Where are we when we read Sloterdijk?
By and large, Peter Sloterdijk’s philosophical arguments are based on an analysis of architecture, highlighting architecture as the prospective material manifestation of philosophy. In this post I want to propose an interconnectivity between the architectural discourse and Sloterdijk’s philosophical conclusions coming from his analysis of the built environment — I’m taking his conclusions from analysing architecture and applying them back onto it.
Based on my reading of “Sphären 3: Schäume” and “Der ästhetische Imperativ. Schriften zur Kunst”, I want to bring forward one main point that I thought was most significant for architecture: Sloterdijk’s concept of positive isolation.
Before I do so, however I want to briefly mention Sloterdijk’s main argument, that of the foam metaphor which he puts into opposition to the Deleuzian rhizome. For Sloterdijk, the network theories lack an attitude towards space — they are radically unspacial: the network operates with points, knots, trajectories, and lines, all elements which we cannot inhabit nor dwell in. They remain a two-dimensional representation. The network is full of loopholes; the gaps in between its flat lines and points create voids, allowing for an escape from the network. One simply can be falling straight through it without getting caught by it. Other than the network, the foam stresses the spatiality and habitability of each element. Foams are agglomerations of three-dimensional bubbles or cells. Each cell must negotiate its boundary condition with its neighbours (thereby creating a mutual structure) while preserving its own minimum volume. The inhabitable cell of the foam replaces the points and knots of the network as the smallest constituent. Instead of a two-dimensional network of endlessly thin lines and dots we now have a three-dimensional construct of co-isolated cells. Which brings me to the topic that especially got my attention: positive isolation.
When we read Sloterdijk we may overcome a common pessimism in architecture: Koolhaas’ Bigness. In his final AA project, Koolhaas suggested we are prisoners of architecture:
Where there is nothing, everything is possible. Where there is architecture, nothing (else) is possible.
In this he sees architecture as the materialisation of power structures, power that is forced onto its inhabitants and users. Architecture takes away possibilities, it builds limits and borders that isolate. For Koolhaas, isolation is a negative term of seclusion and limitation. In consequence, he proposes an architecture of nothingness or the generic city that “is nothing but a reflection of present need and present ability. It is the city without history. It is big enough for everybody. It is easy. It does not need maintenance. If it gets too small it just expands. If it gets old it just self-destructs and renews. It is equally exciting — or unexciting — everywhere.” As an alternative to the generic city he suggests sheer Bigness as the only solution to the monstrosities that in his mind would be necessitated from architecture; structures so massive that they would ultimately become self-justifying and lack all representation entirely. In other words, architecture would lose all autonomy and become reduced to “an instrument of other forces”.
Koolhaas’ proclamations are an apocalyptic surrender to power. For Koolhaas, not only is the panopticon a machine of power, but our entire built environment is nothing but a prison of autonomies. He has declared architecture as dead, it having simply disappeared in the all-encompassing Junk-Space of modernisation. Junk-Space will increasingly take over the landscape and the body until there is nothing left but a life led indoors, where humans shall live “like animals in a zoo”.
Sloterdijk, on the other hand, defines isolation in a positive light, namely architecture’s capabilities of isolation not as imprisonment but as a tool for the design of spaces of different possibilities. He traces isolation back to the origins of human evolution whereby isolation brands our liberation from the evolutionary constraints of the pre-humanoid’s Umwelt dependencies. He uncovers it as one of the crucial and indispensable dimensions for the emergence of human life. By picking up a stone and throwing it against an aggressor the first humanoids created a rupture in evolution. The simple act of throwing has established a distance between the pre-humans and their surroundings. By creating a spacial buffer, our ancestors emancipated themselves from the evolutionary process — “the prison of adapting the body”. It is this isolating effect that allows for the development of an unspecialised human body and mind and in turn for a pluralisation of capabilities. It is here that Sloterdijk turns the term “isolation” from a being locked away into a being freed or ecstatic outside — the ecstasy of being isolated from or being outside of the Umwelt. Isolation is termed positive, as the distancing effect that liberates from the evolutionary constraints and as something that creates spheres of alternative possibilities. Thus architecture’s primitive hut is the isolation effect established by the throwing of a stone. “Small handy stones became the material for mankind’s first walls, walls that weren’t constructed or built, instead they were thrown.” Architecture is the explication of the thrown stone — the stone throw is a functional diagram of architecture’s anthropological importance and its beginnings.
When we read Sloterdijk, architecture becomes a positive and active agent of isolation. Instead of architecture as a tool to power, architecture is an instrument to create new social ecologies that weren’t there before. For Koolhaas, where there is architecture, nothing is possible: it is a prison and only the generic nothingness of Bigness will be the end of it. When we read Sloterdijk, however, we design positive spheres of isolation for different possibilities of being-in-the-world.
