Reading Sloterdijk’s Spheres, alongside Stengers and Barad

Aman­da Win­dle has kind­ly invit­ed me to par­tic­i­pate in her small seminar:

The sem­i­nar is sum­marised as follows:

Con­sid­er­ing Peter Slo­ter­dijk’s ren­der­ing of a Hei­deg­ger­ian ‘being-in’ this infor­mal sem­i­nar will be a sit­u­at­ed read­ing. The dis­cus­sion will be locat­ed at the Roy­al Soci­ety of the Arts to spa­tial­ly think through an approach to Peter Sloterdijk’s ‘spher­ol­o­gy’ across dis­ci­plines. How, where and with what mat­ter­ings do we embark our dai­ly read­ings is no triv­ial mat­ter? Sloterdijk’s writ­ing can both inform and trou­ble read­ers and so the adja­cent read­ings from and will open up fur­ther ques­tions and provo­ca­tions. Sloterdijk’s recent pub­li­ca­tions have been aimed at a design audi­ence (name­ly archi­tects) and with his media the­o­ry the fol­low­ing dig­i­tal media ques­tion will be pro­posed.  With a broad­ly expe­ri­en­tial and per­for­ma­tive approach in mind the dis­cus­sion will loose­ly con­sid­er spher­ol­o­gy in this respect:

• This for­mu­la­tion opens to the some­what irrev­er­ent ques­tion (fol­low­ing Slo­ter­dijk’s own irrev­er­ence) of how his think­ing can be turned into an app or an appli­ca­tion (app dis­plac­ing appli­ca­tion dis­plac­ing the­o­ri­sa­tion dis­plac­ing philosophi­sa­tion, the last term bare­ly being a word)?
• How might Sloterdijk’s work be repar­a­tive­ly ques­tioned through a fem­i­nist enquiry? How might Sloterdijk’s metaphors engage us intra-actively?

I’ve sketched out my response to the latter:

First, I have to say I am not real­ly famil­iar with Slo­ter­dijk’s work, and I come to the sug­gest­ed text informed by two equal­ly live­ly but quite dif­fer­ent threads of think­ing. One is ‘rela­tion­al mate­ri­al­ism’ as artic­u­lat­ed by Annemarie Mol and a host of oth­ers in STS (some­times in dif­fer­ing flavours). The oth­er is a fem­i­nist techno­science that draws heav­i­ly on Barad and Stengers, as well as Don­na Har­away, Lucy Such­man, etc.
Turn­ing, then, to Slo­ter­dijk (and his short Spheres The­o­ry piece), I like the ques­tion of islands, and the mix­tures of think­ing intro­duced by com­par­ing and con­trast­ing islands to spaces as var­ied as apart­ments and worlds. This mix­ing of the mun­dane with the, well, glob­al seems to me to raise lots of inter­est­ing ques­tions about our modes of being, about ontol­ogy. I also quite like the idea of foam as a ana­lyt­i­cal device as it con­jures up much of the mul­ti­plic­i­ty, and con­tin­gent and pro­vi­sion­al qual­i­ties of being that I take from schol­ars, again, like Har­away, Such­man, etc. So these con­cepts of islands and foam, etc. are as Sen­gers would call them help­ful ‘tools for think­ing’ (p. 186).
Yet, at the same time, I must admit that I feel uneasy about what I see to be the strong human­ist posi­tion that runs through Slo­ter­dik’s the­o­ris­ing. For exam­ple, I’m uneasy with the Freudi­an and evo­lu­tion­ary (p. 3, mid­dle col) types, sym­bols, stages, etc. that are so full of cat­e­gor­i­cal fix­i­ty and “ground­ing def­i­n­i­tions” (Stengers p. 187). This, for me, is summed up in Slo­ter­dik’s evoca­tive ques­tion about the “the dif­fer­ence between the paw and the hand” p3. Why should we be look­ing to dif­fer­ence here, at least in any essen­tial way? My wor­ry is that Slo­ter­dik’s posi­tion occu­pies, too much, the ‘major key’ or ‘cen­tre stage’ (p. 186) to bor­row from Stengers or what Barad calls ‘atom­istic meta­physics’ (p. 813). That is, in instruct­ing us to see humans, islands, hous­es and indeed archi­tec­ture in quite def­i­nite ways, Slo­ter­dik pro­vides us with a ‘stake defined by an either/or dis­junc­tion’ (Stengers p. 186), you are either in or out.
So, like I said, I see the ideas of foam and the like as use­ful ‘tools for think­ing’, but I am not so sure about the out­side-inside bina­ry Slo­ter­dijk mobilis­es here. For me, com­ing out of (post)structuralist soci­ol­o­gy, I imme­di­ate­ly think of Durkheim, Mary Dou­glas and also the anthro­pol­o­gy of rit­u­al (Van Gen­nep 1960) when I think of inside/outside and the pro­duc­tion of the home as scared vs pro­fane. And then there is of course Fou­cault (with his under­stand­ing of the ‘order of things’ (2005)), who Barad reminds us leaves us with much trou­ble to ‘hold on to’ (p. 813) or ‘stay with’ (Har­away) when it comes to our per­son­al bod­ies and the wider pol­i­tics that sur­round and invade us, inside (Fou­cault 2010). From these loose­ly con­nect­ed threads of thought, I like to think of the inside being made or ‘per­formed’ (Barad) through the ordi­nar­i­ness of (domes­tic) mate­r­i­al labour. Isn’t it the rou­tine but at the same time rit­u­al­is­ing prac­tices that make homes to be the special/sacred inside places that they are? Home as, for­ev­er, an ongo­ing endeav­our, nev­er to be defined by “inher­ent­ly deter­mi­nate bound­aries or prop­er­ties” (Barad p. 813)?
This is no doubt an ungen­er­ous char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion, but I take Slo­ter­dijk to be work­ing with an almost essen­tial­ist idea of inside, some­thing tied to our evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gy, and to some extent our (meta­phys­i­cal) mas­tery over nature: “Biol­o­gy deals with the envi­ron­ment, phi­los­o­phy with the world” (p. 3). Although he is ready to present his the­o­ry as a “spa­tial inter­pre­ta­tion” and not one able to “explain every­thing” (p. 3) he seems pre­pared to pro­claim what things like phi­los­o­phy, biol­o­gy and homes are, not how they are, and how they are always already ‘becom­ings’: so, for instance, “homes are ini­tial­ly machines to kill time.” (p. 5). While I like the provoca­tive­ness of state­ments like this, I find them too gen­er­al and too couched in a restrict­ed, ele­men­tal­ism  — as if we might just break things down in these neat ways.

“Approach­ing a prac­tice then means approach­ing it as it diverges, that is, feel­ing its bor­ders, exper­i­ment­ing with the ques­tions which prac­ti­tion­ers may accept as rel­e­vant, even if they are not their own ques­tions, rather than pos­ing insult­ing ques­tions that would lead them to mobilise and trans­form the bor­der into a defence against their out­side.” (Stengers p. 184)

I would like to ask what it might be like to be on the inside, liv­ing right there and mak­ing do with the things and prac­tices (a lá Stengers) that are avail­able to us (and that we make avail­able). To me this ‘think­ing par le milieu’ (Stengers p. 187,from Deleuze) is a more respon­si­ble and respon­sive under­stand­ing of our pres­ence and role in place. Yes, I see that Slo­ter­dijk, with his foam and islands is doing some gen­er­a­tive work to blur the bound­aries and reveal the flu­id rela­tion­al­i­ty inher­ent between things, prac­tices and space. Nev­er­the­less, he loos­es or seems to over­look the per­for­ma­tive qual­i­ties of ‘being there’ (that is much more than Hei­deger’s rather too gen­er­al Dasein), and entan­gled in the “(re)configurings of the world” (Barad p. 816),  of being there ‘account­able’, ‘responsible/responsive’ and ‘belong­ing’ (Barad/Stengers).

Barad, K. (2003). Posthu­man­ist Per­for­ma­tiv­i­ty: Toward an Under­stand­ing of How Mat­ter Comes to Mat­ter. Signs: Jour­nal of Women in Cul­ture and Soci­ety, 28(3), 801–831.
Fou­cault, M., Ewald, F., & Fontana, A. (2010). The birth of biopol­i­tics: lec­tures at the Col­lège de France, 1978–1979. M. Senel­lart (Ed.). Bas­ingstoke: Pal­grave Macmillan.
Fou­cault, M. (1970). The Order of Things: An Archae­ol­o­gy of the Human Sci­ences. Lon­don: Tavi­s­tock Publication.
Stengers, I. (2013). Intro­duc­to­ry notes on an ecol­o­gy of prac­tices. Cul­tur­al Stud­ies Review, 11(1), 183–196.
Slo­ter­dijk, P. (2009). Spheres the­o­ry: Talk­ing to myself about the poet­ics of space. Har­vard Design Mag­a­zine, 30, 126–137.
van Gen­nep, A. (1960)  The rites of pas­sage. Chica­go: Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go Press.