Peter Sloterdijk arrived at Tate Modern on 16 June to give his keynote presentation ‘Spaces of Transformation: Spatialised Immunity’ to the ‘Topology at Tate Modern’ series of public talks and events. Sloterdijk is currently president of the State Academy of Design at the Centre for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, where he is also a Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics.

His arrival in UK academic ‘spheres’ is an important and notable occasion for reflection, and a move he himself raised when he began an enjoyable off-the-cuff introduction to his talk confessing: “I feel arrival-sensations”. This worked in dialogue with the key themes of his paper, which also acted as an introduction to his three volume Sphären (Spheres) series (1998-2004), the first of which, Bubbles, was published in English translation late last year. Drawing together themes from Bubbles, Globes (Globen) and the final volume Foam (Schäume), Sloterdijk offered, in presentation and text alike, a litany of spheres, of enclosures, domes, atmospheres, and dwellings, which in his conclusion he claimed as nothing less than an extension of Heidegger’s Being and Time, worked over as Being and Space. In this reflection we discuss several important themes emerging from his presentation.

Arrival

The sensations he addressed in his evocative opening direct our commentary in several ways. First it introduces a particular area of Sloteridjk’s writing which is only now being brought into dialogue with English speaking audiences (Elden ed., 2012) and rapidly at that, as we notice the earlier commentaries on his work in this journal from a few years ago (Elden, Mendieta and Thrift ed., 2009), where it was noted that only a few of his books had been translated. The best known at that moment was Critique of Cynical Reason. Second, joking that he had ‘theory in his luggage’, he mentioned the ‘strange’ or peculiar sensations of speaking to a British audience, as he wondered at his reception withinUK academic and philosophical circles. Citing in particular a networked sociology based on points and lines against which he weighed the volumina of his sphereology, as well as offering a joking aside to theUK’s analytic philosophical traditions. And third, his sensations of arrival inferred a different sort of entry—a move to spatial immersion that he would come back to again in his talk, and it is to this third theme where we direct the rest of this piece.

Sloterdijk argued that in surveying a large part of western philosophy it is precisely immersion that he is interested in excavating, moving away from the predominance of distance, or the points and lines presumed within relational ontologies of flow and connectivity – and he would explain later in questions and answers that he has found little credence in nomadology. Rather he finds import in evoking a sublime that exceeds the Kantian register. Less a matter of being overcome, or overtaken, for Sloterdijk, the sublime is a surrendering to an excess of presence, or a “general presence” found all around. Instead he asks, “Where are the volumes, the volumina?”

In what we might call a ‘voluminology of spheres’, Sloterdijk articulates a kind of phenomenology of spatial co-presence that presumes two key moves. That subjects turn implicitly towards one another, towards sharing-spaces, and an overlapping quality of encounter. Thus we arrive at his critique of the monadic-self, fuelled by his assertion that “there are no individuals.” In Bubbles for example we can locate this notion of the multiplied self in his discussion of the interface – not solely in technological terms, but also as a form of shared faciality. Above all then his micro-spherology is a profound, radical restructuring of individualism. At the same time, there is a turning away from an outside. For his spheres are sealed, protective, immunological boundaries. This is the topological encounter between the micro and macro spheres.

Intimacy

The different examples Sloterdijk drew on (many of them driven by engaging on-screen visual triggers provided by iconic photographs, art works or images of buildings) seemed to us to also denote a particular series of intimate spaces of differential waiting, immersion, protection, even (a dubious) eroticism: the bed, the apartment, the toilet, the bus stop, the cardboard box. Intimacy then is an inference of immersion, both in the shared communion of multiple facialities and in the sense that the social sphere “means to be embedded in human environments”. Sloterdijk’s thought is decidedly architectonic, although the term is now manifestly redundant in the face of his critique of built form. Following Bachelard’s statement that “all life is well being” Sloterdijk offers us a much more ‘atmospheric’ version of dwelling. There is a tingling intimacy where spaces (like individuals) are topologically coupled. To be ‘in’ the world is for the “skin-ego to extend into bed ego, into wall ego, into house ego”. Dwellings are places to inhabit before leaving, sites of temporary dwelling and community, places that protect and seal off a subject from the world for the night. But they are also temporary, or involve temporality. Sloterdijk’s move is to peal the skin off the sphere-as-metaphorical-onion from room to the bed, to the body to the skin-ego that is in a continual process of engagement.

He foregrounded here the priority of the room in thinking through residency, and a particular domesticity of setting, which he variously termed “safety spaces”, “dwelling rooms”, “utility rooms”; spaces of differential waiting and protection. But yet, there is no sense, however, that these bubbles are particularly comfortable or happy, just shot through with feeling and affect. His use of Kabakov’s art installation Die Toilette (first installed 1992) sees an emanation, an “aura of shared misery”. And whilst he spoke lightly of the images of the homeless with a cardboard box over their heads, somewhere he said in India or Pakistan (he wasn’t sure), the arts of everyday living evoked a strong sense of human territorialisation, or what he called the embedding of atmosphere in particular places. For Sloterdijk, both a roof and boredom, or the banality of the everyday permeate these places. The formalism of a ‘roof’ makes these sites inhabitable for slumber – the sphere becomes the “guardian[s] of sleep”.

There was a clear scaling here of ‘intimate’ spaces, and throughout the presentation he referred us to the macro-spherology of Globen,as well as the micro-spherology of his negative gynaecology, understanding human existence through our violent estrangements from that first sphere—the womb. Quite how this scalar topology worked was left unsaid, raising interesting questions for those geographers grappling with the geographies of the spaces closest in, and perhaps the volumina of another reader of Heidegger, Luce Irigaray, whose own bodily spaces and depths offer up – or open – their own problematic envelopes.

Security

Finally, a shadow lurking in the background of the talk and picked up on during questions, were themes of protection and security. Perhaps this is one of the most troubling areas of Sloterdijk’s thesis. The atmospheric is not only the immersive space of co-belonging, but as his work in Terror from the Air (Sloterdijk, 2009) explored, it is also the destructive realm of gaseous warfare. Likewise, just as bubbles can easily protect and reinforce solidarity, they can also create/construct outsides. They can bar others from entry, and restrict those inside from escaping. The discussion turned to the immunological: how might these bubbles be made immune for future threats and Sloterdijk’s answer was intriguing. He suggested a common “institutional expectation of damage”, or rather, the a priori function of many bubbles is that they are preventative and pre-emptive – they expect to be challenged or threatened. The relation to notions of ‘security’ are therefore promising (as Klauser, 2010 has also explored), because Sloterdijk’s conceives of the intimate relations that happen within the relative ‘luxuriousness’ of a protective bubble, as opposed to an abstract asymmetry of simple abandonment. He even went further to concede how such security systems may be quite dysfunctional or autoimmune, so they actually erode the purpose of their deployment by their excess. With this in mind, it is easy to infer a certain political conservatism from ‘spheres’, but perhaps be too quick to level charges at these ideas without careful consideration of their context, or imply leaps from the political controversy surrounding the author to this project: criticism which is not always so well researched or founded.

Sloterdijk’s project – as outlined here – is undoubtedly ambitious, both in scope and textual length. One of course wonders how geographical thought might show up. It is not immediately clear exactly how he has engaged in detail with socio-spatial thinking, or how to push forward possibly profitable links with geography’s own rich explorations of the images and imaginaries, histories and metaphysics, of cosmos and globe. Similarly, the relationship between spheres and ‘senses of place’—well-trodden ground within geography’s humanistic and phenomenological traditions—needs to be further explored. A path perhaps indicated by shared readings of Bachelard. To this end, a question from the audience provided an insight into how one might utilise Sloterdijk’s project in methodological terms. It was asked whether bubbles, spheres, or foam are reconstituted metaphors for the social. In part, perhaps we have to think of these ‘forms’ not as representative of the world, and in more transubstantive terms, as the world itself. This may be where the potential of burgeoning theorisations of atmosphere and ambience reside.

Of what is certain, however, if we could talk about Peter Sloterdijk’s coming before, he has now most definitely arrived and we find ourselves increasingly intrigued by, and suitably immersed in his ideas.    

References

Elden S, E Mendieta, and N Thrift (2009) The Worlds of Peter Sloterdijk. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27(1): 1-173.

Elden S (ed) (2012) Sloterdijk Now. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Klauser KF (2010) Splintering Spheres of Security: Peter Sloterdijk and the Contemporary Fortress City.Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28(2): 326-340.

Sloterdijk P (2009) Terror from the Air. New York: Semiotext(e).

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