1. Envelopes
Bruno Latour points out that when it is said that ‘Dasein is thrown into the world’ [1], as does Heidegger, the significance of the preposition ‘into’ is often overlooked. Peter Sloterdijk, however, Latour notes, does not overlook it and indeed dwells on it, asking such questions as ‘into what is Dasein thrown?’, ‘where is Dasein thrown?’ and, perhaps more mischievously, what is the temperature there, the colour of the walls, the materials chosen, the technology for disposing of refuse, the cost of the air conditioning, and so on. Have you, as an exemplum of Dasein, Sloterdijk asks by way of clarification, been ‘thrown’ or cast into a room or into an air-conditioned amphitheatre? Alternatively, are you ‘outside’?
Sloterdijk responds that there can be no ‘outside’, only a fold into another ‘inside' with another kind of climate control, another type of thermostat, another mode of air conditioning. Are you in a 'public space’? Public spaces, open air spaces, ‘the ‘outdoors’ and the ‘world-at-large’, are places, too, Sloterdijk counters, places ‘into which’ Dasein is thrown, places that envelope you, as a human existent, places that ward off ‘the open’, as the un-enveloped, i.e. where there are no life supports, where forces hostile to human life prevail and destroy human life.
Thus, for Sloterdijk, public spaces and private spaces are both kinds of envelopes, albeit at different scales, organised differently, with different architectures, different entry points, different surveillance systems and different soundscapes, and with different potentialities for the human actors placed (‘thrown’) therein.
Dasein, being thrown into the world, is to be thrown into an envelope of some kind, Sloterdijk argues, following through on the initial Heideggerian insight. To define humans is to define the envelopes, the life support systems, that make it possible for them to breathe, to live. Furthermore, all of the envelopes or life support systems into which people are born (‘thrown’) are artificial, constructed, designed. These envelopes are called ‘spheres’ by Sloterdijk, and the study of them he calls spherology.
For Latour (2009a), there are the two alternative Great Narratives of modernity: that of emancipation (progress), the official story, and that of attachment, the hidden story. Modernist philosophies of history, Latour argues, consider only a single narrative, that of progress or, inversely the failure of progress. [2] Sloterdijk, on the other hand, considers both the narrative of progress and the narrative of attachment, and furthermore considers them to be one and the same. As a consequence, to be emancipated and to be attached are two embodiments of the same event, once attention is drawn to the question of whether artificial atmospheres are well or badly designed.
We, as humans, are enveloped, entangled, surrounded, immersed, or as is being argued here, environed, narratively and spatially, as well as sonorously through language practices, as a major aspect of the ‘soundscape’. We are never ‘outside’ without having recreated another artificial, fragile, designed and engineered envelope, i.e. another ‘narrative environment'. We move from envelope to envelope, from fold to fold, but not from a private sphere to a Great Outside (a universal, homogeneous, spatial continuum).
2. Modernism
For Sloterdijk, Latour suggests, a modernist is someone who lives under a vast dome and who perceives things as though they are sitting under a vast Dome and a vast architectonic expanse, such as the Globe of Science, the Globe of Reason or the Globe of Politics.
However, in the modernist architecture, the life supports necessary for this Dome or Globe to be sustainable have not been explicated. Modernists, Latour argues, take for granted that there will always be air, space, water and heat for the development of their global view.
What happened in the second half of the 20th century was that modernism disappeared in the exact measure as the life supports were made more explicit. Given this recognition, ecological crisis is the slow, painful realisation that there is no ‘outside’ any more. In short, none of the elements required to support human life can be taken for granted.
3. Matters of fact, matters of concern and the distribution of the sensible
As part of this modernist, ecological crisis, the ways in which things have presented themselves as matters of fact are now visible as a style, a style which is equally visibly changing. In this way, it can be seen that the aesthetics of matters of fact are historically situated aesthetics: a way to arrange and light objects, to frame them, to present them, to situate the gaze of the viewers, to design the interiors in which they are presented and to design the politics with which they are associated.
Latour contends that these processes of making explicit, or explicitation, as it might be called, as processes of folding envelopes into envelopes (or immersive, insulating environments into immersive, insulating environments), are important as a powerful way of retrieving science and technology by modifying radically what is meant by a sustainable artificial life.
The process of making explicit (explicitation), Latour argues, enables us to understand that it is possible to dematerialise without bringing along with the notion of ‘matter’ the modernist baggage of 'matters of fact'. Thus, when Sloterdijk deals with materialists he does not do so in a way that proposes that they are so many matters of fact that would inject indisputable natural necessity as the final word on some social or symbolic questions. Rather, when Sloterdijk adds materiality to a site, he is rendering explicit another fragile envelope into which humans are even more entangled. This entanglement is as relevant for the envelopes of biotechnology as it is for space stations.
In approaching materialities in this way, Sloterdijk is challenging a certain form of humanism which is concerned only with humans and for whom the rest, rather than being part of life, is mere materiality or cold, dead objectivity.
Latour insists that Sloterdijk is not treating humans matter-of-factually. He treats humans and non-humans as matters of concern, indeed of grave and careful concern. By treating human life as matters of concern, concerns are piled upon concerns, s humans are enfolded, enveloped and embedded in more ad more elements that have been carefully made explicit, protected, conserved and maintained (immunised, inoculated).
[These Latourian-Sloterdijkian thoughts could be seen to echo Ranciere’s notion of a distribution or partition of the sensible, in which the modernist distribution comes under challenge, prompting a re-distribution of the sensible through the processes of making explicit which show that matters of fact, the taken-for-granted, are indeed matters of concern that need to be addressed and re-materialised.]
Latour argues that this re-definition of matter permits practitioners to reuse the notions of materiality and artificiality by freeing them from the constraints imposed by the older style of modernist matters of fact. Pursuing this re-definition means that nature disappears as the outside of human action. The term ‘natural’ has become a synonym for ‘carefully managed’, ‘skilfully staged’, ‘artificially maintained' and ‘cleverly designed’: what is natural is already a narrative environment.
Bringing in scientists and engineers into a situation is to pose the question of how can something be better designed, re-designed or re-materisliased; it is not to bring to bear on a question the unquestionable laws of nature. The bricolage elements associated with design are now accepted as ‘nature’, rather than ‘nature' being understood as a body or repository of immutable and unquestionable laws.
When Sloterdijk raised the question of how humans could be artificially nurtured, of how they could be re-designed, quite understandably it raised the spectre of eugenic manipulations. Humans have to be artificially made and re-made, but everything depends on what is meant by ‘artificial’ and, even more importantly, on what is meant by ‘making’.
Artificiality is our destiny, as Latour summarises Sloterdijk, but this does not mean accepting the modernist definitions of an artefact as the invasion of matters of fact (immutable natural laws; cold, dead objectivity) into the softer flesh of human frailty for ever. In other words, there is nothing necessarily posthuman in enveloping, folding and embedding humans into their life supports.
The importance of Sloterdijk’s philosophy, Latour contends, is that it offers an alternative idiom to that of modernist matters of fact when speaking of science and technology. It offers the idiom of matters of concern, which reclaims matter, matters and materiality and renders them into something that can, and must, be re-designed.
From this perspective, the collective definition of what artificial life supports are supposed to be becomes the key site of politically minded investigation. What remains is the necessity of reading everything, one again, in a strange combination of conservation and innovation that is unprecedented in the short history of modernism. This necessary re-design must take place while making judgments about how well or how badly done is this re-design; and also while recognising that, to echo a sentiment attributed to Charles de Gaulle, if, from good, only good followed, and if, from bad, only bad followed, government would be so simple that a village parson could do it.
4. Immersing and environing
Immersive art or the art of immersion, Sloterdijk (2011) notes, are relatively new terms. They originate from the discourses of contemporary computer art and are used to refer to immersion in synthetic perceptual worlds. Such immersion has become a significant form of art practice since the late 1980s and early 1990s. Immersion, in this context, means a person’s being perceptually immersed in artificial environments, mainly through the eye, but also potentially engaging the other senses, assisted by technical devices such as virtual reality helmets and electronic visors.
These technological arrangements, Sloterdijk contends, make it clear that it is important to recognise that humans are beings for whom it is natural to be immersed, and to immerse themselves, in environments generally, whether natural or artificial. By so doing, human beings insulate themselves against hostile forces. A key aspect of the phenomenon of artificial immersion, Sloterdijk continues, is the potential replacement of whole environments. Immersion, as a method, unframes images and vistas, dissolving the boundaries between pictoriality and environment.
[Aside 1: Here, like Heidegger (1977), we no longer hold a picture theory of reality. We have moved into the realm in which representationalism co-exists with the non-representational, i.e. the one does not replace the other; they are complementary. Equally, along with the later Wittgenstein, we no longer have a picture theory of language. Pushing this further, it is not only the boundary between pictoriality and environment that is dissolved but also the boundary between language and environment.]
[Aside 2: Such immersion may be experienced as ‘a distribution of the sensible’ in Ranciere’s (2004) terms, in the form of a social order, through an arrangement of percepts in a perceptual order, although it would require a significant critical theoretic labour to move beyond the general suggestion that the work of Sloterdijk and Ranciere can be articulated, the one through the other.]
This refection upon immersive art or the art of immersion prompts Sloterdijk to suggest that architecture, along with music, constitutes a prior form in which the immersion of humans in artificial environments has been developed into a culturally controlled process. Thus, Sloterdijk reasons, it can be said that house building is a kind of immersive technology, as can urban development and, beyond that, empire building. [Immersion, in other words, can be understood as a spatial practice, so long as one acknowledges the sociality, and hence temporality, of spatial practices.]
To be fully immersed in an empire, i.e. to experience it as an insider, one needs to be immersed in its foundational narratives. One has to participate in the history of the empire; and, furthermore, in some sense, history itself is an immersive medium/environment. Immersive environments, it might be argued from this basis, such as houses, cities and empires, constitute narrative environments, as immersion in place (i.e. spatial practices) is redoubled through immersion in time (i.e. temporal practices), as articulated in the spatio-temporality, historicity and narrativity of experience. Sloterdijk, thus, implicitly acknowledges that an immersive environment is a narrative environment, that narrative is equally an element of immersion, and that narrative as well as environment are realised through agglomerations of spatial and temporal practices.
[Aside: These thoughts prompt Sloterdijk to propose an ad hoc definition of 20th century totalitarianisms from both spatial and narrative perspectives, with which we will not engage here. Totalitarianism my nevertheless be an important issue with which to engage from a narrative environment point of view. Such totalitarianisms, Sloterdijk suggests, seek to eradicate the ambiguities of the double existence of the human [‘Man’] in European history, as empirical-transcendental or as material-ideal, replacing them with the certainties of one-dimensional power narratives. This is perceptible in the mono history of communism as much as in the mono-history of (fascist) racial movements. Such narratives aimed at the construction of a monological context of success and power.]
[Posing the question of the meaning and function of architecture in this context might seem to suggest that architecture is a totalitarian practice by nature. This is so because it is concerned with immersion, i.e. with the production of an environment into which its inhabitants submerge, body and all. When a house is built for particular inhabitants, what is created is a space-demon by which the inhabitants will subsequently be possessed.]
[This raises the question of ‘totality’ and of ‘total immersion’. It raises the question of being immersed in more than one medium or environment at any one time. The notion of narrative environment must include the possibility of being able to pass, without perishing, between one narrative environment and another, via trans-medial ‘bridges’ or ‘links'. Theorisations of narrative environments as open systems are necessary, of which there are many options, as noted in Theoretical practice. Totalitarianism, in this context, may be understood as the attempt to make a closed system of an open system, a situation which leads to much violence, double standards and paradoxical injunctions]
5. Immersing, environing and architecture
To develop his understanding of architecture, Sloterdijk draws upon a dialogue by the poet Paul Valery in which one of the figures drawn up from Antiquity, Phaedrus, argues that the building of houses constitutes a problem of love, albeit indirectly and subtly. The totalitarianism of architecture is one of love, the love of space, of being enraptured by that which stands against us, as human beings, but which also envelopes us. In endeavouring to produce the space where we open up completely, architecture articulates a feeling of topophilia, in Bachelardian terms. To build a house for oneself amounts to generating the place and the envelope for one’s own self-abandonment (to the environment, to the medium), a surrender to the environment. In such an environment, which is the work of a human being, we are taken in and mastered by the order that the creator has chosen, an order from which we cannot escape.
Valery articulates a variant of the Christian philosophy of space which declares that humans are not just scattered about the world like pebbles and other self-contained entities. Humans exist in the mode of openness to the world (ecstatically?), and to be open is to be simultaneously here and in another place: there and here at once. The house is an immersion facility (an immersion technology), a designed environment, an artificial environment. What the designed environment has in common with the natural environment is that it takes on the role of total environment. It is, however, in being thoroughly man-made, at the same time the antithesis of natural.
6. The philosophy of situations
To explain further the phenomenon of immersion and of thinking the human as a necessary immersion or a necessary environing, as insulation and as mediation, Sloterdijk proposes that philosophy is a general theory of situations. To philosophise, therefore, is to theorise situations. A situation is defined generally as a relationship of co-existing elements. The factors in this relationship can be understood in the following terms: situations are forms of co-existence of someone with someone and something in something.
Someone with someone indicates a personal association or a primitive social relationship, perhaps a dimension of intersubjectivity, although, Sloterdijk cautions, this term should be used with care. The case of the two somethings, however, is more complicated. The first something indicates people’s accessories and equipment (tools, devices, technics), i.e. the whole accompanying plethora of objects that are attached to people. This class of objects was discovered as an independent theme for thinking and designing only during the 20th century. Philosophically, this occurred with Husserl’s theory of the life-world and Heidegger’s reflections on things that are ready-to-hand. Practically, this discovery came about by way of the applied arts, a set of practices not covered by the term ‘design’.
Immersion, then, can be understood through this theory of situations, as a theory of the togetherness of someone with someone and something in something. Such immersion becomes interesting, Sloterdijk suggests, when collectives are caught up in shared immersive environments, from twosomes all the way up to dictatorships. For Valery, such collective immersions of bodies in bodies create spaces filled with sound, both language and music, a sonorous site which resonates with its inhabitants. Both architecture and music, Valery says, fill the enveloping space with synthetic truths.
As installations of immersive domains, dwellings explicate human beings as a three-dimensional project (four dimensional, when time is included). In this sense, the architect design immersive experiences. The process of embedding in self-selected micro-milieux, Sloterdijk argues, has become the therapeutic maxim of the second half of the 20th century.
Sloterdijk argues that the awareness of being embedded became depoliticised after 1945, as if the collective memory had preserved the intuitive insight that the prominence of the temptation to totalitarianism grows in tandem with the extent of immersion in pooling units. People in the latter half of the 20th century prefer to assemble smaller units of immersion, to help build immunity against totalitarian forms of immersion. They seek actively not to dwell in racial totalities and do not wish to engage with super-collectivisations. Rather, they seek to take responsibility for the micro-totalitarianism of their own dwelling circumstances.
While the people of Europe are no longer citizens of two realms (the material and the ideal; the empirical and the transcendental), they nevertheless remain commuters between situations. Being enveloped in designed spaces constitutes the human condition. Given this recognition, architecture must remain conscious of its responsibility for the shaping of situations (the togetherness of someone and someone and something in something). Architecture, in this view, is the design of immersions in narrative environments, as atmospheric assemblages
Part of the production of space is the responsibility for the atmosphere, which is acknowledged in the design of narrative environments. In this endeavour, Sloterdijk suggests, anthropologists can counsel architects and other environmental designers to take into consideration the recognition that human beings oscillate between the desire to be embedded (immersed, insulated) and the desire to break free (transgress, flow, mingle).
Notes
[1] For Heidegger, the human subject had to be re-conceived in an altogether new way as “being-in-the-world.”, a notion that represents the antithesis of the Cartesian “thing that thinks”.
However, by Dasein, does Heidegger mean solely ‘human existence’? It could plausibly be argued that he means ‘existence’ in all its forms, of which human beings are one class, case or modality. Therefore, such phrases as "the Being of the human individual, which he called Dasein” have to be read cautiously because (a) it is not the human individual which is at stake, it is ‘humanity’ in the form of 'subjectivity' or 'inter-subjectivity', as a class or mode of interconnected beings; and (b) it is all forms of existents that are ‘thrown’ into the world, not just humans: the world, so to speak, is 'thrown together', which may be one sense of which the term Mitsein may be taken: Dasein ist Mitsein. It is this thrown-together world, constituted through situations and -spheres, that Sloterdijk suggests can be re-designed.
Nevertheless, Heidegger does place emphasis on humans as the “entity for which its own Being is an issue” (Heidegger, 1962: 344), in the form of the human subject. Is it this self-reflective human entity which Heidegger calls “Dasein” (literally, “there-being”), in order to stress the worldly and existential features of 'human-being-there-together'?
References
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Heidegger, M. (1977). The Age of the world picture. In: Lovitt, W., ed. The Question concerning technology and other essays. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 115–154.
Latour, B. (2009a). A Cautious Prometheus ? A few steps toward a philosophy of design (with special attention to Peter Sloterdijk ). In: Hackney, F., Glynne, J., and Minto, V., eds. Networks of design: proceedings of the 2008 Annual International Conference of the Design History Society. Boca Raton: Universal Publishers. Available from http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/112-DESIGN-CORNWALL-GB.pdf [Accessed 10 August 2012].
Latour, B. (2009b). Spheres and networks: two ways to reinterpret globalisation. Harvard Design Magazine, 30 138–144.
Ranciere, J. (2004). The Politics of aesthetics: the distribution of the sensible. London, UK: Continuum.
Sloterdijk, P. (2011). Architecture as an art of immersion. Interstices, 12, 105–109. Available from http://interstices.ac.nz/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/INT12_Sloterdijk.pdf [Accessed 9 January 2016].