Sloterdijk 'Bubbles': Between Faces & Humans in the Magic Circle

Below are my notes for the chapters Between Faces & Humans in the Magic Circle (pages 139-268) which I raised at the meeting. Please feel free to add your comments or notes, either as a response to this post or as a separate post

First point – Mirrors and Psychoanalysis

Pages 192-205

Particularly amusing and scathing critique of psychoanalysis and its theories around the concept of mirrors. In these pages Sloterdijk points out the extent to which theoretical apparatuses (spheres of knowledge) are located in the material and technical cultures of the societies in which they emerge. On p. 197 he takes aim at a foundational theory of contemporary psychoanalysis (mirror-stage and self-recognition), and exposes the discipline for what it is: a culturally specific mode of explanation.

'Even Lacan's tragically presumptuous theorem about the mirror stage's formative significance for the ego function cannot overcome its dependence on the cosmetic and ego-technical household inventory of the nineteenth century - much to the detriment of those who were taken in by this psychological mirage'

He argues that in order to prove the valence of psychoanalytic theories in any cultures other than the Western ones we would have to first demonstrate the presence of mirrors (he argues that even until the Modern age few had mirrors and they were cloaked in secrecy – for much of human history S. argues that most of the human race had not seen their own faces [I think he oversimplifies here – e.g. reflection in another’s eyes for example ‘the other thus acts as a personal mirror’ p.200 – but there is certainly something interesting to be said about how the ‘interface’ of mirror technologies opens up new modes of self-encounter – ‘they no longer require completion through the present other, but can complete themselves through themselves so to speak’ p. 20] – says something similar about writing in thought transmission]), and then the emergence of mirror-subjectivities. S. also argues that if we reread the narcissistic mirror-narrative with this intervention in mind, we actually arrive at the stark opposite of narcissism in ‘pre-reflection’ cultures: the visage in the water is not an image of the self, but of another – ‘Looking at the entire history of human faciality, one can say that humans have faces not for themselves, but for the others’ p.192. So through this example we return again to the issues of ontotopology, spherological being and technicity which are of central concern to Sloterdijk’s Spheres

Second point – Faciality

Pages 163-168

I was interested in Sloterdijk’s critique of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of faciality, and returned to the chapter in ATP to begin to reflect on the differences and commonalities between Sloterdijk’s interfacial hothouses and D+G’s abstract machines of faciality. On page 167 Sloterdijk argues that his disagreement with D+G stems from their blindness to the protraction of the Homo Sapiens face, a universal process that takes place through a first stage of facial opening and a second stage of culturally-specific inscription. So rather than an understanding of the face in terms of ‘interfacial hothouses’ that generate insulating forms of togetherness, D+G speak in terms of white walls and abstract machines of faciality that undermine togetherness and allow for modes of domination and exclusion. D+G thus state that the ‘face is a politics’ which fulfils the role of selective response, organising the world in terms of binary and molar oppositions (man/woman, white/black, included/excluded).

However, at points in the chapter Sloterdijk also hints, in line with D+G, at the exclusive effects of living between faces. On pages 183-185, for example, Sloterdijk points to interfacial spheres as spaces where punishment and obedience may flourish (Roman Empire) as well as act as spaces of exclusion (obscurity of the feminine face in art).

Also… the emergence of new technical interfaces (monitors, cameras, assessment forms) that replaces protraction with detraction and abstraction that emphasise the inhuman and extra-human aspects of the human face and which propagate probe-heads, allow escape from facial machines (p. 189, Deleuze’s Cinema books)