Design Philosophy and Poetic Thinking:

Peter Sloterdijk’s Metaphorical

Explorations of the Interior
Thomas Lee1
Design, Architecture and Building, University of Technology Sydney,
Australia

Rachael Wakefield-Rann
Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney,
Australia

Abstract
This article makes the argument that Peter Sloterdijk’s philosophy provides a useful
and thought-provoking basis for studies of contemporary indoor ecologies.
Sloterdijk’s philosophy is distinctively attentive to the various environments in which
humans exist and of the ecological situation of beings in general. The notions of
interiority explored in Sloterdijk’s work, particularly the third volume of his Spheres
trilogy Foams (2016), provide important tools for conceptualizing the changing
nature of indoor spaces and contemporary modes of being in the world. Sloterdijk’s
approach to philosophical analysis exhibits a number of interrelated advantages
that mesh well with the ambitions of human ecology, particularly in relation to
indoor ecological conditions. These include his sustained conceptual exploration
of technological and scientific developments, his distinctive use of rhetoric and
philosophy in the characterization of human agency, and the close attention he
pays to the relationship between being and design. This article unpacks the value
of these perspectives through a sustained attention to Spheres III: Foams and aims
to demonstrate why Sloterdijk’s work provides an invaluable philosophical tool
kit to foreground and unite scholarship in diverse fields exploring the relationship
between interior spaces, human perception, and society.
Keywords: design philosophy, design theory, interior design, Peter Sloterdijk,
philosophy of technology

1 Corresponding author: [email protected].

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Introduction
Peter Sloterdijk is currently Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at Karlsruhe
University of Arts and Design in Germany. Founded in 1992 by celebrated
architecture scholar Heinrich Klotz, Karlsruhe is a progressive university that focuses
on philosophy, design, media, art, and architecture. Sloterdijk’s work has only come
to the attention of the English-speaking world relatively recently, in some part due
to the advocacy of Bruno Latour, doyen of Science and Technology Studies. In his
keynote address at the Networks of Design meeting of the Design History Society
in Cornwall, Latour (2008) suggested, in typically provocative fashion, that it ought
to have been Sloterdijk in his place. Since then, Latour (2009, 2010) has continued
to advocate for Sloterdijk’s work in various contexts, claiming to have been “born
a Sloterdijkian” (p. 139), and suggesting that Sloterdijk’s foam metaphor possesses
many advantages over the popular network metaphor central to the actor–network
theory.
This obscurity is not matched in Germany, where Sloterdijk is arguably the most
well-known contemporary philosophical figure. In 2002, he began cohosting the
popular German television program In the Glasshouse: The Philosophical Quartet,
and was for some time embroiled in a widely publicized media stoush with Jürgen
Habermas, long-time leader of the philosophical orthodoxy in the country who
publicly accused Sloterdijk of resurrecting the kind of thinking associated with
Third Reich politics—an accusation that Sloterdijk (2011a) compellingly analyzes
and evaluates as lacking nuance over a series of extended interviews.
Sloterdijk (2011a) is arguably unique among contemporary philosophers due
to the emphasis he places on space as a “key anthropological category” (p. 9).
In Sloterdijk’s wide-ranging analysis of human civilization, he proposes a theory of
human evolution through a series of interlinked yet distinct developments in the
form of buildings, and the associated biological, psychological, cultural, emotional,
and systemic conditions with which they are accompanied. This article presents
a curation and contextualization of a series of key examples from Sloterdijk’s oeuvre
that are particularly relevant to the study of interior spaces, a consideration that he
suggests is essential to any adequate understanding of humans. After introducing
and explaining some of the distinctive elements of Sloterdjik’s philosophy, a brief
account of his broader history as a thinker is given, before focusing on the third and
final volume in his epic Spheres trilogy, Foams, in which he proposes that technological
and cultural developments in the twentieth century can be suggestively interpreted
using the metaphor of foam. In Sloterdijk’s work, foam is the metaphorical
expression of a generalized notion of dwelling and society that accounts for the
way developments in architecture and telecommunications have serviced and been
served by an ideal of co-isolated living. This aspect of Sloterdijk’s work, and his
theory of spatial immunity, which informs his thinking about space more broadly, is
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particularly germane for any program of research that attempts to interpret practices
of human dwelling and sociality with a transdisciplinary orientation. It does this
by demonstrating the ways in which an understanding of the metaphorical basis
of language and becoming human can be used to create concepts that facilitate the
successful integration of forms of knowledge from the sciences, humanities, design,
and experiential ways of knowing.
This article is written according to a principle that puts sustained, in-depth attention
to a particular text and author over ambitions of survey or critique in relation to
other arguments. The intent is not to judge if Sloterdijk’s various propositions bear
out the claims they make through reference to evidence or application to further
examples. Rather, the approach taken is informed by an intent to highlight the
unique conceptual tools and modes of thinking employed by a thinker with deep
relevance to the focus of this special issue: to integrate disparate perspectives
on indoor life and ecologies. There is much opportunity for further work to be
conducted using and evaluating Sloterdijk’s often bold claims in relation to evidence-
based sociological, scientific, and anthropological approaches.

Techniques of Language, Immunity, Space, and Ecological

Metaphysics
An understanding of the rationale that informs Sloterdijk’s stylistic decisions places
readers in a better position to grasp the meaning expressed in the often peculiar
language play evident in his philosophical analysis. Sloterdijk’s style is characterized
by a unique use of poetic techniques, in particular his abundant use of metaphor
and hyperbole. This approach is informed by a stated commitment to exaggerating
or recontextualizing the language games of other discourses. This stylistic decision
is informed by an interpretation of “the human” that is mindful of the limitations
of biological positivism and adequately accounts for the excessive dimension
of humanity within the context of ecological history: “All the decisively human
capabilities are exaggerations. Walking upright itself was already a hyperbole that
could never be totally compensated for with biological advantages” (Sloterdijk,
2016, p. 31). These impressionistic but often captivating caricatures of evolutionary
history are frequent in Sloterdijk’s analysis. Like all caricatures, they are at once
inexact and, if successful, expressive of a certain truth.
This stylistic inventiveness is further amplified by the numerous disciplinary voices
that echo through his prose. He referred to the “trans-rational, trans-subjective,
trans-experiential” (Sloterdijk, 2011a, p. 30) nature of the visionary thinking that
informs well-rendered philosophical and poetic writing:
All my work moves in such trans-dimensions; it wanders between disciplines,
languages, aspects. It  could be understood as the literary materialization of an
extended conception of the Enlightenment. (Sloterdijk, 2011a, p. 30)

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Understatement and notions of communicative competence are in this sense

avoided in favor of exaggeration, irony (which he described as “an overreaction to
the permanent annoyance of statements of facts” [Sloterdijk, 2011a, p. 31]), and
metaphorical play—to this extent it is revealing that Sloterdijk (2011a, p. 204)
toyed with presenting his Spheres project as a novel until the last minute.
The value of an interpretive or analytical approach grounded in hyperbole or
exaggeration is advocated by a range of scholars for its potential to provide
new epistemological and ontological insights (Ettenhuber, 2007; Ritter, 2012;
Stanivukovic, 2007). Hyperbole, literally meaning to “throw beyond,” is a mode
of thought or a form of philosophical inquiry (Ritter, 2012). It is used variously
in situations when language or thought must transcend epistemological and
ontological boundaries to undermine or “throw beyond” literal meanings. In this
sense, Sloterdijk’s exaggerated and metaphoric portrayals of phenomena are intended
not to capture empirical detail, but to enable us to think beyond the constraints that
would usually inhibit our thinking.
In the context of this special issue, Sloterdijk’s expanded use of the concept of
“immunity” is a particularly instructive and relevant example of his metaphorical
and hyperbolic play, which connects directly with the emphasis on space in his work.
Sloterdijk’s approach to thinking through concepts such as immunity demonstrates
neither the indifference nor hostility shown by many humanist philosophers toward
techno-scientific developments, nor any of the naive reverence for innovation and
truth that informs hard-line advocates for salvation through such means. Instead,
Sloterdijk practices philosophy as a way to express the broader cultural and historical
implications of techno-scientific knowledge. Regarding the notion of immunity, he
begins by emphasizing the distinctive paradox expressed through the idea, and the
interpretative demands it puts on the various institutions that seek to shape what
it means:
One must acknowledge that there are occult battles between pathogens and
“antibodies” in the human organism whose results are responsible for the state of
our health. Many biologists describe the somatic self as a besieged terrain defended
by endogenous border troops with varying success. The users of this hawkish
terminology are opposed by a fraction of biological doves who paint a less martial
picture of immune processes; in this version, the self and the foreign are so interwoven
at deep levels that overly primitive strategies of definition are more likely to have
counterproductive effects. (Sloterdijk, 2016, p. 185)

Sloterdijk (2016) summarized the broad conceptual field associated with the
immune concept, as defined by tendencies to assign more or less significance “to the
presence of the foreign amidst the own” (p. 186). However, the discursive tensions
between biological, political, legislative, and social dimensions that the idea of
immunity brings into relation are accompanied by a further interpretive demand
for a philosophy that attempts to think with the innovative ideas of modern science:
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It is not only through their complexity that the immune systems confuse their
owners’ longing for security; they cause even more perplexity through their
immanent paradox, as their successes, if they become too thorough, are perverted to
become their own kind of reasons for illness: the growing universe of auto-immune
pathologies illustrates the dangerous tendency of the open to win itself to death in
the battle against the other. (Sloterdijk, 2016, pp. 185–186)

In this sense, biochemical understandings of immunity are accompanied by degrees

of complexity and paradox that enable the concept to function as a useful metaphor
for interpreting a range of different systems and technological developments that
play a defining role in modern societies. For example, Sloterdijk (2016) suggested
that the development and dissemination of knowledge itself in techno-scientific
cultures can have paradoxically adverse effects with regard to what he described as
“the mental immune status of ‘enlightened society’” (p. 186). By this he means to
suggest that there is a perverse side to the view that more information will deliver
greater degrees of immunity from risk, and that increases in knowledge—while
delivering undeniable benefits for securing the ongoing safety of humans—can also
trigger something comparable to a kind of autoimmune response at a psychocultural
level. Smithson (1985) made compatible arguments with regard to utility—or
in Sloterdijk’s terms, the immune function—of ignorance in the conditions of
uncertainty that are common to knowledge-abundant societies. In this sense, levels
of mental stresses relating to risks or threats become impossible for individuals or
collectives to adequately manage and begin to have adverse effects as the body politic
begins to attack itself. The metaphor of autoimmune overreaction could also be aptly
applied to contemporary concerns about “helicopter parenting,” by which parental
attempts to protect one’s children from harm constitute an overreaction, which can
lead to children becoming less resilient and lacking in the forms of mental and
embodied knowledge required to develop necessary coping strategies for life.
Sloterdiijk follows this unpacking of the modern scientific notion of immunity with
a broader historical account of the field of meanings, institutions, and practices
associated with the word. While contemporary understandings of immunity are
largely informed by scientific and medical understandings of the concept, Sloterdijk
(2016, p. 500) points out that the older usage can be traced back to Roman law,
when the term described a situation in which various entities, including cities,
groups, and individuals, were granted exemption from obligations to the state or
to a community—a meaning still retained in the current legal usage of the word.
Sloterdijk’s philosophical approach involves bringing together multiple meanings of
this word across different fields of knowledge to think with language in a way that
exploits its dynamic, rather than exclusively semantic possibilities—an approach that
is common to poetry and literature. He allows the different but related definitions
of immunity to ramify through his analysis such that an understanding of social
and architectural contexts can be interpreted in a subtly changed way that reveals

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new light on notions of personal or shared immunity. This approach suggests a new
way of thinking together across biology, architecture, ecology, anthropology, and
sociology (Sloterdijk, 2016, p. 498).
Sloterdijk frames the historical, technological, and cultural developments associated
with modernity as facilitating a distinctive kind of immune experience. He
suggested that the religious and legal immune systems of the past are less pertinent
to interpreting the modern condition than the architectural and technological
systems that support routines of self-care and leisure:
The dwelling of the modern person is the body extension that provides a specific
representation of their habitualized self-concern and backgrounded defensiveness.
It renders explicit that living organisms do not exist without ensuring enclosure
in themselves. Thus dwelling gains a share in the core process of modernization: it
articulates the emergence—or the becoming-explicit—of immune systems as well as
the experimentation of self-referential units with larger associations (in which even
the largest will still be far smaller than the “whole.”). (Sloterdijk, 2016, p. 504)

The terms “emergence” or “becoming-explicit” are Sloterdijk’s alternatives to the

notions of national, technological, or scientific revolutions. In this sense, “becoming-
explicit” or “explication” is the unfolding of forms of knowledge evident in religious
and mythological practices, or otherwise vaguely known intuitions, through more
precise and interwoven technological and systemic approaches. The promise of the
architectural and technological realization of the immune function is “the basic
right to ignore the outside world” (Sloterdijk, 2016, p. 501) so daily routines of
self-care and self-expression (Sloterdijk emphasizes the interweaving of the two) can
be performed and perfected.
While the archetypal architectural situation echoed in the above description is the
solitary, narcissistic apartment dweller, it would be wrong to equate Sloterdijk’s
account of modern living as individualistically oriented in any simplistic sense.
As he made clear in a feature for Harvard Design Magazine:
[a]ll being-in-the-world possesses the traits of coexistence. The question of being so
hotly debated by philosophers can be asked here in terms of the co-existence of people
and things in connective spaces. That implies a quadruple relationship: (1)  Being
means someone (2) being together with someone else (3) and with something
else (4)  in something. This formula describes the minimum complexity you need
to construct in order to arrive at an appropriate concept of world. Architects are
involved in this consideration, since for them being-in-the-world means dwelling in
a building. A house is a three-dimensional answer to the question of how someone
can be together with someone and something in something. In their own way,
architects interpret this most enigmatic of all spatial pre-positions, namely the “in.”
(Sloterdijk, 2009, p. 6)

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The question of being in is among Sloterdijk’s primary and most sustained

philosophical focuses and explains his concern with examples of intimacy and
interiority. This ranges from primitive interhuman and interspecies notions of
intimacy such as bodily gestation, kissing, and biophilic relations with trees, to
increasingly large-scale and complex modifications of interiority, such as air-
conditioning, gas warfare, popular music, and various paradigm-setting architectural
examples, including the stadium and the modern apartment. Sloterdijk’s metaphor
of foam describes the architectural and social situation in which humans are at
once enclosed within spatial extensions of themselves and in mediated relationships
with larger, often weakly connected associations or collectives. This is a significantly
different situation to the simple intimate relations such as those between mother and
child, or smaller collectives—the focus of Sloterdijk’s (2011b) first Spheres volume,
Bubbles—which, nonetheless, still endure as crucial enabling layers within the more
complex and transformed interiors and systems peculiar to the modern period.
Among the key antecedents for Sloterdijk’s philosophy, and what makes his work
such a good fit for the focus and ethos of the present journal, is the making explicit
of the notion of the environment as a key focus in the biological and social sciences.
He makes several references to, and his thinking is clearly influenced by, the work
of the Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll (1992), who, writing in the first
half of the twentieth century, used the metaphor of a soap bubble to express his
concept of the microworld, or Umwelt. According to Sloterdijk (2016), Uexküll’s
theory and the broader notion of living creatures each inhabiting a specific ecology
had a decisive effect on the way space and social life are conceived and demands
a renewed approach to metaphysics:
When Jakob von Uexküll formulated the thesis that it had been a mistake to view the
human world as a shared stage for all living creates, he was not only drawing the life-
scientific from the deflation of the world soul-idea; he was also taking the step from
monological metaphysics, which interprets the world as mono context and projects it
onto a single eye, to a pluralistic ontology that estimates as many worlds as there are
eye types and other sensors to see and feel them, without resorting to the hypostasis
of an eye of all eyes (or a sensor of all sensors). (p. 230)

Uexküll’s interpretation of the world as “countless millions of narrowly bounded

bubbles that overlap and intersect everywhere” (cited in Sloterdijk, 2016, p. 230) is
taken up into Sloterdijk’s thinking as the metaphor of foam and extended to the point
of rupture in his various conceptual and rhetorical acrobatics. Unlike the different
religious and metaphysical conceptions of a unifying spiritual or perceptual force—
whether in the form of the gods in monotheistic religions, ancient conceptions of
heavenly spheres, or nostalgic reiterations of these ideas in naive forms of holism—
Sloterdijk’s ecologically informed use of the foam metaphor emphasizes a complex,
contingent, and irregular field of relations produced by diverse gatherings of beings.

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Sloterdijk’s further contribution to the program set out by Uexküll is to characterize

human spheres in a manner that is adapted to their specific properties. While he is
clearly sympathetic to a decentered notion of ecological agency, Sloterdijk (2016)
also argued that the human species possesses attributes that are not captured in
Uexküll’s biological conception of space, relationality, and perception:
The human households described here as cells in the social foam make use—beyond
merely defensive provisions—of manifold expansion mechanisms extending from the
setting-up of a living container, via the establishment of a personalised traffic system,
to the creation of a customized world picture poem. Such observations provide a
concept of immunity with aggressive qualities: starting from the biochemical layer
of meaning, it moves up to an anthropological interpretation of the human modus
vivendi as self-defence through creativity. (p. 232)

The notion of immunity as defensive force might be adequate for an understanding

of biologically interpreted living things. However, in Sloterdijk’s view, this lacks
the scope to account for the exemplarity of humans with regard to creativity, in
particular the technologically realized expressions of creativity that in modernity go
by the modern name of “design.”
Sloterdijk (2016) argued that attentiveness to creative excesses and multiple
spatial environments of modern humanity sets his foam theory apart from other
conceptions of the social:
The familiar suggestions for solutions offered by such concepts as division of labour
(Smith, Durkheim), capital context (Marx), imitations and somnambulism (Tarde),
interdependency (Simmel), sacrifice (Girard, Heinrich) or progressive differentiation
and communication (Luhmann) all suffer from the same deficit: they do not
adequately address the spatial qualities of social cells or the immune system character
of primary spaces. (p. 235)

Sloterdijk is clearly influenced by all the thinkers listed in this critique, and makes
regular and highly nuanced use of them in his work. For example, his notion of
spatial immunity, or what he described as “the exemption from service to society”
(Sloterdijk, 2016, p. 275), whether serviced by architecture or media, captures and
emphasizes the latent indication in thinkers such as Simmel, Tarde, and Luhmann
in particular, that “‘societies’ are composed of beings that must simultaneously stand
inside and outside of their association” (p. 278). However, he nonetheless maintains
the argument that their various conceptions of society proposed by the thinkers
listed lack a rich enough metaphorical grasp of the spatial diversities, excesses, and
commitments of humans and their technological extensions.
Sloterdijk’s unique attentiveness to finding the right image to describe this highly
nuanced conception of the psychosocial spaces inhabited by humans is recognized
by Bruno Latour (2010)—arguably the contemporary thinker who, in his

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popularization of the network metaphor in actor–network theory, has done the

most to advance a conception of the social that is most compatible with Sloterdijk’s
notion of foam:
As you may know, one of the criticisms often made about networks (particularly
by Peter Sloterdijk) is that they are extremely poor metaphors since they remain
entirely made of nodes and edges to which is often added some conveniently drawn
potato-like circles … To say that something is a network is about as appealing as
to say that someone will, from now on, eat only peas and green beans, or that you
are condemned to reside in airport corridors: great for traveling, commuting, and
connecting, but not to live. Visually there is something deeply wrong in the way
we represent networks since we are never able to use them to draw enclosed and
habitable spaces and envelopes. (p. 5)

In contrast to the spatially impoverished notion of networks connecting in simple

geometric space, Sloterdijk’s psychoanalytically, poetically, and architecturally
informed interpretation of human psychosocial space aims to give an account of
the complex interweaving of physical and psychic space. In this sense, Sloterdijk’s
approach to philosophy is particularly compatible with the often unanswered
promise of the discipline of design, which conceives humans as beings motivated
by aesthetic desires that perpetually ramify in their level of nuance. The importance
of the personalization of interiors as spaces that reflect multiple creative, protective,
and connective urges is evident throughout his works. The next section will focus on
a segment of Foams that gives sustained attention to the routines of apartment living
as a platform for more abstract philosophical and poetic analysis.

Immunity Practices and Apartment Life

Sloterdijk (2016, p. 529) regarded the creation of the solitary apartment dweller as
one of the key sociopsychological phenomena of the twentieth century. He employs
a range of rhetorical and conceptual resources to animate a vision of this lifestyle as
practiced by a relatively wealthy subject living in an advanced industrial democracy.
The value of this approach comes from the simultaneous gathering of theories about
contemporary media, quasi-physiological analysis of metabolic and sensory activity,
and phenomenological-type descriptions of how this might be experienced by
a hypothetical subject. Sloterdijk (2016) described the apartment as “at once stage
and cave” where a “self-care cycle” is performed, which might include “a morning
grooming session consisting of emptyings, washings, acts of cosmetic self-attention
and clothings” (p. 650). The “universe of differentiations that are assigned great
intrinsic value in the consciousness of users” are crucial in this stage of the practices
of getting ready for daily life performances: “here combination becomes the duty
of design, while selection becomes a self project” (Sloterdijk, 2016, p. 650). Next,
the analysis moves to breakfast, which is also an occasion for the development of
“self-care from a nutrition-critical perspective” (Sloterdijk, 2016, p. 551). According

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to Sloterdijk (2016), these “elementary gastrospheric standards” are, along with

sanitary standards, the defining “concept of comfort in a modern housing unit”
(p. 552).
Sloterdijk (2016) then turns his attention to the role of media in the unfolding of
morning routines, which he describes with the characteristically enigmatic phrase
the “anti-silentium,” indicating the entry of sound into the “nocturnal soundfast”:
This anti-silentium shows how the solitary apartment dweller takes their daily
resocialization and attainment of worldliness into their own hands by having a
say, through the choice of media, in the content and dosage of the reality influx.
(Sloterdijk, 2016, p. 552)

He is keen to point out that while in the past this outcome was achieved through
reading, now it is more likely to be practiced through immersion in sound or
(increasingly) audiovisuals, which, once released into broader public spaces, can be
compared to “cells in sonorous foams; with reference to the countless competing
listening collectives” (Sloterdijk, 2016, p. 554). The combined function of different
media in the apartment space, whether paper, radio or television, allows for remote
“world content” to enter into the space of the cell while it still “performs its defensive
functions as an insulator, an immune system and a supplier of comfort and distance”
(Sloterdijk, 2016, p. 555).
The three final focal points of Sloterdijk’s account of apartment life include the role
of the telephone, the elaboration of self-serving sex practices, and the maintenance
of knowledge levels. Each of these points has implications for how apartments
function as immune structures, and the psychological, cultural, and biophysical
states that develop within indoor spaces. Sloterdijk (2016) regarded the key effect
of the telephone as the introduction of a “two-way media” that enjoys the “double
ontological privilege” of connecting the apartment dweller with the “domain of
the real” and puts them into a “state of simultaneity” (p. 555) with the caller. This
function is continued in contemporary Internet technology, which Sloterdijk (2016)
suggested is “merely the continuation of the telephone by visual means” (p. 556).
Telephonic technology is “an ambivalent innovation” with regard to maintaining
the immune function of the apartment space: “it directs a canal for dangerous
infections from the outside into the dwelling-cell, while conversely expanding the
inhabitants radius—in the sense of larger alliances and opportunities for action—in
an explosive fashion” (Sloterdijk, 2016, p. 556). This has significant consequences
that are distinct from religious practices, which Sloterdijk compellingly characterizes
as a kind of telecommunications technology, and print-based cultures. He argued
that “modern telephone supported apartment lifestyle” represents a significant
shift from the premodern era, in which “the most interesting messages came from
a strong sender known as ‘God’,” to a phase in which such messages are to some

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extent trivialized, as individuals attempt to maintain a requisite level of interest

in themselves, or that, failing, “focus on the lives of the stars” (Sloterdijk, 2016,
p. 558).
The following section on sexuality adds a further notch to Sloterdijk’s account of
apartment lifestyle and the broader cultural trends through which it is informed.
This is a world where sexual activity is now to a large extent released from its
biological and social obligations as a force in the creation of offspring, and becomes
a means by which individuals explore and experience erotic possibilities. Sloterdijk
(2016) suggested that while biochemical contraceptives had a significant and
“over-discussed” role in this change, it is also “inseparably connected to the gain in
discretion through apartment culture, or at least to the securities of one’s own room”
(p. 559). Sloterdijk (2016, p. 560) cites the American feminist and masturbation
activist Betty Dodson, who, in awarding herself a PhD in masturbation, offers an
unimprovable characterization of the release of individuals into spaces and time
to conduct research into their own erotic desires. However, such trends are not
unidirectional, and Sloterdijk (2016) lent further nuance to his claims by alluding
to recent literature on singles and by citing Dodson again, who admitted that she
“intermittently resorted to penises” to avoid the onset of weariness associated with
“auto-monogamy” (p. 561). Nonetheless, Sloterdijk (2016) suggested that studies
have “shown beyond doubt” that such needs are not enough for singles to “accept
the disturbance of their cellar peace through a permanent partner” (p. 561).
Lastly, Sloterdijk describes the role of modern telecommunications technology and
its place in apartment lifestyle as supplying isolated individuals with the means to
ensure adequate levels of knowledge are maintained. In light of the relatively small
gains individuals make in self-education in comparison with the rate by which
levels of knowledge increase at a systemic level across society, Sloterdijk (2016)
preferred to call this “enlightened ignorance management” (p. 562). Knowledge
in such contexts functions by affording individuals “the license to choose and have
say” or in a manner comparable to “fashion items and markets,” such that “people
carry isolated particles of knowledge the same way they wear sunglasses, expensive
watches or baseball caps” (Sloterdijk, 2016, p. 562).
Sloterdijk’s hyperbolic characterization of a particular kind of modern interior life
offers a thought-provoking and wide-ranging account of humans as beings shaped
by complex cultural, environmental, and technological forces. The presence of
exaggeration in the absence of any uniform, clearly identifiable, critical, or salutary
perspective makes the reader more keenly aware of the not always enlightening role
of totalizing or minutely detailed explanatory theories of social life. In this regard,
Sloterdijk’s approach can offer unique insights when compared to caricatured
critiques of what is often given the misleadingly anodyne name “consumer culture,”

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particularly those in the influential traditions of the Frankfurt School and Thorstein
Veblen (see Denniss, 2017; Horowitz, 1985), and more broadly across sociology,
cultural studies, economics, and consumer studies.
Studies of consumer culture have undoubtedly become more nuanced and inclined
to detailed and situated ethnographic accounts of how and why people “consume”
resources in different ways, particularly those investigating the “inconspicuous
consumption” of resources that accompanies everyday activities, unrelated to
symbol or status (Christensen, 2015; Eckhardt et al., 2015; Shove & Warde, 2002).
However, Sloterdijk’s use of exaggeration and metaphor offer additional tools for
critique that literal accounts of the minutia of daily life cannot. As noted in the
above section “Techniques of Language,” exaggeration and metaphor can serve to
extend literal meanings to new fields of thought. Ritter (2012) further articulated
the value of such techniques to multiple scholarly pursuits in his statement that
exaggeration and hyperbole are:
a figure of thought that can highlight the limits of figuration and representation
(Bloom, 2003), operate as a vehicle for the sublime (Marvick, 1986), destabilize
norms and conventions, and encourage active reflection on “the different ways in
which meaning is constructed and communicated” (Ettenhuber, 2007, 210). (p. 410)

Hyperbolic accounts can complement the rigorous and detailed observations

of reality by offering a way of playing with the meanings offered at “the extreme
boundaries of thought” (Stanivukovic, 2007, p. 20), thus, enabling an interruption
of the language and logic of the existing argument, which can shift “one level of
meaning to another, re-invented meaning” (p. 20). An argument for the value of this
approach can be made through an analogy to similar arguments created for the use of
different media in the sociological studios of scientific practices. For example, Peter
Galison (2014) made a compelling case that the medium of film can reveal unique
things about scientific practice, specifically the visceral, atmospheric, and particular
dimensions of the everyday that are not captured using the standard conventions
of academic publication. Likewise, through different techniques of rhetoric rather
than media, Sloterdijk evokes an image or story of humans that is not reducible
to the genres of novelistic, poetic, historiographic, and philosophical writing from
which it borrows. The work is too philosophically conceptual in its explorations of
technology for novelistic writing, far more attentive to the description of everyday
life than is permissible in philosophical analysis, too thesis driven for poetry, and
too impressionistic for history. Yet, in this rag-and-bone approach, Sloterdijk evokes
a uniquely post-human account of humans, which demonstrates the subtle dynamics
that animate the relationship between routine and dwelling, media and psychology,
and the historical and futuristic dimensions of technology. The concluding section
of this article will discuss in a more explicit fashion how Sloterdijk’s philosophical

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exploration of the “in” extends to an analysis of how broader conceptions of climate,

atmosphere, and environment have become increasingly important at a subjective
level during the modernization processes of the twentieth century.

Air Design
The difference between Sloterdijk’s technologically informed approach to
philosophical analysis and the phenomenological approaches that have been so
influential in descriptions of human subjectivity is marked out in a particularly
pronounced fashion when approaching the topic of air. Unlike phenomenological
advocates of air, such as Luce Irigaray (1999), Sloterdijk (2016, p. 196) stressed
that the air cannot be adequately understood without reference to the technical and
environmental changes inflicted on the atmosphere over the course of the last 200
years. Phenomenological accounts, particularly those that call for greater attention
to be paid to the air (such as Irigaray’s), ignore all the crucial ways in which the air
has already been made explicit, and been explicitly utilized, for various aerotechnic
practices. Some of these include colonizing the air with gas in warfare to make the
atmosphere uninhabitable to opponents, and researching the possibilities for larger
scale atmospheric terrorism.
By contrast, using his characteristic blend of poetic and conceptual thinking,
Sloterdijk explores the philosophical implications of significant air-related events
over the twentieth century, including “atmoterrorism” practices evident in gas
and aerial warfare; the interaction between the weather, science, the media, and
subjectivity expressed in the convention of the weather report; and the hugely
influential, continuously evolving “aerotechnic” practices that service the increasing
demands for comfort, which are characteristic of indoor life in the modern period.
These and other grouped-together technological and conceptual developments in
air design are, according to Sloterdijk (2016), compelling expressions of the view
for which anyone attempting to understand the originality of the twentieth century
must account: “the practice of terrorism, the concept of product design and the
environmental idea” (p. 85).
Gas warfare is a forceful example of the explication or highlighting of the atmospheric
(a word it is worth remembering literally means “vapor ball”) conditions human
subjects and collectives must persist. Sloterdijk (2016) described the first “large-
scale use of chlorine gas as a warfare agent” on April 22, 1915 (p. 86) as a decisive
event in the development of both terrorism and environmental thinking:
This is, in fact, the point at which traditional war becomes terrorism, assuming the
latter is based on a rejection of the old crossing of blades between equal opponents.
Current terror operates beyond the naive exchange of armed strikes between regular
troops. Its concern is to replace classical battle forms with attacks on the enemy’s
environmental preconditions for life. (pp. 91–92)

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These distinctive martial conditions are supported by a staggering set of statistics

cited by Sloterdijk (2016):
When one learns from military history that between February and June 1916, the
responsible field depot supplied almost five and a half million gas masks and 4,300
breathing apparatuses (mostly taken from the mining industry) with two million litres
of oxygen to the German troops at Verdun alone, it becomes evident in numbers how
far “ecologised” war, a war brought into the atmospheric environment, had become
a battle for the respiratory potentials of hostile parties. Combat now incorporated the
biological weak points of the conflict partners. (p. 95)

The first environmental attack of gas warfare provoked a rapid and large-scale design
response to augment the human body with the technological means to persist in an
atmosphere hostile to life. In this sense, gas warfare “introduced the operative criteria
of the twentieth century—terrorism, design-consciousness, and an environmental
approach—in close union” (Sloterdijk, 2016, p. 96).
Sloterdijk (2016) traced developments in atmoterrorism from these initial uses
of gas warfare in World War I, through the industrial-scale extermination camps
used in World War II, to gas chambers used sporadically in United States (US)
for executions, and the “explication of radioactive matter through nuclear power,”
which resulted in a “reordering of ‘environmental’ awareness towards the invisible
milieu of waves and rays” (p. 130). He concluded this focus with reference to
a paper presented to the US Department of Defense on June 17, 1996, which bears
the chilling title, Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025 (House
et al., 1996), and the following, equally chilling, strategic ambition:
A high-risk, high-reward endeavour, weather modification offers a dilemma not unlike
the splitting of the atom. While some segments of society will always be reluctant to
examine controversial issues such as weather modification, the tremendous military
capability that could result from this field are ignored at their own peril. (cited in
Sloterdijk, 2016, p. 139)

Exactly 110 years on from the first large-scale uses of atmoterrorism in World War I,
these intentions to develop weather-modification technology and the rationale
that supports them signal the potential of a new era in advanced military combat.
Details on the contemporary progress of such research are notoriously difficult to
access. However, in light of the increasing commonality of nonmilitary climate-design
technologies, such as cloud seeding and the evident strategic advantages of large-scale
climatic attacks, it seems entirely plausible that this is an area the military will continue
to explore. Further, with spending on military research and development in the US
(or any other world power) unlikely to dip in the near future, the nonmilitary spin-
offs of these large-scale climate manipulations will have significant and unforeseen
consequences for industries around the world, from agriculture, to tourism, and the
ever-expanding indoor biomes that populate these regions.

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Sloterdijk (2016) proposed that the large-scale environmentally destructive

potentials of modern military technology is one expression of “a progressive
subjectification of the weather” (p. 161). This subjectification is also occurring at
meso and microscales, for which he contended humans have become “weather
clients” (p. 161) through the performance of weather reporting, associated weather
travel or tourism (Sloterdijk mentions vacations for Northerners in the winter
months to Morocco and Mallorca), and air-conditioning developments in shopping
malls and homes designed to sustain thermal comfort for the ongoing presence
of human users. Both these macroscale militaristic and mesoscale comfort-inspired
developments represent a subjectification of the weather through both the rhetorical
and performative techniques used in the reports, and the technological adaptations
of climate to the body evidenced in air-conditioning.
Sloterdijk’s (2016) amusing characterization of the modern weather report as
“a  performance given by a nature for society” by which “meteorologists gather
people to form an audience of connoisseurs under a shared sky” (p. 160) provokes
a  renewed consideration of this perhaps taken-for-granted, everyday convention.
Like other significant natural events such as birth and death, the weather is no longer
the domain of God or nature, but a context for the “nuancing activities” (Sloterdijk,
2016, p. 787) of modern humans, whether the calculations of meteorologists or the
intersubjective planning programs of kinetic elites who escape their colder northern
locales to warmer countries in the winter months. At a more local level, the weather
report and its digital equivalent, the weather app, functions as a permanently
accessible discussion-generating tool through which users “compare their personal
perception with the briefing and form an opinion about ongoing events” (Sloterdijk,
2016, p. 159).
The notion of air design, or what Sloterdijk (2016) also called “atmotechnics”
(p.  165), is realized in micro and meso levels in the air-conditioning technology
and associated practices that increasingly shape public and private spaces over the
course of the twenty-first century. Sloterdijk suggested that various air-conditioning
and climate-control technologies have both enabled and testify to the “addiction to
dwelling” (Sloterdijk, 2016, pp. 169–170), expressed as a preference for conducing
all manner of activities indoors. As with his discussion of the “greenhouse effect” in
the second Spheres volume Globes, Sloterdijk (2014) reinvigorates the interpretative
potential of the otherwise inconspicuous notion of air-conditioning by grounding
it in significant historical examples and extending the metaphor to culture more
broadly. Following the insights of Hermann Broch and Elias Canetti, he suggested
that the “mood modification” techniques used in air-conditioning practices of
commercial shopping centers, offices, and private residences are metaphorically
interpretive of the personal media ecologies and mass communication technologies
that are among the defining features of life in the twentieth century and beyond:
“Broch had realized that after the intentional destructions of the atmosphere in

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chemical warfare, social synthesis itself took on the character of gas warfare in some
respects, as if atmoterrorism had turned inwards” (Sloterdijk, 2016, p. 174). Similar
ideas have been suggested by the French philosopher of science Michel Serres, who
suggested that the new metaphysics of the information ages is “more liquid than
solid, more air like than liquid, more informational than material” (Serres & Latour,
1995, p. 121), and demonstrated a comparative appeal, with efforts by Stokols
(2018), to expand the study of social, or human, ecology into the digital realm.

Conclusion
This article has made the argument that Sloterdijk’s philosophy is a distinctively
thought-provoking resource for scholars whose work focuses on investigating indoor
ecologies from different perspectives. It proposes that Sloterdijk’s work provides
a  basis for integrating perspectives from natural and social scientific disciplines,
which is particularly attentive to the spatial, physical, and experiential manifestation
of knowledge as architecture and design. Sloterdijk’s commitment to practicing
philosophy according to multiple logics and stylistic devices allows him to explore
the boundaries of human thinking by approaching language as something that has
a dynamic, rather than static or simply definitional, relationship with meaning.
In this regard, the hyperbolic and metaphorical techniques Sloterdijk employs allow
him to evolve diverse yet cohesive understandings of concepts such as immunity,
the cell, foam, and the atmosphere, which are often dulled through exclusive usage
in their disciplinary sites. The elaboration and curation of his ideas evidenced in
this article are intended to prompt scholars from different disciplines to further
explore his work, and use it as a reference point in research into indoor ecologies
that requires framing in relation to broader sociotechnical trends and the futures to
which they may give rise.

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published by ANU Press, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.
doi.org/10.22459/HER.24.02.2018.08