Modernity, Sloterdijk and Private Semiologies

In Bubbles, there is a lot of reference to theology, in particular, trinitarian theology. Sloterdijk states that the triadic relationship between " The Father, Son and Holy spirit " is the first spherological bubble of intimacy, without the dimension of space, as commonly thought of — that the relationship itself IS the space, in a sense.

According to Peter Sloterdijk human beings live in symbolic immune systems and in ritual hulls / shells. If it is right that humans yield or produce humans, then they do it not mainly by work and its products and also not by work on themselves or by “interaction” or “communication”; they do it by their lives in exercises / trainings. So humans arise out of repetitions /recurrences, Sloterdijk says.

„Wenn »es« den Menschen »gibt«, dann nur, weil eine Technik ihn aus der Vormenschheit hervorgebracht hat. Sie ist das eigentlich Menschen-Gebende … Technik, hat Heidegger doziert, ist eine Weise der Entbergung. Sie holt Ergebnisse ans Licht, die von ihnen selbst her so nicht und nicht zu dieser Zeit an den Tag gekommen wären.“ - Peter Sloterdijk, Nicht gerettet - Versuche nach Heidegger, 2001, S.224, 228.
Translation:
„If there »is« the human being, then only because the technique / technology has brought him out of the pre-humankind. That is actually the human-giver. … Technique / technology, Heidegger has teached, is a way of unconcealing. It brings results to light that would not have come to light by themselves and not at that time.“

Humans live in 3 “parallel realities” at the same time;

  1. physical
  2. psychological
  3. social

Each has its own design and set of rules.

What do you think about a quadrialism?

I) natural (physical and chemical),
II) natural-cultural (biologic[al] and economic[al]),
III) cultural (semiotic[al] and linguistic[al]),
IV) cultural-natural (philosphic[al] and mathemathic[al]).

So your “1)” would be in my “I)”, your “2)” would be a part of the last part in my “II)” and a part of the first part of my “III)”, your “3)” would also be a part of the last part in my “II)” and a part of the first part of my “III)”, and my “IV” is what is called “consciousness”, “mind” - we already discussed this (=> “Geist”).

Maybe that some parts do not belong to reality, but that doesn’t matter, because it is plausible, if all that parts are interpreted as parts of our world (universe and so on).

Biological and economical seems an odd grouping.

Yes (and the concept “natural-cultural” already indicates it), but it simply means that living beings try to remain living beings, thus try to do their self-preservation biologically and economically - biologically by the processes in the organism (cells and so on), economically by getting food (e.g. hunting and gathering), making and getting goods, money, war, and so on.

My grouping is more centered around:
1) Physical laws, objects, motions, and situations (would include physics, mechanics, chemistry, biology, physiology, physical tools, medicines, diseases, weapons).

2) Mental reactions, beliefs, incentives, and conditions (would include psychology, spiritualism, hopes and fears, strategies (“angels”), mental tools (mathematics, logic, romance), personal philosophies).

3) Group interactions, agreements, devotions, and current states (would include economics, language, semiotics, religion, politics, diplomacy).

Although I often separate physical from physiological (due to the fluid molecular mechanics involved), each of those categories obey the exact same inherent laws…

Yes, I know, James. It is just another approach of the same issue. Our “groupings” can be easily arranged, I think. There are merley little differences which can be neglected, at least in most cases. In former times (before 2000 when I started to design my quadrialistic spiral-cyclical philosophy) I had an approach which was very much similar to your approach.

Ahhh… I see. So where did you go wrong? :-s

[size=85]…sneeker :wink: [/size]

I did not go wrong. And as I said before: our approaches are compatible:

I am not going to go into the details, because I do not want this thread to derail.

“Wo immer das Interesse an Enterbung und Neubeginn aufflammt, stehen wir auf dem Boden der authentischen Moderne.” - Peter Sloterdijk, “Die schrecklichen Kinder der Neuzeit”, 2014.
Translation:
“Wherever the interest in disinheritance and a new start flares, we stand on the floor of the authentic modernity.”

This was a great thread. I should help revive it with more Sloterdijk entries.

A very good idea.

Yes, great thread. About the Fichtean self, or the intermedial and (subsequently) transitive-generative posited ground on which even pre-subjective “immanent” differentiations are supposed as derivative meta-orders of some receded being-itself qua being-in-the-world beyond the confines or reaches of any of that “primordial pre-subjective substantiality”, it is possible to claim this posited sub-realm is that out of which fetal originariness is possible to come (in Deleuzean fashion, ‘BwO’ and so on) in the sense of what Peirce raised as the philosophical problem of identifying the logic of the cause of the possibility for consciousness to exist not saying anything yet about the natural-selective logics by which that consciousness folds into its existences. Is the fetus simply assumed its originary pre-subjective nucleus, as some sort of ontological necessity by way of extension of the fields of the mother, a kind of fracturing, or can we go deeper and posit a ground of meaning beyond even a rhizomatically-structured materiality? Peirce’s distinction between dyadic and triadic relation-structures would at least frame the semiotic as principle of individuation at the site of dyadic rupture, in so far as being becomes self-divided and ‘expansive’ enough (not least in a temporal sense, see Kitaro’s theory of the dimensional vectors-subject) in itself to at least produce logical possibilities for fundentally irreconcilable outcomes. Bergson, Deleuze, these guys are all pointing to the same thing here: self-valuing. A distinction between noise and voice would rest upon a pre-existing capacity for distinguishing differences in sensory stimulation in such a way as to play upon an entire process and universe of possible meaning, meaning in a semiotic and phenomenological sense remaining open to non-enfolded departures and entirely external flows (excess).

In other words where we want to draw the line of fundamental differentiation requires by definition a self-closure of meaning space by virtue of which being becomes inarticulate before the actual contexts and sums of influencing, causal factors by and out of which it is truly being created; furthermore I don’t even think this can act alone as a ground of truth, not anyway until a wider logical clarity is allowed to remake a huge portion of our conceptual spaces.

The entire relationship speaking conceptually needs to be reversed, a kind of return to the Idea, for philosophy is already strained in its concept-making abilities (although S.'s metaphors are very nice). First question, Where do we seat the locus of ideas, ‘what is a concept’ and by extension a logic, a relation, a conditional materiality, a ‘grid’? I’d rather posit difference itself as the ontic quantum, excess therefore being the subjective or materialogical quantum. What do you get if being’s fundament is one of excessivity? Or said another way, if ‘being’ itself is nothing but a derived accumulative representation of an essentially excessive, disjuncted structure?

But the morality here is also reversed, we cannot reject that the kind of building in Heidegger’s sense holds an especially moral-normative place in the existence of being, of beings, even if and especially because of how this building can never get deep enough into the ground or “repair” the abysses which are reflections of that ground. The impossibilities of morality are the conditions of its very necessity.

Private semiologies a la postmodernity and the “foam” (nice visual) has always been the case, even way back when the spheres of the individual principle were way less dimensionalized and far less articulate, far less “art-able”. The inadequacy of the artability of the individual sphere against the domains of possible intersubjectivity available to that sphere (inadequate social construction including mythological and conceptual closures) brought about the necessity for monospherical pre-modern and modern structures, it became possible to produce a shared “dyadic individualism” because the milieu was insufficient to allow artful being in any other sense, thus the formation of comprehensive social-moral codes, the gods, death rites, honor codes, shamanism, etc. Now we have the kind of “end of history” or mass cultural dissolutions “post Europeanisms” (Valery) that express not some Nietzschean will to nothingness but closer to something like the Thanototic pull of the inescapability of one’s own error, of the errors and impossibilities of the structure-positing cultural ego-machines whose ontological limits have been reached in an age where the speed and proliferation of information allows a new secondary kind of excessivity to outstrip the first, more primordial one. This is a “will” only if we choose to examine it only from the perspective of already given ends and from a psychological context already self-bound to the terminating self-reference: Being is a striving for reconciliation which need is produced by the always more basic and disperse self-valuing localities which beings concretize by virtue of the act of “being” at all, by virtue of acting as a loose tethering of disparate materialities; but to merely assume that view would be to hold analysis down to the rock bottom of itself and fail to raise understanding beyond and into the more universal spaces of logic and construction required if we are to really begin framing things “in the real”. It is not enough to merely give passing reference to reality and then bury ourselves in the convenient dirt of already-cogent onto-epistemic formularies. It is “psyche” itself which much also be overcome, not simply the limitations of the common narratives, and a whole new kind of philosophy and vision-capacity is needed to even usher into existence the possibility for something for which the old limits are merely so much detritus, fuel and exclusive value, so much “joyous overcoming” perhaps if we want to evoke Nietzsche.

S. is doing nice work, but I’d like to see him building more toward that future requirement on the basis of which the possibilities for new kinds of philosophy will arise, rather than simply refine the old tools for new problems (this latter is still good work, of course, but truly capable minds are always called to something more noble). But you are more familiar with the body of his work than I am, so please keep posting quotes in here.

Regarding foam and monospheres it would be more correct to talk about tapestries of subjective determinations, tapestries not just in space but across times and ages, tapestries with variations in the ways in which private semiologies are able to organize and relate to the wider social conditions out of which they emerge, rather than reducing it to a sort of hard either-or distinction between pre- and post-modern setups. It seems to me that impossibilities for the maintenance of private spaces of meaning (always limited to certain contexts and domains) would secure the necessity for more all-encompassing “modern” semiotics and the value of master signifiers generally; but in fact private spaces culled from shared conditionality is the root structure and cannot really be inverted except in the sense of imposing more distance and concrete form to individual forms. Nowadays we have more significant conflict and compromise between individual spaces simply because of the sheer greater number and kind of them, but there still exist logical archeologies that bind them into possible configurations. It is on the basis of that by virtue of which such logics arise that we would need to found our philosophy, if we are to avoid becoming trapped in this or that particular configuration.

And it is also here where extra-subjective points and flows can be determined, by seeing into the conditional nature of previously supposed certainties and givens or “doxa”. Does S understand this? What is his analysis of rage, for instance, in an existential or “psychological” sense? I’m looking for more universal concepts and less assumptions, less merely utilitarian or egoic-pathological ideas. Saying rage-banking is a basis of Christianity is a nice observation, but let’s be careful not to replace a larger view of the picture with one small part of that same picture. That is the danger the philosopher faces, and it is two-fold: that he would substitute his own view for the view itself, and/or that he would substitute one partial truth for the larger truth of which the partial is partial. Very rarely have I come across thinkers, past or present, who truly work with regard to these dangers.

“Spaces of Transformation: Spatialised Immunity”.

Turned my phone up and immediately this pops up? Odd, never bother with these threads.

I don’t know the context of the rest of this thread, as I didn’t read it, but this isn’t exactly original. Its your basic Politeia as roughly described by Aristotle and then the Stoics.

Sloterdijk… isn’t he a German Borg, wants to fuck toasters and blenders and make cyborg babies?

The thread deals mainly with his book Bubbles .

It’s part of a trilogy on spheres ( spaces of co-existence ) and is a follow up to Heidegger’s Being and Time .

Imagine Sloterdijk’s trilogy being called Being and Space.