characteristic of social acts is that they are imposed from the outside, by
obligation. To make this claim is to recognise as social relations only those
between the master and the slave, between the professor and the student or
between parents and children, without any regard for the fact that free
relations between equals exist. One has to have one’s eyes shut not to see
that, even in the schools, the education that the schools acquire on their own,
by imitating each other, by breathing in, so to speak, their examples, or even
those of their professors, the education that they internalize, has more
importance than the one they receive or are forced to hear.
(Tarde 1999: 62)The third school of thought arises from the work of Peter Sloterdijk on the
genesis of manufactured environments (Thrift 2005a). In his Sphärentrilogy,
Sloterdijk takes Heidegger on dwelling as a point of reference^18 but then spatializes
his thinking by posing the question of being as the question of being-together:
‘one is never alone only with oneself, but also with other people, with things
and circumstances; thus beyond oneself and in an environment’ (Sloterdijk
2005d).^19 ‘Being-a-pair’ or a couple precedes all encounters.^20 In other words,
Sphären is concerned with the dynamic of spaces of co-existence, spaces which are
commonly overlooked, for the simple reason that ‘human existence... is anchored
in an insurmountable spatiality’ (Sloterdijk 2005d: 229).
Continuing on with this spatial problematic, like Tarde, Sloterdijk is concerned
with how distances intercalate. Sloterdijk identifies three waves of globaliza-
tion, each with its corollary of new forms of ‘artificial’ construct. The first wave is
the metaphysical globalization of Greek cosmology, the second wave is the nautical
globalization of the fifteenth century on, and the third wave is now upon us.
Whereas the first wave created an esoteric geometricism and the second wave
created an exoteric cosmopolitanism, the third wave of rapid communication is
producing, through the work of ‘joining the nervous systems of inhabitants in a
coherent space’ (Sloterdijk 2005d: 226), a global provincialism of ‘connected
isolations’, of microclimates in which ‘communicative relations are replaced by the
inter-autistic and mimetic relations, a world that is constructed ‘polyspherically
and interidiotically’ (Funcke 2005: 2). Thus:
At the centre of the third volume is an immunological theory of architec-
ture, because I maintain that houses are built immune systems. I thus provide
on the one hand an interpretation of modern habitat, and on the other a new
view of the mass container. But when I highlight the apartment and the sports
stadium as the most important architectural innovations of the modern, it
isn’t out of art- or cultural-historical interest. Instead my aim is to give a new
account of the history of atmospheres, and in my view, the apartment and the
sports stadium are important primarily as atmospheric installations. They play
a central role in the development of abundance, which defines the open secret
of the modern.
(Funcke 2005: 3)234 Part III