PETER SLOTERDIJK
Spheres theory:
talking to myself about the poetics of space
We are simply not capable of continuing the old
cosmology of ancient Europe that rested on equating
the house and the home with the world.
Jakob von Uexkull: “it was an error to believe that
the human world constituted a shared stage for all
living creatures. Each living creature has his own
special stage that is just as real as the special stage
that the humans have…this insight offers us a
completely new view of the universe as something
that does not consists of a single soap bubble that
we have blown up so large as to go well beyond our
horizons and assume infinite proportions, and is
instead made up of millions of closely demarcated
soap bubbles that overlap and intersect
everywhere”.
Vital space can only be explained in terms of the
priority of the inside.
Modernity renders the issue of residence explicit:
Benjamin in the arcades project starts from the
anthropological assumption that people in all epochs
dedicate themselves to creating interiors. The
capitalist man in the 19th century expresses this
need by using the most cutting-edge technology in
order to immunize existence by constructing
protective islands: he thus uses glass, iron and other
prefabricated parts in order to build the largest
possible interior (Paxton’s Crystal Palace, London,
1951: the first hyper-interior that offers a perfect
idea of psychedelic capitalism). The arcade heralds
the abolition of the outside world. It abolishes
outdoor markets and brings them indoor, into a
closed sphere…this sparks a trend that is perfected
in the 20th century apartment design as well as in
shopping mall and sport-stadium design.
4 stages o explication of the phenomenon of
residence
-The house as a place of waiting:
Compulsion to wait: houses are initially machines
to kill time. In fact in a primitive farmhouse people
wait for a silent event out in the fields, one they
cannot influence but which, thank God, happens
regularly-namely the moment when the planted
seeds bear fruit.
-The house a s a place of reception
This kind of being in the house has been challenged
in the course of the middle ages, with the raise of
the urban culture o, since then a growing proportion
of European population has been seized by a
culture of impatience, of not being able to wait…
In the city things do not mature, things are
produced.
-the house, architecture means that men lock men
into manmade works
-the house as an atmospheric setting which
provides a spatialised immune system. Especially
as regard the designed atmosphere, the air one
breathe in a building
the apartment: a studio for self-relationship
existence in architectural theory con be defined as
successful phase of the one-person household.
Everything is drawn into the apartment, world and
household blend. today if one person existence can
succeed at all, its only because there’s architectural
support that turns the apartment itself into an entire
world prosthetic.
Today we are again foregrounding the way a building
can isolate, although this should not be confused
with its massiveness. Seen as an independent
phenomenon, isolation is one form of explication of
the condition of living with neighbours. Someone
should write a book in praise of isolation, describing
a dimension of human coexistence that recognizes
that people also have an infinite need for non
communication. Modernity’s dictatorial traits all stem
from an excessively communicative anthropology :
for all too long the dogmatic notion of an excessively
communicative image of man was naively adopted.
By means of the image of foam you can show that
the small forms protect us against fusion with the
mass and the corresponding hyper-sociologies. In
this sense, foam theory is a polycosmology.
So each soap bubble is a cosmos unto itself?
No that would be an overly autistic construction. In
truth, we have to do here with a discrete theory of
coexistence. All being-in-the –world possess the
traits of coexistence. The question of being so hotly
debated by philosophers can be asked here in terms
of coexistence of people and things in connective
spaces. That implies a quadruple relationship: being
means someone(1) being together with someone
else(2) and with something else (3) in something (4).
This formula describes the minimum complexity you
need to construct in order to arrive at an appropriate
concept of world. Architects are involved in this
consideration since for them being-in-the-world
means dwelling in a building. A house is a three-
dimensional answer to the question of how someone
can be together with someone and something in
something. In their own way , architects interpret
this most enigmatic of all spatial prepositions,
namely the “in”.
It highlights both being-contained-in and being-
outside. People are ecstatic beings. They are, to use
Heigegger’s terms forever held outside in the open…
in the ontological sense, they are “ouside” in the
world, but they can only be outside to the degree
that they are stabilized from within, from something
that gives them full support. This aspect needs to be
emphasized today in contrast to the current
romanticism of openness. It is spatial immune
systems that enable us to give being-outside a
tolerable form. Buildings are thus systems to
compensate for ecstasy… ”language is the house of
being” postulated Heidegger…language it is a
staunch fortress in which we can ward off the open.
Nonetheless we occasionally let visitors in. in human
relationships, speaking and building usually create
sufficient security that you can now and then permit
ecstasy. For this reason from my viewpoint the
architect is someone who philosophizes in and
through material. Someone who builds a dwelling or
erects a building for an institution makes a
statement on the relationship between the ecstatic
and the enstatic, or, if you will, between the world as
apartment and the world as agorà.
Something in the Air
In its three sections – ‘Bubbles’, ‘Globes’ and ‘Foam’
– Sphären narrates a Western history of macro- and
micro-space from the Greek agora to the
contemporary urban apartment. With the
technological advancements of the 20th century –
most represented, according to Sloterdijk, in the use
of airborne terrorism and interior ventilation –
traditional maps of geometric space have been
greatly redesigned, unveiling heretofore unexplored
strata: atmosphere, environment and ecology.
the suppression of atmospheric knowledge. Similarly,
until recent developments in space photography,
conventional maps omitted information about the
atmosphere. My ambition was to bring the
atmospheric dimension back to the perception of the
real. My essay Terror from the Air was extracted
from Sphären. It is called ‘Air Trembling’ in German,
and is the introductory part of the third volume of
the Sphären trilogy. Everything in these works is
about the reconstruction of atmospheric perception.
One of the fundamental arguments in Terror from
the Air is that classical warfare ineradicably changed
with the German deployment of chlorine gas during
the second battle of Ypres on 22 April 1915. With
this first use of chemical warfare, a new kind of
‘atmo-terrorism’ has been released upon the world,
one in which the environment rather than the body
is attacked.
The Sphären project is about the creation of a
specific human interior. On a metaphysical level, the
meaning of my theory is that human beings never
live outside of nature but always create a kind of
existential space around themselves.
Urban spaces are a humanized environment where
nature is completely replaced by a man-made
reality. This can provoke a kind of alienation; a sense
of loss within cities that you might normally expect
to feel in nature. In the third volume of Sphären, in a
long chapter titled ‘The Foam City’, I try to describe
these multiplicities of modern life in terms of foam-
making – all individuals are living in a specific bubble
within a communicating foam.
My ‘foam city’ is a theory of living in an apartment.
An apartment is obviously a place that contains the
means of communication to link you with the outer
world, yet it is also a spatialized immune system. It
immunizes you against the influences of the outer
world but it simultaneously links you to the Mitwelt
[‘social world’], which is a form of ‘connected
isolation’ – a term coined by Thom Mayne, an
American architect, in the early 1970s. ‘Connected
isolation’ could be a Heideggerian concept. It is
probably one of the most profound concepts that has
ever been developed within modern architectural
theory because it contains a judgment on the
modern way of life. I don’t believe in Heidegger’s
hypothesis of modern times as the time of
homelessness.
What I see is a transformation in all these traditional
complaints about modern homelessness into a
language of immunology.
For me, practical metaphysics has to be translated
into the language of general immunology because
human beings, due to their openness to the world,
are extremely vulnerable – from a biological level, to
the juridical and social levels, to the symbolic and
ritual levels. We are always trying to create and find
a protective environment. The task of building
convincing immune systems is so broad and so all-
encompassing that there is no space left for
nostalgic longings. This is an ongoing task that has
to be performed and theorized with every technique
that is available. There is no way back.
In some of the most interesting parts of Passagen-
Werk, he develops the idea that the bourgeoisie of
the 19th century created these artificial interiors.
And so when the world became globalized, the
bourgeoisie in their salons wanted to absorb
everything that is exterior into this interiority.
According to Benjamin, the art of the bourgeois form
of life was, in the 19th century, is the effort to
neutralize everything that is exterior and to create
an interior that contains the totality. And that is what
the arcades are all about. In the arcades, in the
passage, the whole world of production – the whole
world of trading and exploring – is neutralized and
re-presented in the presence of the commodity. The
commodities bring these outer totalities into the
apartment of the bourgeoisie. Between the ocean
and the apartment is the passage; the arcade where
all these goods can be bought.
between the modern shopping mall and the primitive
arcade of the early 19th century, there was a step
that is very symbolic. This is the London Crystal
Palace, which is for me the major symbol of the
Postmodern construction of reality. [A cast-iron and
glass building designed by Joseph Paxton to house
The Great Exhibition of 1851. It included 14,000
exhibitors from around the world, displaying
examples of the latest developments in technology.]
Because the power of interiorization here reached a
kind of historic maximum.
Terror from the air
the transition from the classical warfare to
terrorism
from the late middle ages until the beginning of
World War I…even under conditions of distance
fighting and the anonymous war of attrition, the act
of killing man to man remained so closely tied to the
pre-bourgeoisie concepts of personal courage and
possible heroism. …If in the 20th century members of
the army could claim that their profession was still
“manly” and-under wartime conditions- “honest”
one, it is thank to this reference to the danger of a
direct, deadly encounter…The 20th century will be
remembered as the age whose essential thought
consisted in targeting no longer the body, but the
enemy’s environment. This is the basic idea of
terrorism in the more explicit sense.1
The discovery of the environment took place in the
trenches of World War I. soldiers on both sides had
rendered themselves so inaccessible to the bullets
and explosives intended for them that the problem of
atmospheric war could not but become pressing. The
technical solution developed to resolve this problem
came to be known as gas warfare: its principles
consisted in enveloping the enemy for a long enough
period within a noxious cloud of sufficient “combat
concentration” until he fell victim to his natural
breathing reflex…what emerged from this was the
phenomenon of a second artillery: instead of aiming
at the soldiers and their emplacements, it targeted
the air surrounding the enemy body, fuzzying the
notion of a “hit”.2
Gas war-fare combined all three of the 20th century’s
operative criteria-terrorism, design consciousness,
and environmental approach-into a densely
interconnected whole…3
1
Peter Sloterdijk , Terror from the Air, Semiotext(e) foreign agents,
distributed by MIT Press, 2009, originally published in 2002 as
Luftbebern by Editions Suhrkamp, Frankfurt; p14
2
Peter Sloterdijk , Terror from the Air, Semiotext(e) foreign agents,
distributed by MIT Press, 2009, originally published in 2002 as
Luftbebern by Editions Suhrkamp, Frankfurt. P 18
3
Peter Sloterdijk , Terror from the Air, Semiotext(e) foreign agents,
distributed by MIT Press, 2009, originally published in 2002 as
Terrorism from an environmental perspective, voids
the distinction between violence against people and
violence against things: it comprises a form of
violence against the very human-ambient “things”
(air, water, temperature) without which people
cannot remain people.4…
After November 1918, the forms of technical
explication that had been developed during the
wartime continued to be used and improved through
their “peaceful” use: for pest control in the interest
of promoting agriculture once peace is restored.
<: the main compound component of the gas
developed, hydrogen cyanide, evaporates at 27
degrees Celsius and is not immediately perceivable
by human beings. In order to use these substances
for agriculture developers thought it wise to add a
highly perceptible irritant component with a repellant
effect to alert users to the substance’s presence.
After further progression and the development of
environmental awareness, zones emerged in which
the relationship between the surrounding air and
the contamined zone became inverted. In other
words, artificially created-or we might now say: the
air conditioned- zones emerged which provided
privileged air conditions relative to the general
surroundings
The observer privilege:
The innovative idea in penal technology underlying
the execution gas chamber presumes complete
control over the difference between the deadly
climate of the chamber inside and that of the climate
outside-this motif even led to the building of glass
walls in execution cells to enable those invited to
witness gas executions and see the efficiency of the
chamber’s interior atmospheric conditions for
themselves. In this way a kind of ontological
difference became spatially installed at a short
distance – with deadly climate in the clearly defined,
scrupulously sealed cell, and the convivial climate in
the “life-world” are of executors and observers;
being (sein) and being-able-to-see (seinkonnen) on
the outside, beings (seiende) and not-able-to- be
(nichtseinkonnen) on the inside. In the given context,
being an “observer” means essentially to be an
“observer of agony” one
Gas warfare
Thermoterrorism
Radioterrorism
Nuclear attacks on the enemy’s world involve the
terrorist use of latency as such. The imperceptibility
of radioactive weapons becomes a critical part of
weaponry’s effect. Before the enemy would
understand that he exists not merely in the air, but
Luftbebern by Editions Suhrkamp, Frankfurt.p22
4
Peter Sloterdijk , Terror from the Air, Semiotext(e) foreign agents,
distributed by MIT Press, 2009, originally published in 2002 as
Luftbebern by Editions Suhrkamp, Frankfurt. P 25
also in an imperceptible atmosphere of waves and
radioactivity, it was necessary for radioactive
contamination to occur. Like chemical extremism,
nuclear extremism is a critical case o explication.
With the nuclear step of explication, phenomenal
catastrophe is irrevocably also a catastrophe of the
phenomenal. The advances of physicists and their
instructed military personnel showed that something
exists at the radioactive level of environmental
influence, that there’s something in the air that the
children of the pre-nuclear age, that former
humanity of “pupils of the air” (J. G. Herder, ideas for
the philosophy of history of humanity, 1800,
considered by P. S as the initiator of a theory of
human culture conceived as a form of organization of
existence in greenhouses…anticipation of the
nature/culture opposition) who breathed serenely
and with naïve sensibility of context, were quite
simply incapable of perceiving. From this rupture
onwards, the need to perceive the imperceptible
hung over them like a new law formed as a threat5
In his post-1945 writings , Heidegger makes
recurrent use of the term Heimatlosigkeit, or
absence of homeland… then we would be wrong to
imagine he is merely talking about a bygone naivety
of dwelling in rural houses and the moving of
existence into urban habitation machines. More
profoundly, the term “homeless” also suggests a
denaturalization, in the sense of the human being’s
banishment from its natural air-envelope and re-
settlement in climate-controlled spaces; more radical
still the discourse of homelessness can be read as
symbolizing the change of epoch implied by the
exodus out of all remaining protective niches and
into latency. After psychoanalysis, not even the
unconscious is usable as a home, nor is “tradition”
after modern art, nor by any means “life” after
modern biology. The spectrum of these post-
hiroshima breakthroughs toward an a-patrial
existence involves the forced revelation o the
atmosphere’s radio-physical and electro-magnetic
dimensions, and, conditional thereupon, culture
participants’ moving into radio-technology monitored
forms of dwelling.6
With these references to the unfolding question
(itself set into motion by gas warfare and reinforced
by industrial smog and suchlike) of the condition of
breathable air, to the gas terrorist and thermo-
terrorist intensifications of World War II, and to the
explosive revelation of human being-in-the-world’s
underlying radiological dimension-captured once and
for all by the events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki-we
trace an historical arc of increasing explication in
the problematization of human dwelling in gas and
radiological milieus.
5 and global, must increasingly be described as the
Peter Sloterdijk , Terror from the Air, Semiotext(e) foreign agents,
distributed by MIT Press, 2009, originally published in 2002 as
Luftbebern by Editions Suhrkamp, Frankfurt. P59
6
Peter Sloterdijk , Terror from the Air, Semiotext(e) foreign agents,
distributed by MIT Press, 2009, originally published in 2002 as
Luftbebern by Editions Suhrkamp, Frankfurt. P 61-62
Weather-modification (Zeus)
In a paper (Weather as o Force Multiplier: Owning the
Weather in 2025) presented on June 17, 1996 the
Pentagon sketched the parameters of future
ionospheric warfare. The aim was to name the
conditions under which the US could affirm their role
as the absolute air and space force in 2025… The
range of weather weapons will include: the
maintaining or hindering of vision in air space…
thunderstorm enhancement and modification:
rainfall prevention over enemy territories and the
inducing of artificial drought…
Modern meteorology (a term derived, in the 17th
century, from the Greek meteoros, or “high in the
air”) has through its most successfully publicized
form, the so called weather report, imposed on the
populations of modern nation states and political
media-communities a historically new kind of
conversation, best described as a “climatological
briefing”. Modern societies are “weather-chat”
communities.(p 85)
Modern weather reporting turns national populations
into the spectators of a climate theatre, one which
also continually urges receivers to compare their
personal perception with the status report and form
their own opinion about current weather events. By
describing the weather as nature’s performance to
the community, meteorologists muster individuals
into an audience of connoisseurs under a common
sky; of each individual, they make a climate-critic
who evaluates nature’s latest performance according
to his own personal tastes. In periods of poor
weather, the more demanding climate critics fly
copious numbers to regions in which they can expect
an acceptable performance with sufficient
probability- which is why between Xmas Eve and
Epiphany , mauritious and Morocco are awash with
weather dissdents from Germany and France.
So long as meteorology presents itself as a natural
science and nothing else, it can pass in silence over
the question of the weather’s possible author. Taken
as a purely natural context, climate is something
that is entirely self-made, ceaselessly proceeding
from one state to the next.
…the modern weather report speaks of that which
happens just by itself and according to its own
conditions, of how it happens, and of that which, in
the best cases, gets 2reflected2 as objective quality
data in a subjective medium. Nevertheless, modern
meteorology is allied to a progressive
subjectivization of the weather:
because it increasingly relates climatic “givens” to
the opinion, calculations, and reactions of
populations,
second because the objective climate, both regional
result of the life-styles of modern industrial societies
(expectorations, emissions)…people of the modern
age are clients and co-causers of the weather.
 substitutability via prosthetic devices and its ability
Terror explicates the environment from the spects of to be integrated into technical procedure
its vulnerability, iconoclasm explicates culture from
the experience of its parodiability; Science explicates
first nature from the perspective of its

BRUNO LATOUR

Spheres and networks:

two ways to reinterpret globalization

imagine on what conditions the world, at the time o
globalization, could be made habitable…
Spheres and networks might not have much in
common, but they have both been elaborated
against the same sort of enemy: an ancient and
constantly deeper apparent divide between nature
and society.
… that nature and society are two perfectly happy
reversal of depth and superficiality:
For Sloterdijk there’s not the slightest chance of
understanding Being once it has been cut of from
the vast numbers of apparently trifling and
superficial little beings that make it exist from
moment to moment-what Peter came to call “life
supports”.
As Gabriel Tarde had anticipated a century ago,
philosophers had chosen the wrong verb: to be
instead than to have.
if you understand what Peter did to Dasein in
abandoning Heidegger and philosophy more
generally, it means that you have confused the plug
in of life support with the invasion of “nature”. It is
as if he had said: “enough phenomenology. Let’s
naturalize the whole goddamn human by using the
most recent results of the hard sciences: neurology,
biology, chemistry, physics, technology, you name
them!”
The same reversal of depth and superficiality was
achieved when science studies began to “embed”
the practice of science and- until then science had
been able to meander freely through the vast
expanses of time and space without paying any
special price or being embodied in any specific
human. By situating science with a capital S inside
the tiny loci of disseminated laboratories, we, the
science students, have made it hostage of human
vagaries, it means that you have confused our
enterprise with an appeal to “society” as if we had
been saying “enough belief in the objective view
from nowhere. Let’s deconstruct science and make it
a narrative among narratives inside a flow of
narratives”.
The opposite strategies of naturalization and
socialization are able to stupefy the mind only
because they are always thought of separately. But
as soon as you combine the two moves, you realize
bedfellows whose opposition is a farce. ..Spheres
and Network allow us, in our view (Latour and
Sloterdijk) , a reclaiming of the little beings that
make up the life supports without the superficial
gloss the philosophy of natural sciences has
provided them.
Real, objective and material without being “natural”.
When we ponder how the global world could be
made habitable for billions of human beings and
trillions of other creatures that no longer form a
nature or, of course, a society, but rather, to use my
term, a possible collective (contrary to the dual
notions of nature-and-society, the collective is not
collected yet, and noone has the slightest idea of
what its to be composed of, how it has to be
assembled or
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