Modernity, Sloterdijk and Private Semiologies

Erik1 · December 9, 2014, 7:36pm

You’re welcome, buddy. Happy hunting.

Erik1 · December 9, 2014, 10:39pm

Erik1 · December 11, 2014, 2:38pm

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.

Erik1 · December 12, 2014, 11:42am

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 The culturally specific iconotypes have been replaced by structural archetypes (geometrical or anthropological).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.

Jakob · December 12, 2014, 12:02pm

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.

Erik1 · December 12, 2014, 1:46pm

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.

Erik1 · December 13, 2014, 1:21pm

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.

Erik1 · December 14, 2014, 1:06pm

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.

Erik1 · December 15, 2014, 2:18pm

Interfacial Spheres:

Erik1 · December 16, 2014, 1:02pm

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.

Lump · December 17, 2014, 5:47pm

What he said ^
Bunch of incoherent words, mixed with too fanciness.

This isn’t philosophy, please move it to somewhere else.

Erik1 · December 17, 2014, 6:16pm

Listen, I’m not going to condescend in my prose. If you don’t understand a term, then google it. It’s simple. This is a place for higher learning, so view augmenting your vocabulary as ancillary to your philosophical endeavors.

Lump · December 17, 2014, 7:34pm

Just because you think/wish that what you have written in OP makes sense, doesn’t necessarily mean it does make sense.

Most of us have a sufficient understanding of the words, but bound together in the wrong way, the meaning falls apart.

Erik1 · December 17, 2014, 7:38pm

It makes sense - you just need to enter into the Sloterdijkian semio-sphere. Careful, though - or else it will pop.

Lump · December 17, 2014, 7:42pm

Ancient Greeks would have a term “diluted” when thoughts are a stray and doesn’t make sense.

Erik1 · December 17, 2014, 7:45pm

So, are you really saying you didn’t comprehend the OP? Not even the gist?

If you really want me to, I will dumb it down for you.

Lump · December 17, 2014, 7:48pm

OP is very clear, and it’s even more clear it’s pure fantasy, not suited for philosophy, more suited for Harry Potter movies.

Erik1 · December 17, 2014, 7:50pm

Yeah - you are a troll.

First you insinuated it was inscrutable; now you claim it’s perfectly fathomable.

You will be ignored, until you show evidence of sincerity and maturity.

Erik1 · December 18, 2014, 1:15pm

‘Even Lacan’s tragically presumptuous theorem about the mirror stage’s formative significance for the ego function cannot overcome its dependence on the cosmetic and ego-technical household inventory of the nineteenth century - much to the detriment of those who were taken in by this psychological mirage’

He argues that in order to prove the valence of psychoanalytic theories in any cultures other than the Western ones we would have to first demonstrate the presence of mirrors (he argues that even until the Modern age few had mirrors and they were cloaked in secrecy – for much of human history S. argues that most of the human race had not seen their own faces [I think he oversimplifies here – e.g. reflection in another’s eyes for example ‘the other thus acts as a personal mirror’ p.200 – but there is certainly something interesting to be said about how the ‘interface’ of mirror technologies opens up new modes of self-encounter – ‘they no longer require completion through the present other, but can complete themselves through themselves so to speak’ p. 20] – says something similar about writing in thought transmission]), and then the emergence of mirror-subjectivities. S. also argues that if we reread the narcissistic mirror-narrative with this intervention in mind, we actually arrive at the stark opposite of narcissism in ‘pre-reflection’ cultures: the visage in the water is not an image of the self, but of another – ‘Looking at the entire history of human faciality, one can say that humans have faces not for themselves, but for the others’ p.192. So through this example we return again to the issues of ontotopology, spherological being and technicity which are of central concern to Sloterdijk’s Spheres

Erik1 · December 21, 2014, 2:04pm

The structural implication of the current earth-encompassing network - with all its eversions into the virtual realm - is thus not so much a globalisation as a foaming. In foam worlds, the individual bubbles are not absorbed into a single integrative hyper-orb, as in the metaphysical conniption of the world, but rather drawn together to form irregular hills.

Referring to a pathology of spheres displays a threefold focus: a politicological one, in so far as foams tend to be ungovernable structures with an inclination towards morphological anarchy; a cognitive one, in so far as the individuals and associations of subjects can no longer produce any complete world, as the idea of the whole world itself, in its characteristic holistic emphasis, unmistakably belongs to the expired age of metaphysical total-inclusion-circles, or monospheres; and a psychological one, in so far as single individuals in foams tend to lose the power to form mental-emotional spaces, and shrink to isolated depressive points transplanted into random surrounds (correctly referred to systematically as their environment). They suffer from the immunodeficiency caused by the deterioration of solidarities - to say nothing, for the moment, of the new immunizations acquired through participation in regenerated sphere creations. For sphere-deficient private persons, their lifespan becomes a sentence of solitary confinement; egos that are extensionless, scarcely active and lacking in participation stare out through the media window into moving landscapes of images. It is typical of the acute mass cultures that the moving images have become far livelier than most of their observers: a reproduction of animism in step with modernity.