According to Sloterdijk, the contemporary age is an age of foam, i.e., a multiplicity of people, who rub up against each other with their own private semiologies. The metaphysical age was a bubble, i.e., God as the transcendent signified, who encased the Earth, like a dome. This divine macro-sphere provided a psychological immunization to the Lacanian ’ real '. But now, since all the grand meta-narratives and transcendent signifieds have been deconstructed, in the contemporary age, we are in a state of existential nakedness, exposed to the Lacanian ’ real '. The grand bubble has popped and now what remains is foam, the multiplicity of semio-spheres, which contain their own idiosyncratic logic and meaning. Understanding this macro/micro symbolism is conducive to the understanding of contemporary art. Much of modern art is extremely perplexing and ambiguous, even absurd - it isn’t confluent with the metaphysical grand narratives and transcendent signifieds. The deconstruction of the transcendent signified has allowed room for play, as Derrida would say - the signifiers can now play around and create their own semiologies. Once you understand the personal bubble of the contemporary artist, his logic and meaning, you can begin to become part of his semio-sphere.
This is really not much more than mental masturbation, this psychobabble using
all these big words and meaning nothing.
Einstein said it best, only those who truly understand a matter
can make it simple enough for everyone to understand.
Kropotkin
Check the book out; it’s replete with interesting new ways to look at things. Don’t let my prose discourage you.
-Erik
Kropotkin: This is what i was trying to say in the Marx forum also. Before artists used to paint realistically, beliefing in ideal forms such as God, determinism, there was no abstaction, disassocation , there was no modern art to speak of , nowadays there are only private spheres, and where the private globus only represents within the many. (Where there is no comparison, there is no meaning) The deconstruction this dis-associative objective narrative, created the private narratives.
Orb, are you familiar with this work of Sloterdijk?
Not really, but most of the moderns follow a similar line using pretty much similar analysis. But i will try to familiarize myself with it, will be interesting how it corresponds with the others’.
Bubbles/Spheres is a trilogy - consists of three parts, each of which is very dense, but jam-packed with innovative perceptions. There are copious amounts of reviews on the book ( the first one ), which give distillations and explanations of the technical jargon. Def. recommend this.
Thanks, Erik will look into it
Thanks, Erik will look into it
You’re welcome, buddy. Happy hunting.
The pre-metaphysical age, from the Paleolithic to the time of Plato. According to Sloterdijk in this epoch there was a semiotics of immanence. Being in the world was a matter of being in the body of the Great Mother. The typical movement was the journey downward into the depths and return. Time is cyclic and space is a commonly shared macrosphere, identified with the body of the mother. The individual is a cell in this organic totality, in the womb of the Great Mother. The artist is a shaman.
The metaphysical age, from the time of Plato to that of Heidegger. Each historical period within the metaphysical epoch has a privileged set of “iconotypes” or transcendental signifieds which fix meaning into organized significations. These semiotic systems and their signifieds are regularly de-legitimated and dissolved to make way for those of the next epoch. Being in the world is a matter of being inside the body of the Father. The semiotics is based on transcendence. In the Middle Ages, the typical movement is ascension and voyage in the celestial spheres. Truth is certainty. The artist is a cosmocrator, a creator in the image of God. In the post-Reformation period we have the advent of the age of the world picture. The macrosphere of the heavens dissolves and we are thrown into infinite space. Space is Euclidean, infinite, and three-dimensional. Time is linear. There is no macrosphere. The artist is an optician.
The post-metaphysical age, which divides into two epochs: the aperspectival or integral age from Heidegger to World War II and the post-aperspectival age, from the end of WWII till today. In the aperspectival age, a new macrosphere is constituted containing no longer just one perspective, but all perspectives. The world is no longer optical, what we see, but noetic, what we understand and imagine. Truth is multiple and relative to the different perspectives. The culturally specific iconotypes have been replaced by structural archetypes (geometrical or anthropological). Space is an integral hyper-dimensional macrosphere. Time is integrated into space-time. The artist is an archetypologist.
With the advent of the post-aperspectival age the reconstitution of hierarchically organized systems is no longer possible, and we are left with a “midden-heap” of abandoned, isolated, and fragmented signifiers. The artist can no longer presuppose a universal organized semiotic system, and is obliged to select and combine the signifiers of the present and the past, and hybridize them with new signifiers, into idiosyncratic, temporary, partial, multiple organizations, with no universal legitimacy. Truth is no longer just multiple, it is also a matter of degrees – from relativism, it has become quantized. Space is no longer a hyper-dimensional macrosphere, which has been deconstructed and dissolved. Space is an ocean of quantic foam. Time is miniaturized and discontinuous. There is no universal macrosphere, only individual semiospheres. The artist is a monadologist.
In this last phase man is closest to non existence. The next phases artist has to re introduce the primordial pathos of self valuing, which is negated by postmodernism, was miniaturized during the metaphysical age but unrestrained in the premetaphysical age. The agonizingly clearly understood relativity of Achilles’ perspective was the cause of its absolute consequences.
The modern thinks that his standard is already in compliance with the absolute and his consequence is nil. Belief in the one god has been internalized.
The coming age will wash all postmodernism and “monadologue art” away. It is the age of trauma, rupture, in which art must be majestic and universal to survice.
In this last phase man is closest to non existence. The next phases artist has to re introduce the primordial pathos of self valuing, which is negated by postmodernism, was miniaturized during the metaphysical age but unrestrained in the premetaphysical age. The agonizingly clearly understood relativity of Achilles’ perspective was the cause of its absolute consequences.
The modern thinks that his standard is already in compliance with the absolute and his consequence is nil. Belief in the one god has been internalized.
The coming age will wash all postmodernism and “monadologue art” away. It is the age of trauma, rupture, in which art must be majestic and universal to survice.
Postmodernism is a degenerate impulse towards chaos, or fragmentation - a will to deconstruct, to tear down the strata, not for the sake of reconstruction, but for chaos in itself - chaos as the telos par excellence.
I think the coming age will be a revival of the golden; the masses will be thirsty for order and true nobility. The vicissitudes of ethoses are like seasons.
In Spheres, Sloterdijk brings forth the concept of the “placental-double” or " the With ", which is the essential dyadic relationship of the primordial sphere within the mother, i.e., when you were in the mother’s womb, your double, or alter ego, was the placenta - which provided you with comfort and nourishment. This primordial dyadic relationship continues to haunt the human throughout the course of his life - he seeks to re-construct the conditions of the mother’s womb, albeit unconsciously.
Just as according to Aristophanes, contemporary man, in Plato’s Symposium, is the mutilated half of an originally rounded being which is whole; also according to Sloterdijk, humans originally comprised a two-part wholeness this side of the confrontative separation of subject and object. Sloterdijk employs the term Mit (With) to designate this state, which is hard to describe because of its prelinguistic origin. The fetus and its placenta are connected to each other like Orpheus and Eurydice. Every Orpheus is forced to leave his Eurydice. On parting, the latter bestows on him a space, “in which substitutions are possible.” The vacant space that the lost “primal companion” leaves behind in man, becomes the starting point for a consistently renewed search for new companions and new substitute spheres. The Eurydice of the placenta also leaves behind the navel, the bodily trace that points to our original bipolarity, for the Orpheus-like half-human.
For Sloterdijk the problem of the history of mankind begins (as does the problem of Sloterdijk’s version of this history for the reader) with the “excommunication” of this primal companion. Instead of being honoured as the lost half of man, the future of the placenta was either to be utilized by the cosmetics industry, or even, having been turned into granulate, to be used to accelerate combustion in waste incinerators. According to Sloterdijk, a “seamless alliance of silence” has formed, whose aim it is to make humans forget their original companion, the placenta, and to condemn them to an “absence of togetherness” (Mitlosigkeit). At this point, following Sloterdijk’s train of thought, modern individualism enters its hot phase. A “gynecological inquisition” has brought forth the the lonely modern subject. This condition in turn is to have facilitated the formation of totalitarian nations. “The birth of totalitarianism out of the spirit of midwifery? Someone here has apparently taken an overly hot bath in amniotic fluid” (transl. fr. German), as one critic jeered.
Interfacial Spheres:
In Bubbles, Sloterdijk contextualizes and develops his theory by looking at how spheres can be perceived through history by analyzing a variety of sources such as art works and mythological stories. In chapter 2 on interfacial spheres of intimacy, Sloterdijk replaces the term intersubjectivity with interfacial greenhouse effects that form the human species. Eye contact is not seen as a vacuum or neutral “in-between” but rather following Plato, the interfacial space is viewed as a force field filled with turbulent tension that constructs the face as being-for-the-other-face. He analyzes two sacral frescos by Giotto where he studied interfacial constellations.
The first one depicts the moment where Joachim and Anna meet after they had a vision they were going to be parents of holy Mary. This moment where they are partners in the shared secret of the other is a moment where an interfacial sphere is created. Giotto represents this by placing both faces in a two-poled aureole. With a nice optical trick a third face appears in this two-poled sphere. The visible-invisible face that emerges refers to the new life that will be in Anna’s body. It is however not the face of a child that emerges from the faces of the future parents and resembles grandchild Jesus rather than their child, Mary.
The second fresco of Judas’kiss represents a very different interfacial constellation. It presents an antithetical spherical tension. The antagonism between the two is depicted on three levels. The first is metaphysical, distinguishing between god-man and man by using one single aureole. The second is physiognomic, depicting the distinguished versus the vulgar. The third is the spherological gap between the faces. There is an open sphere-creating force in the eyes of Jesus while Judas is unable to enter the sphere. Instead he selfishly tries to steal entrance. The kiss represents the gesture of someone who wants to enter the love space with the attitude of an outsider. There is no possibility for a shared life in their eyes.
Negative Gynecology:
For Sloterdijk, therefore, phenomenological analysis
has to be preceded by a philosophical gynecology, or what he calls in the first
volume of Sphären, a negative gynecology (1998: 275) that is an analysis of
the process of being ejected from, thrown out of the uterus. We are thus strange
and estranged (verfremdetet) creatures, who must arrive to a world, but who in
arriving it and already abandoning it. We are creatures of distance—not always
at home in the world (see 1993a for a lengthy treatment of this dimension of
neoteny). Still, for Sloterdijk, human existence begins with the unfathomable
pain of being exiled from the maternal womb. We are mangled creatures, who
survive because of the generosity and gratitude of the Other, who welcomes us,
who nourishes us, who gives us an abode and refuge. We are born of someone,
and someone receives us. We are loved and we are lovers. Coming to the world
is a form of coupling; being-with is a being-with-another which forms a couple.
But being born before time means we are always arriving in the world. This
arrival is met with the project of fashioning dwelling. To come to the world is to
build a home. In contrast to Heidegger, for Sloterdijk the Mit-sein is always
being-alongside-others in a dwelling that has been built and in which we are
enclosed. Being-with is always being inside of a dwelling. Dasein‘s neotony and
always dwelling alongside another means that the subject is always in a process
of auto-genesis that is simultaneously a making of worlds. Dasein‘s ex-stasis, its
being always ahead of itself, is simultaneously a worlding, a bringing-forth of
worlds, whether they be poetic, literary, or material and real, such as glasshouses,
palaces, or caves.
This is really not much more than mental masturbation, this psychobabble using
all these big words and meaning nothing.
Einstein said it best, only those who truly understand a matter
can make it simple enough for everyone to understand.Kropotkin
What he said ^
Bunch of incoherent words, mixed with too fanciness.
This isn’t philosophy, please move it to somewhere else.