Futures and Fictions Read online

  MF: The question of time is difficult but fruitful — partly because time has been so depoliticised. Thinking of luxury communism in terms of superfluity of time can help to counteract this. First of all, it can begin to de-naturalise the current governance by anxiety, in which lack of time, or to be more precise, our constant immersion in a time of embedded urgencies, is a taken-for granted, and indeed libidinised. Much of what Jodi Dean calls communicative capitalism depends on the libidinisation of this sense of being “always on”, of always being open to the flows of communication. I would like to think that luxury communism would take us out of this form of time. In capitalism, a smartphone used to be a luxury but in many areas of the capitalist world, it is closer now to being a necessity, something that has been made central to our work and subjectivity. The luxury of luxury communism would, by contrast, be about a liberation from many of the things that the smartphone currently stands for and facilitates. In Eros and Civilization, Herbert Marcuse wrote that

  the closer the real possibility of liberating the individual from the constraints once justified by scarcity and immaturity, the greater the need for maintaining and streamlining these constraints lest the established order of domination dissolve.

  He goes on:

  In exchange for the commodities that enrich their lives, […] individuals sell not only their labour but also their free time. […] They have innumerable choices, innumerable gadgets which are all of the same sort and keep them occupied and divert their attention from the real issue — which is the awareness that they could both work less and determine their own needs and satisfactions.

  These passages strike me as extraordinarily prophetic, especially in the light of the rise of communicative capitalism and its technologies. Capitalist luxury is always in the service of distracting us from the very real possibility of liberation from work; communist luxury would exactly be about the awareness that we could work less and that we can determine our own needs and satisfactions.

  You referred a few times to rave culture, and it might be worth thinking for a while about the role popular culture might play in building the conditions for luxury communism. Rave was the last example of a popular psychedelic culture. I have started to thinking about an “acid communism” — a fusion of the psychedelic and the militant that did bubble up in actuality at particular moments (perhaps especially in the Italy of the 1970s), but which was, for the most part, a haunting virtuality. Psychedelic cultures focus on consciousness in a different but potentially complementary way to consciousness-raising practices. Consciousness in psychedelic culture is always radically plastic and mutable. This went alongside a certain — luxuriant, immersive — experience of time, which fed into a politics of the refusal of work. It is sad, catastrophically sad, that the mainstream left — whether social democrats or Marxist-Leninists — could not connect with the implicit or vernacular libertarian and anti-work politics in psychedelic cultures. But perhaps that previously missed fusion is one way of thinking about what luxury communism could be about now, and in the immediate future. The psychedelic returns us to the question of generative fictions, in that, in psychedelic culture from The Beatles through to rave, there is always a dreaming of a world governed by very different temporal rhythms: “stay in bed, float upstream” ... More time for boating!

  1. A disclaimer: luxury communism, and the attendant slogan “luxury for all” are not my ideas. “Luxury for all” was a slogan associated with the German libertarian left, including ...Ums Ganze! in the midto-late 2000s, and was imported to the UK by Shift Magazine. The luxury communism Tumblr blog which was part of the popularisation of the concept was set up in 2012 by me and three or four other people, some of whom are part of Plan C. Parts of this conversation are inspired by the debates about luxury communism within Plan C; some people in Plan C like the idea, others hate it. Its popularisation was also hugely contributed to by Novara Media and their demand for Fully Automated Luxury Communism. The ideas that I bring into this conversation were put together from discussions with my friend Ian Childs. It is very much our personal take on the idea — if you listened to someone else talking about the idea, they would probably describe it quite differently.

  Works Cited

  Ballard, J.G. (2014), High-Rise. London: Fourth Estate.

  Dean, Jodi (2005), “Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics”, in Cultural Politics, 1.1: 51-74.

  Hester, Helen (2015), “Promethean Labours and Domestic Realism”, https://www.academia.edu/11 571359/Promethean_Labours_and_Domestic_Realism.

  Köhler, Thomas and Adrian Buttlar (2015), Radically Modern: Urban Planning and Architecture in 1960s Berlin. Tübingen: Wasmuth.

  Marcuse, Herbert (1972), Eros and Civilization. London: Abacus.

  Ross, Kristen (2015), Communal Luxury. London and New York: Verso.

  Smith, Jack (1977), “Capitalism in Lotusland”, from a performance manuscript for “Irrational Landlordism of Bagdad”, presented at the Cologne Art Fair. Spufford, Francis (2011), Red Plenty. London: Faber and Faber.

  Willis, Ellen (2012), “The Family: Love it or Leave it”, in Beginning to See the Light: Sex, Hope, and Rock-and-Roll. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

  EXTRATERRESTRIAL RELATIVISM

  Stefan Helmreich

  Peter Watts’ 1999 science-fiction novel Starfish concerns a cadre of humans who have been physiologically engineered to live on the seafloor, near undersea volcanoes, where they do maintenance work for a multinational corporation mining the seabed. Their metabolisms are tuned to the high pressure and exotic chemical mixes of these settings so that they are fit to what, in contemporary scientific terminology, is called an “extreme environment”. Partly adapted through technological prostheses, partly through more fleshly modification, these people might be called, after a term popular in recent biology, extremophiles (“lovers of extremes”).

  Robert MacElroy coined the word extremophile (“lover of extremes”) in 1974 as a hybrid of the Latin extremus and the Greek philos. The word gathered together organisms — psychrophiles (cold lovers), halophiles (salt lovers), and more — that previously had little to do with one another classificatorily. Prior to 1974, if one spoke of these creatures in the same moment it was in the realm of food preservation; freezing, salting, drying, pasteurisation and irradiating are all methods of controlling the varied and resilient microbes that live in food. What brought these creatures under the same designation was the notion of the “extreme environment”. While that phrase originated in clinical and personnel psychology and applied psychiatry in the 1960s to discuss communities of humans acting in isolated and intense social settings (Antarctic research stations, spaceships — the science-fiction setting of Starfish would fit perfectly), “extreme environment” by the 1970s came also to have a more ecological meaning. By the 1990s, extreme environments came to embrace extraterrestrial settings, and, in the early 2000s, there emerged the somewhat roomier concept of “extreme nature”, the title of at least two popular science books in the first decade of the century (Curtsinger 2005 and Cowardine 2008, both titled Extreme Nature). In the contemporary moment, then, the “extreme” has become a frame for thinking about nature and its boundaries.

  In this essay, I suggest that the shared semiotic terrain of the extreme and extraterrestrial now grounds a novel kind of relativism, where “relativism” describes a view that takes facts of existence and experience to be relative to conditioning situations, situations that themselves may require a certain suspension of judgment as to their absolute grounding. Extraterrestrial relativism is a relativism about “nature” over culture — and, more than this, a relativism about Earthly nature. It extends into the cosmos Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s (2009) concept of multinaturalism, an analytic he uses to describe interpretations of the world as made of creatures who all experience themselves as subjects (even “humans”), while also each summoning forth their own unique embodiment of “nature” (so, if for the Amer
indian cases he discusses, “jaguars see blood as manioc beer [and] vultures see maggots in rotting meat as grilled fish” [470] — seeing all “food”, in other words, as properly “cultural” — this encounter is clothed in different “natures” [jaguarness, vultureness][for a quick extraterrestrial analog, think of old Star Trek episodes in which even beings of pure light have “gender” and “morality”]). Extraterrestrial relativism as multinaturalism would track how different organisms summon different “natures” even as they share the enterprise of being “alive”. But extraterrestrial relativism also has points of difference from Viveiros de Castro’s experiential and phenomenological formulation of the multinatural. In some instantiations, extraterrestrial relativism is a non-anthropocentric relativism in which humans (as well as other creatures, and, at its limits, life itself) may be entirely absent. Such a relativism may evaporate residues of “culture” (as a contingent, symbolic system) that still reside in the very framing of relativism, forcing us not only to speak of comparisons that might be undertaken relative to different natures, but also, more expansively, to think about whether comparison might always require an agent to enact it and, if so, whether the limits of the concept of agency might then be coextensive with the limits of comparison itself.

  In what follows, I develop the concept of extraterrestrial relativism by leaping off from ethnographic work I conducted among astrobiologists — scientists who consider Earthly extremophiles as analogs, standins, for possible extraterrestrial life. Along the way, I suggest that extraterrestrial relativism be brought into conversation not only with multinaturalism, but also with a newly inaugurated conversation on “comparative relativism”.

  After After Nature

  Toward the end of the twentieth century, Marilyn Strathern suggested that more and more people in the contemporary world were living “after nature”, living simultaneously in pursuit of “natural” foundations for social relations as well as “post-nature”, in a time when it had become clear that “nature” — particularly the biological — was a social category and one ever more amenable to cultural transformation. Following Strathern’s cue, many anthropologists in the 1990s and early 2000s studied zones of cultural practice in which such conceptions of “nature” were in the making, from new reproductive technologies, to genetic engineering, to cloning. Indeed, my own Silicon Second Nature (2000), an ethnography of “Artificial Life”, a field devoted to the computer modeling of living systems, concluded that Artificial Life — and particularly its key method, simulation — hinted at an undoing of the self-evidence of “life itself” as a natural kind, not least because nature itself had become multiple.

  But “extreme nature” may be the new “after nature”. Such certainly seemed plausible to me when I turned my attention from Artificial Life science to examine the work of biologists studying microbes living at deepsea hydrothermal vents, at extremes of temperature and pressure (Helmreich 2009). Like Artificial Life scientists, these researchers were interested in stretching their concepts of living systems. Extremophiles like vent thermophiles (heat-lovers) pressed against the boundaries of what microbiologists believed living things could enact and endure. As Carl Wirsen, a microbiologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, told me in an interview in 2001, one might sensibly use vent microbes to think about the question: “What are the limits of life?” Wirsen’s colleague, Andreas Teske, added that, “microbes have shown us many alternatives for living”. And Mitch Sogin, a microbiologist at the neighboring Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, told me that many of his colleagues believed that marine extremophiles, like those at vents, might provide possible threads back to aboriginal life forms on Earth, which may themselves have been extremophilic microbes. As head of an astrobiology research group at the Marine Biological Lab, Sogin also suggested that such microbes might be pointers to life on other worlds, in other ecologies, analogs for extraterrestrial life. NASA’s LEXEN (Life in Extreme Environments) project, I learned, was interested in precisely this question. The limits of life, the boundaries of vitality, may yet be unknown. Scientists are still chasing “after nature”, but are now doing so by looking to the stars, for yet-to-be-characterised conditions, yet-to-be-known “extremes” relative to which life might be able to survive.

  Extremophilic Relativism

  I learned much more about such framings of extremophiles at a 2005 workshop on astrobiology I attended at the Marine Biology Laboratory. One intriguing presentation came from Lynn Rothschild, an astrobiologist from NASA who studies halophiles, salt-loving microbes that can survive extreme desiccation in suspended animation between waterings. With bacteriologist Rocco Mancinelli, she had in 1994 helped design an experiment for the European Space Agency in which halophiles were exposed to the extreme cold and unfiltered solar radiation of space. During a stint on a recoverable satellite these microbes survived for two weeks, a result that Rothschild argued supported the possibility that living things could be transited to Earth from such sites as Mars, if indeed Mars sports such life. That capacity could support the possibility that life originated on Mars and was ferried to Earth on, say, a meteorite. In this experiment, extremophiles become proxy aliens. The extreme and the extraterrestrial glide rhetorically into one another.

  While the word extremophile has usually been taken to refer to microbial life forms, Rothschild pointed out that the term can apply to metazoans as well, and, more, that “extremophily” is a relative term. Humans might be imagined as aerophiles — air-lovers: an extreme from the vantage point of anaerobes. The “extreme”, here, functions as a relativist rather than totalising operator. What this accomplishes is attention to environment; the ends of this kind of biology are about ecological context (itself in constant readjustment). The effect for many scientists in this discussion is further to displace humans as reference points for accounts of evolution and to place the whole conversation in a more cosmic setting (contrast Farman, this issue, on Singularitarians’ vision of the universe as reaching toward a self-consciousness that has humans as a stop along the way; for Singularitarians a non-relativist “intelligence” displaces “life” as the object about which a cosmic account must be sought). The extreme — that which is outermost from any centre or which is opposed to the moderate (OED) — shades into extraterrestrial — that which exists or originates outside Earth. The fusion of extreme and extraterrestrial is also enabled by the scale at which each category operates — a scale that has zooming-out as its signature property and that has comparison built into it. The extreme and the extraterrestrial are also both relational categories, and perhaps relativist, at least in the canonical sense.

  Comparative Relativisms

  Such an articulation suggests extraterrestrial relativism as a possible data point for discussions of what social science and humanities scholars at a September 2009 meeting at the IT University of Copenhagen termed “comparative relativism” (Jensen et al. 2011). While “comparative relativism” is at first glance an oxymoron (how can relativism, the character of which is predicated on incommensurability, be a stage for comparison?), the question asked by the term becomes clearer if we think about the many uses and flavours of relativist claims. As the Copenhagen conveners put it:

  Comparative relativism is understood by some to imply that relativism comes in various kinds and that these have multiple uses, functions, and effects, varying widely in different personal, historical, and institutional contexts; moreover, that those contexts can be compared and contrasted to good purpose. […] On the other hand, comparative relativism is taken by other[s] to imply and encourage a ‘comparison of comparisons’, in order to relativise what different peoples — say, Western academics and Amerindian shamans — compare things ‘for’ (Jensen et al. 2011).

  In other words, comparative relativism can ask both what knowledge or truth is being imagined relative to and whether comparison always operates in the “same” way — or with the same grounds or purposes (e.g. shoring up the ca
tegories of culture, nature, morality) wherever we find it.

  For extraterrestrial relativism, knowledge or truth about “life” (or even its “conditions”) is imagined as relative to a “nature” whose full character we do not yet know, whose outlines may lead us toward comparisons we cannot predict. Take as a recent manifestation the announcement, in December 2010, by geomicrobiologist Felisa Wolfe-Simon, of the possibility that living systems might use arsenic in place of phosphorous in the making of DNA. Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues isolated a microbe from California’s Mono Lake and cultivated a version in a lab that they believed could live without phosphorus. Wolfe-Simon put the significance of the finding this way: “This is a microbe that has solved the problem of how to live in a different way”. In her reflections on the meaning of her result, she suggested that she was “cracking open the door and finding that what we think are fixed constants of life are not” (quoted in Overbye 2010).

  Such undoings of fixity, such agnosticisms about the ultimate anchors for life, may themselves go to extremes of meta-relativism. Physicists Alejandro Jenkins and Gilad Perez have argued in Scientific American that “Multiple other universes — each with its own laws of physics — may have emerged from the same primordial vacuum that gave rise to ours”, and “may contain intricate structures and perhaps even some forms of life”, which suggests that the cosmos as we know it may not be the only one hospitable to life (2010: 42). Such a framing offers a contrast with many discussions of human spacefaring, which pitch space as inhospitable to life as we know it. But astrobiological and astrophysical framings of space as hospitable resonate with some features of multinaturalism. Viveiros de Castro draws on his ethnographic work in Amazonia to suggest a way of apprehending the world that is not multicultural — “founded on the mutual implication of the unity of nature and the plurality of cultures” — but rather multinatural, supposing “a spiritual unity and a corporeal diversity” (1998: 470). For extraterrestrial relativism, a “spiritual unity” can be discerned in scientific faith in the universality of “life” as a category (which may itself be indicative of a wider epistemological moment in which the off-worldly has become a taken-for-granted point of reference. If in Vivieros de Castro’s accounting, “jaguars see blood as manioc beer” where human people see blood as blood (as their natural, vital fluid), in an extremophilic relativist accounting, anaerobes may experience, say, air as a toxic pollutant created by plant life, where aerophiles experience it as a nurturing surround.