EXCERPTS FROM SPHERES IIISphli,enlll: SchliumeFrankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2004By Peter SioterdljkFirst English translation by Daniela FabriciusFoams In the Age of Knowledge (pages 65-74)The things that are most delicate become objects onlylater. This is true for many things that are taken forgranted and only mature into being recognized oncethey are 1051. and they are usually lost the moment thatthey are drawn into comparisons thai take away theirnaive given ness. The air that we breathe withoutthinking. the places saturated with moods in which weunknowingly exist both contained and containing, theunremarkable because obvious atmospheres in whichwe live. move, and have our beingt-these are allthematic latecomers because until they were brought toour consciousness they provided, like perennial naturesor goods. an a priori silent background to our being andpresence. These elements now become themes onlybecause they have proven manipulatable in bothconstructive and destructive ways. Previously acceptedas discrete provisions of being. they had to becomeobjects of concern before they could become objects oftheory. They had to be experienced as fragile,destructible, and losable before they could advance tobeing tasks for air and mood phenomenologists. forrelationship therapists. for atmosphere engineers andinterior decorators. as well as for cultural theorists andmedia technologists; they had to become unbreathablebefore people could begin to see themselves asprotectors. reconstructors. and inventors of what haduntil then just been assumed.The background breaks its silence only whenprocesses in the foreground overexert its carryingcapacity. How many real ecological and militarycatastrophes were necessary before one could say withlegal. physical. and atmo-technical precision how toprovide an atmosphere that is breathable for humans?How much ignorance towards the atmospheric premisesof human existence had to accumulate in theory andpraxis before the attention of radicalized thinking wascapable of submerging itself into an essence of moods(Wesen der Stimmungenp-only to later encroach onthe constitution of being-in an encompassing milieu andon the modi of existential imbedded ness in totalities 1

(for which we have recently started to use the term"immersion")? How far did the pendulum have to swingin the direction of individualistic misunderstandingsand autistic desolation before the intrinsic value ofresonance phenomena and inter-psychic entanglementin an animated space could be articulated in areasonably complete way? How much neglect. maskedas progress, did close human relationships have toendure before a constitutive definition of sufficienllygood couple and family relationships could bedescribed with respect for their fundamental terms?"fAil th'at is very explicit becomes demoni~e whoengages in making articulate background realities thatwere previously kept in unspoken shared thoughts orknowledge-and even more in what is unthought orunknown-commits himself to a situation in which thestringency of what is required and what is kept silent isadvanced and irresistibly endless. Woe betides him whobears deserts: Now what once seemed to be a givennatural resource must be artificially reconstructed. One

is forced to articulate. with burdensome care andprovocative detail. what once participated in silent(onnolation. At this transilion into the ex.plicit. themodern function 01 cull ural science (KU/tufWissenscho/t)becomes manifesl.lt is the preferred agent ofcivilizational explications in general. From now on itneeds to be both a technical science and the curatorialtraining needed for working in our cultural greenhouses.It is especially after cultures have stopped seeming tobe a given that one must care fortheir maintenance andcultivate their regeneration by redescribing, filtering,clarifying, and reforming. The culture of culturesbecomes a criterion of civilization in the age of makingbackgrounds explicit.To be absolutely contemporary, we have to assumethat hardly anything Ciln be assumed anymore. When webegin, at this point to articulate the world withestranged detail, what can we say about the state of theart of our being·in·the·world? When we carefUllyarticulate (with the phenomenologists) in whatencompassing states or totalities we see ourselves asembedded, when we design and eventually reconstruct(along with the media scientist. the interior architect,the ergonomic specialist, the atmo·designer) thespatialities, the atmospheres, and the encompassing

situations in which we spend time according to our ownplans and values, then there is an aftereffect ofalienation in these constructive and reconstructiveactivities that have eliminated the obvious before theyallow us to return 10 a second set of givens. II theyreturn, then the products or objects of explication comeunder the care of conservation. They either becomeobjects of constant sociopolitical concern or undergothe process of their new design. Where there was awlifeworld," there must now be air~conditioning.What about the Inside'Revolution, Rolation.lnvaslonThe demon ism olthe explicit is the path olthe history ofcivilization. It grows at the pace at which modernityprogresses in becoming aware of its own artificiality.What was once in the background moves into theforeground; that which has been unspoken since onecan remember suddenly has been brought forward; theenfolded implicit is projected onlo an open surface sothat every detail that was once hidden on the inside liesevenly spread out in bright visibility: these scenes areevidence of a movement in which those with knowledgeradically change their position in relationship to nowknowableobjects that were once known differently ornot at all. The obsolete metaphor of the "revolution" asa groundbreaking overturn or relationships betweenbodies and roles can, in respect to such changes inposition, be granted epistemological honor just one lasttime before being stored in the archive of exhausted(oncepts.The closest example of what can be defined as a"revolution" is found in looking at the breakthrough orthe work of the anatomists of the 16th century. whodecided to open the body's interior by cutting into it,and to publish their Rndings through descriptiveillustrations. It may be that the Vesalian "revolution"had a greater impact on the relationships of Westernpeople to themselves than the long over-cited and

misunderstood Copernican revolution. By confrontingthe conventional darkness of one's own corporealitywith organ maps and drafted documents showing a new,precisely viewed inner machine world (it is not fornothing that the magnum opus ofVesalius is called Dehuman; corpo,;s fobrico). the early modern anatomiststore open the image'poor somatic interior ground of a

perceived selrimprisonment and involuted the self·knowledge of Ihe thus·portrayed bodily subject so thatnothing could be found in the same place of knowing orbeing as before. Now I have to look at the anatomicalmaps and take;n their message: There you are! That'swhat it looks like inside you as soon as those who knowwhat they are doing take a look with a scalpel! No anti·anatomical mauvaise fo; can help bring back Ihe naiveteof bodily being as it existed before the ability to operate.Actors of modernity took part, whether they wanted to ornol, in a quasi·autochirurgical revolution. Even thosewho were nol dissection artists occupied with cuttinginto organic tissue were, as cultural partiCipants,virtually placed into a position of operation and ofknowledge in which there was no choice but to complywith the great changes in the old relationship to theinner universe of the body. Understanding one's owncorporal interiority from the possibility of its anatomicalexteriorily was the primary cognitive Nrevolutionary"result of modernity-comparable only to the world·picture·shifting violence of the first trip around theworld by Magellan and del Cano.'For the cognitive habitus, to circumnavigate andmap the earth is the same thing as to cut open thehuman body hom all sides and graphically represent itfrom all angles. 80th operations belong to the greatrotation that chang~d the angte of knowledge 01 thingsand circumstances. ~'Making it explicit" has meant,since the beginning of modernity. a turning around ofthe bodity world-partially through the operaliveabilities of the anatomists-in which one is constitutedas a virtual sell·surgeon with a radically changed angleon the relationship with one's self-NAtter all, an objectbecomes comprehensible to us only at an angle of forty·five degrees.'" Modernity is the age of anatomy, the ageof cuts. of invasions, of penetrations, of implantations inthe dark continent. the former lethe.EJ:cerpls from Sphern III: looms"THE DEMONISM OF THE EXPLICITIS THE PATH OF THE HISTORY OFCIVILIZATION. WHAT WAS ONCE INTHE BACKGROUND MOVES INTOTHE FOREGROUND; THAT WHICHHAS BEEN UNSPOKEN SINCE ONECAN REMEMBER SUDDENLY HAS

BEEN BROUGHT FORWARD."In a much later phase. after academic abstractionshad pushed the underlying operative conditions ofmodern knowledge past the point of recognition,philosophers (ould come upon the idea that makingthings explicit is a discourse operation that first of allconcerns the bookkeeping of the accounts of opinionand persuasion of a speaker.' Is thus every person whospeaks a speculator in the stock market of statements.and philosophy the market regulalor? The true meaningof explication lies elsewhere: The powerful quality ofmodern knowledge relations is not the ability to mirrorthe "subject" within itself or to publicly a((ounl for thereasons for one's opinions; the subject operates onitself and has its own maps of the partially enlighteneddarkness in front of itself, which sketches out potentialpoints of attack for self·invasion. One can', be confusedby the division of labor between surgeon and non·surgeon. He who is a subject afterVesalius inhabits.willingly or not, an auto·operative space. Being modern,I can no longer authentically-meaning in cohetencpwith the cultural niveou-be myself if I abstract from mypotential inner surgeon. When modern people are lyingin a deep way, then it is almost always because they areconsciously avoiding their auto·operable natures.' Theprincipal of saying "no" to operating on the state inwhich one finds oneself is the seed of bad Romanticism.Our unavoidably imperfect but still expandable ability tograsp our own somatic and psycho·semantic interiorground is characteristic of the situation that w~ describewith the worn-out predicate of "modern."We Have Never Been Revolutionary (page. 86-88)With the 20th century having run its course, there is adawning recognition that it was a mistake to put theterm "revolution" at the center of its meaning-just as itwas wrong to understand the most extreme ways ofthinking during that time as the mirroring of a",evotutionary" social base. One 51ill gives (omplicitcredit to the self·mystification of the actors of the epoch.Whoever spoke of revolution. whether political orcultural. before or after 1917. alway. lei himself be madea fool by a vague melaphor of movement. After all. theimpact of the century never lay in reversals. Nowhere didthe top and bottom switch places; nothing that wasstanding on ils head was put on its feet; it would befutile to look for evidence that somewhere something

that was last became first. Nothingwas turned around,nothing was spun in a circle. Instead, everywhere thatwhich was in the background was brought into theforeground; on countless fronts. that which was tatentwas encouraged to become manifest. That which wasopened up through invasive hypotheses, intelVentions.and probes ended UP in think tanks, in printed text, inbusiness balance sheets. The middle ground wasspread out, representational functions proliferated,laws were shuffled , management expanded. the pointsof attack for actions. production, and publicationsproliferated. new bureaus shot out of the ground, andthe number of career options multiplied by a factor of athou.and, Something about all of this fit. well with "PaulValery's malicious thesis that the French and eo ipso,the Moderns. had turned "a revolution" into "a routine~- The real fundamental term for modernity is notrevolution. but eA'PUCQtiO~ExPÄication is. for ourtime. the true word for becoming. under which theconventional modes of being can-through drift.simulation, catastrophe. and creative recombinationbesubsumed. Oeleuze must have articulated a relatedthought when he tried to displace the type of event thatis a "revolution" onto the molecular level, in order toavoid the ambivalences of action in relation to "themasses"; it is not the voluminous overturn that counts,but the flowing. the discrete continuation into the nextstate. the .u.tained night out of the .tatu. quo. In themolecular realm. it is just about the small and theWhal aboullhe In5lde~smallest maneuvers; everything new that carries on isoperative. The visibility of real innovations comes backto the effect of explication-what is then praised as"revolution" is usually only the leftover noise that ariseswhen the event is over. The contemporary age does notturn over objects or themes-it turns them out. It unfoldsthem. it pull. them to the forefront. it lay. them out ona plane. it forces them to become manifest. it spellsthem out in a new analytic way and installs them intosynthetic routines. It turns suppositions into operations:it gives exact methods to confused tones of expression;it interprets dreams in user's guides; it arms ,essenti~ment, it lets love play on countless and often newlyinvented instruments; it wants to know everythingabout what i. in the background. enfolded. formerlyunavailable-at least as much as is needed to make it

available for new acts in the foreground-unfaldings,crackings open. intelVentions, and reformations. Ittranslates the monstrous into the everyday. It inventsmethods of bringing the unheard of into the register ofthe real; it create. the button. that allow u.ers to haveeasy access to what was previously impOSSible. It tellsits own: "Dontt despair. What you can't do you willlearn." Rightly. ours i. called the technical age.World,50ulln Agony orthe Emergence of ImmuneSy.tems (pages 192-201)In the campaign of modernity again.t the .elf·evident.that which was once called nature, air, atmosphere,culture, art. and life are put under the pressure ofexplication. which fundamentally change. the way ofbeing of these "givens." What was once the backgroundof a saturated latency has now been given emphasis asan i •• ue. and ha. been placed in the category of thepre.ent. the objective. the worked out. the manufactur·able. In the forms of terrorism, iconoclasm, and science,three latency~breaking forces were put into place,under whose innuences the data and meaning of theold "Iife·worlds" cave iGrOriSm makes explicit theenvironment from the angle of its vulnerability; iconoclasmmakes explicit culture from the experience of itsability to be parodied; .cience make. explicit primalnature from the point of view of its repUcability throughpro.thetic device. and it. ability to be integrated intoD,agp,·D,uck.anlug.IIPalmt"nl 01 de·(omplt"ssion sickness. 1915. Sourceunknowntechnical processes; systems theories make explicitsocieties as structures visible to their visions and btindto their blindnessJEncompassing relationships that could traditionallybe experienced in the form of devotion. participation.and communion free from ulterior motives were placed,through explication, into the objective givens oftechnical feasibility and execution, without givingpeople the option to remove themselves from these"circumstances" or "media." Even if mistrust grows. weremain immanent to the suspected. We are damned tobeing~in, even if the containers and the atmosphereswith which we have to surround ourselves can no longerbe assumed,like a benevolent nature.'The circumstantial totalities that we cannot leave.but that we al.o can no longer fully trust. have been

calted Umweltenlo (environments) since the beginningof the 19th century, a term that was introduced into thedi.course of theoretical biology in 1909 by Jacob vonUexkiill. It i. al.o a term that has .ince pa •• ed through along and sometimes meandering career. which appearsto be imminent to seemingly self-evident concepts. IIWith the ob.ervation that life i. alway. already life in anenvironment-and thus also in a certain sense againstthis environment and in opposition to many foreignenvironments-the perpetual crisis of holism begins.The ancient human disposilion to allow oneself tosurrender to immediate totalities as to good local godslost its orienta tiona I value when the environmentsthemselves became construe Is or could be recognizedas such. The quasi-religious act of propping oneself upagainst a surrounding primacy-nature. cosmos,creation, situation. culture, homeland. or whateverwould.in an age of toxins and strategies, have thesemblance of a seduction into self-endangerment.The progress of explication forces naivete to have achange of meaning; naivete becomes more conspicuousand even offensive. Now, naive is that which invitessleepwalking in the midst of present dangers.Excerpts from Sph~rn III: FfHlmsAfter the awareness of the first as well as the secondgreenhouse effect,living and breathing under an opensky can no longer mean what it once did. From theimmemorial homeliness of morta l~ in thf Opt" air, anunhomely, unlivable. and unbreathable one has risen.With the appearance of the environmental que~tion.human habitation of its primary milieu has turned outto be problematic. After Pasteur and Koch rttVe~ledand substantiated through scientific publicationsthe existence of microbes. human ellistencf has hadto understand itself. through explicit measur~s.as in symbiosis with the invisible-and moreover.in prevention and resistance against now preciselypositioned microbic competition. From the moment ofthe massive gas attacks of the Germans. as well asthe devastating counterattacks of the Allies in 1915.breathable air 1051 its innOCen c.f; bfginn'ng in 19'9 itcould be portioned and given as gifts in thr lorm 01ready-mades, and from t924 on it could be offered asexecutionary air for delinquents. U After the synchro·nization of national presses during the fir st World War.civil communication was fundamentally compromisedthe

Signs themselves seemed to be stained throughtheir contribution to belligerent deliriums and psvchosemanticarms races; thanks to the critiq~ of reliBion,ideology. and language, vast portions of the Sfmanticenvironment were demarcated as int~ll f-ttuaIlV unbreathablezones-from that moment on. it wouldbe responsible to only occupy spaces that had beenpumped empty by analy.i •• newlv furnished. andcleared for critically mobile living. Even Mona lisasmiled differently after Marcel Duchamp save hera moustache.

In this conle:d,the Question of immune systems;uio;(· ... Wh('n everything could be latently contaminated.lnd poisoned, when everything is potentially deceitfuland suspicious. wholeness and being able to be wholecan no longer be derived from external contexts. Now,integrity is no longer thought of as something won byputting faith in a beneficial enclosure; instead it comesfrom the personal contribution of an organism activelytending to delimiting itself from an environment.Thus the thought emerges that life is not so muchdetermined by openness and participation in awhole, bul by self-enclosure and selective refusal toparticipate. The greater part of the surrounding world isa toxic or meaningless background for the organismthusit arranges itself in a zone of strictly chosen thingsand signals, which become one's own circle ofrelevance: in other words, to come into language as"an environment." One could go 50 far as to call this thefundamental thinking of a post-metaphysical or othermetaphysicalcivilization. Its psycho-social trace ismanifested in the shock of naturalism, through whichbiologically enlightened cultures learned to convertfrom a phantasmic ethic of universal peacefulcoexistence to an ethic of antagonistic protection ofinterests of finite units-a learning process out of whichpolitical systems since Machiavelli have gainedmanifest advantages.With the catastrophe of passed down culture and itsholistic morals, the issue of the century emerges:making immune systems explicit. Clearly, theconstruction of immunity is an event that is much toobroad and contradictory to be described only in medicaland biochemical terms. In keeping with its complexnature, components that are political, military. juridical,

security technological. psycho·semantic, and evenreligious contribute to its emergence in the real." Thetwilight of immunity would determine the intellectuallighting conditions of the 20th century. learning to besuspicious, for which there is no other example inGeistesgeschicMe (the history of ide .. and thought),colors the meaning of everything that was previouslycalled rationality. For Intelligence operating at theforefront of development, the education in noncommitmentbegins.What about thrlflsldr ?The first manifoldly felt, yet hardly fully graspedconsequence of privileging dissociation overparticipation is the growing pressure of risk. which has,since the beginning of the 20th century. burdenedpotential global scenarios and their inhabitants.Because humans in the age of background explicationspick up ever less untouched a priori information abouthow and where they should b. (unless they live high inthe mountains or are rooted in one of the evermorerare traditional cultures), they are forced to adjust theirorientation from being anchored in an implicit backgroundto settling in the explicit. As the self-evidentbecame rare, its role had to be taken over by options.This leads to the age of chosen world images (Welt·bilder) and chosen self-images. The long economic cycleof "identities" sets in.Identity is a prosthesis for self-evidence in uncertainterrain. It is fashioned according to both individualand colle clive patterns. The concept of building mentalprostheses expresses the insight and circumstancethat the production of vital assumptions-life-guiding"hypotheses" (in William James's sense)-is no longerprimarily derived from a cultural inheritance, but isinstead ever more a matter of new Inventions andconstant reformatting. This is where the growingimpulse to individualize life forms comes from.Admittedly, as long as I seethe singular fact of my lifeto be that I am Corsican. Armenian, or Irish Protestant,then modernisms of this kind are none of my business;"11 consider myself an ethnic readymade and preparemyself to appear in the multicultural bazaar. I will even,if must be, protest on the streets for the preservation ofthe British fox hunt. If I don't Ukethis escape into atype, however,' assure myself of my selr·organismicfoundations, on which' will depend from now on .•..

This search for inner solidity is not without irony.In the massive interest in biologically· grounded self·hood. it is precisely the most avid clients of bodilyhealth as a form of identity who are drawn into aparadoxical insecurity that leads to the realization thathealth, in the fullest sense, does not exist. What oneloses sight of in the cult of health is the subversiverole that medical research has played in the events ofexplication. As a consequence of the search for the

"WHEN 500 NEW DISEASES AREFOUND OR DESCRIBED EVERYYEAR, IT DOES NOT MEAN THATTHE SAFETY OF THE INHABITANTSOF THE PROUD TOWER OFCIVILIZATION INCREASES."

latest principals of health as the minimal biologicalrequirement of existence. and the discovery andproblematization of those finely tuned delicatestructures, there had to come that which we have calledthe " immune system" (in the biochemical sense) for thelast tOO years. The forced awareness of backgroundsecurities al the level ofone's own body opened a layerof regulating mechanisms that, once they appeared,allowed the profound implausibility of biosystemicintegrity to come into view forthe first time. With thebody's own immune systems having become an issue,the connection of the enlightened individual to theorganic requirements of being sick or healthy radicallychanged. Now one had to recognize that there are occultbattles between pathogens and antibodies in the humanbody, the results of which determine the status of ourhealth. Many biologists describe the somatic self as a[xcerplS from Sph~ru III: FaamsMoUCI'\ Duchamp • .'io((ofPr,,;( Ai!. 1919.(t) Arli!ot!io Right .. Society lARSI. t~ ... wYorklADAGP. P.lri!io/Suc(l!~sion MarcclDucllolmp. ( ourlt'W Th l' Phil.ldt'lphiaMUSt'um of Art: louise o1nd Waite.A.t('n~ b(lrg (OIlf'(lion. 1'} 'jObesieged terrain defended by the body's own bordertroops with varying success. In contrast to the users ofthis hawkish terminology is a biological dove factionthat paints a less martial image of the events of

immunity; according to this group, the self and the otherare so intertwined at a deeper levellhat one is morelikely to encourage counterproductIVe effects by usingthese an-too· primitive strategies of markingboundaries.In addition, an intricate game at endocrinologicalemissions surfaces. one that works in the thresholdbetween subconscious biochemical processes and theexperiential surface of the organism . It is not jusl in Iheirintricacy that immune systems confuse the securitydemands of their owners; they irritate even morethrough the immanent paradox that their successes. ifthey turn out to be too thorough. can turn into a causefor their own kind of sickness: The growing universe ofauto-immune pathologies illustrates the dangeroustendency of the self to be victorious to the death in thefight against the other.n is not by chance that in more fecent definitions ofimmunity there is a tendency to attribute a much moremeaningful role to the presence of the foreign within theself than was provided for in the traditionalunderstandings of identity as a monolithic. closedorganism of the self- one could almost speak of apostslructurat turn in biology.·· In this light. the parrotsof antibodies in an organism seem le~!t to be a policeforce that applies a strict policy against fOffignefs andmore a theater troupe that parodies its invaders andacts as their transvestites. But no mallet how one sumsup the debates or biologists surrounding the meaning ofimmunity, whoever is extensively interested in health asthe basis for personal lntegrily and identity will soonetor later learn so much about their functional lequirementsthat the biochemical dimension of immunity assuch steps irritatingly out of its latency and grows intoone of the most concerning foreground issues.

This has consequences for the mental immunity of"enlightened society." It no longer just knows what itknows but must now form an opinion on how it will livewilh its always-arriving state of explication. Modernsare shown with increasing urgency that the progress ofknowledge does not consistently translate intoanalogous advantages for immunity. Knowledge, itturns oul. isn't always power. When, as is true today.sao new diseases are found or described every year, itdoes not mean that the safety of the inhabilanls of the

proud tower of civilization therefore increases. Revealedknowledge about the security architecture ofexistence-whether from the fields of medicine. law, orpolitics- often, because of ils increasing explicitness(and decreased ability to be suppressed), has adestabilizing effect. As a result of the counterproductiveeffects of advanced explication. latency as such alsobecomes explicated for its desirable functions. Forsomeone who has come into knowing, it becomes clearonly after the lact what he really had by not knowing,Thus it is revealed that pre'enlightened or alreadyex plica led conditions as such can be relevantimmunologically-at least in the sense that residing inwhat is opened up occaSionally and conditionally allowsfor a psychic profiting from certain protective funclions01 not knowing. This had already been recognized byancient authors like Cicero, who wrote: "Certainly theignorClnce of future malice is more usefullhanknowledge ofit ." I~While enlightened consciousness today springsfrom explicitly imagined possibilities of failureevidenceol~isk in accidents, terrorism, business.cancer and heart attacks/and other scales of preciselyenumerable possibilitie~of damage-the unalarmed

"THE FURNISHING OF SPACES FORA HAPPY BEING-IN-ONE'S-SElFIS A PREVENTATIVE MEASURETHAT ANTICIPATES THE PROBABLEDISRUPTIONS OF WEllBEING INA SHARED REALM."

What about the Inside?life. insofar as it is in vague agreement with itsbackground and can be supported by tradition, oftenstill maintains an aura of protected naivet~ . One who Isenlightened smiles at this. but nevertheless, havingalready lived too long in perpetual alarm, also envies itat timest!he enlightenment of enlightenment becomesa form of management of the collateral damage ofknowledge. Due to first stage enlightenment. we areall- to use a phrase of Botho Strauss-"prognosticallycontaminated."';-JIn whIch we live, and move, and have our beIngOn Modern Architecture as the Making Explicit of

InhabitatIon (pages 501-507)If one had to find the quickest possible way ofexplaining what changes the 20th century brought forhuman being-in-the-world,the bulletin should read: Itarchitecturally, aesthetically, and juridically unfoldedexistence as in~abitation-or to put it SimPlyGt madedwelling explic~ Modern building disassembled thehouse. the supplement to nature that makes beinghuman possible. into discrete elements, and reassignedthem"; it took the city, which was once at the center of aworld planned in a circle around itself. and repOSitionedit so that it became but one position In a network offlows and streams. The analytical "revolution" thatconstitutes the central nervous system of modernityalso infected the architectural shells of human spheresand by establishing a formal alphabet created a new artof synthesis, a modern grammar of generating space.and a changed stale of existing in an artificial milieu. IIThe phrase spatial revolution, which Carl Schmittused to describe the political consequences of thetransition into the age of domination over alr.I' would beworth reserving for this event if we had not alreadyencouraged abstaining from the use of the wordrevolution because it is a kinetically deceptive andpolitically misleading term for processes of explication.What Schmitt was referring to belongs to a complex ofphenomena thatl have elsewhere described as themaking explicit of air space, whether through gasterrorism, the Air force, air design, or air·conditioning. 1oIt represents the epitome for types of practices(aerotechnical, artilliary, aviatory, pyrotechniC,photographic, cartographic) that in sum yield what onecan call air sovereignty or spatial domination in the thirddimension. Its extension into electronic technologyproduces control over telecommunications. or "etherdomination." with the oft· noted consequence thatspace was temporarily moved to the background in favor01 lime. As to the opinion that "spatial thinking"altogether has since then represented something out ofdate, only those who allowed themselves to be overlyImpressed by analogous declarations that have beencirculating since the 19205 can continue to adhere to it.The English author E.M. Forster had alreadY,ln his 1928posthistorical science fiction story. "The MachineStops," put the sentence into the mouth of onecharacter: "You know that we have lost the sense of

space. We say 'space is annihilated,' but we haveannihilated not space. but the sense thereof."ll Thisthesis on the primacy of time is one of the rhetoricalforms in which intimidation cloaks itself in modernity.Whoever gives in to it risks missing a key event incontemporary thought. which can be placed under thetitle "the return of space."]€s Michel Foucault wrote."The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epochof space ....The real "spatial revolution" of the 20th century isthe explication of interior human habitation or dwellingthrough machines for living. climactic design, andenvironmental planning (including the large buildingforms that I call "collectors"))), as well CIS theexploration of neigh borings with two nonhuman spatialstructures that are pre-embedded or adjunct to thehuman. the cosmic (macro and micro) and the virtual. Inorder to make explicable the inhabitation of livingspaces by humans. no less was required than theinversion of the relationship between foreground andbackground. To think of it in Heidegger's perspectiveand put It in his way of speaking: The being· in·something-at-all had to be out of jOint before It couldemphatically be raised to the theme of inhabitation-in·the-world. While traditionally living and housing lormedthe supportive background of lile processes, in thecaustic airof modernity being in a "lifeworld" was partof a greater environmental reversal.uThe self·evidenceof living can no longer remain in the background, Even ifEac.rpts from Sph~~s III: Foamswe do not usually project houses and apartments into avacuum, in the future they might .. well be lormulatedas explicitly as if they were close relatives of spacecapsules.Thus the definition or modern architecture emerges:It is the medium in which the ex.plication 01 humaninhabitation in manmade interiors is articulated in aprocess. Accordingly, building has. since the 191hcentury. represented what was un1i1 1848 caned a"realization of philosophy." To use Heidegger's voiceagain: It puts into effect the er·orterung (discussion;figuratively speaking: demarcating or exploring of asile) of being. Architecture was not satisfied with btingthe more or less artistic handmaiden for meeting thehousing needs of people. the roots of which can betraced back to the arrangement of shelters. caves, and

huts. It reformulated the places where the living,resting, and being·in·places of groups and individualscould happen under conditions 01. high d.g ... of .ellreferentiality.of financial exchange. of legalization,networking. and mobility. We now know that the-Sfplaces can no longer be thought of as just the here andthere of one lifeworld. For a place to exist. it must meetthe following conditions: a quantum of enclosed andconditioned air. a site of inherited and updatedatmospheres. a node in housed rel ationships. acrossing in a network of datanows. an address fotbusiness initiatives. a niche for self· relation ships. OJbase camp for expeditions into the world of work andexperience. and a guarantee of a subjective niChe. Thefurther explication advances. the more the constructionof apartments resembles the installation of spacestations. living itself. and the manufacturing oritscontainers, becomes a spelling out of all of thedimensions or components that were once primordiallyconnoted on the anthropogenic island; in doing so. thefragmentation 01 completely lumped together livingrelationships and their rational new formations can bepushed toward an extreme where the absolute humanworld-jsland is repeated in the form of the apartment fora single resident.Ie is above all the modern mobilization andcommunication of persons and goods that radicallychanged the conditions of perception and design for the

dwelling human being. Ever since the portion ofhumanity that was first affected by the IndustrialRevolution in Europe and the U.S. worked itself out of anagrarian condition and was converted to a multi-local,semi-nomadic modus vivendi, it became apparent howfull of presuppositions the old way of living in villagesand domains in the agrarian age was. All knowledge thatwe carry within ourselves of the habitations and habitsof the old fundus reflects a world of residing inhomelands, fatherlands, and regions, which wasimprinted over the 10,000 year realm of sedentariness,whose formal and material sediment are present in theform of historically referential house. village, and cityarchitectures. This universe belongs to a life that hasstopped, which, because of its imprisonment in narrowfield markers and languid rhythms. was incapable ofgiving an adequate account of the motives and

Whal aboollhe Inside'conditions of its living behavior. It never had a sufficientreason, not to mention the resources, ror this .The present contains, in this regard. not just theadvantages of explicitness; the angle of reflection haschanged draslically enough so Ihal an analylicallyproductive, chronic awareness of questions ofinhabitation and habitus has been provoked. One cannow freely state that sedentary life was too slow. toomuch turned inward. and too oriented to a model basedon the plant to come to speak of its forms of living withthe deterritorialization necessary for theoretical insight.As long as the sedentary world condition stayed in placethen (it is Varros's dictum), the land would be of divineorigin, whereas the city would be an addition of thehuman hand that circumscribed the horizon-only thosewho use the city for a second house and treat theircountry villas as their real homes could still know whatbeing at home means. The city dweller should believeIhal he is jusl a Iransposed planl-and planls don'l jusllive in a place. they root themselves (though plants withdouble root systems seem to be a hybrid). Only since therise of modern transport conditions- transportunderstood as the explication of movement ortelemobility-did real architectural. technological. andexistential alternatives to the post-Neolithic habitus ofliving emerge. an alternative that finally made itpossible 10 bring lighl inlo Ihe elernal half-darkness ofsedentariness. Now skepticism can assert itself againsteverything that sticks to the ground; the term uprooting(or rootlessness) has a light sound to it and can beexpressed on demand. Ever since this split. one couldsay that traditional living in so-called homelands in noway represents the universal ur-form and norm ofhabitation (of housing oneself), as some Pietists haverecently pontificated. It is instead a dogged butsurmountable way that humans inhabit space when theyare held back by somelhing.The Apartment as Immune Syslem (pages 534-545)There is a form of explicit habitation in which humanliving is understood as the construction of a sharedcommunal and personal immune system. This quasihygienicdimension of primal existential spaceformation is best elucidated by an initially implausiblesounding sentence in Gaston Bachelard's Poetics ofSpace: "Ihe wellbeing of allHfe is in ils germ.·"

This Ihesis becomes acceplable when it is lied 10 Ihedaim Ihallopology should be inlroduced as Ihe basediscipline of immunology. The furnishing of spaces for ahappy being-in-one's-self is, in this view. a preventativemeasure that anticipates the probable disruptions ofwellbeing in a shared realm. Bachelard's lopophiliconlology is Ihus read as Ihe foundalion of a Iheory of awell-positioned life-or better, as a theory of residencein a eutonic space. We shouldn't be disoriented byIhe facllhallhis conlradicls crilical conformily. Theoffensiveness of a doctrine of happy consciousness inthe middle of a cult of unhappiness dissolves as soon asone admits that a positive theory of an integral positionis in one dimension many times richer than a criticalIheory Ihal invariably lakes form as a symplom of aninability to participate. A theory of an integral positionallempls 10 explain Ihal. and why.lhe welfare oflhoseliving alone in their own spaces. temporally andobjectively fakes precedence over estrangement.It elucidates why ressenUment usually reveals itself asa jealousy of place: those who wish for the humiliationof others want to see the devastation of the place inwhich Ihey would feel whole in Ihemselves.Thus one reaches a dynamic definilion oflheapartment as a spatial immune system. living is, froman immunological perspective. a measure of defenseIhrough which a zone of well-being is walled off againslInvaders and other bearers of illness.- All -imm-unesyslems go beyond reason in calling upon Iheir righllodefend agaTnst disruptions. If they become contentiou""S,it is only because the di;;osions of zones of sharedimmunity are not defined 0 priori for cultural beings.Immunity (even if under a different name) is aboveall and for Ihe mosl pari underslood as a social faclonecould go so far as to look for the criteria of socialcoherence in the automatic participation in an immunecommune. Tradillonally. families and dans. and laleralso Ihe cily.lhe community of failh.lhe people.Ihe party.lhe corporalion. havewanled 10 qualify as anoperatively effective immune system. and forced onto itsfollowers Ihe behavior Ihal conformed 10 Ihe slandardsof commonly gained immunity, called "solidarity" sinceExcerpts from Sp"~rft III: FoDmsthe 19th century. Whoever steps out of the determinedcommunity of immunity and solidarity is traditionallyconsidered a traitor. The scandal of the modern model of

living consists in the fact that it supports the isolationand communication needs of individuals and their lifepartners. who no longer look for an immunitary ideal inimaginary and real collectives or cosmic totalities hindanalogous models for houses. peoples. classes, andstates),2' For them. the latent layer of meaning of theRoman expression immunitos is brought to the nextlevel by not collaborating in the community project.Can onelhus perhaps say Ihal modern "sociely" formsa collective of traitors of the collective?If modern housing types are forms of explication ofan immunitary quality. could one not then expect thatthe beginnings of modern architecture would manifesta debate around the correct definition of an immunespace? Don'lthe houses of our era have to becomematerial symbols of the struggle between an interest inisolation and a demand for integration? Are theapartments of this time not the manifestations of acivilizational project that brings to the table a newformat of immune unities and integral spaces? What iscertain is that the link between immunity andcommunity has had to be thought out in a new way asliving and working conditions have started movingtoward the atomization of individuals living on theirown. Just as life in the age or"bare life" is defineod as thesuccessfulphase of a (biochemical) immune sysu~m. so"existence" thus describes the successful phase of aone-person household.The Roman juridical expression integrum did notonly refer to the unharmed state of natural-born livingconditions. which are protected bv law; it atso rl!'f~n~d10 Ihe idea Ihallhe unharmed slale of Ihe whole "Ih ing"Ihal is a household or a public good was ilself alreadvthe result of conflicts and measures. This seeminglywillful and. so·lo·speak. heaUhy slale exisls as suchonly because il profils from Ihe benefit ot living undorIhe sharp sword of Ihelaw (in differenll~ rms Ihis hasbeen called Ihe dialeclical relalionship b~tw •• nviolence and law). The integrum is an a .. embl~d lifeor rhymed lola lily in which Ihings belong logolhor.like house and yard. skin and hair. man and mouse.U

"THE MODERN APARTMENT ISA PLACE TO WHICH UNDESIREDGUESTS ALMOST NEVER HAVE

ACCESS. HERE TOXIC PEOPLEHAVE TO STAY OUT. ALONG WITHBAD NEWS:·

These double forms evoke the protective blessing thatguarantees peace for a collective: they beseech thecommon roof of immunity that shields the community.The so-called whole thus takes advantage of a bordermaking.assembling. complementing power.Seen from this angle. the right to integrity of thedomestic sphere is the source from which the earlyEuropean culture of law unfolded. The institution ofHousherrenrechr(patriarchallaw) Is the latent model foraU immunity-provided that one interprets th is as thedecision-making authority over the admitlance or nonadmittanceof that which is foreign to one's own realmwhereasthis realm always already has to be imaginedas an effective immune assemblage of own and notown,lI lmmunity implies a prophylactic violence toprevent a harmful violence-it interiorizes what it wants~to protect again~ Roumrecht (the right of space). whichforms the heart of private law, protects the unified life asthe embodiment of the activities of multiple intertwinedlives: these should be able to thrive alone in the placeswhere they realize themselves by themselves, whichunavoidably means in their own borders. to theexdusion of others.Immunity, as a tocat aseity. stems from the practiceof successfully setting limits-it is an emergency ofinclusive exclusivity. No universalist propaganda canchange this. Even a single god, whether it is Yahweh orAllah or Pater Noster, is first and foremost a big evictor.Even if he sends out invitations to everybody, they areformulated according to rather standoffish conditions.There is no mention of the fact that there is enoughroom at his house for everybody. There may be manyapartments in the house of the Father, but most areempty because they are unaffordable. As the spiritWhat about the 1n!.lde?01 immunity. the One who supposedly addresseseverybody actually represents the quintessence ofselectivity.Intuitions of this type were present for Nietzschewhen he presented his friends with a suggestion forformulating a new categorical imperative after the death

of God: 8e a new beginning yourself, by your own power!Be an original game that plays itself. be "a sell·rollingwheel, a first movement, a holy Yea " !:r, With suggestionsof this kind. the adjustment from theology toimmunology is implicitly complete-and eo ipso theresulting release of finite egoisms. Saying yes to oneselfsketches the outline of the real living space of the yessayer,in recognition of the fact thai no sphere of self·yes· saying can be all·encompasslng-and that fortheOther. and others Ihal want themselves. there willalways be enough room, even if never in the same exactplace. Every loca' "yes" to one's self noats in a foam ofanalogously sectioned off self·affirmations. "And hewho proclaimeth the Ego wholesome and holy. ands.IHshness blessed. verily. he. the prognosticator.speaketh also what he knoweth.·" What Nietzsche. whounsuccesslully searched for a place in the world thatwas atmospherically bearable for himself. does notexplain here, of course, is why the empirical place forrefurbished and legitimized selfhood is usually theapartment-understood here as an immuno-spatlal self·extension of the human who remains happily by himself.That this should be a small room can only at ftrst glanceseem surprising.It was Marshall McLuhan who later let slip the secretof living in modern conditions when he deduced It from afully transformed immune situation. The literate person,according to McLuhan, no longer has the need "to seehis hous •.. . as a cult·llke e.tenslon of his body .....because he no longer uses the universe. its divinefoundation, and its supposedly universal set of rules asa personal immune system. Thus he no longer needs toequate the house with the cosmos; global order andlifestyle part ways. For the resident of the media·enhanced house. modernity has replaced the vaguepsycho· semantic protection systems of religiousmetaphysics with specialized legally and climaticallyinsulated living cells (as well as anonymous systems ofsolidarity). The modern apartment is a place to whichundesired guests almost never have access. Here toxicpeople have to stay out. along with bad news. if possible.The apartment is developed into an ignorance machineor an integral defense mechanism. In it the basic right tonot take note of the outside world finds its architecturalsupport.nThe modern apartment is the extension of the body

through which Ihe habitualized care for one'S self andone's own background defensivity is specificallybrought to representation. It makes e.plicit the fact thatliving organisms do not exist without making sure thatthey are enclosed within themselves. Thus the apart·ment wins a share of the core processes of modernization:It articulates the appearance-or the becomingarticulate-of immune systems, and at the same timethe experiments of self'relating individuals with largerassociations (of which even the largest will be muchsmaller than the "whole"). It materializes the lact thathuman openness to the world always corresponds to acomplementary aversion from it.At night, the hour strikes when the immunitaryhouse reveals its performance as a protector of sleep.In forming a prate clive sleeping environment, the housebecomes complicit in the acosmic needs of its residents.It forms an enclave of world less ness in the worldanightly integrum. secured through roof and wall,door and lock. The house. which is the shell of sleep.delivers the purest evidence of the relationship betweenimmunity and spatial sequestering. It embodies theunity of geometry and life. a topically realized utopiaasa timeless projection of the interior as a still·always·being-inside." It guards the human-forming and regeneratingnights in which no plan for the world ofdaylight is forged.The natural transcendence of night is articulatedmost closely in the built forms of bedrooms offeringdeSigned rest environments. Here the skin·1 expandsinto a bed-i- surrounded by a room-' in a house·l. Thepuresl sleep is one in an acosmic onion. In the houseof nighl, the houseless are accommodated: those of uswho are "released" also find here another umbrella overour heads-an umbrella that we don't have to wish, forthat moment. to have poked through with holes andopened to the outside. '· Because nest formations" inthese four walls that are called one's own neither servethe sleep of death nor postulate a flight to heaven. thehouse that ensures nightly immunity does not make anydemands in terms of size. It demands neither a Pharonicpyramid nor the furnish ing of cathedrals. Maybe the" small house," which some contemporary architects areconcerning themselves with .)~ is above all a form ofexplication of the nightly being·at-home-herein aresponse of an architecture for historical people to the

ahistoric hut. At the cen ter of the small, immune,acosmic house stands the bed-the Simple technicalassistant to sleep that more than anything else hascontributed to the humanizing of nights. Thus muchsupports the idea that living is, in the last instance,the epitome of being able to sleep at one's own place.In this sense the bed is the middle of the world."The bedchamber of real people is not "as Hegel says ...a crystal, in which a dead person resides")': it is alsonot a gothic tree of life that curves itself up into an" organic excelsior"n; it is the shell of the acosmic at ahuman scale. In homeless people one can observe howthe need for a place to sleep approaches the minimum;a cardboard box over one's head can be enough to meetthe requirements of an inviolable space. The expressionIs delivered by the most famous among the homeless:"The foxes have holes. and the birds of the air havenests; but the Son of man hath nowhere to lay hishead."·oWhat does this mean? He who is sua spherical hyperimmunity (et non sum solus, quia Potermecum est)-' can even abstain from the most basicsleeping comfort of God's children; he does not demandhis own bed. but the blanket of paradise. When thehouse acts as a giver of shelter at night, the primalscene of the integrum is lulHlled.Thus il turns out that worldlessness IS a localattribute. Every sleep is the sleep of somebody: eabsent·mindedness is the absence of a finite sp i Jlt ofa section of the world . There is no sleep of the world.because the world has no eyes that it could close asa whole. just as there is no world·house 10 whicheverything could be at home. The guiding hyperbole ofclassical metaphysics. the suggestion that the cosmosis a house, went out of service with the transition in to

explicit living. We recognizelhatthe metaphysical reflexof looking for immunity in the all-inclusive representsa thriftlessness that onlv the poorest, the unhousedand uninsured of antiquity and the middle ages,could afford. Those who are weak live in hyperboles;the strong fill territories and leave them again. Everyapartment, as the support point of a finite-being-ableto-live, creates exclusivity: every punctual self-yessingproduces breakdowns in communication and theits "selfhood, ",.:I and all the same its normal diagnosis.

The crisis of the world-soul passes through housing.Even God cannot. if He is committed to life and not anempty mask of. totality, take in everyone. These .reharsh words for those who romanticize the dissolutionof boundaries. Who will hear them?denial of environments. That is its affirmative virtue.Thanks go 10 Simone Boler for checking this translation.Additionol thanks go to Suhrkomp Verlag GmbH & Co ..Frankfurt, for permission to reprint this text.