On Sloterdijk's Terror from the Air

Terror from the Air – originally published in 2002 in German under the title Luftbeben, or “Airquake” – constitutes a turning point in Sloterdijk's attempt to understand human cultures as atmospheric systems and his more general conception of politics as a subsection in the technique of climatology. Shaking to its core the metaphysical and ultimately fascist grounding of the notion of the human – think of the Blut und Boden, “Blood and Soil” ideology – Sloterdijk adds another chapter to his seminal Spheres project by defining our primary situation as being-in-the-air and affirming our collective responsibility for the environment we inhabit that such a situation entails. After Bubbles and Globes, Terror in the Air, which forms part of the third and last book of the Sphere Trilogy, Foams (Schäume, 2003), thus focuses on an essential climatic dimension of our being-in-the world, paving the way for a new attitude toward our environment that leaves aside the lords and masters of nature ethos to instead favor a conception of ourselves as “atmosphere designers and climate guardians” (p. 89).Sloterdijk traces this shift to “atmosphere designers” back to a greater consciousness of our constitutive aerial vulnerability. According to Sloterdijk this expanded consciousness of our environmental vulnerability emerged with a tragic event, which he also considers as the effective starting point of the twentieth century. On April 22, 1915, at Ypres, Northern France, a specially formed German “gas regiment” took advantage of favorable winds to launch the first large-scale atmoterrorist attack, using chlorine gas as a weapon of indiscriminate mass-extermination. For the first time, it wasn't so much the enemy as its ecologically dependent vital functions that were targeted – and at the same time, explicated. As Sloterdijk states, “The discovery of the ‘environment’ took place in the trenches of World War I” (p. 18). In the same vein, describing in great detail this shift from classical warfare to chemical war, he produces a preliminary definition of terrorism as “the maximal explication of the other from the point of view of his exterminability” (p. 28). Atmoterrorism, allied with the “nuclear step of explication” (p. 59), definitively destroyed the traditional relation to the air milieu as an “unquestionably given and anxiety-free, unproblematic being” (p. 47) and plunged the average human being-in-the-world into radical modernity where environment can no longer be taken for granted. Sloterdijk moves on to describe the offensive of modern aesthetics and especially that of surrealism, against those “inner aborigines, regionalists and the voluntary curators of their own untimeliness” (p. 70) who wished to maintain the immunizing benefits of their cherished unconsciousness against the juggernaut of modernity. His readings of Dali, Duchamp, and Malevitch convincingly show how the modernist aesthetic terror acts as an anti-naturalist force projected against “unexplained cultural relations” and “all-encompassing attitudes such as faith, love and moral rectitude ...” (p. 79). Along these lines, Sloterdijk develops a strong interpretation of permanent revolution as “permanent horror” and defines revolution in the cultural domain as “a code word for ‘legitimate’ violence against latency” (p. 72).Terror in the Air's stimulating descriptions of the irruption of the monstrous into our lifeworlds is but one aspect of Sloterdijk's greater project of creating a “plural spherology” that allows us to think the emergence of new ways of being-together after the implosion of the classic metaphysical monosphere. As he joyfully announces at the beginning of Foams, “the One sphere has imploded. But well, foams live” (Sloterdijk 2005: 20). Sloterdijk's uncompromising post-metaphysical way of understanding human societies leads him to thematize with great brio the question of immunity and life's autopoietic self-closure. Following Luhmann and Esposito among others, Sloterdijk insists on the fact that integrity can only be thought as “the individual effort of an organism's concern with demarcating itself out from its environment ... by its stabilization through self-closure and the selective refusal to participation” (p. 110). Arguably, here lies Sloterdijk's deepest and most original insight about human condition, and I would suggest that it is most eloquently developed in Sloterdijk's oeuvre through his consideration of the relation between politics and therapeutic culture. One of Sloterdijk's most comprehensive definitions of the therapeutic follows his unsettling descriptions of atmoterrorism and the notion of the nuclear apocalypse. Discussing Heidegger's description of post-1945 humanity as “homeless” [Heimatlosigkeit] and his well-known insistence on dwelling [Gegend], Sloterdijk recognizes the “undeniably indicative force” of these terms and gives them a characteristic therapeutic inflexion:The word Gegend [dwelling] ... registers the therapeutic dimension of the art of space-building after the catastrophes through which explication was advanced. After all, in what does therapeutics consists if not in a knowledge of the processual and in the art of re-instituting measures more apposite to the human after the irruption of the immeasurable ...? (p. 62)Sloterdijk's admirable care for “liveability” is mostly expressed in the third chapter, suggestively entitled “Air/Condition.” In this chapter, architectural as well as therapeutic considerations mesh with dazzling remarks about the media, “respiratory economies” (p. 99), and air design. If, as Sloterdijk says, “life in the media state resembles a stay in a gas palace of high-spirited adventures” (p. 102), then individuals living beneath the totalitarian semiotic sphere will be doing nothing but “constantly re-inhaling their own lies-cum-public-opinion and freely chosen absence of freedom, moving around in an opportunistic trance” (p. 104).In this regard, Sloterdijk suggests that if Benjamin could investigate the nineteenth century “dwelling addiction” through his minute descriptions of the Parisian arcades, a book that would have the same ambition for the twentieth century would have to consider the “Indoor Air Quality Policy” of our living interiors, work offices, amphitheaters, or shopping malls. A book of this kind would therefore be entitled something like “The Book of Air Conditioning” (Sloterdijk 2005: 159) – but isn't it precisely the book that we have in hand

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Aside · Atmosphere (unit · Consciousness · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Ethos · German · Ideology · Literature · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Earth Systems and Cosmic Evolution · History · Law · Philosophy