Global Soul

Definition

The global soul is Pico Iyer's term for the contemporary subject of global mobility — "characterized by the fact of falling between all categories" (The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home, 2002, pp. 23, 34). Hadjiyanni conscripts the concept to problematize the interior's user: "A global modality problematizes how interiors relate to happiness at a time when 'everyone's problems are everyone else's.' Pico Iyer situates discourses on globalism within the notion of the soul – the global soul – 'characterized by the fact of falling between all categories.'"

The concept's interior-theoretical yield is a mismatch thesis: the global soul falls between categories while interiors are categorically fixed — "What are the implications of 'falling between' for interiors, which are fixed spatialities, bounded by walls, floors, and ceilings?" The global soul is thus the user condition that makes global constructs necessary: a fixed, bounded spatiality confronted with an unbounded, category-breaking occupant. Its question-set expands the designer's brief: "Whose soul are we talking about, and who might be left out? How are 'categories' formed and sustained, and what role do interiors play in the process?"

Key Thinkers

• Pico Iyer — the concept's author: The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home (Knopf, 2002); "falling between all categories" (pp. 23, 34); not yet paged (see log).
• Tasoulla Hadjiyanni — the concept's interior-theoretical deployment: the falling-between user against the fixed spatiality; the category-formation question.

Related Concepts

• Interiors as Global Constructs — the concept's parent theory: the interior theorized for the falling-between user.
• Non-Places — the concept's spatial twin: Augé's transit spaces as the global soul's native environment (jet lag, shopping malls) — the figure and its habitat.
• Liminality — the state-formal relative: the "falling between all categories" as a threshold condition, radicalized from the passage to a life.
• Cosmopolitanism — the concept's ethical counter-form: Appiah's obligation and interest as what the falling-between subject might nonetheless owe.
• Dwelling — the concept's provocation to dwelling theory: a subject that never fully arrives cannot be-at-home in the Heideggerian sense; "the search for home" is Iyer's subtitle.
• Boundaries — the category apparatus: "How are 'categories' formed and sustained, and what role do interiors play in the process?"

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Interiors as global constructs (Hadjiyanni 2018) — the founding source: Iyer's global soul quotation (pp. 23, 34); the fixed-spatialities mismatch thesis; the category-formation question; "everyone's problems are everyone else's" as the global condition.

Open Questions

• Is the global soul an identity or a condition — a subject-type (the jet-setter Iyer writes from) or the general human condition under globalization? Hadjiyanni's extension to refugees and the undocumented ("whose soul… might be left out") suggests the category splits by mobility privilege.
• What role do interiors play in forming and sustaining "categories" — the chapter poses the question but does not answer it; the wiki's boundary (boundaries) and partition (partition-of-space) apparatuses are the obvious candidates.
• Can a fixed spatiality ever house a falling-between subject — or does the global soul require the weak, transient, permeable interior (weak-architecture, ephemeral-interior) rather than the bounded room?
• How does the global soul differ from Augé's non-place user (the solitary contractor of the "turning back on the self") — is Iyer's figure the non-place's occupant generalized to life, or a different anthropology?