I’ve updated my bibliography of Sloterdijk’s writings in English again: see the post. Not much has appeared recently, except the arrival of two monographs: The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice (2012) and You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics (2013).
See http://interstices.ac.nz/call-for-papers-4/
Materiality has recently claimed centre stage in architectural discourse and practice, yet its critical meaning is ever receding. Tropes like material honesty, digital materiality, material responsiveness and dematerialisation mark out an interdisciplinary field where scientific fact and artistic experimentation interact, and where what in fact constitutes materiality and immateriality is constantly re-imagined.
Interstices14 invites contributions that address the thematic strands: Immateriality; Atmosphere+Experience; Interactivity; Material Politics; Material Technology+Aesthetics; Material Referents.
Immateriality: As a reaction to developments in science, materiality came under scrutiny with the emergence of nineteenth century German aesthetics (Vischer, Schmarsow) and the early avant-garde projects (Lissitzky, van Doesburg). Initiating an epistemic shift in art and architecture, these works pointed point to the connection between the concrete material properties of objects and their interaction with the inhabitant through psycho-physiological effects. From one of these early projects, this publication borrows its title – Immaterial Materialities – a term invented by El Lissitzky to describe the dynamics of our spatial conception, which could be explored through the design of imaginary spaces – possibilities pioneered by film and modern mass media. The inclusion of ephemeral elements such as light, line, colour, and media, reconceptualised materiality as an entirely dynamic category, a kind of ‘materialised energy’ (Vesnin). These ideas re-emerged transformed in the work of the Neo-avant-garde of the 1960s and 70s, and surfaced again in contemporary architectural debates.
Atmosphere + Experience: Gernot Böhme thematizes the idea of ‘materialized energy’ under the heading of ‘atmospheres,’ which he sees as the fundamental concept of a new aesthetics in architecture. Questioning the primacy of vision, Böhme asks “is seeing really the truest means of perceiving architecture? Do we not feel it even more? And what does architecture actually shape – matter or should we say space?” Böhme points to the architecture of Herzog & de Meuron and Peter Zumthor whose works build upon material experimentation and foreground sensory qualities. “Atmospheres”, notes Böhme “are something that defines the human-in-the-world as a whole, i.e. his relationship to the environment, to other people, to things and works of art”.
Interactivity: Considerations on our relationship with atmosphere and weather have informed recent projects, which deploy materials as mediators or activating agents that probe the relationship between audience/user and the physical environment: Spatial investigations with phenomena-producing materials such as water, light, colour and temperature experiment with the viewer’s experience (Eliasson); responsive high-tech materials interact with audiences (Spuybroek); ‘weather architectures’ (Hill), or ‘atmo architectures’ (Sloterdijk) technologically re-create nature as spatial experience and spectacle (Diller and Scofidio).
Material Politics: Traditional materials such as timber and concrete have been re-imagined through the rediscovery of forgotten methods and connect us to the material traditions of historic regional architecture. Through the use of low-cost materials such as corrugated metal, Australian architects connect the beach house, the wool-shed, and industrial estates educing trans-historical, cross-cultural, and climatic associations by fusing the Australian vernacular with international modernism. In East Germany, architect Ulrich Müther’s material experimentation with cast concrete generated an aura of cosmopolitanism that stood in stark contrast to the visual monotony of the iconic ‘Plattenbauten’ (pre-cast concrete towers) promoted by the government; whereas in 1950s Bosnia, Juraj Neidhardt argued that a systematic re-arrangement of architectural elements could facilitate an interactive relationship between the heritage built fabric and the new Communist society.
Material Technology + Aesthetics: Architectural experiments in material-oriented computational design explore the design potential of conventional construction materials. Waste material and natural materials are fused chemically, or mechanically-fixed, providing imaginative design solutions for technological problems. New composites with changed material and aesthetic properties are suitable for an extended variety of applications. The traditional visual language of tectonics gives rise to a plastic aesthetic that rejects discrete structural elements in favour of homogeneity and gradient – a language that is just beginning to be explored.
Material Referents: In contemporary art, Liam Gillick uses materials and architectural elements that reference the universal modernism favoured in corporate architecture; plexiglas, steel, and colour aluminium connect “the project of emancipation of the avant-gardes and the protocol of our alienation in a modern economy”; these material fragments prompt the viewer to reflect on a range of, at times conflicting, environments, which can be read “as partial images that call to mind a range of other moments and environments” (Verhagen). It is precisely this “calling to mind of other moments and environments” that Philip Ursprung detects in Hans Danuser’s photographic representations of Peter Zumthor’s architecture. Danuser’s images evoke seemingly incompatible associations by revealing unexpected links between Zumthor’s atmospheric concrete spaces and the problematic, post-industrial spaces of Alpine power plants and cooling towers. Photography, as Barthes argues, entails a frictional encounter with the reality of an image; an invisible disturbance of the photographic surface.
All these approaches probe boundaries — between material and immaterial, art and science, practice and theory, representation and experience, tradition and innovation, and producer/object/user, giving rise to the following concerns:
- What is the validity of different approaches to materiality in relation to the vital problems of our time?
- Where do materials allow us to cross disciplinary, cultural, or other boundaries?
- Can materials be deployed to create environments which predict user behaviour and control social relations and experiences?
- Which trans-historical correspondences can be detected in contemporary approaches to materiality, and how do these challenge, imitate and expand on previous thinking?
Submissions: Interstices: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts 14, “Immaterial Materialities: Materiality and Interactivity in Art and Architecture,” invites critical investigations of theoretical and historical content from academics, as well as practice-oriented contributions from content providers such as architects, artists and curators, that redress imbalances and missing links in the portrayal and debate of matters concerning materiality and interactivity in art and architecture from the 1920s onward.
For the refereed part, we welcome submission of 5000 word papers and visual submissions with an accompanying text of approximately 500 words. For the non-refereed part, we welcome papers up to 2500 words and project reports and reviews of up to 1000 words related to the issue theme. Please check out the Notes for Contributors for details about the reviewing process, copyright issues and formatting for written and visual submissions.
Please send your submission to Sandra Karina Löschke (sandra.loschke@uts.edu.au) by 3 March 2013.
Authors accepted for the reviewing process will receive confirmation and a schedule of production in mid-March and the journal will go to publication in October/November 2013.
Joshua Mostafa on Peter Sloterdijk’s Bubbles from the LA Review of Books: Sphere Theory: A Case For Connectedness (21 Aug. 2012).
[Bubbles] is . . . the first volume to be translated of Sloterdijk’s Spheres trilogy: the other two are due for an English release over the next year or two. Each volume uses the motif of the “sphere” in different yet complementary ways to refer to “spaces of coexistence” between and among human beings. Bubbles is devoted to micro-spheres, the most intimate of originary spaces: the womb; the relationship between lovers; and that between God and the human subject. The second and third volumes deal with other kinds of spheres: the world considered as a single cosmopolitan macro-sphere, and then our contemporary decentralized network of social and cultural spheres, in which the concept of a central, self-structuring totality — religion, myth, science, enlightenment — has collapsed, and we find ourselves living in a complex sea of fragmentary yet contiguous spheres, which Sloterdijk likens to a “foam.”
See my “Peter Sloterdijk in English.”
I’ve updated a post from last year on all the Sloterdijkstoff available in English: go there.
There’s a couple of new essays out:
Of course, Bubbles is also out (a.k.a. Spheres, vol. 1: Microspherology). Better late than never!
A new review has just been published of Peter Sloterdijk’s Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation, trans. Mario Wenning (Columbia UP, 2010).
It offers a very useful summary of the text — although it’s pretty scathing of Sloterdijk’s style and scholarship:
Sloterdijk argues that our age is doomed because of our inability to understand and address our rage. He turns our attention back to Plato’s account of thymos (all too briefly) as an integral part of our soul and of our society. Contemporary society, by contrast, has either relegated our spirit and its rage to political incorrectness or else appealed to rage in unfortunate and often destructive ways. Along the way, Sloterdijk offers glosses on Marxism, capitalism, psychoanalysis, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. He frames each of these movements in terms of what he terms their “thymotic” aspects. His accounts are irreverent, often interesting, playful, perhaps dangerously misleading, and worst of all obstructive of real critique.
Kinda misses the polemic nature of Sloterdijk’s work, which takes as its model Nietzsche’s Gedankenexperiment, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872). As a lapsed [?] Heideggerian, Sloterdijk would, of course, think polemic in the sense of polemos, i.e. Auseinandersetzung (lit. conflict, conversation, analysis), a.k.a. difference, that “setting apart from one another that serves essentially to bring together, a contest that unites” (Heidegger, Nietzsche: The Will to Power as Art 231). But there is something more plainly polemical — “thymotic” even — about his work, in that he sets it against the polite scholarly tradition that people like Duane Davis represent.
Here is the review as a Word document for annotation: Peter Sloterdijk, Rage and Time (2010): Review by Duane Davis (docx formatted in MLA style). An excerpt of Rage and Time appears here.
From the Goethe Institute, a brief introduction to Peter Sloterdijk’s book on autopoeisis, You Must Change Your Life!, (apparently) forthcoming from Polity Press:
Don’t you consume too much energy? Aren’t you after a quick buck? Don’t you constantly lie to others? “You must change your life!” In March 2009, at the height of the financial crisis that began in September 2008, Peter Sloterdijk, one of the best known and also most controversial German philosophers, published a book with this timely call for transformation as the title [see Du mußt dein Leben ändern: Über Anthropotechnik (Suhrkamp, 2009)]. No wonder it struck a chord.
In the book, Sloterdijk develops his doctrine of human beings, who, he argues, possesses no naturally fixed essence, as the great religions postulate they do. On the contrary, human beings creates themselves, as Nietzsche and the existentialists thought. This activity must, however, be learned. That means it must be practised: human beings, according to Sloterdijk, are practising beings. They create themselves through their actions — an insight that the young Karl Marx in 1844 also espoused. Sloterdijk, however, expands the zone of practice beyond the scope conceived of by Marx: not only as workers, but also as models, as feeling and communicating beings, human beings are in training to achieve peak performance. At any rate on this point, Sloterdijk’s thought is not traditional.
What has this to do with the financial crisis of 2008? Well, when human beings are conceived of as practising and self-creating beings, they will naturally be responsible for their own lives. They must (and can!) respond to the global crisis by changes in their own lives, in the financial world as in the environment. In this way the “crisis” has taken the place of gods and gurus, who in earlier times confronted human beings with similarly tremendous demands.
In order to pursue the prospect of common survival, Sloterdijk calls for the building of a global immune system, which he calls “co-immunism” [i.e., a system of mutual protection from social contagion, i.e., against commun(al)ism]. In this he does not propose to rely on force, but rather, as does liberalism, on the hope in human beings’ ability to reason, which makes them see their duty.
The title is a line from Rilke’s “The Archaic Torso of Apollo” (New Poems [1907], trans. Stephen Cohn):
Archaischer Torso Apollos
Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt,
darin die Augenäpfel reiften. Aber
sein Torso glüht noch wie ein Kandelaber,
in dem sein Schauen, nur zurückgeschraubt,sich hält und glänzt. Sonst könnte nicht der Bug
der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen
der Lenden könnte nicht ein Lächeln gehen
zu jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug.Sonst stünde dieser Stein entstellt und kurz
unter der Schultern durchsichtigem Sturz
und flimmerte nicht wie Raubtierfelle;und bräche nicht aus allen seinen Rändern
aus wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle,
die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.Archaic Torso of Apollo
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
Stephen Turner and I will be talking about the neo-Gothic architecture of the neoliberal university at the Unsettled Containers: Aspects of Interiority Conference at The University of Auckland, 8-10 October 2010.
The abstract:
Crystal Capital: the Business of University Building
Everything beckons us to perceive it. … One space spreads through all creatures equally – inner-world-space [Weltinnenraum]. Birds quietly flying goflying through us. Oh, I that want to grow, the tree I look outside at grows in me! (1957: 193)
What is disclosed in the enclosure of the splendid University of Auckland Owen G. Glenn Business School building is the pantheistic affect of transnational or “transcendental” capital (Hage, 2003: 18-20). In its see-through space, an outside – every other place, in fact – grows in us. There, everything communicates psychically with everything else in the code of capital: the language – the logo-rhythm – of the academosphere is encoded according to the design-drive of econometrics, namely, in terms of economic calculability and accountability. And the mission of the University is growth, a mission that transcends its onetime imperative to educate and demands a glasshouse of industry: in Sloterdijk’s terms, an “immaterialized” and “temperature-controlled” enclosure (2008: 12).
The architecture of this glasshouse is transcendental, a negative monumentality, affording a Crystal Palace-like sense of transparency, lightness, flotation, vacuum. Its pantheistic affect is generated by three main features: generous atria, curved rather than rectilinear surfaces, and the use of glass as prima materia. This is the negative theology of neo-liberal Gothic, “a transcendental architecture composed of space, light, line, and geometry,” now aspiring outward to all places, rather than upward to heaven (Trachtenberg and Hyman, 1986: 252). Neo-liberal Gothic aims both to immaterialize and interiorize, to capture a positive void of investment space for transcendental capital. As Chris Barton writes in the NZ Herald, “[t]he building cuts and thrusts . . . slicing the air. It means business” (2008: n.p.). And its glass and steel exterior displays the transparency and integrity of its inner processes, practices and products. Today the University is business.
University of Auckland Business School Owen G. Glenn Building, Auckland, New Zealand.
However, the design-drive of transcendental capital makes human fallibility an excrescence. All the machinery of education – classrooms and cloisters, books, writing, projectors and operating systems – is screened out; the all-but-translucent architecture is mirrored in the ap- parent transparency of its processes, practices and products. Education approximates to thaumaturgy. All we see is surfaces on and through which magic is worked: “open” spaces and open plan offices; terminals, real or virtual; images, projections, GUIs, and panels. The human scale is discounted, via amplification and wireless connection, in favour of the telematic (Gk “acting at a distance”) and the telemetric (Gk “measuring at a distance”). The danger of this disclosure of the one space of the transcendental university, a space that grows in us and in which we grow as teachers and learners, is that it closes out the many human foibles by which education flourishes: just talking, being idle, sharing, charity, invention.
From Brian Dillon, “Under Pressure,” Frieze 99 (May 2006) . . .
The Crystal Palace from “World Architecture Images—Crystal Palace” at Essential Architecture
According to Mary Merrifield’s “The Harmony of Colours as Exemplified in the Exhibition” that accompanied the Great Exhibition Catalogue (1851), the Crystal Palace was
the only building in the world in which the atmosphere is perceptible. . . . To a spectator situated in the gallery at the eastern or western end, who looks directly before himself, the most distant parts of the building appear enveloped in a bluish halo. (qtd in Agamben 39)
Here is the original (it has “blue haze”; the evocative phrase “blue halo” in Agamben is an effect of retranslation):
Merrifield ii.
The blue haze interiorizes the sky, as if to phantasmagorically capture its openness, which suggests the free movement of capital (transcendental capitalism) and information (telematics), the Gods of the coming age (see Heidegger on “the Serene“).
For Sloterdijk, what is prophetic is the atmosphere of the Crystal Palace—it is for him, as Dillon puts it, “a pneumatic machine for representing the world”—but also its transportability. At the time, The Palace was also considered a triumph of modular construction. (See Stephen Turner and my essay from Interstices 12, “‘Built Pedagogy’: The University of Auckland Business School as Crystal Palace.”)
a parliament building that is quick to install, transparent, and inflatable; it can be dropped in any grounds and then unfolds itself. In a mere one and a half hours, a protective shell for parliamentary meetings is ready, and within the space of 24 hours, the interior ambience for these proceedings can be made as comfortable as an agora.
All free governments, whatever their name, are in reality governments by public opinion, and it is on the quality of this public opinion that their prosperity depends. It is, therefore, their first duty to purify the element from which they draw the breath of life. With the growth of democracy grows also the fear, if not the danger, that this atmosphere may be corrupted with poisonous exhalations from lower and more malarious levels, and the question of sanitation becomes more instant and pressing. Democracy in its best sense is merely the letting in of light and air. (my emph.)
That is to say, because air, for Sloterdijk, is “the last common property.” But most often he sees it negatively: it is both weapon and target in modernity; hence,
See
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872)
[T]he writings of the young philologist seemed to me haunted by what I’ve called his “Dionysian materialism.” This provocative expression signaled my intention to read the Nietzschean corpus as forming part of the subversive tradition of those marginal thinkers who’ve managed to keep themselves apart from the idealist closure.
In the 1980s, this notion of “materialism”—which I employed with a touch of humor—had, in spite of everything, retained a last hint of its initial aggressiveness. It seemed always useable to me as a positional—and oppositional—beacon in relation to an intellectual environment that displayed hostility to everything that could evoke the vitalism of the early years of the century. (319)
(By vitalism, he presumably means Bergson, Teilhard de Chardin and Deleuze, not to mention the psychoanalysts, inter alia, who espouse a kind of “spiritual” materialism in which matter is imbued with life force.)
Sloterdijk then positions his reading vis-à-vis the conservative Heideggerians’:
I wasn’t unaware, either, that this “materialist” terminology was going to create definite unease among Heideggerians of a neo-pietist persuasion. Having proposed an iconoclastic—and “Left-wing”—reading of Heidegger’s work in Critique of Cynical Reason, I didn’t at any cost wish to be confused with that de-virilized, conservative Heideggerianism. . . . As for Heidegger’s enormous (not, it must be said, a particularly Nietzschean quality) and, in certain respects, admirable Nietzsche, I must stress I’ve never accepted his claim to have “gone beyond” Nietzsche [indeed!]. On the contrary, it was, in my view, in Nietzsche that one should look for paths leading somewhere, toward an open future for thought. “Dionysian materialism”: the formula expresses the need for a rapprochement between the post-Marxist and post-Nietzschean currents, a highly implausible encounter in the academic and public context of the time. (319-20)
It’s true that I haven’t explicitly gone back to this formula in the fifteen years since the publication of Thinker on Stage. And yet it’s become virtually second nature to me, and if I didn’t use the expression often, that’s because I’d formed the habit of considering all my problems and all my interventions in the affective light of this concept—without having any further need to develop its purely theoretical dimensions. I carry the notion on my head like a miner’s lamp; without it I couldn’t follow the seam that keeps leading me on.
Now, to come back to the question: there is, for certain, a strong epistemological linkage between concepts like “Dionysian materialism” and “vitalism,” a linkage made even more interesting by the fact that the life sciences and life technics have just passed into a new phase of their development. We’re arriving at a point where the most committed idealists are obliged to admit the productive and “ideoplastic” nature of the process of conceptual labor. (320)
Dionysius on a Panther’s Back, Pellas, Macedonia (c. 300 BC).
The panther, by a fanciful etymology (Gk pan- “all” + ther “beast”), represents all animals, the thyrse (Gk “stalk,” i.e., staff) all plants; that it is leaping, the forces of nature. Dionysus, riding the panther, embodies the supplement of nature as represented by human beings.
———
So what is DM? According to Stuart Elden and Eduardo Mendieta in “Being-With as Making Worlds: the ‘Second Coming’ of Peter Sloterdijk,” it is the wisdom of the necessary supplement (or, perhaps, an aesthetic of excess):
This materialism is more than a mere vitalism, where everything that humans undertake is for the sake of the enhancement of life. The Dionysian dimension celebrates that which augments life, but this is a life that is in pursuit of a truth, a truth that is a necessary error. The Dionysian is the excess of the aesthetic and poetic, but one that is linked to the material conditions of possibility of human life. For Nietzsche, art has priority over knowledge, for we can die of too much knowledge, while we need art in order not to die of too much truth. (2)
(Note that for Nietzsche in BT [sec. 1.1], there is Dionysian art, like music, that “formlessly” represents—inasmuch as that is possible—the chaotic productivity of nature; its mood is intoxication and its embodiment dance. And there is Apollonian art, like the visual arts, in particular sculpture or architecture, that gives nature plastic form; its mood is dream and its embodiment the beautiful appearance [of order]. So, strictly speaking, the world may be Dionysian, but our truths are Apollonian.)
From the standpoint of Nietzschean or post-Nietzschean philosophical metabiology [i.e., what Sloterdijk does], “truth” is understood as a function of vital systems that serves in their orientation in the “world” and their cultural, motivational, and communicational autoprogramming. At this level we are dealing with a philosopher/biologist Nietzsche, the author of the famous phrase, “We have need of lies . . . in order to live” [Will to Power (1888), sec. 853, which quotes BT]. In my terminology, one would say that the truths (which I shall term “first-order”) are symbolic immune systems. Lives are condemned to perform a permanent effort of raising their morphoimmune shields against the microbiological invasions and semantic lesions (we call these “experiences”) to which they are exposed. (316-17)
Ah. The world is a limitlessly productive (chaotic) living system. We experience it through the medium of (ordering) truths that enable us limited beings to cope with its apparent threat to our well-being. Ecosystem; immune system.
From “Airquakes,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27.1 (2009): 41-57, trans. Eduardo Mendieta, an excerpt from Sphären III: Schäume (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004) 89-126, 5 Feb. 2009 <http://www.envplan.com/abstract.cgi?id=dst1>:
If one wanted to say . . . what the 20th century . . . contributed . . . to the history of civilization, answering with three criteria could suffice . . . : the praxis of terrorism, the conception of product design, and concepts of the environment. Through the first, interactions between enemies were established on postmilitary foundations; through the second, functionalism was able to reintegrate itself in the world of perception; through the third, the phenomena of life and knowledge were entwined to depths hitherto unknown. Taken together, these three criteria indicate the acceleration of explication of the revealing inclusion of latencies and background data in manifest operations. (41)
This definition also opens Terror from the Air (Luftbeben: Aus den Quellen des Terror [“Airquakes: Out of the Sources of Terror”), trans. Amy Patton [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002; Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2009] 9), but with the last phrase slightly differently translated: ” the revealing-inclusion of the background givens underlying manifest operations.”
Explication, elsewhere termed “thematization” (after Heidegger, Being and Time 412-15), is making implicit or “latent” things “explicit” or manifest. In his dichotomy of explication and latency, Sloterdijk plays on Heidegger’s correlative characterisation of truth as aletheia (αλήθεια: from alethes, true, lit. not concealing, thus unconcealment, i.e., openness or remembering), and lethe (λήθη: “forgetfulness, oblivion,” thus concealment, i.e., closure or forgetting [N.B. the word “latency” derives from lethe also]). Hence, explication is “a rephenomenalization of the aphenomenal” (32), and it answers “the [modern] need to perceive the imperceptible” (59).
François Lemoyne, “Time Saving Truth from Falsehood and Envy” (1737), Wallace Collection, London.
(The nexus of time and truth is implicit in the role ascribed to memory in truth as aletheia.)
Sloterdijk and Heidegger’s etymological readings of their respective terms suggest that they see unfolding truth as primarily textual, something which is implicit in the root word of explication: “explicit.” Explicit comes from L. explicitus, past participle of explicare “unfold, unravel, explain,” from ex- “out” + plicare “to fold.” Unfolding is indeed a textual metaphor: “explicitus” was written at the end of medieval manuscripts, short for explicitus est liber, “the book is unrolled”—or unfolded. Hence, Heidegger primarily thinks of truth as etymological, hermeneutic or poetic, as deep explanation akin to reading; so, to a degree, does Sloterdijk.
But unfolding can also be a textile (“woven”), or even textural (“of the visual and, especially, tactile surface of” or “of the characteristic physical structure of”), metaphor. Sloterdijk’s idea of explication is in the main textural. It aims to get at the characteristic physical structure of “reality,” as it is taken to be (we could say “metaphysical structure of reality,” if it weren’t illegitimate to speak in such a way). Sloterdijk adds to the temporal aspect of truth a spatial one (not unlike Heidegger with his notion of truth as “clearing“).
Bruno Latour explains explication, which he calls “explicitation,” in this way in “A Plea for the Earthly Sciences,” the keynote lecture at the annual meeting of the British Sociological Association (Apr. 2007), to be published in Judith Burnett, Syd Jeffers and Graham Thomas (eds), New Social Connections: Sociology’s Subjects and Objects (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010):
[H]istory was never about “modernization” or about “revolution,” but was rather about another phenomenon, . . . “explicitation.” As we moved on, through our technologies, through our scientific inquiries, through the extension of our global empires, we rendered more and more explicit the fragility of the life support systems that make our “spheres of existence” possible. Everything that earlier was merely “given” becomes “explicit.” Air, water, land, all of those were present before in the background: now they are explicitated because we slowly come to realize that they might disappear—and we [sic] with them. (2-3)
So this shift is about how we understand how we exist both in the world and with others (these dimensions of existence being inseparable):
[T]he whole idea of “social connections” was linked to a moment in history, that of modernization and of emancipation. What happens if we have shifted to another period, one of explicitation and of attachments?
[Or rather, s]ince “we have never been modern”, we have always been living through a completely different history than the one we kept telling ourselves about: until the ecological crisis began to strike hard and tough, we could go on as though “we” humans were living through one modernization after another, jumping from one emancipation to the next. After all, the future was one of greater and greater detachment from all sorts of contingencies and cumbersome ties. Free at last!
What happens to our identities, if it finally dawns on us that that very same history always had another meaning: the slow explicitation of all of the attachments necessary for the sustenance of our fragile spheres of existence? What happens if the very definition of the future has changed? If we now move from the taken into account of a few beings, to the weaving of careful attachments with an ever greater and greater list of explicitated beings? Attached at last! Dependent! Responsible! (3)
From Eric Morse, “Something in the Air,” an interview with Peter Sloterdijk, Frieze 127 (Nov.-Dec. 2009)
Te Ipu Pakore: The Broken Vessel 
