Of Bubbles and Black Holes: The Role of Form in the Social Theory of Baudrillard and Sloterdijk

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Jonathan Fardy, PhD

Article: Of Bubbles and Black HolesJournal: International Journal of Baudrillard Studies

Of Bubbles and Black Holes:

The Role of Form in the Social Theory of Baudrillard and

Sloterdijk

Social theory is a conceptual instrument for logically linking

and explaining diverse phenomena in a relatively coherent manner

using a small number of postulates. Such postulates are often

quite abstract like “interpellation” (Althusser), “class” (Marx),

“hyperreality” (Baudrillard) and so on. But on occasion social

theory takes form and sometimes it even assumes a certain shape.

This is the case, I claim, with the work of Jean Baudrillard and

Peter Sloterdijk.

In this essay I compare the figure of the black hole as

presented most vividly in Baudrillard’s most important statement

of social theory, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, or The End of the Social,

with that of the bubble presented in Bubbles, the first instalment

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of Sloterdijk’s magnum opus Spheres. Baudrillard’s theory of the

social takes the form of the black hole. He sees the social as

having imploded on itself like a dying star. Sloterdijk’s social

theory takes the form of the bubble. Modern subjects are figured

as fragile bubbles ever in search of the spherical security of

the medieval world-view. Examining these two forms— black hole

and bubble— reveals a host of meta-philosophical and metaphysical

entanglements between theory and reference in the arena of social

thought that in both Baudrillard and Sloterdijk operates within a

theoretical economy of form-based concept production.

1. The Black Hole Hypothesis

Baudrillard published In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities

(hereafter Silent Majorities) in 1983 at the very height of his fame.

Starting in the late 1960’s, Baudrillard published a series of

works that contributed immensely to the field of cultural

analysis such as The System of Objects, For a Critique of the Political Economy

of the Sign, The Mirror of Production, and The Consumer Society. But by the

late 1970s, Baudrillard’s thinking turned increasingly towards

the problem of media and mediation. With this shift, his writing

in both its scope and style changed radically.

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Silent Majorities is the fruit of Baudrillard’s late style. It

offers a radically postmodern re-theorization of the social,

social theory, and theory itself. The text is actually a

collection of four related essays: “In the Shadow of the Silent

Majorities,” “…Or the End of the Social,” “The Implosion of

Meaning in the Media,” and “The Theatre of Cruelty.”

Baudrillard’s major morphological argument is advanced in the

first two essays, but is echoed throughout the text.

The thesis of Silent Majorities is that the social has imploded,

disappeared into itself, and taken with it that favorite figure

of early twentieth-century political and sociological theory—the

“masses.” For Baudrillard, the social qua object of political

machination was granted empirical veracity by statistical

research on the “masses.” Empirical sociology sees the masses as

a quasi-natural element that conducts social energy: the masses

can be galvanized, electrified, and mesmerized by power, money,

commodities, and entertainment. Empirical sociology axiomatically

transforms the masses from a statistical phantom into a

substantive entity. Through this empirical chimera, Baudrillard

argues, sociology and politics lay claim to the “truth,” or the

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“nature” of the social. Baudrillard writes, that the masses are

in fact a phantasm, a “statistical crystal ball…‘swirling with

currents and flows,’ in the image of matter and the natural

elements. So at least they are represented to us. They can be

‘mesmerized,’ the social envelops them, like static electricity”

[1].

Against this empirical naturalization of the masses,

Baudrillard asserts that the masses are in fact neither “good

conductors of the social, nor good conductors of meaning in

general” [2]. They are at best a “spongy referent” [3]. The

masses are everything and nothing: dupes to be saved by

politically responsible ideological criticism, generators and

conductors of revolutionary energy, indices for political

pollsters, subjects of consumer reports, the electorate, and much

else besides. Above all else the masses are the “silent

majority,” but not the kind Nixon invoked. They are silent in and

of themselves for the object called the “masses” only exists,

Baudrillard insists, as a series of opportunistic figurations

through which the social is ventriloquized.

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The mystery of the masses is matched only by that of power.

The two are fatally joined: the mystery of the masses seeming to

necessitate a theoretical rationale for the theologico-political

imposition of sovereignty. The masses (like power) absorb

everything but radiate nothing. Baudrillard writes that the

masses “do not radiate; on the contrary they absorb all radiation

from the outlying constellations of State, History, Culture,

Meaning. They are inertia, the strength of inertia, the strength

of the neutral” [4]. Baudrillard puts the matter quite radically

when he asserts that his view of the social is “exactly the

reverse of a ‘sociological’ understanding. Sociology...survives

only on the positive and definitive hypothesis of the social. The

reabsorption, the implosion of the social escapes it” [5].

Baudrillard asserts that the masses as object of socio-

political hope, derision, or as object of study belong to a

specific class of objects that reverse the polarity of the

subject-object relation. In order to grasp this it will be

helpful for a moment to consider another class of objects—art-

objects—in order to see how this reversal in polarity can be

effected. Art-objects give rise to particular ways of seeing, and

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hence give rise to a particular kind of spectator—a certain kind

of subject—that exists on account of the art-object in view.

Contrary to the still popular Romantic notion that all art is in

the eye of the beholder (and thus under the presumed mastery of

the beholder’s gaze), the art-object commands attention, it

provokes, it seduces, it frightens, it humors, it delights and so

on. Michael Ann Holly (1996), Georges Didi-Huberman (2005) and

others have argued that the simple fact that a viewer is affected

by a work of art demands a reassessment of the subject-object

relation and the presumed mastery of the former over the latter

[6].

Baudrillard argues that the masses, like art, effect a

reversal in the subject-object relation. The masses appear to be

the object, the instrument even, of the designs of powerful

subjects: propaganda ministers, advertising executives, the

State, and so on. But the bureaucratic and statistical production

of the masses as object affects a radical hysteria in the

managerial class. This hysteria is a function of the masses’

silence, their inert objectality. The mute objecthood of the

masses is the form and essence of their power argues Baudrillard.

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He writes, the masses “have no virtual energies to release, nor

any desire to fulfill: their strength is actual, in the present,

and sufficient unto itself. It consists in their silence, in

their capacity to absorb and neutralize…any power acting upon

them” [7].

Is not this thesis absurd on the face of it? Surely the

social exists. Look at statistics. But what do social statistics

signify? What is their referent? Is it the social? Is not the

practice of statistical sociology also a product of the society

it reflects? The social of sociology and politics continually

winds back on itself like the figure of the Uroborus. The social

says Baudrillard is caught in an epistemological bind. The social

must always be produced, simulated, into being. The masses can be

sociological data, revolutionary subject, accursed share, and so

on. It is precisely this continual clash of competing and

conflicting hypotheses on the “nature of the social” that

summarily demonstrate the spectacular defeat of the project to

ascribe to the social coherent or complete meaning. The social,

writes Baudrillard, is an “unacceptable and unintelligible figure

of implosion…[a] stumbling block to all our systems of meaning”

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[8]. The social continually renews the “outbreak of

signification” with “a blaze of signifiers” that signify only a

“central collapse…of meaning” [9]. Baudrillard restates this

epistemological problem in cosmological terms.

The social void is scattered with interstitial objects and

crystalline clusters which spin around and coalesce in a

cerebral chiaroscuro. So is the mass, an in vacuo aggregation

of individual particles, refuse of the social and media

impulses: an opaque nebula whose growing density absorbs all

the surrounding energy and light rays, to collapse finally

under its own weight. A black hole which engulfs the social

[10].

It is statements like the one above that Sokal and Bricmont

lambaste in their book Fashionable Nonsense [11]. Sokal and Bricmont

charge that Baudrillard misuses and misunderstands science. But

as Mike Gane has pointed out, this criticism is facile [12].

Neither Baudrillard nor his critics have ever believed for a

moment that works like Silent Majorities were meant to be taken as

statements of cosmological theory. The problem with Sokal and

Bricmont’s treatment of Baudrillard is that they completely fail

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to read his work in terms of what it actually is—a statement of

social theory and metaphysical philosophy. Moreover terms like

“black hole,” “nebula,” “particles,” and such, are not the

exclusive province of science. They belong to language, which

properly speaking belongs to no one. The term “black hole” does

not belong to cosmology any more than “weather” belongs to

meteorology.

The black hole provides the form around which Baudrillard’s

thesis on the radical implosion of the social constellates. To

study the social as it is for Baudrillard—an imploded concept—is

only possible by studying the drift exerted on neighbouring

concepts as they gravitate towards the social. Baudrillard’s

project in Silent Majorities (and elsewhere) can be understood, then,

as a meta-sociological and meta-political querying of the

conditions of the possibility of the social qua concept. But what

makes Silent Majorities unique is that it goes beyond the limits of

meta-theory in the direction of metaphysics.

2. Perverse Metaphysics

Traditional metaphysics concerns itself with fundamental

truths. Metaphysical propositions are arrived at through

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“theoretical speculation and are not open to empirical testing”

[13]. While it is certainly true that Baudrillard’s theses hardly

ever admit of empirical testing, they are not metaphysical in the

traditional sense. Baudrillard’s distance from traditional

metaphysics is set by his infamous thesis presented in Simulation

and Simulacra that the reality principle has withered in the face

of simulation. Baudrillard sees technological society as trapped

in what he elsewhere calls the “Great Game” in which the line

between simulation and reality has been outplayed: now simulation

realizes itself as reality [14]. The world has entered its

“fatal” form—a terminal condition—that in The Intelligence of Evil

Baudrillard names “Integral Reality” [15]. Baudrillard’s

simulation hypothesis states that the metaphysical border that

for centuries divided reality from appearance has been irradiated

by simulation. This is what makes Baudrillard’s metaphysics

perverse. Baudrillard rejects the concept of a fundamental

reality upon which metaphysics stakes its grandeur. This perverse

metaphysics short-circuits the reality-illusion dialectic of

classical metaphysics.

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Baudrillard’s social theory follows from his

(post)metaphysical move: he rejects the idea that there is a

fundamental reality to the social. Moreover, for Baudrillard, the

quest to uncover a fundamental social reality only further

collapses the conceptual certitude of the social as such. The

social qua concept involutes upon itself. The social becomes a

conceptual black hole.

Without getting into technical details that escape this

author, it is enough to state that a black hole results from the

collapse of a star. A black hole is the terminal state of the

life of a star when all matter contained in the astral sphere

collapses in on itself, radically warping space-time in the

process. To make scientific sense of the center of a black hole—

called the “singularity”—requires using both classical and

quantum mechanics, because the center of a black hole is both

extremely dense and extremely tiny. As of yet no testable theory

has emerged that successfully bridges quantum and classical

mechanics. The singularity remains a scientific aporia.

Analogously, for Baudrillard, the social is an aporia. It

seems to require two seemingly incompatible modes of analysis. On

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the one hand, Baudrillard invokes meta-sociology when he comments

on the conceptuality of the social. On the other hand, he invokes

a post-reality metaphysics inasmuch as the “end of the social” is

a fundamental claim. The social is always mediated by what is

asked of it or demanded of it. More radically, the social qua

concept is itself mediated by processes that actually simulate it

into being by realizing a seemingly empirical referent for the

social qua concept. Therefore the meta-sociological question

concerning the “observer effect,” as it were, on the study of the

social necessitates the metaphysical solution that there is no

social apart from its figurations. However, this metaphysical

solution collapses since it is based on a radically non-

metaphysical concept. The dissolution of reality dissolves the

appearance-reality split and with this goes the entire regime of

metaphysics—its principles, its philosophy, its politics, its

sociology. The implosive condition of the concept of the social

draws Baudrillard’s metaphysics into an aporia that warps and

distorts classical metaphysics. Baudrillard writes that the

collapse of reality into simulation requires a thoroughgoing

acceptance that there “is no longer any polarity between one and

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the other…This is what causes that vacuum and inwardly collapsing

effect in all those systems that survive on the separation and

distinction of poles” [16]. Baudrillard’s black hole hypothesis

collapses (mass) sociology and metaphysics into a theoretical

aporia— a singularity. Baudrillard writes,

the masses function as a gigantic black hole which

inexorably inflects, bends and distorts all energy and

light radiation approaching it: an implosive sphere, in

which the curvature of spaces accelerates, in which all

dimensions curve back on themselves and ‘involve’ to the

point of annihilation, leaving in their stead only a sphere

of potential engulfment [17].

3. Resistance

Baudrillard’s late style is a mirror of the postmodern

culture it describes: fragmentary, hyperbolic, cynical, and non-

systematic. Richard J. Lane notes that Baudrillard “doesn’t

simply analyze cultural forms, but explores them through a

doubling of those forms: his texts are cultural events that

partake of the structures of postmodernity” [18]. Baudrillard’s

statements about postmodern culture are themselves part of (even

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symptomatic of) postmodernity itself. Baudrillard’s statements on

the empirical non-existence of the social are paradoxically

another simulation of the social. The social qua black hole is

itself a figuration of the social. The social therefore functions

nonetheless as the prime reference point in Baudrillard’s post-

metaphysical, meta-sociological, conceptualization of the social.

What holds together the antimonies of Baudrillard’s theory

of the social is an image—the black hole. This image pulls

together—like a gravitational field—the seemingly contradictory

aspects of Baudrillard’s thinking. The black hole as figure

collapses and radically condenses the entangled mass of

provocations, observations, and polemical asides into a

singularly dense, impenetrable conceptual mass. At the center of

Baudrillard’s black hole logic breaks down. The distinction

between concept and referent, between polemic and critique,

between object and subject are collapsed to a point—an end—a

singularity. The black hole as form is a hyper-reflexive

theoretical structure. Social as referent and social as concept

annihilate one another in a continually involving state. The

black hole images less the end of the social as such, and more

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the infinitely terminal state of social theory. It is an anti-

form for an anti-sociological theory of the social.

4. The Bubble (Bursts)

The Big Bang Theory says that the universe emerged out of

single space-time point, meaning that the origin of the universe

began with something like what is supposed to exist at the center

of a black hole—a singularity. In a parallel sense, Baudrillard’s

black hole of social theory could be seen as either the end, or

the theoretical degree-zero point for, social theory. If the

theoretical singularity of the social as black hole were to

undergo a rapid expansion it might end up taking the form of the

social theory that Peter Sloterdijk elaborates in his ground-

breaking trilogy titled Spheres.

The first volume of Sloterdijk’s trilogy titled Bubbles was

published in Germany in 1998 followed closely by Globes in 1999,

and lastly Foam. English translations have been sadly slow to

catch up with so-far only Bubbles and Globes having been translated

and released by Semiotext(e). But for present purposes, Bubbles

will suffice. Sloterdijk’s project aims at nothing less than a

wholesale re-theorization of the relation between subject,

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object, and world in the Modern Age as told and imaged through

the form of the sphere. This at first might sound whimsical if

not preposterous. However with reference to a dizzying array of

examples from art, cosmology, psychology, gynaecology, mysticism,

literature, philosophy, and much else, Sloterdijk shows how the

sphere has been central to the Modern Age.

Sloterdijk begins with an oft-repeated truism. The

Copernican Revolution destroyed the comforting illusion that

humans dwell under the protective spheres of the heavens watched

over by their creator. The ascent of humanism in the Renaissance,

the scientific and political revolutions of the Enlightenment,

the Industrial Age, Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud, Einstein, Bohr,

Heisenberg, in short the Modern age, exposed humanity to the cold

indifference of an accidental world. In response, the Modern Age

furnished itself with new structures designed to protect it from

the effects of its own progress. Sloterdijk writes: “To oppose

the cosmic frost infiltrating the human sphere through the open

windows of the Enlightenment, modern humanity...attempts to

balance out its shellessness in space, following the shattering

of its celestial domes” [19].

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Bubbles advances the thesis that modernity was not simply The

Age of Reason. It was also a deeply metaphysical even mystical

period. It sought through a host of means to recapture the

protective guarantees of the Medieval world-view. Sloterdijk’s

analysis has a certain affinity with the view advanced by Adorno

and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment, namely, that modern

Reason never broke with its supposed enemy—mysticism [20]. As

Adorno and Horkheimer argue, Reason underwent a kind of mystical

enchantment as it promised nothing short of redemption for a

blind and ignorant humanity.

However, Sloterdijk takes an imaginative leap that would

have made Adorno and Horkheimer deeply uncomfortable. Sloterdijk

proposes a psychical and social metaphysics: human subjectivity

is to be described as a fragile bubble—a self-enclosed sphere—

floating haphazardly amidst the sharp edges of the modern world.

The psychical danger of the modern world has given rise,

Sloterdijk argues, to a whole host of social, political, and

psychological therapies designed ultimately to shield fragile

subjectivities from the brute materiality of an unkind world.

Sloterdijk writes:

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What makes the Modern Age special is that after the turn to

the Copernican world, the sky as an immune system was

suddenly useless. Modernity is characterized by the

technical production of its immunities and the increasing

removal of its safety structures from the traditional

theological and cosmological narratives. Industrial-scale

civilization, the welfare state, the world market and the

media sphere: all these large-scale projects aim, in a

shelless time, for an imitation of the now impossible,

imaginary spheric security” [21].

Modern subjects are “disappointed, cold and abandoned” hence they

“wrap themselves in surrogates of older conceptions of the world,

as long as these still seem to hold a trace of the warmth of old

human illusions of encompassedness” [22]. Modern subjects are

highly anachronistic; they are never at home in their time. They

suffer from Hamlet’s pain—the dislocation of the temporal joint.

Their eyes are ever on the horizon. They look to the future, the

direction from which progress, Messiah of the Modern Age, is to

come. Yet progress, Sloterdijk argues, disarms. Its lesson is

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always the same. Humanity is frail and unfit for the unprotected

world it makes.

Sloterdijk pictures the history of the modern world as a

morphological venture on the part of humanity to create in-

dwelling spaces—bubbles—to shield itself from the Modern Age.

These bubble worlds seek to form inter-globular links through

intimate encounter, love, domination, exchange, and so forth.

This is the shape of the condition that Heidegger called “being-

in-the-world” [23]. Sloterdijk writes:

What recent philosophers referred to as “being-in-the-world”

first of all, and in most cases, means being-in-spheres. If

humans are there [da-sein], it is initially in spaces that

have opened for them because, by inhabiting them, humans

have given them form, content, extension and relative

duration” [24].

But all bubbles burst. Thus these “atmospheric-symbolic places

for humans are dependent on constant renewal” [25].

Understood as a series of dislocations and spheric security

collapses, the iconic story of the Modern Age, Sloterdijk argues,

is that of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Paradise.

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By a twist of anachronistic historiography (itself quite modern),

the expulsion of Adam and Eve retrospectively became the ur-

mythical origin of modern subjectivity. Sloterdijk writes: “The

‘expulsion from paradise’ is a mythical title for the

spherological primal catastrophe” [26]. Contra the traditional

linkage of subjectivity to the individual, Sloterdijk argues that

subjectivity as imaged in the Genesis account is founded on a

relation between two. While the Genesis story of creation

collapsed in the Modern Age, the “dual bubble” was re-inflated by

(among other things) conferring a psychical premium on the

mother-child biune relation [27]. The collapse of the creation

bubble of divine providence was sublated in the Modern Age into a

metaphysically enriched biological account of psychical-subject

formation.

Psychoanalysis enshrined a paradoxical science of biological

mysticism in the Modern Age. The originary bubble world of in-utero

encasement was taken as the founding moment not only of “human

development,” but also the first loss, the first castration

episode, in the process of individuation. The exile from the womb

and the protected floating world of the amniotic sac became the

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new Garden of Paradise in the doxa of psychoanalysis. Sloterdijk

seeks less to expand or expel this metaphysics of gynecology, and

more to assert its centrality to the conceptual development of

modern subjectivity. Sloterdijk sees psychoanalysis as a poetics

and science of navel gazing. It typifies the Modern Age’s

fascination with its own origins. Sloterdijk writes, “the

umbilical cord is tied off everywhere in modern times, in all

imaginable ways; to this day, the navel on the subject’s body

constitutes the hieroglyph of its drama of individualization”

[28]. The gaze of psychoanalysis like modern anthropology,

biology, linguistics, and so on is fastened upon its own

condition of “de-fascination” (the loss of its origin) of which

the navel is its physical and metaphysical scar [29].

At breathtaking speed, Sloterdijk links the Garden of

Paradise to the uterus. Modern subject development is figured in

terms of a quasi-metaphysical, mythological and gynecological

account that traces the emergence of the sole subject from its

originary belonging inside the biological Garden of Paradise, the

uterine sphere, to its separation from it. Bubble expansion,

enjoinment, separation, and collapse become stations of the

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subject as iterated in modern mythological and biological

narratives. Sloterdijk writes:

In all these models, spheric liaisons are brought up in

which reciprocal animations generate themselves through

radical resonance; each of them demonstrates that real

subjectivity consists of two or more parties. When two of

these are exclusively opened towards each other in intimate

spatial division, a livable mode of subjectness develops

[30].

Sloterdijk sees the Modern Age as the historical search for

a utopic non-place of Edenic, uterine security and protection

from those cataclysmic catastrophes brought about by the pursuit

of progress. The Modern Age is seen as the age not of Reason but

rather the Age of the Child. Modern social theory tethered itself

to the family and ultimately to the biune sphere of the pre-natal

world. The womb was seen as the microcosm of the child-parent

social relation as the family was seen as a microcosm of the

social totality. The history of the social in the Modern Age is

figured in Bubbles as the West’s autobiographical re-tracing of

its supposed lost innocence—its pseudo-originary biune beginnings

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—through a host of utopic social and political programs. It is

the story of the West seeking spheric metaphysical shelter to

protect its transparently fragile self.

Sloterdijk’s model, contra much contemporary theory of the

last forty-plus years thus seeks to rehabilitate interiority.

Sloterdijk favours an epistemological prioritization of the

psychical over the social—the inside over the outside.

[T]hough sphere theory by its nature begins as a psychology

of inner spatial formation from biune correspondences, it

inevitably develops further into a general theory of autogenous

vessels. This theory provides the abstract form for all

immunologies [31].

It would seem, however, that power exercised by the few over the

many—the tragic story of all societies—renders Sloterdijk’s

picture problematic. But there is a rejoinder, namely, that power

is an immunological device intended to shield the fragility of

power. The psychical life of power (to appropriate the title of

one of Judith Butler’s texts) is one aspect of society that

Sloterdijk’s psycho-sociospheric recasting of the Modern Age aims

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to tell [32]. Sloterdijk states this with customary brevity when

he notes:

The theory of spheres is a morphological tool that allows us

to grasp the exodus of the human being, from the primitive

symbiosis to the world-historical action…It reconstructs the

phenomenon of advanced civilization as the novel of sphere

transference from the intimate minimum, the dual bubble, to

the imperial maximum [33].

Sloterdijk retains the concept of the human inside as a

necessary element for any historical recounting of the Modern

Age. To think the modern concept of the social thus paradoxically

for Sloterdijk means understanding the ways that the concept was

interiorized by successive bio-socio-psycho-political substitutes

for the imagined (meta)physical protection of originary uterine

bliss. Modern social life (and the concept of it) is constituted

through the internalization of the exteriority of the social as

such. The expansion of the psychical sphere is a protective

measure taken against the immune deficiency syndrome of the

modern world.

5. Bubble to Black Hole (And Back Again)

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From a theory of nothing to a theory of everything; from a

theory of the social as radical collapse, as a black hole, to a

theory of the social as an expanding fragile sphere, a bubble,

from Baudrillard to Sloterdijk there is a morphological

continuity. Baudrillard’s use of black hole rhetoric suits his

model of the masses as a strange attractor that animates the

socio-political field while simultaneously frustrating its desire

to exercise an innocent imperial empiricism. Sloterdijk on the

other hand provides a model of the social in the Modern Age as a

series of attempts at self-enclosure and a return to spheric

security. In Baudrillard, the “end of the social” takes the form

of radical involution whereas in Sloterdijk closure takes the

form of encirclement. I suggest that both these forms are really

forms of utopian thought or rather a meta-thought on utopia:

thought about the thought of social utopia given form.

Baudrillard’s vision in Silent Majorities (as elsewhere) is to an

extent highly pessimistic, perhaps even nihilistic, but also to

an extent utopian in that he figures the social as that which

resists mastery at the hands of sociological, political, and

bureaucratic functionaries. Is this not in its own melancholic,

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disenchanted way a theory of the resistance of the social or even

social resistance? Is the black hole also a black flag that

waives for the social in the face of institutional encirclement?

Is the collapse, the radical involution, of the social a tactical

outplaying of managerial strategy? Is this really pessimism after

all or is the terminal state of the social as black hole a

perpetual state of no surrender? Is the “end of the social” to

end its own domination?

These readings are perhaps too charitable. I want to

suggest, however, that the form of Baudrillard’s social theory—

that of the black hole—does not itself invalidate this reading.

Even if the social does not exist apart from its figuration, then

it is nevertheless the concept of the social that resists, and

hence the theory at the very least can be taken to be literally a

conceptualization of the social qua resistance. The black hole

then is not too opaque after all. It rather admits of a rich

description of resistant modalities of action and/or thought. The

black hole hypothesis—like a real black hole—is not vacuous. It

is an overfull, compacted, dense space. It has an inside even but

one which is a singular inside—a singularity—somewhere beyond the

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event-horizon of conventional sociological thinking. Is not then

the social for Baudrillard an interiorized concept or even

perhaps a theory of the social as a phenomenon of radical

interiority?

Sloterdijk’s spherological model of the social is dense too.

A bubble is fragile but dense. A soap bubble encloses round a

pocket of densely compacted air. The bubble—at least the soap

bubble—is the exact opposite of the picture of the social as

black hole provided by Baudrillard. The former is transparent and

fragile while the latter is opaque and strong enough to

atomically dismantle any object that falls into in. But they

share the same morphology. They are both spheres. Despite its

name, a black hole is really a sphere—a collapsed sphere—the

involving, terminal state of total stellar death. Although the

bubble model proposed by Sloterdijk rests on a kind of neo-

humanism that is theoretically at odds with Baudrillard, it

mirrors the black hole by proposing that the social is to be

understood as a radically interiorized phenomenon. This is not

to say that the “inside” of the black hole qua social is the same

as the human interiority that underwrites Sloterdijk’s quasi-

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molecular and mechanistic account of spherological world-

historical formation, but it is to say that from a topological

viewpoint there is a spherical continuum from the black hole to

the bubble. The two theories at the level of their form and shape

are topologically continuous: one speaks of collapse, compaction,

opacity; the other of expansion, multiplication, transparency,

fragility. But at the level of form, each theory refuses

Foucault’s advice to “abandon our tendency to organize everything

into a sphere” [34].

In The Culture of Time and Space, Stephen Kern writes that

sociology “is the geometry of the social sciences, the one most

concerned with space. Its central analytical impulse is to

understand the spatial distribution of social forms” [35]. If one

accepts Kern’s thesis that time and space are culturally coded

and historically variable concepts (a thesis that seems self-

evident), then one might say that Baudrillard and Sloterdijk are

modern social thinkers. But what differentiates their theoretical

projects from modern social theory is that Baudrillard and

Sloterdijk see the social as a dynamical topological structure.

Each theory provides a formal conceptualization of the social as a

29

constitutively uncertain dynamical system in which collapse and

expansion are defined as singularity points from which it is

impossible to determine the truth, nature, totality, duration, or

telos of social forms. That is why they are both utopian.

Baudrillard’s black hole and Sloterdijk’s dynamical sphere both

grant the social a form but not a definite place within a

rationally predictive schema. The social in both theories takes

the form of a non-place—a utopia—constitutively beyond the stable

geometries of social science.

The spatialization of the social qua concept enables

Baudrillard and Sloterdijk to extend the sociological imagination

beyond banal empiricism in the direction of a properly

metaphysical account of the very conditions under which the

social becomes thinkable. Their formal theories enact a

diagramatization of the conditions for the possibility of a

concept of the social. Baudrillard and Sloterdijk’s formal

conceptualizations of the social are born of a desire to give

form to the social. Baudrillard collapses the sphere of the

social into a theoretical black hole. Sloterdijk expands the

story of the human sphere into a world-historical psychical drama

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of epistemic fragility. But the center form of each theory is a

sphere. Here questions emerge and collapse. What kind of

singularity is the social? Do the social and its

conceptualization follow a non-teleological trajectory of radical

involution or uncertain expansion? Does the social live in the

universe of Baudrillard or Sloterdijk? Is the social a black hole

or a big bang?

Notes

1. Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, or The End of the

Social and Other Essays, trans. Paul Foss, John Johnston, Paul Patton

(New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 1.

2. Baudrillard, Silent Majorities, 2.




6. See Michael Ann Holly, Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the

Rhetoric of the Image (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996);

Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain

History of Art, trans. John Goodman (University Park: The

Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005).

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10. Baudrillard, Silent Majorities, 3-4.

11. Alan Sokal, Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern

Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science (New York: Picador, 1998).

12. Mike Gane, Jean Baudrillard: In Radical Uncertainty (London; Sterling,

VA: Pluto Press, 2000).

13. Matthias Benzer, “Metaphysics,” in The Baudrillard Dictionary, ed.

Richard G. Smith (Edinburgh: Edinburg University Press, 2010).

14. Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil, or The Lucidity Pact, trans.

Chris Turner (London: Bloomsbury, 2005).

15. Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil, chapter 1 especially.



18. Richard J. Lane, Jean Baudrillard (New York: Routledge, 2009),

127.

19. Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres, Volume 1: Bubbles: Microspherology, trans.

Wieland Hoban (Los Angles: Semiotext(e), 2011), 24.

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20. Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment:

Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmidd Noerr, trans. Edmund

Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

21. Sloterdijk, Bubbles, 25.


23. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh

(Albany: State University of New York, 1996).











34. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection

(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).


33

36. Michel Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum,” in Language, Counter-

Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed., intro. Donald F.

Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard, Sherry Simon (Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 1977), 166.

37. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1983), 221.

-Jonathan Fardy received is PhD in Theory and Criticism from

Western University in September of 2014. His dissertation

examines the historical emergence of the photographer as a novel

subject position in the nineteenth century. He has published on

Baudrillard and Guattari.

Of Bubbles and Black Holes: The Role of Form in the Social Theory of Baudrillard and Sloterdijk

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