fo:.1111 1 33

foams-at most, they indicate an endogenous foaming of men­ tal systems and encourage the formulation of hypotheses about the laws derermining rhe development of symptorns and tbe bubbling-up of inner images. If modernity is distinguished by its shifts of seriousness whar about che ocher side of che equation of dreams and foams? How seriously did the twentieth cencu1y know to rake foam? What sta­ tus did it a sign to chat "air in unusual places?" In what way did ir work on the rehabilitacion of chis Beeting phenomenon dedi­ cated to disincegration? By what means did ir attempt to do justice to the self-referential spaces, the internal spheres füled with intrinsic values, the breachable inreriors and the climatic facts? The adeguate response to these quesrions, assuming ir is already possible in our time, would consisr in a synopsis oF modernization. Ir would describe a wide-range admission proce­ dure for che coincidental, the momentary, che vague, the transient and che atmospheric-a procedure in which the arts, tbeories and experimental life forms are involved with rheir own respective stal