Spheres Theory. Sloterdijk

7/30/2019 Spheres Theory. Sloterdijk

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Spheres TheoryTalking to Myself About the Poetics of SpacePeter SloterdijkHarvard University Graduate School of DesignFebruary 17, 2009, a lecture with Sloterdijk askinghimself questions.Mr. Sloterdijk, as part of your trilogy onspheres,1 you set out to create a theory thatconstrues space as a keyanthropological category. Why this emphasis?We have to speak of space because humans arethem-selves an effect of the space they create.Human evolution can only beunderstood if we also bear in mind the mystery ofinsulation/island-making [Insulierungs-geheimsis]that so defines theemergence of humans: Humans are pets that havedomesticated themselves in the incubators of earlycultures. All thegenerations before us were aware that you nevercamp outside in nature. The camps of mansancestors, dating back over amillion years, already indicated that they weredistancing themselves from their surroundings.In the third volume of your trilogy there is anextensive chapter on architecture, Indoors:Architectures ofFoam. Why did you choose such aprovocative metaphor?First of all for a philosophical reason: We are simplynot capable of continuing the old cosmology ofancient Europe that restedon equating the house and home with the world.Classical metaphysics is a phantasm on an implicitmotif that was highlighted


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in only a few places by Hegel and Heidegger forexamplenamely that the world must itself beconstrued as having thecharacter of a house and that people in Westernculture should be grasped not only as mortals butalso as house residents.

Their relation to the world as a whole is that ofinhabit-ants in a crowded building called cosmos. Sothe quest-ions are: Whyshould modern thought bid goodbye to this equationof world and house? Why do we need a new imagein order to designatehow modern man lives in social and architecturalcontainers? Why do I propose the concept of foams?

The simple answer is: because since theEnlightenment we have no longer needed auniversal house in order to find the worlda place worthy of inhabiting. What suffices is a unitdhabitation, a stackable number of inhabitablecells. Through the motifof the inhabited cell I can uphold the sphericalimperative that applies to all forms of human life butdoes not presupposecosmic totalization. The stacking of cells in anapartment block, for instance, no longer generatesthe classical world/houseentity but an architectural foam, a multi-chamberedsystem made up of relatively stabilized personalworlds.Is this deterioration of the world-house or theall- embracing sphere into foam bubbles animage of entropy?On the contrary, in modernity far more complexity isestablished than was possible under the classicalnotion of unity. We


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must not forget that metaphysics is the realm ofstrong simplifications, and thus has a consolatoryeffect. The structure offoam is incompatible with a monospherical mindset;the whole can no longer be portrayed as a large,round whole. Let meuse an anecdote to indicate the immense change: Inhis memoirs, Albert Speer recollects that thedesigns for thegigantomanic new Reich Chancelleryin Berlinoriginally envisaged a swastika crowning the dome,which was to be over 290meters high. One summers day in 1939 Hitler thensaid: The crown of the largest building in the worldmust be the eagle onthe globe. This remark should be taken as attestingto the brutalist restoration of imperial monocentricthinkingas if Hitlerhad for a moment intervened in the agony ofclassical meta-physics. By contrast, around 1920, inhis reflections on thefundamentals of theoretical biology [TheoretischeBiologie], Jakob von Uexkll had already affirmed:It was an error tobelieve that the human world constituted a sharedstage for all living creatures. Each living creaturehas its own special stagethat is just as real as the special stage the humanshave. This insight offers us a completely new viewof the universe assomething that does not consist of a single soapbubble which we have blown up so large as to gowell beyond our horizonsand assume infinite proportions, and is insteadmade up of millions of closely demarcated soapbubbles that overlap and


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intersect everywhere. Le Corbusier himself usedthe image of the soap bubble in order to explain theessence of a goodbuilding: The soap bubble is completelyharmonious, if the breath in it is spread equally, andwell regulated on the inside.

The outside is the product of an inside.2Thisstatement could be taken as the axiom ofspherology: Vital space can only beexplained in terms of the priority of the inside.In your exploration of the architectures offoam, you write that modernity renders theissue of residenceexplicit. What do you mean by that?Here I am developing an idea that Walter Benjaminaddressed in hisArcades Project. He starts from theanthropologicalassumption that people in all epochs dedicatethemselves to creating interiors, and at the sametime he seeks to emancipatethis motif from its apparent timelessness. Hetherefore asks the question: How does capitalistman in the 19th centuryexpress his need for an interior? The answer is: Heuses the most cutting-edge technology in order toorchestrate the mostarchaic of all needs, the need to immunize existenceby constructing protective islands. In the case of thearcade, modernman opts for glass, wrought iron, and assembly ofprefabricated parts in order to build the largestpossible interior. For thisreason, Joseph Paxtons Crystal Palace, erected inLondon in 1851, is the paradigmatic building. Itforms the first hyperinterior


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that offers a perfect expression of the spatial idea ofpsychedelic capitalism. It is the prototype of all latertheme-parkinteriors and event architectures. The arcadeheralds the abolition of the outside world. Itabolishes outdoor markets andbrings them indoors, into a closed sphere. Theantagonistic spatial types of salon and market meldhere to form a hybrid. Thisis what Benjamin found so theoretically exciting:

The 19th-century citizen seeks to expand his livingroom into a cosmos andat the same time to impress the dogmatic form of aroom on the universe. This sparks a trend that isperfected in20th-century apartment design as well as inshopping-mall and sports-stadium designthese arethe three paradigms ofmodern construction, that is, the construction ofmicro-interiors and macro-interiors.Le Corbusier once said that we had to choosebetween revolution and architecture. Hedecided in favor ofarchitecture. In your interpretation does thatmean that he voted for the explication ofresidential conditions?Revolution is simply the wrong word chosen todescribe explication. An engineer always opts forthe better technology.Everything successful is operational, whilerevolutionary phases achieve nothing as long asthey do not contain real potentialabilities. Which is why no one today asks whatprograms are being announced but rather whatprograms are being written.


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Writing is an archetype of ability: The invention ofscript marks the beginning of the operationalsubversion of the world as itexists. Only that is effective which popularizesgetting a new handle on things. Incidentally, modernapartments are full oftechnical appliances that explicate life in thehousehold. Current tools no longer have handles,because handles belong to anoutdated stage, having given way to devises withbuttons: We have arrived in the world of fingertipoperations.To return to Benjamin: To what extent shouldwe read his reference to the major interiors asan explication ofcapitalism?

Just as Freud tried to make dreams explicit,Benjamin proposed a kind of dream interpretation ofcapitalism. My explicativework refers to the spatial dynamism of our being-in-the-world. I want to show how every shape ofcreated space entails aproblem of projection. Humans are animals who liketo move, who change rooms, space, indeed eventhe element in whichthey live. They always live while on the move fromA to B and back again, to quote Andy Warhol, andthey are the way theyare because they always take with them into eachnew space the memory of a different space theypreviously were in. Inother words, you cannot create an absolutelyneutral space, and you cannot invent a completelynew space; you alwaysgenerate differential spaces that are out-fitted indistinction from a different, former space. Homosapiens possesses a


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projective dynamism that stems from the fact thatour species is equipped with memories of prenatalsituations.I am right in thinking this prenatalism is theleitmotif in the first section of your Spheresproject, which you havetitled Bubbles?Spheres I is essentially dedicated to elaborating astrong concept of intimacy. To this end I develop anexplicitly regressivemovement in order to approach the topic of being-in, in reverse gear (as it were). I first address thephenomenon of interfaciality.Let me explain: If people look at each other, anontrivial space arises that cannot be construed asphysical orgeometricinter-facial space. Here it does not helpif I take a tape measure to determine the distancebetween the tip of mynose and your nose. The inter-facial relationshipcreates a quite unique spatial relationship. Idescribe the latter in terms ofmother/child inter-faciality, something we can studyin the animal kingdom, too. In my next step I try tointer-pret the imagesof the inter-cordial relationships that arise whenpeople are attuned to each other affectively so thattwo hearts form aresonant space togetherhere, the metaphoricalfactor increases. And then I tiptoe up to the mostintimate of relationships,that between a mother and a child: In the process, Iexplicate how women are architectural unitsatleast if seen from theperspective of the nascent life.


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Womens bodies are apartments! Now behind thisrather shocking thesis we find a fairly dramaticperspective on naturalhistory. Among insects, reptiles, fish, and birdsthat is, among the vast majority of speciesthefertilized egg, the carrier ofgenetic information, gets laid in an outside settingthat must vaguely possess the properties of anexternal uterus or nest.Now something quite incredible happens in theevolutionary line that leads to mammals: The bodyof the female members ofthe species is defined as an ecological niche for herprogeny. This leads to a dramatic turn inwards inevolution. What we seeis a dual use of the female members of a species, asit were: Henceforth they are no longer only egg-laying systems (in ametabiological sense, femininity means thesuccessful phase of an ovulation system), but theylay the eggs withinthem-selves and make their own body available asan eco-logical niche for their progeny. In this way,they become integratedmother animals. The result is a type of event thathad not existed in the world before: birth. It is theproto-drama that shapesthe departure from the primary total setting toarrival as an individual. Thus, birth is a biologicallylate type of event and hasontological consequences. The expression to beborn emphasizes the animal side; the expressionto see the light of daystresses the existential difference. A very explicitlogic is required to explain this.


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Are you saying that the projection of thisprimary basic experience is operative in alllater architecturalactivities?

Exactly. Here the creative side to projectionemerges. Projection evidently does not refer, as inpsycho-analysis, just tofeelings (that is, confused affects) but to the processof spatial creation per se. If we thus ask: Whatinteriors will livingbeings wish to have if they bear within them themarks of being born? Then the answer must be:

They will no doubt opt forinteriors that enable them to project a trace of thatarchaic state of protection onto their later shellconstructions. Theconstruction of shells for life creates a series ofuterus repetitions in outdoor milieus. Architectsmust understand that theystand in the middle between biology andphilosophy. Biology deals with the environment,philosophy with the world.But that does not explain the great diversityof human spatial needs. Not all individualspass on the wish for anarchaic state of protection in this shape.When in small spaces, many people feellocked in and developclaustrophobic responses. We could dividepeople into the cave dwellers and the treedwellersfor the one, it isthe love of the shell that counts; for the other,the love of spaciousness.I couldnt have put it better myself. The spherestheory does not seek to explain everything. It is nota universal theory but


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an explicit form of spatial interpretation.Incidentally, you can account for all manner ofdifferent types of space from thevantage point of prenatalitywide oceanic spaceson the one side and hellishly confined spaces on theother. addressesmicro-spherological phenomena in general. Iunderstand microspherology as the general theoryof the interior. Thesephenomena are always interpersonal in structure,and the dyadic relationship offers me the paradigmhere. I show how weshould construe the human dyad and follow it backas far as prenatal proto-intersubjectivity. Thediscovery here is thatinitially it is not so much a mother/child but achild/placenta relationship. The original doublingtakes place at a prepersonallevel by the bond formed by the so-called psycho-acoustic umbilical cord. Here, I draw on the thoughtof Alfred Tomatis andother authors who have plowed this tricky field.3

They regard the fetal ear as the organ of primarybonding. That is quiteirritatingly exciting for those who accept thepostulates and nonsense for those who do notbelieve there is an issue here.What role does the act of explication playhere?Explication is a matter not just of the conceptualinstruments that we deploy to illuminate thephenomena of lifesuch asdwelling, working, and lovingit is not just acognitive process. Rather, it has to do with realelaboration. That can only be


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achieved using an expressive logic or a logic ofproduction. Needless to say, here Im following inthe tradition of Marxist and/or pragmatist anthropology. If it is true that all ofnatural history is necessary in order to explain theformation of the humanhand (or rather the difference between a paw and ahand), then it is likewise true that we need all ofcultural history toexplain the difference between noises andlanguages.Not everything that implicitly exists needs to berendered explicit. An explication covers only thoseparts of the context of lifethat can be technically reconstructed. Theassumption underlying my undertaking is ametabiological proposition: What wecall technology rests on the attempt to replaceimplicit biological and social immune systems withexplicit social immunesystems. You need to understand what you want toreplace better than a mere user understands it. Ifyou wish to build aprosthetic, you have to be able to define thefunction of the organ to be replaced more preciselythan if you use the original.Here, you move from the actual functionalstatement to the level of the general and then backto the possible functionalequivalent. And you can recognize functionalists bythe fact they always ask two questions: at first,What does the systemachieve in its current form? and at the end, Whatcould be done instead?Architects are pretty good at this. When theybuild a private residence they ask: Whatfeatures should this


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intimate space have? What should it be ableto do? It is above all a protective space, onethat provides relief.How can we represent it with technicalmeans? Architects would probably think, Weneed to build cuddlyspots!And that would probably not be far off the mark. Ifyou ask what a cuddly spot represents, then interms of functionalanalysis you arrive at the concept of the primacy ofthe secluding atmosphere. And if you haverecognized the primacy ofsuch a secluding atmosphere, indeed the primacy ofthe atmospheric per se, then architects candefinitely infer from this thatthey cannot take geometric ideologies as theirstarting point. Instead, they need to think in termsof the atmospheric effect ofspace.That calls for a strong act of translation.Intimacy is an intersubjective category thatcan be expressed spatiallyin many different ways.As I said, I construe intersubjectivity as anonphysical spatial relationship. Creatures of thehuman type can, through beingtogether, generate the effect of reciprocalaccommodation. As the example of a pair of loversclearly shows, lovers are in oneor another way already together; they are, whenthey are together, to a certain extent in each other.Meaning that the classicquestion My place or yours? is actuallysuperfluous. Moreover, it offers a nice example ofexplication: This goingsome-


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where-together-as-already-being-together is thekinetic explication of what the being-together oflovers implies.Because the two are implicitly already together,they have a list of options of explicit localizations.You take the architectural example of theapartment to show what the process ofexplication can achieve asregards modern residential living.I interpret apartment construction as the creation ofa world-island for a single person. To understandthis, you need toconcede that the word world not only means the bigwhole that God and other jovial observers havebefore them. From theoutset, worlds take the stage in the plural and havean insular structure. Islands are miniatures of worldsthat can beinhabited as world models. For this reason, onemust know what constitutes a minimally completeisland, one capable ofbeing a world. In my study on insulations[Insulierungen] I distinguish between three differenttypes of islands: theabsolute island, such as a space station, which isplaced as a completely implanted lifeworld into amilieu inimical to life; thenthere are the relative islands like greenhouses forplants (one need think only of the well-knownexperiment Biosphere II);and finally the anthropogenic islands, spaces built insuch a way that humans can emerge. They form aself-insulating,dynamic system reminiscent of a human incubator.

You insert apes and out come humans. And how isthat possible? How can,


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to argue in a Darwinian and philosophical vein, apesenter into conditions of selfness[Selbstverhllnisse]? How did theanthropogenic engine get kick-started?I describe the human-generating island as a nine-dimensional space in which each of the dimensionsmust exist for thehuman-generating effect to be triggered. If only onedimension is absent, you do not get a completehuman. It all starts withthe chirotope, the place of the hand. And what doesthe hand have to do with the genesis of the human?

The answer to thisquestion provides a first version of a theory ofaction, an elementary pragmatics. I then tackle thephonotope, the space ofsound in which groups that hear them-selves tarry.

This is then followed by the uterotope, the spaceoccupied by deeperseatedmemberships of shared caves; the thermotope, thesphere of warmth or the space where you getspoiled; and theerototope, the place of jealousy and the field ofdesire. (I would like to note that the emergence ofspecies-specific jealousywas extremely important for the genesis of humanbeings, for humans are mimetic animals that havealways watched whatother humans do attentively and jealously, in fact,even aping those who successfully behave as if theywere not watchingwhat the others were doing). The next dimensionsare the ergotope, the field of war and effort; thethanatotope, the space ofcoexistence with the dead in which religioussymbols prevail; and finally the nomotope, thespace of the legal tensions that


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provide a group with a normative backbone.Buckminster Fullers theorem of tensegrities givesan important role to this.From this general theory of islands we can derivemodern apartment culture, for an apartment willonly function if it isconvincing as a minimally complete world-island foran individual.It does not seem that, so far, this descriptioncontains the definition of residence, of thehuman being as aresidential being.

You must understand that houses are initiallymachines to kill time. In fact, in a primitivefarmhouse people wait for a silentevent out in the fields, one they cannot influencebut which, thank God, happens regularlynamelythe moment when theplanted seeds bear fruit. In other words, peopleinitially only live in a house because they confess tothe conviction that it isrewarding to await an event outside the house. Inthe agrarian world, the temporal structure ofresiding in houses must beunderstood in terms of the compulsion to wait. Thiskind of being-in-the-house was first challenged inthe course of the MiddleAges, when in northwest Europe a wider- rangingurban culture had arisen again. Since then, agrowing proportion ofEuropean populations have been seized by a cultureof impatience or not-being-able-to-wait. DuringGoethes day, in Germanyonly 20% of the population was urbanized; 80% stilllived under the old agrarian conditions. Heidegger,whom I would like, in


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this context, to regard as the last thinker of rurallife, continues to construe existential time as waitingtime and thus also asboredom. The event that this waiting leads to is ofcourse something abysmally simple, namely the factthat things on thetilled field become mature. The philosopher equatesthis tilled field with world history without bearing inmind that the worldsof the cities can no longer assume the form of tilledfields. In the city, things do not mature, they areproduced.I move on from this definition of residential living asbeing-in-the-world put on hold and of the house as aplace of waiting tothe house as a place of reception, the locationwhere the important wheat gets sorted from theunimportant chaff. Theoriginal house is a habitation plant. By spendingmuch time there you unconsciously become ahabitual unit with yoursurroundings; you in-habit by habit. Once that hasbeen achieved, the background has been createdagainst which theunusual can first stand out. Residential living is inthis regard a dialectical practiceit makes itselfuseful for its opposite.In a third step, I develop the theory of embedding orimmersion. Here the philosophical theory of being-in, as originated byHeidegger, is moved forward. I answer the questionof what it means to be in something. How does thathappen? I illustratethese questions by relying on statements by PaulValry, who interpreted the being-in in terms of theparadigm of


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architecture: For him, architecture means that menlock men into man-made works. Here we touch onthe totalitarian side ofthe art of building.Finally, as the fourth stage of explication, I exposethe essential nerve center of the phenomenon ofresidence, namely thehouses destiny as a spatialized immune system.Here, I focus specifically on the dimension ofdesigned atmosphere, the airwe breathe in a building. Part of the adventure ofModern architecture is that it has also rendered theapparently immaterialsides of beingnamely human residence in anatmospheric settingexplicit in technical andaesthetic terms. The modern artof dwelling will not be able to get back to an earlierlevel of designing human containers.Once I have taken these steps, it becomes clear thatwhat I mean when I claim that the apartment (alongwith the sportsstadium) is the primary architectural icon of the20th century. A monadology is needed to think theinterior today. Onemanone apartment. One monadone world cell. and at the beginning of architecturalModern- ism the adage was: one unmarriedperson one apartment.Right. Modern apartment construction rests on acelibate-based ontology. Just as modern biologydefines life as the successfulphase of an immune system, so we could, inarchitectural theory, define existence as thesuccessful phase of the one-personhousehold. Every-thing is drawn into the innersphere of the apartment. World and householdblend. If a one-person


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existence can succeed at all, it is only because thereis architectural support that turns the apartmentitself into an entireworld prosthetic. Early Modern architects were thusright to see themselves as molders of humanity. Ifone ignores the shot ofmegalomania, what remains is the fact that thearchitects of the one-person apartments haveenabled the mass version of ahistorically singular type of human beingat best itwas otherwise pre-figured by the Christian hermitmonks.You describe the apartment as a studio ofself-relationships. If we bear in mind that thehistory of humanitystarted when hordes formed, with arudimentary division of labor in hunting and inraising children, then theemergence of this singular reproducing typeof human, who can live almost autonomously,is slightly worrying. Ihave two questions here: You just describedintimacy, dyadic intimacy, as something thatconstitutes space.What of that survives in the apartmentculture? And are there no forms of coexistencethat impact on spacebetween the extreme poles of single andmass, the solitary and the assembly?

The first question is easier to answer: Theapartment individualists have discovered a processenabling them to form pairswith themselvesincidentally, Andy Warhol, who, Ihave already mentioned, was one of the first toexplicitly show this by


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claiming that he married his tape recorder. Modernautogamy involves choosing a stance ofexperiencing ones own life,viewing it judgmentally from the outside. Individualsin the age of a culture of experience constantly seekdifference fromthemselves. They can choose as their partner noneother than themselves as the inner Other. Strongindividualism alwayspresumes that you draw inwards the second poleand the other poles that are part of a completepersonality structure. Thebasis for this psycho-structural move has long sincebeen given in European culture, and elements of itcan be traced back toclassical antiquity. The archetypal example is thehermit monks who moved to the Theban desert, afew days journey southof Alexandria, in order to pray. As far as we know,they led inner lives that featured manyrelationships; the most famousamong them was St. Anthony, who was visited bytormenting spirits so often that there can be no talkof him having livedalone. To put it in modern words, he shared a padwith his hallucinations.Today, he would probably reside in apsychiatric ward, dosed to the gills withtranquilizers. How does thisextreme form of individuation differ fromautism?

The autistic person does not possess the innerspaciousness that would enable him to be his owncompany. The individualsself-supplementation structure has deep media-anthropological roots and can only be explained interms of media history. The


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minimal formal condition of self-supplementationconsists of the fact that a so-called individual isintegrated into a dyadwitha real or imaginary Other. The question of social lifeof the isolated individual is harder: What happens tothe small-groupanimal Homo sapiens if he sits in pure individualistform as the solitary inhabitant of his worldapartment? Two possibleanswers would seem obvious: One is that theindividual on his own plays at being the entirehorde. This implies the task ofrepresenting twelve or twenty people within hisinner world, members of at least three generations.

Thus, in the absence ofreal Others, a complete social structure has to besimulated.Psychology regards the formation of amultiple personality as a symptom of illness, aserious disturbance inpersonality development.From my point of view, the multiple personality isnothing other than the individuals answer to thedis-appearance of his realsocial surroundings, and is thus a plausible responseto the chronic lack of social stimulation. The secondpossibility relates tothe modern practice ofnetworking. The hordereturns in the guise of an iPhone address book.Close physical togetherness isno longer a necessary condition of sociality. Thefuture belongs to tele-socialism. The past returns astele- horde life.You use the heading Dialectic ofModernization to describe how societysempty center is filled with illusionaryimages of a center.


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In Spheres III, I attempt to explain why we shouldnot only purge the two portentous words revolutionand mass from ourvocabulary, but also the concept of society, whichsuggests a coherence that could only be achievedby violent-assertingconformism. The conglomerate of humans that has,since the 18th century, called itself society isprecisely not based on theatomic dots that we tend to call individuals. Instead,it is a patchwork of milieus that are structured assubcultures. Just thinkof the world of horse loversa huge subculture inwhich you could lose yourself for the duration ofyour life but which is asgood as invisible if you are not a member of it.

There are hundreds if not thousands of milieus inthe current social terrainthat all have the tendency from their own viewpointto form the center of the world and yet are as goodas nonexistent for theothers. I term them inter-ignorant systems. And,among other things, they exist by virtue of ablindness rule. They may notknow of one another, since otherwise their memberswould be robbed of the enjoyment of beingspecialized members of aselect few. In terms of their profession, there areonly two or three types of humans who can affordpoly-valence in dealingwith milieus. The first are the architects, who (atleast virtually) build containers for all; the secondare the novelists, whoinsert persons from all walks of life into their novels;finally come the priests, who speak at the burials ofall possible classes


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of the dead. But that is probably the entire list.Oops, I forgot the new sociologists la Latour.In other words, the multiple personality on the onehand and the single networker on the otherthoseare the two options Isee open to individualized populations. The wayHomo sapiens is influenced by the dowry from thedays of hording is nodoubt insurmount-able, but because the explicationof that old heritage continues simultaneously invarious directions, theproto-social elements of the life of Homo sapienscan be reworked. They lead to an electronictribalism. In the dyadic motifs,by contrast, the intimate relationships areexplicated to such a degree that intimacy can quiteliterally be played through withthe technical media of self-supplementation. In thelong run, human types arise that are fairly unlikewhat we have known todate.The heyday of the models you describe for theapartment, from early Modernism through toKisho Kurokawa andfor urbanism through to Constant, was in the1960s. Then architecture changed direct-ion,with the city back infocusnamely, the city as somethingintangible, indefinable, irreducible. Theconcept of the capsule disappears;the city is then construed as fabric. Theconcept of the net marks the start of theonward march ofpostmodernism, which leaves the utopianindividualism of the 1960s on the sidelines.


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Youre right to the extent that the critique of capsulearchitecture means a critique of urban autism. Butlet me point to acomplementary risk. All the talk of nets and fabricstends to neutralize existential space, and I think thatis as dangerous ascapsule individualism. Net think-ing includes onlydots and interfaces that underlie the notion of twoor more intersecting linesor curves, giving you a worldview whose constitutiveelement is the dot. The net theorists think inradically nonspatial terms,that is, in two dimensions; they use the concept ofanorexia to interpret their relationship to theirenvironment. Their graphicsreveal that the individual world agency is seen as anintersection between lines lacking volume. I, bycontrast, go for theconcept of the foam bubble or the world cell in orderto show that even the individual element alreadycontains intrinsicexpansion. We should not revert to an ontology ofthe dot, but take as the minimum variable in ourthinking the cell that iscapable of constituting a world. A little moremonadology cannot harm us: The monad is not adot bereft of extension; it hasthe character of a microworld. Cell expresses thefact that the individual place has the shape of aworld. The metaphor ofthe fabric or net at best gives you minute knots, butyou cant inhabit a node. By contrast, the foammetaphor emphasizesthe microcosmic, intrinsic spatiality of eachindividual cell.


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However, the metaphor implies a question:Where does it lead to if asked in the contextof architecture?Architects tend to take images literally.

That happened ages ago. Frei Otto is one of theModern architects who tried to derive nature-like ororganomorphic spatialstructures from soap bubbles. The foam metaphorsupports an intellectual virtue: It prevents us fromreverting to theoversimplifying Platonic geometries that weretransported by the traditional history ofarchitecture. There are no rectangularshapes in foam, and that is interesting news. Andthere are no longer any primitive sphericalstructures, at least if foams passbeyond their wet or autistic stage. Within them,reciprocal forces of deformation are always at workthat ensure that we getstructures that are not smooth and in which morecomplex geometric rules prevail.What do you have against right angles?

The idea underlying this theory of diverse spacescan only be grasped if we also consider thereflection on alternativeload-bearing structures underpinning thespherology. We live in an age in which classicalload-bearing structures based onpressure give way to structures based on tensileforces, that is, integral units of tension. I am ofcourse thinking primarily ofFullers well-known tensegrities and of pneumaticedifices and 20th-century air structures. The newlogic of structuresfunctions throughout beyond all walls and pillars.

Tensegrities form the technical transition from themetaphor of foam to


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modern buildings. Foam is a kind of naturaltensegrity, especially when it ceases to take theform of individualistic foam, inwhich, in a liquid solution, individual bubbles floatpass each other hardly touching. If a foam grows oldand dry, a complexinternal architecture arises. Many bubbles burst; theresidual air from the burst bubble then enters theadjacent bubbles, andthe foam dries up from within. Beautiful,morphologically discerning structures arise,polyhedron foams. They are completelydefined by the motif of co-isolation, which is to saythe foam cell shares with its neighbor the fact that itis separate fromitmy walls are your walls. What joins us is that wehave turned our backs on each other. The conceptof co-isolation isfundamental for the universe of foamy shapes. Theadjacency of world projects or living spaces within aco-isolated structurehas a quality different from the vicinity of spaceswithin traditional segmented cultures. There,everything social ispartializedthe world is a conglomerate of desertedyards. The image of the sack of potatoes that Marxuses in his 18thBrumaire to describe the situation of the allotmentfarmers in France is a prime description of the stateof wet foam. Each cellfloats past the other cells, blind to its sharedenvironment, not touching, for all their similarity.How much of the psychosocial constitution ofspace remains in the metaphor of foam, andwhat remains of theconstructivist side to constituting space?


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Foam, in my opinion, is a very useful expression forwhat architects call densityitself a negentropicfactor. Density can beexpressed in psychosocial terms by a coefficient ofmutual irritation. People generate atmosphere bymutually exertingpressure on one another, crowding one another. Wemust never forget that what we term societyimplies the phenomenon ofun-welcome neighbors. Thus, density is also anexpression for our excessively communicative state,and incident-ally, thedominant ideology of communication is repeatedlyprompting us to expand it further. Anyone takingdensity seriously will, bycontrast, end up praising walls. This remark is nolonger compatible with classic Modernism, whichestablished the ideal of thetrans-parent dwelling, the ideal that insiderelationships should be reflected on the outside andvice versa. Today, we areagain foregrounding the way a building can isolate,although this should not be confused with itsmassiveness. Seen as anindependent phenomenon, isolation is one form ofexplication of the conditions of living with neighbors.Someone should writea book in praise of isolation, describing a dimensionof human coexistence that recognizes that peoplealso have an infiniteneed for noncommunication. Modernitys dictatorialtraits all stem from an excessively communicativeanthropology: For alltoo long, the dogmatic notion of an excessivelycommunicative image of man was naively adopted.By means of the image of


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foam you can show that the small forms protect usagainst fusion with the mass and the correspondinghypersociologies. Inthis sense, foam theory is a polycosmology.So each soap bubble is a cosmos unto itself?No, that would again be an overly autisticconstruction. In truth, we have to do here with adiscrete theory of coexistence. Allbeing-in-the-world possesses the traits ofcoexistence. The question of being so hotly debatedby philosophers can be askedhere in terms of the co-existence of people andthings in connective spaces. That implies aquadruple relationship: Beingmeans someone (1) being together with someoneelse (2) and with something else (3) in something(4). This formuladescribes the minimum complexity you need toconstruct in order to arrive at an appropriateconcept of world. Architects areinvolved in this consideration, since for them being-in-the-world means dwelling in a building. A house isa three-dimensionalanswer to the question of how someone can betogether with someone and something insomething. In their own way,architects interpret this most enigmatic of all spatialpre-positions, namely the in.Why do you think the preposition in isenigmatic?Because it highlights both being-contained-in andbeing-outside. People are ecstatic beings. They are,to use Heideggersterms, forever held outside in the open; they cannever definitely be included in some containerother than graves, that is.


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In the ontological sense, they are outside in theworld, but they can only be outside to the degreethat they are stabilizedfrom within from something that gives them firmsupport. This aspect needs to be emphasized todayin contrast to thecurrent romanticism of openness. It is spatialimmune systems that enable us to give being-outside a tolerable form.Buildings are thus systems to compensate forecstasy. Here, the architect should be located,typologically speaking, in thesame ranks as the priest and the therapistas anaccomplice in repelling intolerable ecstasy.Incidentally, in this contextHeidegger focuses less on architecture and more onlanguage, and it is indeed language in its habitualform that is a perfectagenda to compensate for an undesired ecstasy.Since most people always say the same things alltheir livesand theirlanguage games are, as a rule, completely repetitivewe live in a world of symbolic redundancy thatfunctions just as well asa house with very thick walls. Language is thehouse of being, postulated Heidegger, and we aregradually under-standingwhat he meant when he came up with the phrase.Language is a staunch fortress in which we can wardoff the open.Nonetheless, we occasionally let visitors in. Inhuman relationships, speaking and building usuallycreate sufficient securitythat you can now and then permit ecstasy. For thisreason, from my viewpoint the architect is someonewho philosophizes in


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and through material. Someone who builds adwelling or erects a building for an institution makesa statement on therelationship between the ecstatic and the enstatic,or, if you will, between the world as apartment andthe world as agora.Notes1. Sphren (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag,19982004).2. [Vers une Architecture, 1923.]3. See Alfred A. Tomatis, The Conscious Ear

(Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1991

Spheres Theory. Sloterdijk

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