Anthropotechnology: Sloterdijk on Environmental Design and the FoamWorlds of Co-Isolation

Abstract

The paper has two primary goals. The first is to re-examine the dynamics of cultural change by applying the innovative interpretations of German theorist and cultural historian Peter Sloterdijk, who contends that the ways we traditionally have made and understood our built environment are grossly inadequate in our contemporary media-saturated, war-weary, biotechnological world. The second is to show how such a reinterpretation of space, architecture, and culture could help us to learn to design better and act by way of an “anthropotechnology” (Sloterdijk’s word) that is simultaneously developmental and threatening – that might enable us to find an orientation in a world of complexity, and thus more positively shape our lives and future world. Sloterdijk’s intriguing concepts – spheres of immunization (bubbles, globes, foams), co-isolation, dyads, tensegrity – hold great promise for the next pulse of architectural, planning, and construction theory.

Keywords:

• Peter Sloterdijk
• anthropotechnology
• spheres of immunization (bubbles
• globes
• foams)
• co-isolation
• housing

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their critique that led to a modified, improved paper. The editorial support, insight, and advice of Suzanne Ewing, and especially Diana Periton, has been exemplary and collegial.

Notes

¹ Peter Sloterdijk, Sphären III: Schäume (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004), 535.

² Ibid., 592–595.

³ Ibid., 870.

⁴ Sloterdijk published his Spheres trilogy in German between 1998 and 2004: Sphären I: Blasen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998), Sphären II: Globen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999), and Sphären III: Schäume (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004). Volumes I and II have been published in English translation: Spheres, Volume I: Bubbles, trans. Wieland Hoban (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011) and Spheres, Volume II, Globes, trans. Wieland Hoban (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2014).

⁵ Sloterdijk, Bubbles, 25.

⁶ Ibid., 616.

⁷ Peter Sloterdijk, “Rules for the Human Zoo: A Response to the Letter on Humanism,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27 (2009): 12–28, 12, 15.

⁸ Sloterdijk, Bubbles, 62–66.

⁹ Peter Sloterdijk, In the World Interior of Capital (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 171.

¹⁰ Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture [1927] (repr. New York: Dover, 1984), 114–115, 237, 259.

¹¹ Alan Gowens, The Comfortable House (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), xv.

¹² Gail Cooper, Air-Conditioning America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).

¹³ Robert Clark, The American Family Home 1800–1960 (London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 211.

¹⁴ See Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009); or idem, Sphären III.

¹⁵ Eric Klinenberg, Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone (New York: Penguin, 2012), 5, 10.

¹⁶ Sloterdijk, Sphären III, 535–536.

¹⁷ Ibid., 57, 255.

¹⁸ Peter Sloterdijk, Neither Sun Nor Death (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011), 255–256.

¹⁹ Ibid., 256.

²⁰ Robert Mugerauer, Interpretations on Behalf of Place (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994); or idem, “Bio-Technology/Life-Sciences Buildings: A Phenomenology of an Emerging New Gestalt,” paper presented at the International Association of Environmental Theory Annual Conference, Duquesne, November 2008.

²¹ Sloterdijk, Neither Sun Nor Death, 76.

²² Sloterdijk, Bubbles, 71.

²³ Sloterdijk, Schäume, 55.

²⁴ Ibid., 59.

²⁵ Sloterdijk, Bubbles, 54; idem, Neither Sun Nor Death, 264; idem, Schäume, 55.

²⁶ Sloterdijk, Schäume, 57.

²⁷ Sloterdijk, Neither Sun Nor Death, 144.

²⁸ Klinenberg, Going Solo, 15.

²⁹ Sloterdijk, Neither Sun Nor Death, 144.

³⁰ Ibid., 159.

³¹ Ibid., 183, 186–187, 190.

³² Sloterdijk, Schäume, 655.

³³ Ibid., 577, cf. also 569–582, 586–603; Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 320; idem, Stress and Freedom (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), 6.

³⁴ Klinenberg, Going Solo, 5.

³⁵ Sloterdijk, “Rules for the Human Zoo,” 22.

³⁶ Shu-Mei Huang, Urbanizing Carescapes of Hong Kong: Two Systems, One City (New York: Lexington Books, 2015).

³⁷ Sloterdijk, Schäume, 586–603.

³⁸ Keith Harris, “The Visual Grammar of Soft Urban Advertising” (2010).

Available online: https://www.academia.edu/245,633/The_Visual_Grammar_of_Soft_Urban_Advertising/, 6–8, 11.

³⁹ Sloterdijk, In the World Interior of Capital, 218–219.

⁴⁰ Sloterdijk, Schäume, 542.

⁴¹ Peter Sloterdijk, “Foam City,” Distinktion no. 16 (2008): 47–59, 47.

⁴² Ibid., 48, 57.

⁴³ Sloterdijk, In the World Interior of Capital, 171.

⁴⁴ Huang, Urbanizing Carescapes of Hong Kong, 102.

⁴⁵ Ibid., 101–102.

⁴⁶ Efrain Kristal, “Literature in Sloterdijk’s Philosophy,” in Sloterdijk Now, ed. Stuart Elden (Malden: Polity, 2012), 147–164, 155.

⁴⁷ Sloterdijk, Neither Sun Nor Death, 218.

⁴⁸ Ibid., 350; idem, You Must Change Your Life, 320.