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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
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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
30
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.
3. Baudrillard, Silent Majorities, 1.
4. Baudrillard, Silent Majorities, 2.
5. Baudrillard, Silent Majorities, 4.
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).
31
7. Baudrillard, Silent Majorities, 3.
8. Baudrillard, Silent Majorities, 3.
9. Baudrillard, Silent Majorities, 3.
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.
16. Baudrillard, Silent Majorities, 6.
17. Baudrillard, Silent Majorities, 9.
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.
22. Sloterdijk, Bubbles, 26.
23. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh
(Albany: State University of New York, 1996).
24. Sloterdijk, Bubbles, 46.
25. Sloterdijk, Bubbles, 46.
26. Sloterdijk, Bubbles, 51.
27. Sloterdijk, Bubbles, 67.
28. Sloterdijk, Bubbles, 390.
29. Sloterdijk, Bubbles, 393.
30. Sloterdijk, Bubbles, 53.
31. Sloterdijk, Bubbles, 57.
32. Sloterdijk, Bubbles, 57.
33. Sloterdijk, Bubbles, 60.
34. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
35. Sloterdijk, Bubbles, 67.
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.