Futures and Fictions Page 14

  Of course, such relativism may in some instantiations actually underwrite a deep universalism, even absolutism. Witness in Jenkins and Perez’s consideration of a multiverse a continued faith in “laws of physics” and “forms of life”. Such trans-universe vitalism in view, it is not surprising that the Vatican has lately taken a keen interest in astrobiology (Pontifical Academy of Sciences 2009). For Vatican thinkers at a November 2009 meeting on astrobiology, the question was not whether God could create life beyond Earth or beyond Earth-like environments — of course He could — but whether humans might learn more about the Creation from knowing about such zones.

  But extraterrestrial relativism may also be a tool for more thoroughgoing reframings of life on Earth. Another rhetorical move that an extraterrestrial relativism permits is a folding-back toward rethinking Earth “itself” (a theme iterated by Battaglia and by Valentine). Such bending-backs to think about alternative Earths in these days of environmental crisis tend, however, to unwind relativistic frames, asking humans to think about the uninhabitable Earths that may result from continued human depredation of the planet. In this way, extraterrestrial relativism is recuperated into more normative claims about life on Earth.

  Extraterrestrial Earths

  At the 2005 meeting on Astrobiology at Woods Hole, Philip Crane, who studies exosolar planets, described worlds that might support life as “other Earths”. The phrase flummoxed many participants, who protested that our Earth is the only one there is; “Earth-like planets” might be a better term, they offered. But the framing also suggested its negative image: reimaginings of Earth as other than it is — a kind of speculative extraterrestrial relativism, bent back to respin “Earth”. Interest in the extraterrestrial, after all, always comes with an attitude toward the terrestrial. Doom-and gloom Cold War visions had escape from Earth as a necessity for survival in an apocalyptic age in which humanity was considered to be teetering on the brink of nuclear self-immolation (and persists these days in commercial NewSpacers’ motivations for designing “exit strategies” for leaving a ruined Earth). More recent environmentalist attitudes have Earth as the only planet we have, one we must steward and love. The cautionary tales told in both narratives relativise Earth in the service of more absolute moralities.

  Let me make a partial inventory of what I call “extraterrestrial Earths”. I offer this historical list to point to the emergence of an extraterrestrial mode of thinking about the planet. After this detour, I return to the question of why an “extraterrestrial relativism” has come into articulation in the contemporary moment, what it might betoken, and how we might understand its limits.

  In 1969, Buckminster Fuller argued in Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth that the modern world was first connected by those he called the Great Pirates, those mavericks who in traversing the sea comprehended how the globe could be connected and created through the lines of their repeated routes between nations and empires. Using such practices as triangulation — the taking of bearings from two sites such that a third can be fixed — they filled the world with imaginary triangles, shapes that wedged the earth into segments that could be mapped to scale, and that could therefore allow these agents to scale up their own traveling enterprises. Fuller’s geometric and utopian vision of world history inspired his invention of the geodesic dome, a sphere constructed of triangles (though global Earth, of course, was also partially fashioned out of a more terrible, not unrelated, geometry called the triangle trade). Earth geometrised became an armature, a ship.

  The famous Apollo image of Earth from space smooths that territory into something called “the globe”. And for many viewers, the image of the Earth from space is not an image of Earth as ground, but an image of Earth as sea (famously so pronounced by Arthur C. Clarke: “How inappropriate to call this planet earth when it is quite clearly Ocean” [quoted in Lovelock 1990: 102]. This distant vision has been in the aid of a return to intimacy with the planet, what Donna Haraway calls a “yearning for the physical sensuousness of a wet and blue-green Earth” (1995: 174). Lifted above the ocean that Edmund Burke in 1757 named as the signature symbol of the sublime — that which overwhelms with terror and beauty — we embrace the blue planet as sensual home, as what atmospheric chemist James Lovelock called “Gaia”. Earth not undone, but redone as Ocean. But the ocean also undoes Earth, too — and not only because of the uncanniness of an ocean as at once of us and not of us, but more, because the ocean becomes a metaphor for outer space. The sea of space, the sea of stars, turns Earth into an island — This Island Earth, as the 1955 science-fiction film had it. But Earth is redone here, once more, for the idea of the island suggests other islands and turns the space between into a sea. Think only of the names of spaceships sent to Mars: Mariner, Viking. Here, astropoetics is astronautics. For scientists who believe, with physicist and astrobiologist Paul Davies, that life-as-we know-it may have originated as microbial life in an ancient Martian ocean and then been ferried to Earth on meteorites — the claim that Rothschild and Mancinelli sought, in part, to think through — the space between Earth and Mars becomes very much like a sea, with currents, eddies, pulls. Earth and Mars become islands in an archipelagic ecology, ocean worlds in a larger ocean. Space is not a “lifeless” sea in this imaginary (or, if it is, it is certainly not a space of calm — nor, even, perhaps, a “space”. These days, near-Earth space is more like “an environment”, or “ecology” [Olson 2010]).

  Mars and Earth have long been locked in relative comparison — Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, which suggested that one could read Earth’s atmosphere as an index of life, was first inspired by his meditation on how one might look for life on Mars by seeking spectrographic traces of organically produced compounds. These days, scientists looking for life on Mars scout for microbes analogous to those archaebacteria on Earth that live in such sites as deep-sea hydrothermal vents. That project has the ricochet effect of making portions of Earth into analogs for other worlds: turning parts of the Utah desert into Mars, parts of the Arctic into Jupiter’s moon, Europa. Submerged in the sea of space, Earth acquires extraterrestrial characteristics. It becomes not only one planet among others, but also a planet that points to and even contains its others. Part-Martian Earth gathers to itself extraterrestrial relatives. An ocean world floating in a more capacious ocean turns Earth not into an ark, perhaps, but into a submarine, whose distinction from its outside is a differential, not an absolute. Not Buckminster Fuller’s Spaceship Earth, but Submersible Gaia.

  And Gaia is resilient. Less than an avatar of harmony, it is a cybernetic system, and it can do without humanity. This genre of extraterrestrial relativism does not care about humans. But humanity cannot do without a narrative about Earth, even a transformed one. In her dissertation on American astronautics, “American Extreme”, Valerie Olson writes that

  Contemporary American ecologists imagine the future of life on Earth in astronautical terms as a kind of ‘return’ to an original planet, such as ex-NASA contractor James Lovelock’s ‘Gaia’, or as an arrival to an utterly hostile one, such as Peter Ward’s vengeful ‘Medea’. There is also Bill McKibben’s ‘Eaarth’, the title of his book predicting the human need to adjust to the permanent transformation of our planet. The book was released with jacket image featuring a small whole Earth rising — or setting — behind a giant black ‘X’ (2010: 9).

  Recursively operated extraterrestrial relativism becomes a survival strategy, one that returns to humanity as the arbiter and measure of Earthly health. In this sense, this species of extraterrestrial relativism may have something in common with what Clifford Geertz (1984) described as “anti-anti-relativism” — not a double-negatived position that simply snaps back to relativism fullstop, but rather a position that indexes a commitment to understanding how conditions relative to which a phenomenon is to be understood are themselves arrived at.

  The Objective Conditions of Extraterrestriality

  Why is this materialising now, this extraterrestrial imagina
tion? Olson writes that, for today’s science, the “extreme” has come to be “regarded as a vital site (a place or condition) in which essential truths and proofs emerge”, and that, more broadly, in American popular culture, the extreme is now used “to signify ‘ultimate’ generative, liberatory, alternative, and transcendental states of being; there are extreme sports, extreme foods, and extreme makeovers” (2010: 7). For Olson, the extreme is bound up with particularly American stories about limits, frontiers — and in that sense is not a relativist frame at all, but rather an argument for continued exploration in a neo-colonial key.

  Sociologist Melinda Cooper suggests that life’s newfound extraterrestrial elasticity is not only a function of work in the biosciences, but is also a function of capitalism:

  the notion of life itself is undergoing a dramatic destandardisation such that the life sciences are increasingly looking to the extremes rather than the norms of biological existence. Importantly, these new ways of theorising life are never far removed from a concern with new ways of mobilising life as a technological resource (2008: 32).

  Cooper argues that attention to extreme life forms is coincident with a capitalism anticipating and seeking to overcome its own ecological limits. In the wake of the Club of Rome’s “Limits to Growth” report of 1972, which predicted environmental collapse if world industry and population continued to grow exponentially, capitalists began looking out for new modes of capital accumulation. Rejecting the geochemical finitude of Earth as the last word on limits, Reagan-era futurologists chided the Club of Rome for a failure of imagination for not anticipating the promise of biotechnology. Cooper detects in contemporary interest in extreme life forms — in researches into how biological systems continually redefine the limits of life — raw ideological material for fresh kinds of capital that burrow into the generativity of living things to create new fantasies of endless frontiers of surplus. That framing suggests that the “extreme” or “limit” may be, like the “mania” that Emily Martin (2009) finds valorised in popular culture and psychology, a sign not of biology unbound, but of its binding toward a political economic purpose (in this context, the appearance of the extreme in high-art worlds may also be a symptom, as with Eduardo Kac and Avital Ronell’s 2008 bioart book, Life Extreme).

  But I want to offer another reading. For many of the scientists I know, the “extreme” is not always about testing humans and their institutions — as in Olson’s excellent ethnography in which this is very much the case for her astronaut interlocutors — but is rather about relativising biology, and, by extension, “nature”. This is not the “anthropomorphised cosmos” (127) Olson found in her research, but rather a kind of nonhuman — even post-human — relativism. It may intersect with the recent philosophy and art movement called “speculative realism”, which seeks to produce philosophies and aesthetic objects that do not privilege or orient toward the human (Brassier 2007).

  Still, yet another folding-back seems necessary to this analysis. Advocates of privatised space travel, of asteroids as destinations for exploration, and Singularitarians often conjure their visions of extreme futures with respect to very human concerns. In some cases, such people speak from addresses of class and race privilege, and, in that sense, their extraterrestrial relativism represents not just a humanist point of departure, but an elite vanguardist one. Of course, even in less humanly oriented extraterrestrial relativisms — human locations and histories are ever-present. As indeed they are in speculative realism, which, for all its anti-humanism, actually posits a particular kind of nature (machinic, unyielding, sublime), and therefore, as Gayatri Spivak (1988) might have it, hosts within it invisible authors who deny their authorising and authoritative presence. Karen Barad’s “agential realism” (2007), which posits that reality always manifests as such — comes to matter — with respect to an observing and participating agent, offers another useful query for speculative realism.

  And for comparative relativism. The various flavors of extraterrestrial relativisms I have discussed here exist at the uneasy interface of speculative realism and agential realism, with “reality” at once abstracted away from human and organismic concerns and never quite achieving escape velocity. One might add to Casper Bruun Jensen et al’s catalog of kinds of comparative relativism speculative relativism and agential relativism. In the hybrid of those two that is extraterrestrial relativism, the very nature of nature — as a space of the real, as a space of/for agency — may be becoming unmoored, something like the aquatic cyborg bodies in the novel Starfish with which I opened, working at the limits of categories and phenomena.

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