Peter Sloterdijk | MUSEUM FATIGUE

The Living Life in Real Human Spheres

January 15, 2020 by Museum Fatigue

In the final three chapters of Peter Sloterdijk’s In the World Interior of Capital, he discusses the “spatial revolution of the present,” the idea of the local and its asymmetrical relationship to the global. Finally he concludes with the components necessary to “living in real human spheres.” Sloterdijk begins with the observation that the technologies of the global interior have seemed to make space an “ignorable factor”—compressing space to the point that it really seems to make no difference. In this […]

Categories: Reading Notes • Tags: In the World Interior of Capital, local, Peter Sloterdijk

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Exploding Machines

January 13, 2020 by Museum Fatigue

What is the history of the politics of pampering? If the universal agent of pampering is petroleum (214) as Sloterdijk asserts, then it follows that the material politics of energy might be a foundation for this history.” Sloterdijk suggests exactly this: “…it can be argued that all narratives about the changes in the human condition are narratives about the changing exploitation of energy sources–or descriptions of metabolic regimes” (224). From this perspective, the industrial revolution is not just about making […]

Categories: Reading Notes • Tags: engines, In the World Interior of Capital, motors, pampering space, Peter Sloterdijk

The Pampering Hothouse

January 12, 2020 by Museum Fatigue

In his chapter, “Mutations in the Pampering Space,” Sloterdijk finally gets to describing aspects of the comfort space of the great interior of the palace—the boredom of the hothouse existence on the inside. I like his idea of a “pampering space” because it suggests the hyper-abundance of material goods and security in the overdeveloped interior. Sloterdijk begins by observing that for the populations within the “comfort sphere” there is a shift from need and lack to “thinking in options.” While […]

Categories: Reading Notes • Tags: In the World Interior of Capital, pampering space, Peter Sloterdijk, The Crystal Palace

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Boredom and Fascination of the Crystal Palace’s Inhabitants

January 10, 2020 by Museum Fatigue

In his usage of the Crystal Palace as metaphor for the ordered interior space of the modern project, Sloterdijk describes the inhabitants as afflicted by a “palace boredom” (180). This boredom makes the inhabitants’ pine for “news from the outside” thus threats are experienced as a stimulant. This waiting for news makes their media nervous systems easy to invade through, for example, the violent acts of terrorism. In the dense contexts of encounters in urban and global communication networks, there […]

Categories: Reading Notes • Tags: In the World Interior of Capital, Peter Sloterdijk, The Crystal Palace

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Peter Sloterdijk’s Crystal Palace Metaphor

January 9, 2020 by Museum Fatigue

This morning I arrived at the heart of Sloterdijk’s book, In the World Interior of Capital, the chapter “The Crystal Palace.” That he examines the Crystal Palace of 1851 as a metaphor for modernity is not new—certainly not among anthropologists and folks in visual culture and museum studies who look to the practices of imperial and capitalist-market visuality that the palace represents. The palace’s grand promise to categorize the world and its geographical commodities of empire is obvious—as is its historical position […]

Categories: Reading Notes • Tags: In the World Interior of Capital, Peter Sloterdijk, The Crystal Palace

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