archplus: Mr Sloterdijk, in your Spheres1 trilogy you attempt to sketch a philosophical theory that conceives space as a central category. Why?
Sloterdijk: Because human beings themselves are an effect of the space they have been able to create. All previous generations were aware to some extent that humans do not camp out in nature. The camps of prehistoric humans already began as a minimal structure based on distance, which shows that beings like us live under a particular spatial principle of assembly. The oldest camps date back over a million years, far beyond the prehistory of Homo sapiens. They show that the whole of human development can only be understood in relation to the secret of spatial construction for anthropogenesis.
This monster of a book with its two and a half thousand pages should actually be called Being and Space, rather than Spheres. But the times for working on ontological theory are over. So I have settled for something more contemporary, for a constructivist and anthropological style of theory.
The third volume of your trilogy contains a detailed discussion on architecture that includes the sections ‘Cell Building’ and ‘Foam City’. The chapter as a whole is titled ‘Indoors: Architectures of Foam’. It is not clear from the discussion why you chose that title.
Indeed, why can’t we simply carry on with the old cosmology that was built on the equivalence of the house and the world? For that very reason. The whole of classical metaphysics is a figment of the imagination based on an implicit theme that is only openly revealed in a few places, such as in the work of Hegel and other authors. It says that the world is like a house and that human beings are not only mortals but also people who live in dwellings. In other words, humans are fundamentally creatures that reside. Their relationship to the world as a whole is a relationship of residence. The question is: Why does modernist thought depart from this equivalence between world and house? Why do we need a new metaphor to describe the manner in which human beings establish themselves in their own spatial structures? And why do I propose the concept ‘foam’?
The answer is, quite simply, because we no longer need a universal house but rather a unité d’habitation, a habitation unit, a conglomerate or stackable mass of habitable cells. The idea of the cell abides by the spherical imperative, but instead of the cells stacked in a house producing the classical form of ‘world house’ it produces foam – solid foam as a multiplicity of individual worlds. I emphasize the individualistic aspect of the self-construction of these cells with so much feeling because the plural character of the cell conglomerate is important. For the early modernist architects, the quasi-metaphysical imperative of the new architecture with its slogan ‘Support the individual’s need for world education!’ was obviously felt much more keenly than it is by their present-day counterparts, who have long since regarded it as self-evident.
Is the collapse of the world house or of the all-embracing sphere into foam bubbles an entropic image?
Not only entropy is involved, but also negative entropy – what I call ‘negentropy’ – because things are much more complex nowadays than was possible under the concept of unity. Let’s not forget that metaphysics is the realm of great simplification, which explains its comforting effect.
Where does the energy for this negative entropy come from?
From the friction between the cosmoplastic plans, the world-creating designs of individuals. In earlier times individuals were much more heavily involved in the collective enterprise of creating something like a shared cosmos. You could say that the world picture itself had performed the function of a collector. Today we release the cosmoplastic energies of individuals and build up much more energy with them. The result is not easy to express as a totality; it cannot be represented as a rounded whole like the huge Ball of Being of metaphysics, which was supposed to serve as a universal vessel, a container for everybody together. When we are sitting in foam we cannot even imagine being able to see into the neighbouring cell.
Explication as a figure of thought acts as a guiding thread all through the third volume of Spheres. For example, in the introduction to ‘Architectures of Foam’ you write that the modern age makes dwelling explicit. What do you mean by that?
Walter Benjamin, in his Arcades project, was the first person to attempt to depict an architectural form as a historical-philosophical phenomenon. This involves an idea connected with our theme of explication. Benjamin’s great intuition consisted in looking more intently than earlier generations of scientists had done at the role that people of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries played as creators of milieus, or, even better, as creators of interiors. In other words, he saw the building of interiors as a timeless motif in the sense that human beings always have the need to construct an ‘inside’, an interior for themselves. At the same time, as a historical materialist, he wanted to emancipate this anthropological motif from its apparent timelessness. Consequently he asked: ‘What does the capitalist man do with his need for an interior?’ The answer was clear: he will use the most advanced contemporary technology to orchestrate the most archaic of all needs. He takes cast-iron, glass, the constructive possibilities of new pillar technology; his technique combines prefabricated elements. Paxton’s Crystal Palace with its famously short construction period of only eight months represented the triumph of this technology.
Arcades are such provocative structures for Benjamin because the market, a type of space that had seemed until then to be the epitome of openness in the polis, is drawn inwards. Although markets built inside halls were an older trend, it was exciting and shocking for hermeneutic interpreters of capital like Benjamin that capitalism adopted the architectural possibility, firstly, of drawing the forum effect inwards, and, secondly, of inverting the interior effect, that is, the salon, outwards. These two tendencies meet in the arcade. The citizen wants to bring the world, the cosmos, into his salon; to some extent he wants to impose the dogmatic form of the room onto the universe. From this perspective, he no longer wants to go out at all. Benjamin thought he could decipher the need to dispense with the outside world in the deepest interior of the capitalist dynamic. He was naturally projecting from his own personal structure, for real capitalists, in fact, are quite different from Benjamin’s assumptions – they go outside, they are sea voyagers and they flee from interiors. Benjamin lent an anthropological perspective to a piece of his own scholarly neurosis, but that is not our problem. The author’s handicap turned out to be heuristically fruitful because he could project exactly the point at which he could count on the cooperation of reality. In fact, that is always the fruitful moment: when reality is more neurotic than the neurotic person, it is enough to look through the lens of personal disturbance to identify the situation. Benjamin is a perfect example of this. In his own way he felt the need of the capitalist man of private means to exist as a pure hothouse plant. Like that man, Benjamin wanted to bring the world inside and completely aestheticize it to satisfy his need for security and immunization.
A passage in Corbusier’s writings states that the choice is between revolution and architecture. He decided in favour of architecture. In your terms it would mean he decided in favour of the explication of new living conditions.
And then he no longer needed a revolution because revolution is only a false description of explication. In a wicked passage in the introduction of Spheres III, referring to Bruno Latour, I say this even more sharply: ‘We were never revolutionary.’ Basically the twentieth century became almost completely trapped in its own linguistic games. We must remove two dangerous categories from its vocabulary: one is the concept of revolution, which only belongs in marketing nowadays, and the other is the concept of masses, which is also no longer usable in an affirmative sense. If such a thing as an effective (so-called revolutionary) change of reality actually exists, then we will see it in the sense that a new technology develops the implications of something that is happening in life, transforming and propelling it forward in the process. In this respect Corbusier was completely right. A technician always decides in favour of advancing technology. Everything that is successful is operative and he or she is not really interested in the symbolic accompanying noises. People no longer ask which programs will be announced but which programs will be written. This is the operative infiltration of existing conditions. Mere symbolic announcements have no effect at all, but anything that promulgates and popularizes hand movements and allows other people to make hand movements they have never made before has an impact. Modern apartments are full of technical gadgets that explicate life in the household (although now, rather than having grips, which belong to the obsolete phase of tools with handles, these gadgets have buttons, for we have reached the world of fingertip operations).
To return to Benjamin: can we use the historical-philosophical interpretation of contemporary architectural phenomena to re-trace how implicit issues become explicit? Is this a kind of guiding theme of the Spheres project?
In this context Benjamin is usually read as the hermeneutic analyst of capital, as somebody who discovered a coded script of reality in a parallel act to Freud and who proposed a sort of dream interpretation of capitalism. Just as Freud propagated the interpretation of dreams of the individual soul, Benjamin promoted the dream interpretation of the money system. He left the aspect related to spatial philosophy in the background. Despite this, Benjamin evidently understood that behind every form of spatial creation is a problem of transference. Human beings are creatures who move house, who change to another space or even a different element. In other words, they move constantly from A to B, and if they are as they are it is because they always bring with them the memory of another space in which they have been. Furnishing and decorating, producing spaces, is based on a difference. We cannot create an absolute space, nor a completely new one. Instead, we always create a differential space that is furnished in comparison to another space. Benjamin had understood that human individuals could have a unique transference dynamic. From this he deduced the fact that we are born as creatures equipped with a prenatal memory and prenatal spatial remembrance. The constellation of woman and space cannot be entirely eliminated, even with the modern gynophobia. Whatever the architecture, the question as to how far the coding of an interior is feminine remains relevant in the sense that building serves the purposes of dwelling. To the extent that human beings operate as dwelling creatures, they move in an energy field where the creation of the interior is influenced by feminine transference.
Is that the argument developed in Spheres I: Bubbles?
Spheres I is essentially devoted to exploring a powerful concept of intimacy – in an explicitly regressive movement. In this book I approach the topic of ‘being in’ in reverse gear, so to speak. First, I look at the phenomenon of interfaciality: when human beings look at other human beings it creates a non-trivial space – the interfacial space – that we cannot interpret physically. It is useless for me to measure the distance between the tip of my nose and theirs with a tape measure. The interfacial relationship creates a completely unique type of spatial relationship. I describe this spatial relationship from the perspective of mother–child interfaciality and trace it back to the animal kingdom. My next step tries to interpret the images of the intercordial relationship that arises when humans interrelate so emotionally that two hearts create a resonance chamber together – the metaphorical factor becomes more important here. And then I tiptoe around the most intimate relationship that exists because, from the perspective of the new life coming into the world, women are habitable.
Women’s bodies are dwelling places! Behind this shocking thesis, a natural history perspective emerges that I examine under the heading ‘The Egg Principle’. As we know, among birds and insects, and among the great majority of species, the fertilized egg, the carrier of genetic information, is laid in an outside environment that must have certain external characteristics of the uterus. At this juncture something quite incredible happened in the evolutionary line that leads to the mammals: the body of the female specimen of the species was defined as the ecological niche of the species’ own progeny. To some extent that is a dramatic turn in evolution. We could say that a double usage of the female specimen occurs: not only that she lays eggs, in which case her role as an ovulation system wholly suffices for the definition of femininity, but rather that the eggs are laid inside her and she is occupied as the ecological niche of her own progeny. This is how women became integral mother animals. Moreover, a kind of event arose that never previously existed in the world, namely being born as a product of this total milieu. And because birth is a biologically ambitious event with ontological consequences, it is important to stick to this moment with the ultimate indiscretion.
Does the transference of this primary fundamental experience seem to you to be an extremely virulent theme in spatial imagery?
Absolutely. Because if we use the concept of transference from psychoanalysis, is it possible to ask how living creatures who carry the trace of being born will construct themselves? The answer will be that they will probably do it in such a way as to build a minimal trace of that archaic sense of being protected into their later shells. We should note that transference evidently does not relate to feelings, nor to confused affects, but to the process of spatial creation as a whole. The construction of casings for life generates a series of uterus repetitions in outside environments.
This does not explain variations in spatial needs. Not all of them transmit the wish for archaic protection in this form. Many people feel extremely trapped in small spaces. There are the so-called cave dwellers and tree dwellers.
Spheres theory is not trying to explain everything. It is not a universal theory but a detailed kind of spatial interpretation. Incidentally, one can also elucidate very different kinds of spatial types in terms of the prenatal perspective – wide oceanic spaces on the one hand and hellishly tight ones on the other.
As I have said, Spheres 1 discusses microspherological phenomena. By microspherology I mean the description of the effects of intimate space. They are always seen interpersonally and I find the paradigm for this in the dyadic relationship. I show how we should actually conceive the dyad and I trace it back to a prenatal proto-intersubjectivity. I discover that the question is less about a mother–child relationship than about a child–placenta relationship. In other words, the original duplication occurred on a pre-personal level and the mother only entered the picture later, after the deepest possible regression exercises through the discovery of the so-called psychoacoustic navel. My results are based on Alfred Tomatis and other authors who have worked in this delicate field. They describe the foetal ear as the organ of primary bonding. That is quite exciting for people who wish to believe it but meaningless for those who do not accept the topic as valid.
What does that mean in relation to a contemporary explication? Or does ‘explication’ in this context mean that we can detect implicit content with contemporary analytical tools?
It is not only the analytical tools that give us access to specific elements of living relationships such as dwelling, working or loving; it is not only a cognitive process that is in progress. What we are dealing with here is a real process of working something out. That can be understood simply with a form of expressive logic or production logic. In this case, of course, I am in line with the tradition of Marxist anthropology. If it is true that we have to look at the whole of natural history to explain the formation of the human hand, then it follows that we have to consider the whole of cultural history to understand why we can do psychoacoustics today. Anyone who works anthropologically always has to try to date his or her own anthropological theses. This leads us to observe that everything Hegel and his contemporaries described as the phenomenology of mind – including a wildly over-optimistic teleological interpretation of process – can be rewritten again as the history of explication.
Not everything that exists implicitly becomes explicit. An explication will only relate to the parts of living relationships that have been developed by contemporary technology. For technology – and this is actually the book’s basic assumption – is the attempt to replace naturally arising or religious and symbolic immune systems with explicit technical immune systems. If you want to replace something, you have to understand it better than a mere user does. If you want to make an artificial limb, you must precisely define the organ to be replaced. This takes you from the concrete function statement up to the general situation and then back down again to the possible functional equivalent – which is just how functionalists work. They always start from the question: ‘What does the system in its present form achieve?’ And: ‘What can we do instead?’
Architects understand that very well. What are the characteristics of the space formed by intimacy? What does it achieve? It is certainly a pre-geometric space. How can we replace it with technical methods? Architects would probably immediately have the associative idea: ‘We must build cosy corners!’
That wouldn’t be too far wrong. If we ask what a cosy corner represents, in functional analysis we arrive at the term ‘primacy of the protecting atmosphere’. And when we have recognized the primacy of the protecting atmosphere – in fact, the primacy of the atmospheric factor at all –, architects can deduce that they should not take geometric ideologies as their starting point. Instead they should be thinking in terms of atmospheric spatial effects.
That requires translation. After all, intimacy is first and foremost an intersubjective category that can be thought about or expressed in different spatial terms.
I think of intersubjectivity as its own kind of spatial relationship. It took the first seven hundred pages of the Spheres project – the entire first volume – to construct a non-geometric, non-physical concept of spatiality. Its strong characteristic is that, by being together, beings of the human type evoke the sense of reciprocal accommodation. An amorous couple provides a clear example: the lovers are already together in some way or another and the question ‘Your place or mine?’ is actually secondary. Incidentally, this is a lovely example of an explication: this state of togetherness and going somewhere as people who are already together is the gestural explanation of what was already implicitly present by being together but now emerges explicitly. That is also why Spheres I includes a theory of the bedroom, as well as a little theory of the bed or of the anonymous self-completer.
Balzac’s theory of the bed is, to be precise, also a spatial theory. Do you refer to it?
Unfortunately not, but I refer to other sources. In relation to the phenomenon of bed, what interests me most of all is the pillow and the eiderdown because I want to show that there is a kind of intimate cohabitation that remains entirely within the pre-personal realm. Many people would rather divorce their spouse than part with their pillow. Human beings always set up an inconspicuous completer around them. The cultural history of sleep is itself a history of explication of these nocturnal self-completers with the aid of sleep helpers, if you like, who are technically represented in the history. Covering oneself is a gesture of acknowledging oneself. It contains the quest for one’s own unmistakable tight space that one sees as assisting sleep. Many people cannot fall asleep without a blanket covering them because they need this minimal completer to give the all-clear signal at night.
Your book uses examples of two types of building, apartments and stadiums, to combine the result of different explication processes. ‘Result’ not in the sense of a final outcome but rather as a segment of a continuing process. This brings your discussion onto the contemporary plane of architecture. Some intermediary steps are missing between the ontological grounding of a spatial theory as you developed it in Spheres I and its concrete establishment in historical/contemporary terms.
Does ‘world island’ mean the whole presence of the world at a place and at a particular time?
Yes. Contrary to the generally accepted view so far, the world is not this great whole that God and other jovial observers have spread out before them. Rather, worlds appear in the plural and have an insular structure. In some ways islands are extracts from worlds that are inhabited and they can be used as world models. This is why we have to know what is meant by a minimal complete island, an island capable of being a world. In the chapter ‘Insulations’ in my book [Spheres III] I distinguish between three kinds of island: absolute islands such as a space station, which is completely isolated; relative islands such as a hothouse for plants; and anthropogenic islands with a structure that could allow human beings to emerge on them. The anthropogenic island is a self-insulating dynamic system resembling a human incubator. Apes are put in and people come out. How is that possible? If we argue in Darwinist and philosophical terms, how can apes enter into such self-reflexive relationships? How was the anthropogenic engine started?
I describe this island as a nine-dimensional space in which each individual dimension has to be given to allow the effect of anthropogenesis, of becoming a human being, to occur. If just one dimension is missing, we fail to get a complete human being. It begins with what I call the chirotope, the space of the hand. What does the hand have to do with anthropogenesis? The answer to this question yields an initial theory of action, an elementary kind of pragmatism. Next, I deal with the phonotope, the auditory space in which the self-hearing group resides. Then comes the uterotope, the space of deep affiliations, followed by the thermotope, the heat spheres or pampering space, and the erototope, the jealousy space and the field of desire. On the latter I would note that the development of species-specific jealousy was extremely important for the process of humanization – because human beings are mimetic animals that never stop jealously and vigilantly watching what other people are doing. Indeed, they even imitate those who successfully pretend not to watch what others are doing. This is followed by the ergotope, the space for war and struggle, the thanatope, the space for coexistence with the dead, in which religious symbols dominate, and finally the nomotope, the space of the legal tensions that give a group normative security. Buckminster Fuller’s theory of tensegrities plays an important role for this aspect.
Modern apartment culture can be derived from this general island theory because an apartment will only function if it is convincing as a minimal complete island for an individual.
Doesn’t this description include the definition of dwelling, of human beings as beings that reside?
Not really. In my book I develop what dwelling means in a long opening sequence to one of the chapters. I describe step by step how the different dimensions of house dwelling become explicit. You have to understand that houses are, firstly, machines for killing time. Admittedly this is a rather curious theory. In fact, people wait in a primitive farmhouse for a silent event in the fields outside that they cannot influence but that comes regularly, thank God. They wait for the moment when the fruits they have planted ripen. This means that at first people only live in a house because they acknowledge the belief that it is worth waiting for an event outside the house. In the farming world the temporal structure of house dwelling was seen from the perspective of being compelled to wait. This kind of being-in-the-house was first questioned in the Middle Ages when urban culture began to spread in northwestern Europe. Since then, growing sections of the European population have been integrated into a culture of impatience, or being unable to wait. In Goethe’s times only 20 per cent of people were urbanized, and 80 per cent still lived under the old agrarian conditions. Heidegger, whom I regard in this context as the last real philosopher of peasant life, continued to conceive existential time as waiting time and consequently as boredom. The event this waiting leads to is naturally something profoundly simple: that things will become ripe on the field of becoming. The philosopher equates this field with world history without considering that the world of the cities can no longer be field-shaped. In the city, things do not ripen, they are produced.
Having defined dwelling as halted existence and the house as a bus or train stop, I move on to the house as a reception centre, as the sorting place for important and unimportant things. The original house is an acclimatization plant. People spend considerable time there, which means they acclimatize unconsciously and their habits unify with their surroundings. When that happens, they have created the background that makes unusual things possible in the first place. In this sense, dwelling is a dialectical practice – it makes itself useful for its opposite.
Perhaps we should briefly mention that in this opening sequence you cast Vilém Flusser in the role of Heidegger’s opponent. The arc of suspense could not be greater: where the one argues ontologically, the other makes things technically explicit, and where the one assesses modern human beings’ losses in terms of the past, the other sees things pointing towards a new start.
This is why the two men belong together in a wider perspective. My third step develops the theorem of embedding or immersion. The philosophical theory of being-in that Heidegger established is extended here. The question of what it means to be inside something is answered. How does it happen? I illustrate these questions with the aid of some statements by Paul Valéry, who interpreted what ‘being-in’ means in terms of the paradigm of architecture. Valéry thought architecture meant that human beings enclose human beings in works made by humans. This touches on the totalitarian side of architecture.
Finally, in the fourth stage of the explication the real nervous system of the phenomenon of dwelling is exposed, the definition of the house as an immune system. This is done by focusing particularly on the dimension of atmosphere design, of the air we breathe in the building. Part of the venture of modern architecture is that it has made the apparently immaterial facets of existence, human beings’ stay in an atmospheric environment, technologically and aesthetically explicit. The modern art of housing will not be able to return again behind this level of skill in designing casings for human beings.
If you go through these steps in my book, it will be clear what I mean when I claim that the apartment and the sports stadium are the key architectural icons of the twentieth century. At this point we can return to Benjamin’s path once again – but we arrive at different answers to the ones Arcades gave. To conceive the interior nowadays, we first have to practise monadology. One person – one apartment. A monad – a world cell – …
... although it used to be: one bachelor, man or woman – one apartment.
That’s right. Modern housing construction is based on a celibate ontology. In the same way as modern biology defines life as the successful phase of an immune system, from the perspective of architectural theory we could define existence as the successful phase of a one-person household. Everything becomes integrated. The world and the household are one. But a one-person existence can only be successful, if at all, because there is architectural support that makes the apartment into a completely artificial world. In other words, the early modernist architects were right to see themselves as portraying humanity. Eliminating the megalomania factor leaves us with the fact that the architects of the first one-person apartments enabled a historically singular type of human being on a mass scale – at most this was prefigured by the Christian ascetics.
You describe the apartment as a studio of relationships with the self. Considering that human history began with the formation of hordes, with a rudimentary form of division of labour during hunting, the emergence of this type of human being with its singular reproduction, a being that can live almost autonomously, is rather disturbing. Two questions about this. Earlier you described intimacy, dyadic intimacy, as spatially constituent. What remains of this in apartment culture? And are there any forms of spatially significant coexistence between the extremes of single and masses, isolation and assembly?
The first question is easier to answer. The apartment individualists have discovered a process by which people as singles can create a couple with themselves. This happens in such a way that the person selects the ‘event’ setting for his or her own life – in other words, the mode of judgemental observation. Individuals in event culture constantly differentiate themselves from themselves. They can choose their own self as their interior Other. Strong individualism presupposes that one keeps the second pole and the other poles that belong to a completely rounded personality structure inside oneself. This psycho-structural possibility is prefigured in ancient European culture; its origins can be traced back to Antiquity. The classical examples are the hermit monks who went to the Theban desert to the south of Alexandria, a few days’ walking distance, and settled there to pray. As far as we know, they had a fairly rich interior life. The most famous of them, St Anthony, was visited so often by torturing spirits that he could not be described as being alone. In modern terms we would say he lived with his hallucinations as roommates.
Nowadays he would probably be in a psychiatric hospital and dosed with tranquillizers. What is the difference between this extreme form of individuation and autism?
Autistic people do not have the degree of inner space that allows them to be in their own company. The idea of individuals’ structure of self-completion in interaction with themselves is deeply rooted in media anthropology and only explicable in terms of media history. The minimal formal conditions for self-completion are that a so-called single is integrated into a dyad – whether with real or imaginary Others.
The question of the social life of isolated people is more difficult. What will become of the animal from the small group Homo sapiens if it sits there in its pure individual representation as the sole inhabitant of its world apartment? The question is worrying. Two possible answers come to mind: the first one would be that the individual imitates the whole horde. That implies the task of representing twelve people in one’s interior. In the absence of the real Other, this is how a complete social structure would necessarily be simulated.
In psychology the formation of a multiple personality is seen as a symptom of illness, as the development of a seriously disturbed personality.
From our point of view the multiple personality would be nothing but the individual’s response to the disappearance of the real social environment. It would be a plausible reaction to chronic social under-challenging. The other possibility comes from modern practices of networking. The horde returns as the address book. Physical proximity is no longer a necessary condition for sociability. The future belongs to telesocialism. The past returns as the life of telehordes.
Under the heading ‘Dialectic of Modernization’ you describe how the empty centre of society becomes filled with illusory images of the centre.
In Spheres III I try to explain why the concept of society should vanish from our vocabulary along with the concepts of revolution and masses. This human conglomerate that has been called society since the eighteenth century is built on monadological or nuclear units of life forms. Moreover, we can also see that it contains numerous milieu hordes, specific groupings that organize as subcultures.
Think of the world of horse lovers – a huge subculture you could lose yourself in for your whole life, yet it is nearly invisible if you are not a member yourself. There are hundreds of other such milieus in the social field at present, all typically constituting the centre of the world themselves and barely existing for others. I describe them as inter-ignorant or mutually ignorant systems. They are necessarily set up in a way that they can’t or shouldn’t know each other, otherwise their members would be cheated of enjoying their specialization and exclusiveness. If you had encyclopaedic tendencies and peeked into hundreds of scenes, you would get nothing out of it. In terms of profession there are only two or three types of person who can afford such polyvalence. In the first place there are architects, who – at least virtually – build for everybody; then novelists, who put people from all kinds of different scenes into their novels; and lastly clerics, who have to make graveside speeches for all sorts of odd people. And the list ends there.
In other words, the multiple personality, on the one hand, and single networking, on the other; those are the two possibilities for completion that I see operating in individualist populations. Doubtless the predisposition of Homo sapiens passed down from the anthropological hordes cannot be overcome, but because the explication of the old legacy is progressing simultaneously on several sides, the horde-like or social moments of the life of sapiens can be revised for today’s special needs. The rather more dyadic theme, that is, intimate relationships, is explained up to the point at which intimacy is formally imitated by self-completion mechanisms. That provides the starting point for new evolutionary forms. The more collective features derive from telesocial tendencies and milieu tribalism. Looking towards the longer term, this will lead to the emergence of human types who are rather different from anything we have known so far.
The models you describe for the apartment, from the early modernists to Kurokawa, and for urbanism to Constant, were valid for the 1960s. After that a change of direction occurred in architecture, based on a reconsideration of the city – the city in particular as something that cannot be grasped, defined or reduced. The concept of the capsule disappeared. The city was seen as a weave that was defined as typology on the one side and urban morphology on the other. This was the beginning of the triumphal march of postmodernism that sidelined the utopian approaches of the 1960s.
Please allow me to explain – or defend – the capsule motif again in a different way. I am not concerned with the excluding aspect that characterizes encapsulated relationships. I am more interested in a critique of the textile metaphors that urban studies and network theory have been using in recent years. Talking about nets and weaves encourages a tendency towards despatialization, or disregarding space, that I see as dangerous. In network thinking there are only interfaces and points derived from the model of two or more intersecting planes or curves. This results in a world picture whose constituent element is the point. Network theorists think radically non-spatially, that is, two-dimensionally, and they use concepts of anorexia nervosa to express their relationship to the environment. Their graphics reveal that the isolated point in the world is seen as an interface between lines without any volume.
In contrast, I use the concept of the foam bubble or the cell, or the capsule if you like, to show that the isolated element already has an expansion of its own. We should not revert back to an ontology of points but should start by assuming the cell fit for the world as the minimal element. A little more monadology can do no harm – but a monad is not an extendable point; it is more like a micro-world. I am not interested in the capsule metaphor as such because the cell metaphor is much more important. The term ‘cell’ expresses the content of the world and the form of the world contained in the individual point. Weave and net metaphors bring us, at most, to tiny nodes, but we cannot inhabit nodes. The foam metaphor, however, highlights the microcosmic unique spatiality of each individual cell.
The foam metaphor as the implosion of a universal unity, a globe, is a fantastic image. This still leaves the question of which characters these metaphors have when they are conceived in connection with architecture. Architects tend to take images literally.
That has already happened. Frei Otto2 quite intentionally tried to extract nearly natural or organomorphic spatial creations from soap bubbles.
Frei Otto used experiments with soap bubbles and soap film to demonstrate that minimal surfaces, that is, surfaces with the same tension, are the optimal form for load bearing in constructions made with membranes and tensile structures. That is rather different from a formal loan from the realm of biology or nature. In fact he was concerned with geometrical questions in relation to the use of materials and power dissipation.
The foam metaphor supports an intellectual virtue: it prevents us from reverting to the over-simplifying Platonic geometries of traditional architectural history. Foam has no square forms – and that is interesting news. However, there are also no simple spherical structures any more, at least when the foams have left their wet or autistic stage. Contradictory forces of deformation are always at work inside them, with the result that we end up dealing with structures that are not smooth in which more complex geometric laws apply.
What is the argument against the right angle?
The basic idea of this theory of multiple spaces can only be understood if, at the same time, we keep in mind the reflections on alternative statics that run through the whole of the third volume of my book. We live in an age in which the function of classical statics, of loading and carrying in stress-bearing constructions, has been replaced by constructions under traction, in other words, tension totalities. I am thinking mainly, of course, of Buckminster Fuller’s tensegrities as well as the pneumatic constructions and air structures of the twentieth century. The new logic of structures works entirely beyond the wall and the pillar. Tension totalities are the technical transition between the foam metaphor and modern construction forms. Foam is a kind of natural tensegrity, the more so when it no longer appears as ‘individualistic’ foam in which soap bubbles float past each other in a liquid solution, barely touching each other. When foam becomes older and drier, a complex interior architecture develops. Many bubbles burst, the remaining air from the bursting bubble merges into the neighbouring bubble and the foam dries out from the inside. Beautiful, architecturally sophisticated shapes, the polyether foams, are created in the process.
Polyether foam is characterized by the theme of co-isolation, which means we and our neighbours share our mutual separation. My walls are your walls and we have the situation in common of being turned away from each other. The concept of co-isolation is fundamental for the universe of foamy forms. The neighbourhood of world designs or living spaces inside a co-isolated structure has a different quality from the neighbourhood of spaces within traditional segmented cultures. There, everything is socially segmented; the world is like a conglomerate of isolated farms. The image of the potato sack that Marx used in the 18th Brumaire to describe the situation of peasants farming parcels of land in France perfectly describes the situation of wet foam. In that case each cell flows past the other cells without reference to the world around it; they do not touch each other, however much they resemble each other.
How much is left over from the foam metaphor of the psychosocial structure of the space, and how much from the constructivist approach of spatial constitution?
In my opinion, foam is a very useful expression for what architects call density – which is another negentropic factor, by the way. Density can be expressed in psychosocial terms by a reciprocal stress coefficient. Human beings create atmosphere by urging each other to get closer to one another. We should never forget that what we call society implies the phenomenon of the unwelcome neighbourhood. Density, therefore, is also an expression for our over-communicative constitution, which, by the way, is continually goaded on by the dominant ideology of communication. By contrast, anybody who takes density seriously arrives at praise for the wall. This observation is no longer compatible with the classical modernism that set up the ideal of the transparent house, the ideal of mapping interior relationships onto exterior relationships and vice versa. Today we are focusing once again on the isolation capability of a building, which should not be confused with massiveness. Isolation, taken as an independent phenomenon, is used to explicate the living relationship of neighbourhood (which remains rather weak in my book). It would have required writing a song of praise to isolation. That would explore a dimension of coexistence which acknowledges that human beings have an infinite need for non-communication. The dictatorial features of modernism all derive from a false version of communicative anthropology: the dogmatic view of an over-communicative image of human beings has been naïvely accepted for far too long.
We should conclude by talking about the different levels of abstraction that the Spheres project covers. It is a philosophical sketch of a theory of space. It uses knowledge from anthropology, biology and psychology and from medicine and the social and natural sciences, engineering technology, etc. These areas are sometimes like digressions and can be read as essays in their own right. Is philosophy still the meta-theory that succeeds in integrating all these fields of knowledge?
Contemporary philosophy is a rather perverse science that has difficulty revealing its subject. Any other discipline can easily say what it is about: biologists study life, architects study constructed space, psychologists are concerned with the psyche, etc. Which subject are philosophers actually dealing with? The only possible answer would be a super-subject that is not an authentic subject but an overall relationship or a horizon – and that is called the world. If we imagine the world as the ancients once did, as a giant container, the subject of philosophy would appear as a big globe, so big that it contains absolutely everything. As long as we conceive the world as the maximal globe which integrates everything that exists by a single reverse movement inside itself, a movement that is rightly called universe, which means once-reversed, so that everything is inside and nothing can be outside, then philosophy seems to have a proper subject, namely this beautiful maximal globe called the world that is surrounded, if you wish, by the absolute globe called God. Spheres II: Globes is concerned with these two big globes, with philosophical cosmology and philosophical theology.
In the third volume, however, I show that classical philosophy was prematurely optimistic about its ability to confirm the existence of its subject with cosmological and theological methods. Today, in many respects, both epistemologically and empirically, we know so much more than our ancient predecessors that we are no longer blithely able to approach the great totality. Instead, we look for a more discrete type of theory. In the third volume, Foam, I try to show that even small forms demonstrate world character. In this sense foam theory is a micro-cosmology connected to a poly-cosmology.
Each soap bubble as its own cosmos?
Yes, we should always work right through these implications. When I talk about a couple, I mean it from the perspective of world-making à deux. When I talk about a bedroom, I do it from the perspective of world-making through a construction form, and even when I talk about pillows and duvets, those nocturnal completions for a dismantled self, it is always an amorphous form of world-building3 using intimate quasi-objects. Even sleepers are in the world and are together with something. Being-in-the-world always has the features of being together with someone. For us, the so-called question of being is the synousia question, the issue of social intercourse. Being as togetherness implies a four-place relationship because it describes the existence of somebody with somebody and something in something. This formula describes the minimal degree of complexity that must be construed to arrive at a concept of the world. Architects are deeply involved in this way of seeing from the start because they have particular skills for interpreting the total relation of being-in-the-world. For them, being-in-the-world means staying in a building. A house is nothing in the first place but a sculptural response to the question of how somebody can be together with somebody and something together with something. Architects interpret this most mysterious of all spatial propositions – ‘in’ – in their own way; all they do professionally is ‘inside’ or ‘in’ theory.
Heidegger deduces the problem very beautifully in Being and Time, to the extent that the book deals with a theory of space rather than a theory of time. He begins with being inside generally and moves on to being-in-the-world. He has understood that the preposition ‘in’ or ‘inside’ goes very deep. He makes every possible effort to illuminate the basic relationship of being-in-something. He shows that we are on the wrong track if we conceive being inside as a container-type relationship. In fact, Heidegger’s freshly conceived being-in means ecstasy, and that is something absolutely crazy because it means being held out into nothingness. From that moment on, the ‘inside’ does not have the sense of a container but of ecstasy instead. It follows that we no longer really know where we are when we are in-the-world.
Returning to the methodical plane: the architect who buys archplus4 and reads part of the third volume of your book may think: ‘Fantasies about architectural theory’.
That would be the wrong conclusion.
Would architects also realize that your argument is on a level of digression where you develop this ‘being inside’ from the perspective of the twentieth century’s performance? How can the poor architects reading this get their bearings?
Architects are not poor but rich people who obviously have the luxury to think, otherwise they would not be doing theory. As I try to show, luxury is absolutely fundamental. If you start thinking you are poor, you are lost. Believing in poverty is the sin against the spirit that will not be forgiven. Human beings are never poor, not even the poor. Homo sapiens is constitutionally incapable of being poor because of his tendency towards world-openness. People only think they are poor to be rid of world-openness. Interpreting human beings as poor animals is a trick invented by laziness.
The spatial theory of my book Foams is principally a theory of ecstasy linked to a theory of ecstasy compensation – which means architectural theory. So I thought it was meaningful from the beginning to try to establish a dialogue with architecture. Heidegger, incidentally, anticipated this with his essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’,5 although I think it misses something in relation to the premises and the exposition. But he was asking the right questions. We have to do the same thing all over again with Heidegger against Heidegger, to quote a well-known phrase. That is just what I have attempted in Spheres III. Human beings are indeed ecstatic creatures, they are held out into the openness, they can never be definitively tied to some kind of cosy contained situation. In the ontological sense they are always outside, but they can only be outside to the degree that they are stabilized by inside support. We must strongly emphasize this aspect today against the current romanticism of openness. It is spatial immune systems that make the state of being outside bearable. It follows that buildings are compensatory systems for ecstasy. The architect as a type is found here next to the priest and the therapist – as an accomplice for the resistance to unbearable ecstasy. Heidegger’s starting point, by the way, is less to do with architecture than with language, and language is, in fact, a complete programme of ecstasy compensation. As the majority of people say the same thing all their lives and language usually functions wholly repetitively, we live in a state of symbolic redundancy that functions just as well as a house with very thick walls. ‘Language is the house of being’6 – we are gradually beginning to understand what that meant. My language is a fortress in which we can take refuge against the open world outside. Still, we let visitors in now and again. Talking and building usually create so much security in human relationships that we can occasionally succumb to a little bit of ecstasy. From my perspective it follows that architects are people who philosophize in material. Somebody who builds a house or a building for an institution is making a statement about the relationship between the ecstatic and the enstatic, between being outside and being inside.
This brings us to a controversial topic, namely that architects often tend to educate people – whether deliberately as the modernist architects did, or simply by implying that the design of a building is always a design for life as well.
The educational element of the early modernists refers to an explicit recognition of the latent megalomaniac moments in architecture as a whole. And that is perfectly justified because as an architect one makes fairly challenging proposals for forms of life. When somebody erects a building that will have a lifespan of a hundred years or more, it is a massive intervention in living conditions. If I were an architect, the best I could do in the circumstances would be to convince myself as follows: ‘I am allowed to do what I am doing because I know what life is, I know what a good form of life is. I have thought for long enough about ideal containers for human beings, and I know my containers are absolutely fit for human habitation.’ In other words, these architects would be well advised to admit their delusions of grandeur. If I cannot say something like that, it would be better for me to seek refuge in another profession. Perhaps the history of architectures in the past decades has been influenced most of all by sceptical themes invading architects’ self-confidence, at least on the surface. But the architects who once built the arcades in Paris and the palm houses in England and then the buildings that housed the world exhibitions, and the architects of early modernism, were people who may have suffered in many ways, but certainly not from a lack of self-confidence. They were obviously convinced that they were the pioneers of a new form of humankind.
A better world.
The pioneers of the new types of building were apostles with something better than an old gospel. They had plans for new human beings in new kinds of houses.
What comes next? Will you keep on pursuing the spatial theory approach of the Spheres project?
There will be one more volume: In the World Interior of Capital.7 It is a sequel to Spheres II and III from the perspective that the earth, for better or worse, is also a sphere – but not the world sphere of ancient cosmology. This book looks at the emergence of the world system and the overall condition of life under capitalism. My argument refers back to Dostoevsky’s metaphor of the crystal palace. On his journey to London in 1862, Dostoevsky visited the rebuilt Crystal Palace in Sydenham near London – not Paxton’s original construction of 1851, which famously stood in Hyde Park. What the great Russian writer saw, or thought he saw, became, if you like, the birth moment of the opposition to globalization. Faced with Crystal Palace and London’s addictive amusement industry, Dostoevsky turned into the first fundamentalist of anti-Western reflection. He thought he had recognized how the whole West was integrated into a kind of consumerist Baal cult. ‘Baal’ was consequently the title for the London chapter of his travel sketches, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, published in 1863. It is, incidentally, one of the best works the nineteenth century produced in the travel writing genre, certainly on a level with Thomas de Quincey’s The English Mail Coach or Heinrich Heine’s magnificent piece The Baths of Lucca.
Starting from Dostoevsky’s text, I would like to elaborate the crystal palace metaphor as a symbol of world capitalism and a powerful emblem of globalization. Part of the virtue of this image is that it highlights the difference between inside and outside from the very beginning. It emphasizes the necessary and unavoidable exclusivity of the so-called process of globalization. In this sense globalization means the erection of an exclusive kind of comfort structure with the aid of all the appropriate kinds of media and material transactions. We are only using the word ‘globalization’ properly when we realize that it is a camouflage for an extended macro-interior – in other words, a world interior space that encompasses the reality of products as a whole to the extent that it is developed for the owners of purchasing power. The crystal palace is the shared house of purchasing power: a building with invisible, yet from the outside nearly insurmountable, walls that houses around one and a half million persons or somewhat more – for simplicity’s sake, let’s say the group of the winners of globalization.
If we extrapolate Dostoevsky’s crystal palace through the twentieth and into the beginning of the twenty-first century, we arrive directly at the concept of Empire that Negri and Hardt recently proposed for the entire structure of present-day capitalism.8 But Negri and Hardt forgot to make it explicitly clear that their empire and their multitude are by no means figures that are completely integral to the planet; even the empire is only a very big but thoroughly exclusive event. We could call it a yacht club with moorings in a large number of countries. The authors’ theses can only be understood in the sense that there is no alternative place for the opposition today: of course not, when we know that you have to belong to the yacht club if you want to oppose the club rules. Naturally, there is an exterior, even now, and more than ever. One can leave the empire when one wants – in the way adventure tourists do. But one cannot stay out permanently without being downgraded.
What is the difference between the symbol of Benjamin’s arcades and that of Dostoevsky’s crystal palace? Circulation of products occurs in both, and both are interiors – we could say the crystal palace is the place where globalization is present, whereas the arcade is more local. Are we talking about a qualitative leap?
That’s right, there is a leap in format that includes a leap in quality. Benjamin rightly conceived the arcade as a synthesis of market and salon. On one occasion he called it the ‘sexy street’ of trade where, he said, useful things prostitute themselves. The crystal palace, however, goes well beyond these oases of lascivious cosy capitalism where dandies and flâneurs feel at home. We should not forget the historical fact that the original Crystal Palace was designed to house a new type of event. The Palace of 1851 was the site of the first World’s Fair. The idea that the world represents the epitome of things that can be bought and that it can therefore become an object for exhibition underlines the trend of transforming the entire world into an event environment.
The ontology of capital created a powerful new instrument for itself with the world exhibition concept. The main impact was that the consumption dynamic became part of the interior world as well and made subjects into integral consumers. By ‘subject’ I mean that which consumes and enjoys itself by consuming and enjoying world objects. The Crystal Palace’s form of construction was exactly what was needed for this in the nineteenth century – it incorporated the result of globalized world trade and colonialism. The programme of psychedelic capitalism has been around since that time – and a hundred and fifty years after Dostoevsky’s visit to London we can clearly see the continuity of the development. From then on, real world trade or transportation continued to happen only inside superlative buildings.
We should remember that trade or transportation in the explicit sense means control of reversible relationships, whereas the less controlled and one-sided movements are better described as expeditions. We can only begin talking of traffic when the equation ‘Outward journey minus return journey equals zero’ holds in a practical sense. A metro train driver who drives back and forth every day can give precise information about the transportation system. In the age of discovery, on the other hand, there were only asymmetrical journeys and the journey out was always of prime importance. Outward and return journeys first became strictly symmetrical in the context of authentic transport conditions – that is why transport is an entirely post-historical phenomenon. Train drivers in local transport are the most authentic witnesses of post-histoire; they drive back and forth on their route twenty times a day in both directions and can testify that there and back is a difference that makes no difference.
So far we have hardly talked about the second volume of Spheres: Globes. It ends with the philosophical history of terrestrial globalization. Here, too, the main focus is on space, or what happens to space. How do you relate that to the different levels of spatial criteria in the Spheres trilogy?
I have just outlined the main ideas of the concluding section of Spheres II. The terrestrial globalization that began with Columbus’ journey and ended with the establishment of a satellite environment in the Earth’s outer atmospheres is an episode lasting just five hundred years that we could describe as the world history of Europe. In this period the Earth’s inhabitants, and the Europeans first of all, became clearly aware that the Earth itself was the only globe in the cosmos that was important to them. During this authentic era of globalization people in Europe started to feel that the Earth was immensely big – yet not too big to be circumnavigated with the aid of ships, as long as one could invest a year for a journey. In the age of electronic globalization, however, there is a growing feeling that the Earth is a dirty, clouded little globe that we can circumnavigate in a single day. Globalization in the age of rapid media means destruction of space, and consequently negation of the globe.
You describe the history of the modern age as a history of the space revolution going into the exterior, as blasting the protective shells of a metaphysical cosmos in which there was only one unique interior.
I begin by following the tracks of the great writers about ideas and culture, from Jacob Burckhardt to Hans Blumenberg, who have shown us what resulted from the discovery of the world and of human beings in the Renaissance. The space discovered in the age of Renaissance sea voyages yielded a very equivocal result: first, a planetary agoraphobia that was expressed in the fear of the world felt by common people from the countryside; and, second, a new type of feeling about the world as a homeland in which many individual people became like nomads and learned to feel at home in the wide open spaces of the world system. As we can see, the present has inherited both of these feelings and perpetually combines them into the oddest syntheses. Nowadays the feeling of the world interior has been transferred from Christian metaphysics to the social security system.
Is this ‘world interior of capital’ a new kind of world house, to return to the concept you began with – a formation on a new level of an interior which is gradually losing its exterior?
Liberal ideologues would obviously like to describe the world of the Global Age in those terms – the whole of humanity gathered around the donation table of capitalism and everybody receiving their allotted share of the great gifting. The truth is that the hothouse of interiorized comfort creates a partial universalism that includes many and excludes very many. The optimists calculate the proportion of inclusion to exclusion today as two billion to four billion people, and the pessimists as one billion to five billion people.
In other words, at the moment it is still a Western house with limited entry and tight control over access.
A Western house through and through, even if it straddles parts of Asia. In this ocean dome of capitalism everything that is consumable in any way can be experienced as part of the interior of capital. Its borders are drawn by discrimination. As I have said, they follow the line along which people have purchasing power.
What are we dealing with here? With a new form of metaphysical sphere or with a world made of foam?
In my view, reality belongs by nature to conglomerations of multiple elements and bizarre neighbourhoods – in other words, to foamy structures. Still, for several thousand years there have been powerful and real forces trying to unite the multiple elements. The will to power is nearly always expressed as the will to create a synthesis and, consequently, the will towards the middle and the will to capture the world from a dominant centre. The age of imperial world fantasies coincided more or less with the age of unified metaphysics.
Aside from philosophers, fortune-tellers and generals, architects have also been involved in this affair since Antiquity because the epitome of the unified form, the metaphysical sphere, appears in domed buildings. Spheres II contains a fairly ambitious chapter on architecture, which is placed exactly in the middle of the book and deliberately tackles this problem. The digression about the Pantheon in Rome crowns the attempt towards a summary reconstruction of metaphysics out of the spirit of crystal ball gazing. I interpret the Pantheon and the culture of large domes in general as the attempt by older architects to reconstruct the classical idea of the Uranus cosmos in architectural form. The Pantheon dome is the original image of all the domes that have ever been built. Everywhere that the idea of constructing a dome exists, a macro-interior is designed that expresses the cosmological claim to encompass the whole world under one roof. Classical metaphysics is based on the world–house equation in which the dome, or domed building, functions as an invisible member. The house is a dome and the dome is the cosmos. In other words, the dome is a theocosmic form of construction, a form arising from theology and cosmology, and it will continue as long as God appears as the building owner.
The introduction to Spheres III, ‘Airquake’, says something like: ‘God is dead. And that is the good news.’ But it seems as if reality did not hold to this idea. Otherwise we could shimmer away dreamily and peacefully as mutually isolated soap bubbles, some with a Muslim tint and others with Christian colouring. Instead, the liberal achievements of the West are clashing with the eternal values of Islam.
I think you are correct in observing that a kind of war about images of the world is in progress. The West has left behind the era of metaphysics of the monocentre, whereas reactionary or, in other words, revolutionary Islamism represents a movement to rescue the illusion of the centre. Temporarily, however, the ideology of President George W. Bush9 has resulted in a degree of symmetry between the two conflicting sides because Bush behaves as if we are still living in the age of militant centrism. This explains the Americans’ silly expression ‘the war on terrorism’.
Looking concretely at the processes of the conflict, we see immediately that we cannot talk about a symmetrical conflict. Terrorism is a correct, if evil, way of interpreting Western formation of foam, namely by trying to make isolated bubbles burst in the big society of cells that makes up Western civilization. Here a pair of towers, there a tourist bus, somewhere else a train in the station, or a discothèque or pizzeria. This kind of thing admittedly succeeds in isolated cases, but not more than that. The rest is about over-interpretation. Nowadays it is not easy, of course, to avoid over-interpretation of terror because, by its nature, life in the foamy world is accompanied by the explicit consciousness that all of us exist together in a state of fragility – and anybody who thinks about their own fragility tends towards exaggerating the danger to himself or herself (just as people in heroic and immortalist cultures tended to exaggerate their own self-confidence). This radically distinguishes us from the Islamists’ way of thought. Like the Christians of the Middle Ages, they have revived or perpetuated the idea of a divine super-immunity that is supposed to surround every true warrior. The most effective weapon against this would be the export of Western-type social security. As long as such systems are not available to Islamic people, they will take refuge in immortalism and post-mortalism. If we take a relaxed view of religious metaphysics, particularly metaphysics of monotheism, we can discern a form of imaginary social security. As we can see, these are all topics that belong to the extended field of immunology.
In the metaphysical security system the community always takes priority over the interests and well-being of the individual.
There is no doubt that the pre-eminence of the collective super-immunity, the community, was conventionally evident without discussion. The individual’s interest in immunity only became emancipated in the modern world. Before then a strict collective style of immunization was imposed, and there are still remains of this today in the form of compulsory conscription, the duty to pay taxes and statutory insurance systems. Anybody who refuses to cooperate with them is still seen as a traitor and deserter. Community and immunity are basically expressions for the same thing. Both words derive from munus, which means something like social task or collective work that must be accomplished. In Roman times munera were taxes and communal levies, and later state construction projects as well, and the term was also used for the organization of games in the arenas.
The concept of immunity describes the corresponding negations. People were in-mun if they were exempt from obligations and had the right to take leave from communal duties such as the collective burden of taxation or the civic burden of a court case – as long as they held public office. I think today we live on the cusp of a major turning point of the immunity system and the concept of community is on the decline and is becoming diffuse, although in the past it was the most important universal term in the whole of social theory. The concept of immunity, however, is inexorably rising to the heights of theory and practice; today it is already the most important universal concept for the functional definition of both the biological and social systems. Now comes the most important point: individualism relates to individual immunology – on closer inspection we can see it is an incredible notion that people who tend to think and feel conventionally cannot imagine easily, if at all. And let us not forget that our current post-anti-modernist Catholicism also declaims against these changes just as it campaigned a hundred years ago against all kinds of liberalism and secularism, sometimes using expressions that sounded like clerical fascism. Some historians of ideas rightly feel reminded of this when they hear what the spokesmen of militant Islam propound against the West. Present-day Islamists argue against the Western design of the world for the simple reason that they cannot imagine individualism as a modus vivendi and condition of immunity – unless it is in the form of pornography. These are the reactions we get when God is not dead.
That was not the good news, then. Incidentally, God is dead just as little in the USA.
He is still alive wherever the changeover of immune systems from transcendent safeguards to immanent safeguards fails. Nevertheless, the Americans have found something that allows human beings to get along with the not-dead God. They have developed a perfect synthesis of religious totalitarianism and ecumenical tolerance – our Muslim friends could learn a great deal from this. The American compromise on religion could tell us what happens when some groups remain religiously hot, like panicking Ascension Day congregations permanently waiting for the final countdown but still behaving like ordinary members of civil society. In terms of religious history, American sectarian culture is phenomenal. There are thirty-five Protestant denominations, including a multitude of fervent fundamentalists coexisting under the open skies of the Constitution, probably because the country is big enough to allow the many manic communities to settle with the requisite distance between them. The privatization of religious space rounds off the picture: people live in a world that fosters private life and communitarianism and they accept that there are other, similar worlds to which – thank God – they are not obliged to belong. People can tolerate each other because the idea of a state church, an established church, is frowned upon.
The political theology of the United States is usually expressed in very general terms and has a latent effect, which means it cannot be broken down to apply to one particular member of the thirty-five denominations. That is why liberal Americans have been rightly worried since a fundamentalist sect succeeded in bringing one of its men to the top – by American standards the case of Bush is an anomaly. Normally we are dealing with mediocre Christian presidents. These lukewarm brothers in the White House then receive visits from the representatives of manic groups who recharge them with their transcendental mandates as far as possible. The result is a working form of religious mania that is tolerable under normal conditions. An atheist in the White House is still as unthinkable as ever.
The foam metaphor of Spheres III communicates a degree of lightness, as well as hope, in relation to the rubble heaps of the past such as conflicts of faith, ideologies of the nation state, etc. But shouldn’t an analytical-philosophical approach start from the idea that phases of peaceful development where rationality is prioritized are replaced by troubled phases such as the present one – that there seems to be a kind of fundamental metaphysical need that persistently breaks through in specific waves? Shouldn’t the question focus on how we deal with this problem?
I see it rather differently. From the perspective of empirical idealism, what you call a fundamental metaphysical need is the need for integral immunization. I really think that cultures imply the continuation of immune systems by symbolic means. When people design different kinds of metaphysics, we must always ask ourselves what they are actually doing. There are two possible and totally contradictory answers. Either the metaphysicians are doing a kind of art in the coded language of theology, they are creating complexity surpluses, they are increasing the risky nature of their life forms and are constructing further improbability. In this sense metaphysics would be a practice of the adventurous heart – it would be a form of life and thought beyond the struggle for existential security. Or, on the other hand, metaphysicians weave a symbolic net against the real and imagined risks of life, they build up their immune system to get ultimate insurance against threats of all kinds, against the hostility of the outside environment; they work towards reducing the riskiness and improbability of their existential imaginings. In these cases – and they are the overwhelming majority – metaphysics is a practice of the fearful heart. In my opinion, we can incorporate conventional theology and known religious practices into this kind of view without violating their own specific character. I propose a non-reductionist way of dealing with religious and theological tradition, an approach that preserves the sense of the complexity and beauty of metaphysical constructs without negating the work of three hundred years of deconstruction and criticism.
The conflict between Islam and the West is also the conflict between different orders of immunity. If I am well insured, I do not need a merciful God. Modernism explains religion and proposes optimized substitute forms for its various functions – and this occurs for long enough and often enough that the radicals who resist substitution are released. In my opinion the only thing from God that will survive the reduction will be the psychological luxury functions. He continues to be a space for enhancing ecstatic communications; the result is a residual God who can be symbolized by references to pure transcendence. It seems to me this is a worthy solution and all the other tasks of religion are only a superior form of social welfare.
Isn’t religion’s main task to regulate interpersonal relationships?
You can look at it like that if you wish, but then you turn religion into a moral code and thus an easily replaceable factor. For us in the West, the God of social relations should be able to die in peace because we have evolved a secular form of morality that is strong enough to replace the socializing themes of religion. Our attitude to all the remaining mystical issues and the thanatological nucleus of religion can then be a private matter. I also think that Islam, like all the other monotheisms, is an agonizing religion, a religion of dying – but its agony is still stuck in the vehement phase. In that phase the dying persons parody life by behaving aggressively and – God knows how – robustly and vigorously. Basically, however, this rotten monotheism no longer has anything reasonable to say about the modern world. A clever Orientalist once remarked that Islam stopped thinking in the thirteenth century, and everything suggests this is true. Nowadays the return of thinking is happening in the form of defence. This creates redoubled hatred: first, hatred against the riddles of the modern world, and, second, hatred of the cultural forms that are considerably more advanced in terms of their work on the process of dying. What is acted out today on the world stage is a confused affair internal to monotheism – overlaid by an almost equally confused tension within academia because it is obvious that the Arab and Qur’anic university does not yet know how to deal with the fact that it was first degraded by the Christian and later by the secular European university, while, conversely, Western academics do not know where to make the connection with their Muslim colleagues.
Isn’t that hate targeted at a system that distributes life chances in the world very unfairly?
Hate against the system has existed ever since the outline of the modern world with its whole blasphemous novelty has become visible in our own lives. Everything that is attributed to the external haters today was argued earlier by the haters of modernism inside Europe itself – argued in great detail and by hundreds of people. Anti-modernist resentment has been a kind of European folk music since 1789 – and it is not generally played by the poor but by prosperous people seeking revenge. We have been battling with home-grown estrangement critique for more than two hundred years now. Since Fichte’s early writings, since 1794 if not before, when the first overall representation of the system of epistemology became available, a finely honed neo-idealism has existed on European soil that has constructed the most explosive ideas of a critique of the system from within, the idea of estrangement which says that true human beings are not at home in the shell of the civilization that objectifies them. Since then the metaphysical left has always offered a critique of the real world in which we are living in the name of the true homeland in which we are not living. My metaphor of the world interior of capital, which has echoes of Rilke, expresses the attempt to leave the continuous line of linguistic games about estrangement. It adds some levels to the concept of immanence – without becoming completely devoted to that concept.
As far as the critique of modern forms of life from inside Western civilization is concerned, the last two hundred years were an epoch in which things reached incredible intensity. As a result, extremism was the style of the times. I think it was Nietzsche who first said: we are the ‘most extreme’; our power consists in identifying ourselves with the extreme. Countless members of European modernism didn’t need to be told that twice. All our home-grown opponents of the system, on the left and on the right, had their bombs in their hands whether they detonated them or not. By now we can look back at eight generations of intelligentsia who made bombs – although we must admit that not everybody who makes bombs goes on to throw them; at least not in the area of semantic bomb-making. Still, the question remains as to why these people who supply the knowledge of destruction have not conclusively destabilized the system.
Your contribution has been rather towards introducing the necessary corrections.
In fact, these internal extremists have achieved the complete opposite of their declared intention – and, ironically, this even applies to the various types of European fascism. They have kept the system educable and provided it with the amount of stress necessary to make it more flexible. This is why the modern West is so remarkably invulnerable. Although our commentators, politicians and advisers today behave as if we are incredibly fragile, this discourse is based on a false interpretation of statistics of external terror and an outdated concept of building. It refers to archaic statics as if everything that ‘stands’ today were a complex of buildings in the traditional sense. Only in this context can we understand why the attack on the World Trade Center was thoroughly regressive – and why completely the wrong lessons have been learned from it so far.
The optical illusion of September 11, 2001 is that two buildings collapsed before the eyes of the world on that day. Everybody was sure they had seen what happened there. But in reality the spectacle distracted us. Since that time the collapse of the twin towers has been a false metaphor for what terrorism does. What actually happens is the opposite, for instead of collapsing, the attacked structures are reconstituted. They develop their self-repairing energies. When we realize this, we arrive at a concept from the new post-statics logic of structures on which our world design is based. September 11 concerned the old type of architectural structures, which do not represent the structures of modern structural art at all because we cannot conceive the latter in terms of traditional statics. Anybody who only thinks about the falling buildings misses the timely conclusion to be drawn from the story as a whole. Only a few months after the event it was clear to everybody concerned that the towers would be replaced by another random structure – and that this would be done quite easily by drawing on the enormous energy surplus released by the disruption to the system. This is the way intelligent systems react, systems characterized by totalities of tension instead of the old heavy type of static constructions.
Architects react much more intelligently to terror than do politicians, who make stupid speeches about war to hypnotize themselves into feeling they are doing what is necessary. I think the reason for this is that modern architecture has been part of the new immunity structure for a long time now. It has recognized that the architectural buildings we traditionally describe as houses represent spatialized user-defined immune systems. Immune systems are embodiments of the expectation that disruptions will occur, and their task is either to have the right passwords ready (as in the case of known invaders) or to develop new ones (as in the case of viral agents). That is exactly what happens nowadays. Regardless of how one judges the individual entries for the Ground Zero competition, we can predict that in terms of technology the new structure will be greatly superior to the old one. This should be the real information we glean from the events of September 11.