Sloterdijk Class Final Paper Aakash Solanki

Sloterdijk Inc., Scalable Design Solutions for World Improvement!

INTRODUCE

I want to elaborate upon three impressions I have of Sloterdijk’s work. These impressions are of

scale, design, and improvement. Through this essay, I want to tacitly suggest that reading

Sloterdijk’s work through scale, design, and improvement could open up possibilities of a

theoretically informed practice and a practically informed theory. This mode of ‘meditational

philosophy’ which can go beyond the European dichotomy of theory and practice is something

that Sloterdijk seems to have been developing since the Critique of Cynical Reason (1983). Sloterdijk’s

work is of a gigantic scale, and given that he is a philosopher, his writing is expectedly systematic.

When I invoke the notion of scale, I draw attention to Sloterdijk’s notion of sphere making and

immunology as malleable to allow him to discuss life at any scale, from protosubjectivity of the

foetus to the planetary scale of environmental challenges. I suspect that philosophers’ works are

meant to be of general application but Sloterdijk’s framework is such that there is one basic

component, or a core concept if I may, and this concept mutates as it is adopted to explain

questions or issues at many possible scales. In that sense, I think Sloterdijk’s achievement might

be in formulating a basic, flexible model to conceptualize the small as well as the large—at times,

all at once—using the same fundamental underlying logic. It is not like there are various building

blocks which expand the more complex things gets, as in in the case of single variable calculus to

multi-variable calculus or capital, finance capital, and speculative finance and on and on, it is just

spheres. In physics, we have Newtonian physics and Einsteinian physics: where Newtonian physics

is used to address questions at supra-atomic scale, Einsteinian physics or quantum physics is used

to explain issues at the sub-atomic scale. Principles of quantum physics cannot explain how

planetary interactions happen, whereas Newtonian physics cannot explain sub-atomic level

interactions between electrons and other particles given its various limitations. What Sloterdijk

provides—in philosophy, at least—is a robust framework to explain the emergence of human

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subjectivity and its extension to planetary scale in order to assess climate change issues, all using

the same concept of the “sphere.” The sphere allows him to talk about ontology, the role of

museums, schools, and the ethical challenges which the problem of global warming raises for

humanity at large along one commensurable plane, at times in the same discussion. In order to

enunciate this point, I follow Sloterdijk’s commentary on Being, schools, museums, black boxes,

Design and various other topics drawn from his body of work.

The second key theme throughout Sloterdijk’s work is design. When I invoke ‘design’, I don’t

mean to reduce Sloterdijk to his current job title—Professor of Philosophy and Media Theory at

University of Art and Design Karlsruhe—but instead point out the manner in which design is

central to Sloterdijk’s description of both philosophical problems and the prescription of

‘solutions’ (if I may) to these problems. In other words, Sloterdijk does not seem to be merely a

philosopher who thinks about design—in the nominal, objective sense—but one who does not

shy away from designing—as a set of actions or practices—‘solutions’ to philosophical problems.

If his analysis of environmental warfare shows product design to be one of the central themes

through which the environment becomes “explicated” (2009c, 9) in warfare, Sloterdijk’s response

to Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism” (1946), argues for an anthropotechnic approach rather than

simply a humanistic education (as it was conducted between 1789-1945) as a solution to a present

situation conceived as a design problem: How to make rules for the human zoo/park? (2009b).

The third theme which I plan to survey is improvement. I am hesitant but I have a sense that at

the core of Sloterdijk’s work is an intention for improvement. I cannot confidently argue whether

that is indeed a major thrust of Sloterdijk’s overall work, but the theme of improvement definitely

underlies at least several of his works. This discussion will focus on You Must Change Your Life

(2013). In the section on improvement, I shall argue that it is possible to read the title as You Must

‘Improve’ Your Life. I draw out improvement as a theme in Sloterdijk’s work which concerns him

across many scales—whether he is ruminating over the loss of canon in our post-modern times or

the development of human subjectivity via sphere formation—even when ‘improvement’ as such

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is not explicitly invoked by him. I conclude by highlighting why and how do these themes help in

engaging with Sloterdijk.

SCALE

Since Clifford Geertz’s proposal for an interpretive theory of culture, anthropologists have

become extremely cautious of even pretending to make even remotely generalizable or universal

claims about the objects of their study. The influences of post-structuralist theory, including

Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and more recently Gilles Deleuze, have pushed the emphasis

from explanation or theorising to ‘analytics’ (Foucault 1992, 82). The publication of Writing Culture

(Clifford et al.,1986) seemed to have at least temporarily put the discipline in a state of paralysis,

an epistemological crisis of sorts wherein anthropologists realised that researchers could only ever

write about themselves. My sense is that the ontological turn, and the emergence of multispecies

ontologies, is partially a response for navigating or escaping this epistemological impasse

(Boellstorff 2016, 389; Carrithers et. al. 2010, 174). In sum, a post-structuralist influenced and

post-reflexive turn anthropology differentiated itself from sociology, economics, political science,

and even philosophy in its claim that it had never and could no longer attempt to claim

generalizable knowledge over large scales of time and space; our reflexivity—which should could

be lauded in most cases—seems to have made us successively confident about the risks of the

“general” or “universal”, at least since the partial “going out of fashion” of Lévi-Straussian

structural anthropology.

Conversations regarding generalizable knowledge indicates the relevancy of scale and

scalability. In her work on the specificities that govern logistics and supply chain of the matsutake

mushroom, Anna Tsing has discussed some limitations of modern science (2016). Tsing points

out that expectations of scale and scalability is the hallmark of modern science and also the reason

for the violence that science carries out. For Tsing, scalability “is the ability of a [research] project

to change scales smoothly without any change in project frames” (2016, 38). According to Tsing,

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scalability “banishes meaningful diversity, that is diversity that might change things” (ibid).

Predictably, Tsing’s call is to focus on the absolute “indeterminacy of an encounter” and to

formulate a “theory of non-scalability” (2016, 38-9 emphasis mine). To Tsing, I want to ask whether

it is a proposal to formulate theory of non-scalability or a proposal for non-scalable theory. I

invoke the work of Tsing here, not to engage in a direct dialogue with Tsing per se, but given that

Tsing has explicitly addressed the problem/s of scale—across multi-sited ethnography,

collaborative ethnography, theory of non-scalability—I bring up her work as perhaps symptomatic

of a perceived general trend in anthropology as it relates to Sloterdijk’s attention to scale and

scalability. The trend towards the particular, the individual, the specific, the indeterminate, the

non-predictable, the non-generalizable is, as I suggest here, is less of a question of non-scalability

and more of a design problem of creating an appropriate scalable theory. Sloterdijk provides his

readers with a highly scalable theory, one which is malleable such in a cybernetic way in that it

mutates or transforms based on the scale at which one is operating and in that sense mitigates the

problems of scalability which Tsing and many anthropologists continuously point out in doing

generalizable work. The misrecognition of this scaling work at times can risk surfacing as

ideological opposition against other theories of scalability (such as those deriving from statistics

and economics or even sociology for example).

Sloterdijk’s project is impressively scalable. By scalable, I mean that it is one which provides

for a model to think about phenomena and subjectivity at many possible scales without implying

Sloterdijk as a “systematic” thinker, a banal point for a philosopher. Sloterdijk’s theory of

spheres—including spherology or general immunology—is akin to vector graphics. Anyone who

looked at images on a digital interface such as a computer or a smartphone has encountered JPEG

files which start to pixelate beyond a certain zoom level. Sometime in the late 1990s, in order to

address the problem of pixelating, the World Wide Web consortium came up with a specification

for SVG file format, an acronym which stands for scalable vector graphics. The way SVG works

is that it is independent of the pixels on a screen, instead it is a mathematical specification of how

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the image must come to be. Thus, irrespective of the dimension of the device interface and the

intended zoom level, the final image stays clear to the human eye because the computing

infrastructure is continuously recalculating the image specification based on given situation. I

wonder if Sloterdijk’s spheres can be thought of as specifications to the scalable vector graphics

e.g. planet, groups, biunes etc. almost as if his schema or design of an Object Oriented

Programming (OOP) language where in spheres is an object of the most abstract type, but one

which allows a programmer to instantiate objects of this class and specify the particularities during

the instantiation. Let me give some examples.

Sloterdijk begins Bubbles (2011) with a preliminary note on Plato and his academy, drawing our

attention to the statement above the gate of the academy: “Let no one enter who is not a

geometrician” (2011, 9). After pointing out this statement, Sloterdijk tells us that instead of just

the academy, this statement should be applied to life itself. He suggests that the basic hypothesis

of his framework is one where life and thinking are the same. “Spheres” allow Sloterdijk to bring

many scales of operation—individuals, communes, groups, the planet—along one commensurable

plane. Sphere is then a placeholder of the most abstract kind. When Sloterdijk’s reformulates

Engels’ footnote on how “all written history is the history of class struggle”i as “all history is the

history of animation relationships” (2011, 53), he argues how no matter what model of animation

relationship one prefers to use, we are fundamentally discussing the formation of ‘spheric liaisons’

(2011, 53). For Sloterdijk, “the theory of spheres is a morphological tool that allows us to grasp

the exodus of the human being, from the primitive symbiosis to world-historical action in empires

and global systems” (2011, 67). This general immunology continues throughout much of

Sloterdijk’s other work. Consider the following statement in Sloterdijk’s piece on museums in the

volume, The Aesthetic Imperative (2017):

In his travels through world history Hegel became the first total museum visitor. Acting as
secretary of the world spirit he recorded the developmental phases of the spirit that exists in

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itself and the spirit that exist for itself…This interior space has already been conceived as the
exhibition room of the absolute historical world museum. (2017, 225)

What is explicitly stated in the introduction to Bubbles (2011) continues to implicitly flow through

much of Sloterdijk’s later work as in this example, the world and the museum through the spherical

framework become thought of as commensurable. Earlier in the same essay, when Sloterdijk refers

to the world as a global factory and a wholesale emporium, the factory and the world or an

emporium and the world as commensurable on the same plane is tacit (2017, 224). Importantly,

the factory is not a mere microcosm of the world or the emporium a logical extension of the world,

but instead exist as the same abstract sphere contracting and expanding—as in the case of a SVG

image based on whichever zoom level we are looking at. In You Must Change Your Life (2013), world

improvement and self-improvement seamlessly interchange because of Sloterdijk’s general

immunological framework (2013, 436). This framework allows Sloterdijk to interchangeably move

from the ‘false teacher’ to the ‘false school’ and then to the problem of seduction in art (2013, 432-

435). This is possible because the basic formulation regarding all three instantiations of the

problem in logic demonstrates spheres which have basically broken off from the largely spherical

milieu, as captured by the following statement: “…remoteness from everything outside its own

sphere” (2013, 434).

Thus, it appears that Sloterdijk’s general immunology consisting of sphere as the most abstract

and scalable form offers a starting point to address both problems of scale and scalability as a

‘design problem.’

DESIGN

Sloterdijk is not merely a philosopher of design; as I briefly described in the introduction, design

is an important component of his philosophy at large. Not only does Sloterdijk formulate issues

of design, or in more appropriate philosophical term, form, but as a philosopher not averse to

‘acting’ via proposed design solutions.

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In Terror from the Air (2009c), Sloterdijk describes how the gas warfare of the 20th century was

essentially a product design task. To demonstrate this, Sloterdijk discusses how successful gas

warfare requires certain ‘atmotechnic’ innovations, which implicate Human Centered Design, and

Design Thinking (to use terminology current in design circles today) from the beginning (2009c,

23). Efficacious gas warfare required the “efficient coordination of cloud-forming factors such as

concentration, diffusion, sedimentation, coherence characteristics, mass, extension and

movement,” all amounting to a design task. Sloterdijk points out that one of the consequences of

humanist thought are such design approaches, which enable the creation of spherical air-

conditioning be used for negative air-conditioning (2009c, 24-25).

If Terror from the Air (2009c) is about design as description, Rules for the Human Zoo (2009b)

employs design as prescription to problems demanding to be solved. In this essay, Sloterdijk argues

that the era of humanism has ended not necessarily because humans became decadent but because

humanism cannot enable us to pretend that economic and political structure could potentially be

organised along the model of ‘literary societies’. Now society can only marginally organise these

structures through books (2009b, 14). Accordingly, Heidegger’s response to this crisis in Letter on

Humanism (1946) entailed moving beyond humanistic education as letter writing among friends to

the ‘centre of ontological consciousness’ (2009b, 18). But for Sloterdijk, Heiddeger’s ‘design’ is not

practically implementable. Sloterdijk states that “no nations, not even alternative schools, can be

derived from this circle of fellow shepherds and friends of Being” (2009b, 19). The alternative

proposed design is a manner to address the crisis of the loss of a culture of letter writing among

friends. If humanism cannot calm the inner beast, as current situations show, how does one tame

men? Sloterdijk’s suggests that instead of starting from the ontological primacy of the human, and

instead historicizes the becoming of thinking animal to thinking man (observed through the

development of language), a more practical design can emerge. Following Nietzsche, Sloterdijk

suggests that perhaps a combination of breeding and reading might be a better design for an

insufficient humanism. Before breeding can be recognized as eugenics, Sloterdijk anticipates the

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critique by demonstrating how historically, breeding has played a definite role in the taming of

men whether acknowledged or not (2009b, 21-24). He says: “…nonetheless, breeding, whatever

form it may have taken, was always present as the power behind the mirror” (2009b, 23). Sloterdijk

is certain breeding must accompany humanism because abstaining from it will eventually be

insufficient for designing the requisite anthropotechnology (2009b, 24)—a call to breeding ethically,

perhaps. It appears that even though the possibility of thinking carefully vis-à-vis breeding has

been closed off (because it raises the spectre of eugenics almost automatically), Sloterdijk is serious

about reopening certain conversations. He is not sure as to where such breeding will lead, but

these are the vague and risky questions that arguably require engagement (ibid). In the end

Sloterdijk’s design suggestion or solution (as a certain return to Plato’s philosopher king,

reemerging as the ‘expert-king’ engaged in a ‘royal anthropotechnology’) entails “bringing together

free but suggestible people in order to bring out the characteristics that are most advantageous to

the whole, so that…the human zoo can achieve the optimum homeostasis” (2009b, 26). Following

his formulation of design as the modernisation of competence (2017, 84-96), given various

anthropotechnic innovations in sight, Sloterdijk is wondering if breeding without breeder might

even be possible as a way to mitigate issues of eugenics (2009b, 23). I wonder if he is thinking

about a kind of AI system but I am not sure.

Thus, an ethic which might fit closer to designer than a philosopher proper, Sloterdijk is

serious about not just describing the world’s form or design but in also designing solutions. This

leads to the theme of improvement in his work, with which I will conclude this essay.

IMPROVE

In this concluding section, I draw attention to You Must Change Your Life (2016) to argue

that this text is a clarion call for improvement through the ambivalent use of the term ‘change’. I do

not know as to why a call for improvement is framed as a call for change –change is

multidirectional. Change is perhaps a broader category of difference between two states than

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improvement, and I argue that Sloterdijk uses the term “change” to avoid an overtly prescriptive

title, one which avoids turning a philosophical treatise into a self-help text (even though the title

might have been intentionally translated as such in a tongue-in-cheek reference to such self-help

literature). The word ‘change’ also leaves open conceptual space for individual or group choice to

choose as against the more narrow ‘improve,’ which has a prefigured moral connotation. However,

I argue that the text is still largely a call for improvement. After forcefully arguing that there is no

return to religion, since there never existed religion in the first place, Sloterdijk underscores that

‘You must change your life!’ is a concern for the whole (2013, 442). He writes, “It cannot be

denied: the only fact of universal ethical significance in the current world is the diffusely and

ubiquitously growing realisation that things cannot continue in this way” (ibid). Sloterdijk points

out that since the global catastrophe began its partial unveiling, humans are being told to “‘Change

your life!’ Otherwise its complete disclosure will demonstrate to you, sooner or later, what you

failed to do during the time of portents!” (ibid). Given the urgency with which Sloterdijk writes at

the end of the text, I am compelled to read change as improvement. For example, Sloterdijk

characterises the current state of affairs as an absence of an efficient co-immunity structure for the

global society (2013, 450). As humanity hits an absolute limit beyond which the planet will not be

able to support it, ‘protectionism of the whole’ becomes the prime directive (2013, 451). How are

directives to change not also statements for urgent improvement? This project of improvement is

thus a design project of all scales, from the self to the world, a project of global immune system

design to create a macrostructure of co-immunity borrowed from the redeemable aspects of

communism (2013, 452-3). I would argue that this improvement is cybernetic without the explicit

emphasis on the idea of feedback or a closed looping of communication. In the discussion of

practice, exercises to change and the idea of feedback requires ‘explication’ (2009c, 3). In the

process of transformation from Nothing to Becoming to Being, when seen in comparison to

Nothing, Being may be framed as ‘improvement’. In the activities which enable the continuous

reproduction of humans by humans, this cybernetic feedback process of improvement becomes

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tacit in You Must Change Your Life (2013). In suggesting the true meaning of the Marxist dictum,

‘Man himself produces man’, Sloterdijk locates reproduction as one of ‘practice’: the continuous

everyday reproduction of the human through practice (2013, 4). Sloterdijk’s definition of practice

is helpful in this regard: “Practice is defined here as any operation that provides or improves the

actor’s qualification for the next performance of the same operation, whether it is declared as

practice or not” (ibid, emphasis mine). Even ‘anthropotechnics’, the mode through which this

practice of co-immunity is achieved, is defined as: “…the methods of mental and physical

practising by which humans from the most diverse cultures have attempted to optimise their cosmic

and immunological in the face of vague risks of living and acute certainties of death” (2013, 10

emphasis mine). Optimization in personal lives such that it leads to saving the planetary sphere

amounts to the project of improvement. “The Domestication of Being” (2016) and Bubbles (2011)

can also be construed as projects with a latent theme of improvement. Therefore, the manner in

which Sloterdijk argues for sphere formation—as a process of the forming a luxuriating interior

and his broader theory of general immunology—could be conceived as a system which intrinsically

attempts to form spheres, making interiors, and thus improving.

In summary, Sloterdijk’s work concerns with the design of scalable improvement solutions

as not merely a problem for philosophy, but also a problem for the world (Alliez et al. 2007, 311),

a concern that seems to have driven Sloterdijk since The Critique of Cynical Reason (1984). At least

one core part Sloterdijk’s work is concerned with finding ways to reconcile the total loss of idealism

in wake of the failure of the radical politics that he once participated in, as well as serious concern

for ‘action’ without becoming too weary for action. One sees this most acutely in You Must Change

Your Life (2013). The term change—over what is clearly an ethical call for improvement—is a

method to urge everyone and yet no one to act, and act now without becoming overbearingly

moralistic about one’s prospects. There is a fine line Sloterdijk navigates, which allows him to

exercise a theoretical praxis that move beyond the dualities of theory and practice (2017, 296, 300).

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Design as ‘action’ seems to be a very serious engagement for Sloterdijk in reconciling these

dualities. Design as a way to describe but also as a way to mobilise suggestions for action

reverberates throughout his work, one which allows Sloterdijk the ability to perform his

‘meditational philosophy’ at the largest as well as the smallest possible scales.

i
I learnt recently that this Engels’ footnote didn’t have the adjective ‘written’ when it was first written, and then
during a republication Engels added the word. I wonder if Sloterdijk would want to edit this and many
reformulations he makes of Engel’s statement through out his work. On the topic of ‘writing’ strictly though I am
not sure if orality as such is under Sloterdijk’s purview. But this could be a function of my shallow reading. I do not
have space here, but I would like to hear that Sloterdijk might have to say about how large parts of the world started
using the mobile phone without having text from their own languages printed on either the hardware or the
interface (2017, 83-96). I would like to draw Sloterdijk’s attention to how many tribal people in the world whose
cultures don’t have written language use technology, and products designed in California or elsewhere in the global
north but reach the south many times without any modification, his formulation of design as the tool for power
changes. My sense is that when people in the global South (or poor black people in Chicago asked to get onto
smartphones by the Chicago Housing authority without ever having had access to an email account), are forced to
use products designed keeping white people in mind, they are not purchasing sovereignty, they become sovereign by
struggling and eventually making use of these products. I guess the question is, where would Sloterdijk have to stand
to look upon the whole of design (2009a, 39)?

References

Alliez, Éric. 2007. ‘Living Hot, Thinking Coldly: An Interview with Peter Sloterdijk’. Cultural
Politics 3 (3): 307–26. https://doi.org/10.2752/175174307X226870.
Sloterdijk, Peter. 2009a. ‘Geometry in the Colossal: The Project of Metaphysical Globalization’.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27 (1): 29–40. https://doi.org/10.1068/dst2.
———. 2009b. ‘Rules for the Human Zoo: A Response to the Letter on Humanism’.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27 (1): 12–28. https://doi.org/10.1068/dst3.
———. 2009c. Terror from the Air. Translated by Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran. Los Angeles :
Cambridge, Mass: Semiotext.
———. 2011. Bubbles: Spheres Volume I: Microspherology. Translated by Wieland Hoban. Los
Angeles, CA: Semiotext.
———. 2014. You Must Change Your Life. 1 edition. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
———. 2017. The Aesthetic Imperative: Writings on Art. Translated by Karen Margolis. 1 edition.
Malden, Massachusetts: Polity.
Sloterdijk, Peter, Michael Eldred, and Leslie A. Adelson. 1984. ‘Cynicism: The Twilight of False
Consciousness’. New German Critique, no. 33: 190–206. https://doi.org/10.2307/488361.

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