Air/Condition, Peter Sloterdijk

· surrealism — "honed the idea that the present is all about trying to explain in detail creative processes i.e. culture."

· "in the cultural domain 'revolution' is a code word for 'legitimate' violence against latency. it stages the break of its new, procedurally aware operators with the holisms and geniality of bourgeois artistic situations."

· Dali as representative of the surrealists acquires technical apparati for symbolic purposes.

· "the premise of symbolic aggression lies in the legitimate assumption that the cultural closets are overly filled with corpses and that it is high time that the latency-protected links between armament and edification be ruptured."

· the provoked became the provokers — "it was almost inevitable that the bourgeoisie... would take the lead role in matters of explicating art, culture, and signification through the activities of marketing, design, and autohypnosis."

· Hegel's analogue in aesthetic production: "the depth of a thought can be measured only by its power of elaboration — otherwise depth is no more than an empty symbol of unresolved latency."

· Dali — "photorealism applied to internal, irrational images: the point was to render the content of dreams and deliriums objective with the precision of an old master — manifestation of the surrealist force and desire to make advancements in modernization."

· "such is exemplary of the user mindset, whereby, in childlike fashion, one leaves the technical side of one's own performance to the specialists, the competence of whom one has not bothered to verify." (sounds like an architect, 'bad' only for not verifying.)

· "the artist's choosing to wear a deep-sea diver suit with an artificial air supply for his performance as the 'ambassador from the depths' unerringly ties him to the unfolding of atmospherical consciousness, which, as i have attempted to show, is central to the self-explication of culture in the 20th century... (diving gear: physical and mental immune system)."

· "his performance makes obvious that conscious existence in this era must be lived as an explicit diving-into contexts."

· "modernity strives to overcome anxiety through technology, which generates more anxiety... justification of further violence to break open latency and control the background — or to use the current prescribed terminology: it demands fundamental research and permanent innovation."

· "aesthetic modernity is a procedure of applying force not against people or things, but against unexplained cultural relations."

· "out of its keen will to explicitness, surrealism declares war on mediocrity, detecting in it an opportune hiding place for the anti-modern inertias resistant to the operative unfolding of folded, latent givens."

· form-representations like 'White on White' and 'Black Square' by Kasimir Malevich "consist in elevating the unthematic to the thematic."

· assumption: the fact of making-explicit leads from a present, sensory form to a not-present, intellectual form.

· suprematism — "drawing upward and simplifying forms to pure primary forms."

· surrealism — "a making-explicit of material that draws downward."

· using Freudianism as "a strategy for reading signs and manipulating background givens, permitting those interested to make free use of it in accordance with their own needs."

· unconscious — "defined as a subjective dimension of non-unconcealment, of internal latencies and of invisible latent presuppositions linked to I-like states."

· Freudian unconscious — " small, inner container that becomes filled through repressions and that is placed under neurogenic pressure by the impulse of the repressed."

· Freudian unconscious was mistakenly appropriated by the Surrealists, thinking it was akin to 'Romantic metaphysics.'

· explication of the atmosphere, esp. indoors, leads to attention paid to what one breathes. immersion, physically and metaphysically, conditions and impresses upon one's experience. "cultures are collective conditions of immersion in air and systems."

· "making the air conditions explicit."

· cultural theorizing should align with meteorology and climatology — as these have such advanced in explication.

· "modern societies are 'weather-chat' communities wherein an official climatological information system places in the mouths of its citizens the topics for their own reflections on the prevailing weather conditions."

> ... really? i would imagine that every and any society throughout history could be named 'weather-chat' communities — especially when and if they lived more closely to the outside environment, paying more attention to the diurnal and yearly shifts alike, finding their own weather signs through experience. if i didn't have a weatherman to tell me that it was going to be 90 degrees with a 75% of rain, i'd still remark to my neighbor that it was damned muggy and hot. if a season appears too 'this' or 'that' i'd bet that it would be an option based upon experience of past seasons, and not a farmer's almanac, or record highs/lows.

· "in periods of poor weather, the more demanding climate critics fly in copious numbers to regions in which they can expect an acceptable performance with sufficient probability..."

· people who could have the opportunity to do this i'm sure did, long before the weatherman and long before meteorology was a science, there to explain the degrees of the sensing heat. also... do we expect birds to have to wait for the weatherman to make up their minds to flee to warmer climes?

· "taken as a purely natural context, climate is something that is entirely self-made, ceaselessly proceeding from one state to the next. as such, it suffices merely to describe the most important 'factors' of climate in their dynamic effects on one another. these several factors — namely: the atmosphere (gaseous envelope), the hydrosphere (water world), the biosphere (plant and animal worlds), they cryosphere (the ice region), the pedosphere (solid land) — together, under the influence of the sun's radiation, comprise extremely complex patterns of energy exchange, representable in terms that are entirely natural scientific and devoid of all reference to any intelligence that allegedly either had a prior plan or intervened subsequently. these processes are so complex that an adequate analysis of them demands a new kind of physics able to deal with their unpredictable currents and 'chaotic' turbulences."

· modern meteorology and the modern mindset has exonerated any deity from the responsibility and effects of weather — "it speaks [the modern weather report] of that which happens just by itself and according to its own conditions, of how it happens, and of that which, in the best of cases, gets 'reflected' as objective quality data in a subjective medium."

· modern weather where it exonerates or is indifferent to a god, implicates human societies still, or more and more with the repercussions of industrialization and the effects of pollutive output.

· modern reliance upon the designed air-spaces: large, accumulative living and working spaces, mobile and static food refrigeration, etc. ... has been made possible through the use of fossil fuels, which in turn sully the atmosphere — the balanced greenhouse effect is put in jeopardy. so, the environment that made life possible is being threatened by the desire for environments that make life more pleasurable.

· "air constitutes an implicit condition of existence, which ... lies latent in the unthought and the unperceived..."

· air design: thematized air, it aims at directly modifying the mood of airspace users — it serves the indirectly manifest purpose of enticing a space's passers-by with pleasant smell-induced impressions of a situation, contributing to heightened product acceptance and willingness to buy."

· beginnings of shopping atmospheres in the greenhouse-like shopping environment of the glass-covered arcades — which "represented an early level of urban atmosphere explication — an objective imagination of the 'dwelling-addicted...'"

· Walter Benjamin — dwelling addiction: "the irresistible drive to shape and re-shape a casing for ourselves."

· Canetti and zeitgeist: he "defined an artist's dwelling in his period as a breathing-relation — as a particular mode of immersion in the tangible atmospheric conditions of the age..."

· "... the big city is as full of such breathing spaces as of individual people. now none of these people is like the next, each is a kind of cul-de-sac; and just as their splintering makes up the chief attraction and chief distress of life, so too one could also lament the splintering of the atmosphere."

> what about water, too? about 60 percent of the body is made of water, ever-changing water that recycles from person to earth to sky to earth to person, like a great palindrome, continually. we are also connected through this splintered hydrosphere.

[self-note: meeting of earth-water-air — littoral zone]

> i suppose i shouldn't take Broch's novel literally, but in reality we cannot say that are hermetically sealed off from one another via our respective breathing-spaces... the space is disconnected, yes, visually and physically, and by degrees climatically. air can go under doors and out of windows, however. in some way i feel as though the thought is provocative because it renders something transparent as a boundary. is it not perhaps just the flipping air over into that of the character and the symbol of a wall, like Rachel Whiteread flips the space under the table to 'on'?

> correlations between war atmosphere of hermetically sealed bunkers.

> there is immediacy in air — we can function without sunlight, water, even food for days. without air — we die with alacrity.

· "air is the lost common property. it belongs to all people collectively ... . and this last thing, which has belonged to all of us collectively, shall poison all of us collectively ..."

· "toxic self-induced and self-destructive war — "caused by a mass-somnolence. states of somnolence are states in which people move as mere trend followers under the trance of the normal."

· "... the air is filled with these hurt masses' dreams of victory, with their ecstatic and empirically cut-off acts of self-aggrandizement, these masses who are followed like a shadow by their desire to humiliate others."

· "... large modern societies, integrated from the mass-media viewpoint, have entered a phase in which their day-to-day existence has, from the atmospheric viewpoint, come under the domination of mass-psychological mechanisms."

· theory of mass-insanity — "in this theory, permanent communication by means of daily newspapers and radio become the vectors and agents of hallucinatory structures. it posits that daily newspapers and radio functions, for the most part, as a media of disinhibition whereby statements end up coming true..."

· "these effects serve to immerse entire national populations in strategically generated trend climates, and thus constitute the informational analogue to chemical warfare. from a distance what Broch's theoretical intuition grasps is the parallelism between gas warfare — as the attempt to surround the enemy in a poison cloud thick enough to annihilate him physically — and the production of mass insanity — as an attempt to envelop one's own population in a suffocating self-destructive ecstatic atmosphere, glutted with cravings for "super satisfactions."

· "... as though the wind could be partitioned." — national air space. > the advent of air-military strategy was in a sense a kind of 'wilding' — in the abandonment of society's well-paved routes, well-expected routes of action.

· "... today they are so blind to their acute penchant for forming closed atmospheres and for according excessive importance to the hallucinatory systems built by victors..." > where war left off, sport took on.

> city air mapping:  http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/08/29/opinion/20090829-smell-map-feature.html