Shantih shantih shantih

If juxtaposing the two authors’ work, T S Elliot’s The Waste Land and P D James’ The Children of Men, the former is a retained version of the latter. True to Hagakure, putting ten words into one, Elliot’s poem would have, if unpacked, looked very much like James’ drama about humanity’s end of days by mass infertility. This barren wasteland, set in England 2021, twenty-five years after the last child was born, depicts a society set on short-term goals and longing for golden ages past. Elliot himself could even have played the main character, Oxford don Theo Fallon, who privileged, educated and detached eventually set roots, heart and hope in the wasteland.

While Elliot wrote The Waste Land following World War 1, the environmental critique continued, even after the trenches had been covered over and the rains had washed the toxics from the land. That wasteland is still beneath us but also lies up ahead. As a reading of the Anthropocene, The Waste Land is not an ode to the past, but an attempt to cope continuously with things which once lost are irretrievable.

He who was living is now dead

We who were living are now dying

With a little patience

Elliot struggled to make real what seemed unreal; the Falling Towers (Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna, London).

James’ The Children of Men play on the fall of the civilization through the changed space of society. While the authorities plan to concentrate populations, power and produce to the cities, under the administration of the “Warden of England” (isn’t that a great title?), many react by fleeing to the woods, going rouge with face-paintings and torches, or stockpiling food. Theo did the same except his home was filled with literature, the reality of the past as a cushion against the unreality of the future (in fifty years time without any humans in it). The tragedy here is not the range of imagined horrors to come but the limitations imposed by real horrors ever-present:

She (Julian) and Miriam were in the back drowning and there was nothing he could do to help. Sweat broke out on his forehead and, clenching his wet palms, he forced his eyes from the horror of the lake and looked up at the sky, wrenching his mind from imagined horror back to the horror of normality. The sun was pale and round as a full moon but blazing with light in its aureole of mist, the high boughs of the trees black against its dazzle. He closed his eyes and waited. The horror passed and he was able to look down again at the surface of the lake.

How to explain why Theo, Julian and Miriam are better off at the lake-side than on the lake-bottom when all will be over for humanity in a foreseeable future? More than any societal upheaval, class of civilisations or economic systems, the end of history becomes a psychological dilemma by the simple reason that humans no longer can reproduce. Theo Fallon perhaps more than anyone is pissed at how things turned out. As a historian, the death of theological time takes the fun out of any history, what is in indeed the point? The psalm rings true, “You return man to dust and say, ‘Return, O children of man! (King James Bible, 90:3)’ but none is there to say the words.

The environmental narrative comes out even stronger in the movie adaptation Children of Men (2006) and has been analysed in relation to climate change repeatedly, most recently by Dougald Hine. The movie’s story is one about faith and change. Faith bring us to places, chance can bring us together in those places. By chance, hope is lost, and through lingering faith hope can be regained, if by chance the occasion presents itself. Through a similar line of reasoning, the environmental critic Rob Nixon said that “humans in the Anthropocene do not need hope but faith” (Tales From Planet Earth, Stockholm 2014).

With The Waste Land putting ten words into one, The Children of Men added so much more to a narrative that cannot be described only as an environmental critique. It is about a Christian worldviews, of self-righteous lamentations and the confusion both of having no children and growing up as lonely children, in lonely houses. The book digress to deliver these points and does it equally artfully and ordinarily than both the poem and the movie adaptation (and make no mistake, I love that movie to death). The Anthropocene is at the edges of the pages, hidden in the leaves of the forests through which Theo and the last of the humans are passing. While my 2016 is, like James’ 2021, a time of mass extinction, the warning bells are primarily the death of other species, not ours. The children of men is not yet dead, but already is returning to dust many of its companion species.

The Children of Men and The Waste Land are artful because they never answer the question why? Why is it that we cannot make babies anymore? Why is the world turned barren? And why would the coming of Alpha make right what by the Omega, the end of time, had gone astray?

Carl looked down at the child with his dying eyes and spoke his Nunc Dimittis. “So it begins again.” Theo thought: It begins again, with jealousy, with treachery, with violence, with murder, with this ring on my finger.

‘Why’ is the salient but less important aspect of The Children of Men. The ending parallell to the Anthropocene and ‘why’ the climate is changing challenge us to think of not only what things are ending, but what could be there at the beginning. How would we begin to formulate what the world should be like if we steer clear of extinction? What would be different about life if we learned how to die?

We will pay, so it goes

I found Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 and Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon in one of my engineer’s reading list on “Books that I found hard to put down“. Perhaps a radical reading of the ANT-dictum “follow the actors”, I decided to pile through both what these engineers did and what they read (as a literature critic, philosopher and friend of mine pointed out, they are worth reading anyhow).

To the question “What are you writing about”, Vonnegut’s reply was always “Dresden”, but in Slaughterhouse 5 this climatic event come and go in passing. The time travelling of the main character, Billy Pilgrim, contributes to the impact of the mass bombing on the mood of the story. Dresden always will happen, is happening and has happened. And the extermination of its population by fire bombs is a necessity in the war, the cause, the peace. “So it goes”.

The insanity surrounding Slaughterhouse 5 is pared with the curiosity and puzzlement of Pilgrim, always one step behind or, as we learn later, ahead.  He awaits and faces his death with calm, having found dimensions of life that to most are in the realm of the metaphysical.

Koestler’s main character Rubashov too finds himself time travelling. Locked in his cell, in contemplations as intermissions from the interrogations lead by his former comrades of the Russian revolution. Rubashov, the former of hero of USSR ends his life accused of counter-revolutionary plotting against No 1, The Party and the People.

The fate of Rubashov and his comrades are that of the children being eaten by their own revolution; Jacobins and Robespierres wishing for nothing but “to sleep” and perhaps the vindication of posterity.

In conversation between Ivanov and Rubashov, the different worldviews of Darkness at Noon collide. Moralism and cynicism. As opposed to other revolutionaries, who were moralist dilettantes acting in good faith, we [USSR] for the first time are consequent, Ivanov remarked. Rubashov retorts with what I believe is also the summary of Koestler’s argument,

“So consequent; that in the interests of a just distribution of land we deliberately let die of starvation about five million farmers and their families in one year. So consequent were we in the liberation of human beings from the shackles of industrial exploitation that we sent about ten million people to do forced labour in the Arctic regions and the jungles of the East, under conditions similar to those of antique galley slaves. So consequent that, to settle a difference of opinion, we know only one argument: death, whether it is a matter of submarines, manure, or the party line to be followed in Indo-China. Our engineers work with the constant knowledge that an error in calculation may take them to prison or the scaffold; the higher officials in our administration ruin and destroy their subordinates, because they know that they will be held responsible for the slightest slip and be destroyed themselves; our poets settle discussions on questions of style by denunciations to the Secret Police, because the expressionists consider the naturalistic style counter-revolutionary, and vice versa. Acting consequentially in the interests of the coming generations, we have laid such terrible privations on the present one that its average length of life is shortened by a quarter. In order to defend the existence of the country, we have to take exceptional measures and make transition-stage laws, which are in every point contrary to the aims of the Revolution. The people’s standard of life is lower than it was before the Revolution; the labour conditions are harder, the discipline is more inhuman, the piece-work drudgery worse than in colonial countries with native coolies; we have lowered the age limit for capital punishment down to twelve years; our sexual laws are more narrow-minded than those of England, our leader-worship more Byzantine than that of the reactionary dictatorships. Our Press and our schools cultivate Chauvinism, militarism, dogmatism, conformism and ignorance. The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been. We have built up the most gigantic police apparatus, with informers made a national Institution, and with the most refined scientific system of physical and mental torture. We whip the groaning masses of the country towards a theoretical future happiness, which only we can see. For the energies of this generation are exhausted; they were spent in the Revolution; for this generation is bled white and there is nothing left of it but a moaning, numbed, apathetic lump of sacrificial flesh. … Those are the consequences of our consequentialness. You called it vivisection morality. To me it sometimes seems as though the experimenters had torn the skin off the victim and left it standing with bared tissues, muscles and nerves. …”

The lesson to social causes are to question to means through which the ends are envisioned. To look through the barrel of a gun as were it telescope for gazing into the dreamy futures. What are the tools with which the future is crafted?

What I am struck by is how little Rubashov’s analysis is about Marxism and focuses more on how the former revolutionarydiscovers and contemplates humanism. In Marxist theory the labour by which people are involved in the revolution would be preferable or not based on what it did to the people involved. Engel once said that the tools we use change how we conceive of the world, a person wielding a hammer think more of the world in terms of spikes. This lead to Vygotskian psychology and pedagogy where learning is considered to be social, explicit and tool-oriented. By the same reasoning, although the end would justify the means, the means, i.e. the tools used, would in turn then change the people involved in it, hence the ends met. The means mean the end.

But ultimately Koestler does not search for the alternatives to blind faith in ideas, rather he paints the tragedy of conflicting ideals, drawn to their logical conclusion. The death of Ivanov and Rubashov are abstractions and belong, like the rest of their generation who were locked away somewhere in USSR, belong to the Party. The Party stake out the logic of history, and its enemies are anachronisms to be wiped out, epistemological mistakes corrected by their ontological expulsion, execution after having committed their erroneous trespassing from the revolution.

Yes Rubashov time travels like Pilgrim, but these are not places to also exist in, but memories to be revisited, to be reassessed and recognised as parts in his own undoing. “I will pay”. In the end, Rubashov’s life is inextricably linked to the totalitarian nightmare from which he cannot wake up, and not worth reliving,. If Rubashov could live again he would be an astronomer.

Both Vonnegut and Koestler believe in the synchronicity in ethics. There is no necessity for which humanism could be done away with, trampled down in the mud for a path of least resistance. There is so much to their respective universes that their characters know so little about. What is frightening is the degree by which the adversaries seek to stamp out uncertainties. “Dresden had to be bombed, you know that right?”, “The alternative to the way laid out by the Party is civil war, you know that right?” The Neanderthals would never understand how a conversation about ginniepigs could end up anywhere.

Getting in and out of Clancy-Land

For some reason, reading Tom Clancy’s works is a guilty pleasure. The technolingo, the self-serving role of male protagonists in a machine-world, and yes the taken-for-granted gratefulness from the rest of the world for intelligence agencies saving the day to the benefit of all the free world.

Having just finished Red October (Russian: Красный Oктябрь, “Krasniy Oktyabr”), I plan to keep reading until I am done with “The Cardinal of the Kreml”. The reason for going about this reading is because Tom Clancy knew his homework, which indirectly is also my homework. The critics aside, Clancy talked to A LOT OF PEOPLE about the topics on which he wrote, which made for good writing in the end. One of these people were Christer Larsson who worked with the Space Media Network, a Swedish subsidiary newspaper conducting investigative journalism using satellite observation.

Image excerpts from “The Cardinal of the Kremlin” inspired by Larsson’s investigative journalism using satellite observation

Larsson was awarded The Swedish Grand Prize for Journalism 1986 due to his work on satellite journalism, among them exposing the Chernobyl Disaster earlier the same year. Clancy took interest in this and called up Larsson to discuss one of his new book ideas, a Soviet equivalent to the Reagan “Strategic Defence Initiative” (The Star Wars). Once Clancy had described his book theme, Larsson responded, “the thing is Tom, the Soviets are doing it for real”.

The original image has been reworked to include some dramaturgical components, like the KGB-barracks which were not on site in the original data-satellite image.

The Cardinal in the Kremlin is not just another book about the agent Jack Ryan, but it is also about the continued collaboration between Larsson and Clancy on the use of satellites in the Cold War surveillance. In this respect satellite surveillance influences fiction and the linkage from fiction back to fact is what is also interesting here as well. My ending question in this reading so far is what became of the peaceful use of satellites once the Die Mauer had fallen, to what degree are the same or similar arguments found in environmental agendas for satellites in the post-Cold War world that satellite operators had to adjust their artifacts to?

The Martian Chronicles

After finishing Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles there is a sense of loss. With Earth gone to cinders, me like most actors of the story felt at a loss with what to do next. One of the last desperate message to the colonisers were “Come home. Come home.”

Bradbury, apart from Asimov and others writing epochal writings on the SciFi-future for humanity in space, leaves you with a more realistic, humble and depressing prospect: loneliness. While the death of Earth is dramatic there are several chapters covering the long silence and loss of direction as humans seek to return to Earth for, yes for what? To share the nuclear fallout?

The answer is for the colonisers to become something else. They are no more Earthlings, they are Martians. Having killed off most other species previously inhabiting Mars, the few surviving humans must painstakingly return life to a world that itself is indifferent to their existence.

Though set in outer space, Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles brings back the focus on problems like myopic geopolitics, technofixes and fear of the other as issues that are unlikely to go away with the move to outer space. Indeed, they are not even outsourced but aggravated as it too become an arena for unequal distribution and power struggles among nations stuck on Earth. This Bradbury succinctly summarised as Mars being colonised primarily by Americans seeking that final frontier and ironically also the African-Americans seeking refuge from that very same apartheid-society.

A good read for anyone who for a while wish to venture beyond our own planet only to look back on it from far away and then with a different view.

Past or Post Human?

There is something about being posthuman that appeals to me, who would not want to go beyond previous categories of “The Human”? But would the term “posthuman” makes sense 5-10 years from now? “Posthuman…”, the future posthumanist reflects, “…that is such a thing of the past.” But then again, this is not the point of departure for posthumanist discourses today – the term may well serve fruitful discussions where we are at the moment, to which I now turn.

The Norrköping Workshop on Posthumanities 15-16 October brought people and thoughts together from various strands of the humanities, material, environmental, posthuman. The point here is not the different points of departure but the juncture at which we met, which was and still is how to engage with humans in a rapidly changing environment of which we are both co-causing and co-becoming with.

Planning non-anthropocentric cities

Jonathan Metzger sough to analyse the co-becoming of humans in cities, and raised here the issue of safeguarding against irony (remaining in theory) but to get hands dirty with sincerity (put ideas into a practice).

Regardless of if theory is ironic or not, what is a study of environment meant to achieve, except greater analytical clarity of causality? Is there ethics in environment? Metzger retorted, paraphrasing Martin Luther King Jr.’Arc of the moral universe’ “[thus far] it does not appear as the arc of the universe has bent toward justice”. The assumption that life should keep going for its own stake (if we do away with the self-worth of Anthropocentrism) seem a strategic essentialism. Be that human rights, value-systems, nations, humanism…

Jonathan Metzger: What we can gain is the capacity to ‘fail better’

Tim Le Cain: Well Jonathan, we risk to ‘fail catastrophically’, but we must still act and envision alternatives to the modernist world

Must we be critical to any formulation about nature as simply “there”? At one of his Gifford lectures, Bruno Latour had begged for an ecological war, referring to the need to see that evocations of nature are political, and should thereofre be politicized. The Norrköping symposium had the spectre of Latour hanging over it, offering hybridity and politics of things as an escape of exceptionalist humanity. Young men march off to fight old men’s war, and never fight old battles (Science wars?) to win new ones ((The Anthropocene?). A caveat, according to Ian Hacking, ‘war’ is best kept far away from academic debate and discourse as it has absolutely no parallell to the real thing, which is what we really should be worried about.

Remotely distant

When getting to the history of remote sensing satellites, the immediate question was: “What is remote about it?” ‘Remote sensing’ is perhaps an oxymoron, how can a thing be sensed at a distance? The posthumanistic approach would be to ground sensing in tacit practices and components, the materials and equipment, the satellite payload, where it came from and how it eventually got into space, along with the areas for downlinking.

In hindsight, I think this approach might be close to what Armin Reller and Jan Zalasiewicz have elaborated as technostratigraphy, asking three things of a thing:

1. Of what materials is a thing made?
2. Where does these materials come from?
3. What are the politics (re)assembling these materials at a specific points in time into a thing?

In short, what human practices and powers bring metals from the ground into polar-orbit in space?

Matters of Culture

Being part of Tim Le Cains upcoming work on material history (and new materialism), not too much should be given away beforehand. Except this: the work was first planned to bridge theory and empirical studies. However, the theory-part outgrew its limits and eventually became the piece in its entirety, an irony of wich Le Cain is all-to-aware of in this critique of empiricism.

What I found thought-provoking was the supposed Anthropocentrism of SCOT, namely the assumption that artefacts (technology) are distinct from culture, which new materialism challenges. Only seeing society as shaping technology, and not the other way around, is to operate at levels of abstraction (and determinism) that obscures as much as reveals. How would the cultural turn define history?

society = people without things

– Tim Le Cain on The Cultural Turn

Le Cain sees the goal of neo-materialism as an attempt “to escape the dangerous delusion that humans chart our course alone, limited only by our imagination and our will to triumph….[neither is it] to find the decline of the Roman Empire in a lead pipe or the kingdom lost for want of a horse.”

Life in Transaction

Although useful for future work, some of the most thought-provoking things were raised by Owain Jones, starting out with his loathing for historical novels.

 Humans were different things before. I do not believe in historical novels, those were almost like alien creatures – Owain Jones

 If things are truly this contingent in the human constituancy, what is continuous and worth progressing? The new ideas Owain outlined are feminism and ecologism for developing politics of degrowth, representational rights and dialogue. This is not to say that feminism is more dialogical than the masculine (which could also be contingent in history) but that feminism at this stage calls for dialogue on what is relevant within human societies at present.

My reaction to this is how you build momentum (assuming that momentum requires progression along a trajectory) if so much of past humans are alien (different from ‘us’) and also that the political movements on one hand pursues equity within the human species, the other without it.

Roadmap towards posthumanities

Environment is the game changer – we must work with materiality

Think pragmatically about Environment – keep doing the humanities but with other than the human condition

Matter is active and self-productive – humans ‘become’, rather than ‘is’, products of a material world

Start simple – stop talking so much about humans

There is so much more that could be said about the Norrköping workshop, Martin Hultman’s “Flow of WELGAS” and Jennie Olofsson’s illustration of how ‘technological illiteracy’ leads to e-waste. I hope to have summed up some of their merits in the roadmap. As for writing a technostratigraphy of remote sensing satellites, it would do well to learn from the challenges of tracing a technology when this runs up against the practices of reassembly and disassembly (how do you track e-waste that upon recycling is broken down into individual metals and removed from public view by corporate regulations?).

From Paris With Love

At a parisian coffee table, I realise my Scandinavian habits about dairy products (in this case access to milk) had not been anticipated by french hosts. “Here”, Jim Fleming hands me one of his bags of powder-cream, “I always bring these when I go abroad”. Jim Fleming is a frequent friend and visitor of Scandinavia.

Paris was the venue for Sebastian Grevsmuhl’s conference on “Global Environmental Images”. Apart from my interest in remote sensing satellites, the general question asked was:

What technologies and imageries are involved when making environment ‘global’?

Mass media is one part of the equation. Finis Dunaway presented work from his upcoming book ‘Seeing Green’ where late 20th century media is full of corporate funding with a serious influence over how environmental issues are appropriated. Although the source material is a bit US-centric, it adds to studies of image meaning a material ground which I found compelling. Rather than just discussing aesthetics and cultural meanings of an image, it does matter that advertising firms had a clear role and mission in framing environment to be a question of individual responsibility and consumption, the clever combination of therapy and empowerment, instead of getting at structural problems more at the heart of environmental degradation.

The story of the environmentalism in media is then also the emotional history of capitalism, that while companies may cause problems we can solve it by populating the market with responsible consumers. Together these add up to a clever combination of therapy and empowerment, faith and market-solutions.

While Dunaway concluded that this rhetorical use of environment is prevalent also at present, e.g. Al Gore and ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, Richard Hamblyn made a push for optimism, that we should continue to turn to images as these stirred society towards action. Although a challenge of climate change is its imperceptibility, Hamblyn suggests we may have crossed the point of peak pessimism and are now beginning to understand how environment can be appropriated in order for us to act upon its and our continued existence.

“Remember this, everything simple is false, everything that is complex is unusable.”

I got from Hamblyn (citing Latour) that seeings starts where nature ends, we can simply not speak of environment in ways that have not be articulated according to human concerns. And furhermore, the issue is not whether how historical imagery have impeded us from acting sustainably; the larger story is that images have power over actions, period. What then follows is to formulate imagery interpretations that deal with images of concern for humanity. Sort of long for saying:

If industrialists are going to have the last word, then why are we here talking about this stuff?

Martin Mahony followed up on the importance of images, citing Peter Galison “The Map has become the territory”. We cannot reduce imagery appropriation as good science being destroyed by bad politics (or companies), but it is also about ideas of objectivity and that how the world is understood is inseparable from how we are concerned with living in it.

I think this is the reason why studies in technological systems are relevant for understanding what environment predicament, the territory, is. But a caveat here is that it is a history not only of how things are constructed but reconstructed as new elements must be appropriated as work goes on.

The global is not just about images, but the discourse these are thought to invoke or influence. How to get at the discourse? Follow words used, and changing etymology? Nicolas Baya-Laffite exemplified this by showing thematic shifts in words and topics prevalent in climate negotiations, i.e. words, not images, of environment and the global. Baya-Laffite and his colleagues had used proxys, the bulletins handed out day-by-day at IPCC-meetings, which portrayed “in the corridor”-discussions of climate negotiations. In terms of source tendency, this is excellent although the end result would “just” be an exposé of the rise and demise of words, themes and problem areas. But this descriptive account of the IPCC does serve to frame more qualitative, and speculative, studies of environmental debates. Also, an image of these discursive trends underlines the aphorism “An image says more than a thousand words”, precisely because Baya-Laffite’s image does include a thousand words, or more, and also serve as reminder for us to study the production process through which images were assembled.

We come then to the issue of narratives, which is where Jim Fleming made a point about expanding discussions of the Anthropocene to previous time periods in order to understand what has influenced present technocultures. One such is sci-fi, e.g. the author Arthur C Clarke in his influence on space development and in particular the satellite Tiros. The enterprise is two-fold:

1. the impact of technological infrastructure for our conception of environment at present

2. the influences on technoculture which put the technological infrastructure there in the first place

Fleming’s final remark, that “all good sci-fi have a moral core” is a reminder for what makes narratives, scientific or popular, able to inform society. On this last point I am reminded that one of the most influential parts of Grevsmuhl’s conference were meetings with people yet unmentioned.

And it would have been great to have seen more of Paris or hang out with Anna who was hosting me in the northeast near Courneuve (also the setting for La Haine). Ofcourse, This is stuff for future writing and collaboration. In all, I left Paris with love and a belief that narrativizing technological systems is part of giving the Anthropocene its moral core.

When lost, any map will do

Hackett, Edward J., Amsterdanska, Olga., Lynch, Michael., Wajcman, Judy (eds). The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies of Science. MIT Press, 2008.

I began reading about environment and images in science and technology studies (STS) in journals that, at the time, seemed to exist at the fringes of my previously known reading-universe. To not begin my studies with more foundational work like the Handbook of Science and Technology Studies seems in hindsight then a bit paradoxical.

But it is with a sense of ‘coming home’ that I have now positioned myself in relation to these seminal readings. And besides, I did not know that there was a handbook to begin with. And there probably will never be a THE HANDBOOK for STS, considering the eclectic character of this field.

The Handbook outlines these relativistic and ethical approaches of STS that have become, ironically, its foundations. This (anti)-tradition is also one of its challenges. Previous categories of society, technology, science have required further division into more specific areas of inquiry: “what society, which technologies, whose science”? New topics, like ‘environment’, have become relevant, provoking questions of how technologies and information develop concepts of nature etc.

The Handbook does not claim to be representative for all bifurcations for STS. But it does give a glimpse of what has changed since last. The Handbook is a continual endeavour to gather the different directions of STS into comprehensive themes of a single publication. The first edition was finished 1977, requiring  six years from conception to publication. Subsequent editions have each added a year to the production phase (and the current, fourth, edition does not yet have an end date as of yet).

 
Practices, Peoples and Places

Steven Yearley’s study of environmental issues in STS developer a keener understanding of how networks have been involved in  mediating ‘environment’ as concept. It connects to a wider critique of the ‘natural’ in modern society (p. 921), this time relating to climate change, genetically modified organisms (GMO) and human nature in a changing environment.

Humans are conceived as both in and above nature. And similarly, ‘the natural’ is looked for in relation to, a supposed, pre-human condition (p. 932-8), which is indicative of problems in defining what is ‘natural’.

Yearley’s contribution to the Handbook pinpoints why environmental studies are relevant and also illustrates the eclectic character in which STS appropriates new theories (and theorists), blending the old with the new: Bruno Latour, Francis Fukuyama, Tim Ingold.

What´s Wrong With This Picture?

The making and meaning of images is also something that I grapple with when understanding mediation of environment. Burr and Dumit position such ambitions at the heart of the Social Studies of Scientific Imaging and Visualisation (SIV). Basically this is to ask: “What happens when images travel outside of their original settings into other contexts?” (p. 297). What makes images relevant to studies of science, nature and (indeed) identity are their social persuasiveness and power.

The implication and deployment are more important than the nature behind images. Power comes from playing on concepts of realism rather than what is actually seen in a location (like an astronaut over a cloudy Earth).This is hyper-realism and calls us as STS-scholars to historicize what can be seen in an image (p. 300), looking at sciences, technologies, bureaucracies, education systems. The method proposed by Burr and Dumit is to distinguish the image as:

1. production: image as artifact
2. engagement: image as scientific tool-
3. deployment: image as used in other contexts

As image presentation holds more power than image stories, scientific communities have begun debating picture manipulation, though I am not sure if the authors used by Burr and Dumit would claim that studies of causes behind images could be downplayed so as to only focus on their effects (p. 306 ; cf. Edwards, Bowker, Lahsen).

Eitherway, a start would be to begin with definitions of images as:

• ‘epistemic things’ (Rheinberger, 1997)
• ‘incomplete models’ (Schienke, 2003 ; Fortun and Fortun, 2005) and/or,
• ‘symbolic capital’ (Bourdieu, 1988)

I realise that as we expand the possible means by which environment and images may be interpreted and defined, we move from practice studies towards more complex studies of power. Olga Amsterdamska suggest that STS may become sensible, and susceptible, to issues of power distribution by following practices in relation to more permanent, large-scale, processes.

According to Henke and Gieryn, the action-structure dilemma is connected to places of knowledge production, of “who is speaking from where?” It is the characteristic of places to make ‘placeless’ knowledge claims that explains why certain facts travel and others do not (p. 353).

How ironic that as things become mobile, wireless, digital, they also cease to be the immutable mobiles that Latour so forcefully argued was relevant to movement of knowledge. If Henke and Gieryn are right so is Latour: as facts become mutable so too does the claim to truth crumble apart. Science, again, cling to place for authority and credibility (p. 364).

But this claim by Henke and Gieryn could also be read as leading to scientific provincialism, that neither origin nor movement of science are the most important consideration, but the ability of facts to be picked up by others, or used in the service of other networks.

Similar to my reading of this Handbook, science would be more like cherry-picking. Globalisation in this case contributes to different power-centres emerging, rather than old places retaining their authority we would see think tanks and more interest-driven research centres. Place might indeed become important (again) but perhaps then the importance of the state as a place for knowledge production diminishes.

If it isn´t broken (by you), don´t fix it

There is no easy way of summarising a handbook – let alone The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (I looked and they don´t have one). That said I will end with relating Johnson and Wetmores discussion of ethics with Evans and Collins on the emergence of technological and scientific expertise as both these are areas of further inquiry for my research on satellite projects.

Johnson and Wetmore outlines how origin and movements of knowledge concerns issues of ethics and responsibility of its makers. Although users and marketers are influential for the usage of a technology (cf. Pinch and Bijker, 1987 ; Oudshoorn, Nelly & Trevor Pinch, 2003), engineers would be ultimately to be held accountable for the appliance of their work (p. 567).

Responsibility to whom it belongs is a question of who holds expertise, which according Evans and Collins itself is a matter of community. Experts hold tacit, social and cultural knowledge which the community agrees is a requirement for membership (p. 610). Knowledge, following from expertise, is defined as socialisation within a community (p. 620).

Another solution regarding responsibility then is not to hold engineers accountable for innovations but for laymen to pass judgment on which knowledge they want to be guiding the future development of society. Evans and Collins witty solution is that as laymen are not members of the expert-community, neither are they tied by their obligations of agreement or socialisation. I suppose only further studies of laymen-expert communities could outline how such strategies have, could and should work out.

References

Bourdieu, Pierre. Homo Academicus, trans. Peter Collier, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988.

Bowker, Geoffrey C. Memory Practices in the Sciences, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.

Edwards, Paul. The World in a Machine: Computer Models, Data Networks, and Global Atmospheric Politics [Final title is A Vast Machine], Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010.

Fortun, Kim & Mike Fortun. “Scientific Imaginaries and Ethical Plateaus in Contemporary U.S. Toxicology,” in American Anthropologist 107 (1): 43–54, 2005.

Hackett, Edward J., and Society for Social Studies of Science. The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies. MIT Press, 2008.

Lahsen, Myanna. “Technocracy, Democracy and U.S. Climate Science Politics: The Need for Demarcations,” in Science, Technology & Human Values 30(1): 137–69, 2005.

Oudshoorn, N. & T. Pinch (eds). “How Users and Non-users Matter” in N. Oudshoorn & T. Pinch (eds), How Users Matter: The Co-Construction of Users and Technologies, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.

Bijker, Wiebe, E., Hughes, Thomas P., Pinch, Trevor (eds). The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology Published by The MIT Press. The MIT Press, 1987.

Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997.

Schienke, Erich W. “Who’s Mapping the Mappers? Ethnographic Research in the Production of Digital Cartography,” in M. Hård, A. Lösch, & D. Verdicchio (eds), Transforming Spaces: The Topological Turn in Technology Studies, Darmstadt, Germany: Online Conference Proceedings, 2003.

Roots & Routes

Heise, Ursula K. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet. The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford University Press, 2008.

 

Modern environmentalisms have cultivated our sense of place. But the challenges ahead also require connecting this to a new sense of belonging – a sense of planet. This is how I read the central argument of Ursula Heise’s ‘Sense of Place and Sense of Planet. The Environmental Imagination of the Global’ (2008).

Heise develops a cultural theory for addressing the effects of globalisation, the  imaging technologies which are its tools, and elaborates on risk theory. The outcome of these are to give directions towards what she labels as “eco-cosmopolitanism”. Eco-cosmopolitanism is environmentalism gone virtual, where wireless fibre is as much part of the fabric of nature as the air breathed where in your immediate locality. It is about allowing us to sense risk at different scales, from local to global, and to share that risk.

Risk theory, developed by Ulrich Beck (1992), is by Heise given more cultural and environmental connotations by referring to works on the human condition in emerging risk society. Of these I found Christa Wolf’s ‘Störfall’ and Gabriele Wohmann’s ‘Der Flötenton’ discussion of the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986 as interesting for exploring experiences and mixtures of risk, place and daily routines.

Taken together, Heise’s readings exemplify how globalisation exposes people to new types of risk, making it apparent that connections in our lives stretch far beyond the immediate concerns of the locale. Chemicals travel downstream; Chernobyl fallout drift across national borders; CO2 emissions changes climate everywhere (p. 150). What is the sense of place of the Maldives when its islands have been submerged under rising sea-levels?

Environmentalism is then, Heise argues, not one but several strands of thought, and has from its emergence in the 1960 been concerned with different types of risks. Most of its proponents have sought to uphold and protect the local against global forces imposing change, or deterritorialisation, upon it. Although many environmentalists have relied on imaging technology, like ‘Earthrise’ 1968 or ‘Blue Marble’ 1972, for rationale and sense of place, the movement have remained anti-technological.

Hostility towards deterritorialisation and technology is according to Heise misrepresentative of actual risks to environment and society. Risk is something that is formulated and adressed depending on what sense of place one have, or in the words of Simon Levin “the world looks very different, depending on the size of the window you are looking through” (p. 205).

When technology became digitized and data could be gathered from satellites and updated daily, the scales at which Earth was depicted made transition between global and local scales effortless, like in the software of Google Earth. Perhaps transcendence, or collapse, of scales is a better word than transition as this both implies:

1. a user,
2. a power relation,

But this is another topic than what Heise engages with.

The sources used by Heise relate not to technology itself but to the cultural employment of technology as an indicator of the emerging risk society. In the late 20th century, risk has shifted its emphasis from the local to the global scale. Of importance here is how cultural tropes shape the perception of previous risks when new, still larger, menaces may be of greater concern.

The dangers of nuclear disasters that reach across geographical, national, and social borders continue to reconfigure themselves in the cultural imagination, as the more recent image of an entire planet undergoing climate change superimposes itself on the older risk scenarios (p. 156).

Since new concerns shaped and reshape modern environmentalism, risk is a means for resituating place, relating it also to a sense of planet. Part of this involves harmonisising theories of sensing and belonging, like Heise’s, to the fieldwork (or activism) of environmental justice movements. It is by learning about the uneven effects of globalisation on communities and nature worldwide that new communities may be formed, and new meanings such as eco-cosmopolitanism, emerge. In this way, Heise sees globalisation not as a deterministic force for a risk society – but as enabler of new meanings, of risk sharing in the eco-cosmopolitan future.

Heise is clear about her assumptions: Communities are, in the words of Benedict Anderson, imagined (1983). And the sense of belonging, and risks, can be understood and read as cultural strategies of contemporary literature, like the appropriation of Chernobyl for weaving together daily life and risk in ‘Störnfall’ and ‘Der Flötenton’. Although these works support Heise’s theory and choice of sources to develop eco-cosmopolitanism, it would be interesting to see how “Sense of Place and Sense of Planet” for sake of argument could engage with historians like Oliver Zimmer (2003) whose critique of Anderson questions the ‘modernist’ idea of communities (e.g. nationalism) as imagined. Perhaps this is the topic for a future discussion (the next book!)?

What I find most provocative about Heise argument is the potential she sees in technology and globalisation. The cultural outcome of their development is still in the balance. Imaging technology are tools in the hands of users, or activists, who from their deterritorialised and destabilised nations may grow a new interconnected world. Roots, environmentalist sense of place, is useful for risks against local issues. But the risk society is a global world, where we must choose our routes, of what risks we are willing to share with others (p. 10, 147). That if your roots are cut, then choose your route all the more freely.

But one could stress more fervently that globalisation and technological development are not neutral instruments or by whom they are used. One such case is where national locality, and interests, control which patch of the internet you may use. Google Maps depict Krim as part of Ukraine vis-á-vis Russia depending on if your wi-fi connection is in Kiev, or Moscow. Who influences the imaging technologies we use for sensing the world? Technological literacy and ownership are also part of our sense of place and sense of planet.

In this way, roots are not cut but contaminated; while routes may restricted to recommended trips. Where Heise end with analysing the effects of globalisation and technology, we should complement by studying its causes – the chain of events preceding the uprooting of roots, and when routes first were trodden.

 

References

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, London 1983.

Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society. Towards a New Modernity. Sage Publications, 1992.

Heise, Ursula K. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet. The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford University Press, 2008.

Zimmer, Oliver. Nationalism in Europe, 1890-1940. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

 

Challenging the Status Quo: Research, Writing & Activism

Workshop on Writing and Activism at KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory, Stockholm, 8 April 2014. Organisers: Marco Armiero and Isabel Pérez. Presenters: Rob Nixon, Salvatore Paolo de Rosa, Stefania Barca and Rauna Kuokkanen. Workshop held in relation to the film-festival Tales From Planet Earth.

 

The workshop in Stockholm concerned writing and combining research with activism. The forum was academic, and it may have been for this reason that Marco Armiero began by describing Rob Nixon’s “Slow Violence (2011) as an ambition to encapsulate Foucalt’s tension between telling the truth and proving the truth. Another paraphrase was made to to Carl Ginzburg (1991) on the relevance of studying “non-existent events”, i.e. to find things not recognised in society’s everyday story of what belongs to history.

Another piece by Ginzburg that excellently exemplifies this is The Cheese and the Worms (1980), but we had plenty of readings as it were for this workshop to reach further. In “Dancing with Professors” (2001) Limerick argues that academic prose is neither stimulating nor competitive in reaching larger groups of readership.

Does discussion need to be closed? And must communication have jargon? – Patricia Nelson Limerick

A change in language could allow greater access to academia. But it seems also that Limerick goes after the disciplines (and disciplining of writing). It is inadequate to describe this as a branch to which academics become wired – it is just as much a nest in which scholars are hatched and acquire wings to fly. What young scholars need is not to eat ones parents (professors) but to find platforms  (labs?) for trial-and-error writing.

If moving on from what is “competitive” towards what is “meaningful” in academia, we touch upon activism and research – two areas tied together in a Gordian knot. On the one hand, you need adress matters of concern; On the other hand, research should be original and be able to follow problems and questions wherever curiosity leads it. And if you needs must push an agenda then there is always politics.

Nixon’s way of cutting this knot is instead by threading his research through it – “situating” his position (coming from a white working-class family in apartheid South Africa. Indeed, his current career as middle-class scholar had its foundations laid by his frugal parents. In “Barrier Beach, Nonfiction” (forthcoming, 2014), Nixon explores how topography is layered with social behaviours and memories of people. This would also explain why certain groups are restricted in certain topographies and argues that a move from dispossession towards self-possession requires stories of places to dig into its sediments. Writing is in this sense a means to remake topographies, and hence the choice of soil and what text to plow into it is very much about activism. Any literary critique would rejoice at having such powers.

But why does a person seek to appropriate or represent a collective? And if writing for groups, you need rely on simplification and double-viewpoints of audience. Words are words in context. Here there are many common mistakes.

Do not overestimate what your audience knows, but do not underestimate what your audience understands – Rob Nixon

Similarly, do not disregard the opinions of the community you are writing for – this is to impose ones analysis on the community. Rauna Kuokkanen, writing on Indigenous peoples in Canada and Scandinavia, underlines that academic papers can, and need dare to, explore new ideas. For one thing, a community is not homogenous and in this sense the scholar may legitimately bring new perspectives into it. This does require a sense of humility on part of the scholar.

Another is to mistake activism and public writing – these overlap but are not synonymous. One aspect of this, perhaps showing how myopic academia can be, is that we neither learn to distinguish nor practice different types of writing than those promoted by education systems. Great Britain used to value public writing, but metrication of academia segregated Journalism and Academia – the former becoming less informed; the latter less engaged.

Solutions may be to fill the gaps, of collaborative science and public experiences relating to the research topic. No, what was discussed was not to increase the amounts of surveys but the forums of discussing the research and topics at hand. I recall Habermas having proposed something similar, so probably this has already been tried to less success than hoped for (the world is not a seminar room).

Another is to not waste your ignorance. Sverker Sörlin once advised me and colleagues to write the introductions of dissertations straight away. The same is probably true for any text or argument. The point is to remember ones ignorance – to treasure and dramatise it. Like Virgil with Dante, escorting your reader through an arch of discovery. To share confusion, and bit by bit guide ones way out of the Inferno.

This probably involves accepting that the body of work will be impersonal. But to use, again as Nixon suggests, the personal as counterpoints to blend personality with methodology – voice and idea.

And lastly, to make things concrete – to write a 1000 words is to stop at 999 words. Pieces of work can be rewritten to “public versions” and tried out in group. “Am I hooked in the first sentence?” This question, coming back to Limerick, what academics could afford spending more time on.

Stepping back a bit, why is this important (I believe it is)? Many researchers coming to environmental issues have had their fair share of troubled thinking.

How can we understand this problem? What would humanity and life on Earth be like if we do not? What means and solutions are available?  – Environmental humanist (pretty much every monday morning)

 

Despite the vast input on activism, the most rewarding component of the workshop “Challenging the Status Quo” was to actually practice new types of writing. This was lead by Isabel Pérez, and I re-post the outline in its entirety for reproduction (do try this at home):

Writing exercise

• 2 minutes. Write to describe the room, with your senses.
• 2 minutes. Re-use three of the words written and write about anything
• 1 minute. Relate to your our work: how would you describe your research with 5 adjectives.
•  3 minutes. A politician wants to change the world using your research. Select 3 of the 5 adjectives, use them to summarise your research for her to use in a campaign
• 3 minutes. A popular science magazine holds competition for most interesting dissertation. Write a “first sentence” to submit to this competition.

 

References

Ginzburg, Carlo, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, London: Routledge, 1980.

Ginzburg, Carlo, “Checking the Evidence: The Judge and the Historian”, in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 18, No. 1, Autumn, 1991.

Limerick, Patricia Nelson, “Dancing with Professors: The Trouble with Academic Prose”, in Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West, W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.

Nixon, Rob, “Barrier Beach Nonfiction in Greg Garrard, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, Oxford Handbooks (forthcoming 2014).

Nixon, Rob, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Harvard University Press, 2011.

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the end of an orbit

Parks, Lisa. Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.

 

This is not the history of satellites. Rather, Lisa Parks is using the remote position of satellites to complicate what we know about television. And to show that orbiting around us are (Western) cultures.

Along with this purpose, ”Cultures In Orbit” opens with some central questions that are then expanded upon using various source: ”How many satellites are there? What do they do? Who controls them? What can they see?” (9-10).

What constitutes the cultures orbiting Earth is the convergence of interdependent industries and interests in the making of ”the televisual”. Parks seeks to differentiate between these interests in order to backtrack how the convergence came about. One part of this is the process of gradual change, quoting Raymond Williams and Langdon Winner, in which satellite television is the derivative of previous technologies.

Since the convergence is related but not necessarily planned, my reading is that Parks consider it more relevant to speak of technology as enabler rather than as determinant. Satellites was developed in the West, and made social norms of the West into global commons. But this does not exclude the possibility of other groups adopting these global tools for other aims. For example, the Aborigine channel ”Imparja” used a satellite’s downtime (the network’s sign-off hours) to broadcast Indigenous knowledge and connect communities worldwide (63).

And literally, Imparja (Aboriginal word meaning ”tracks”) is what Parks’ methodology is about:

to study who leaves tracks in the globalisation process. Where does the satellite signal fall? What cultural territory is also the site for up- and downlinking satellite data?

Following the tracks of the satellites, we see that footprints are unequally distributed on the face of the Earth), where some patches have much activity and where some users are in proximity and others at a distance from them.

 

With this rather long detour, I return to discuss how Parks studies this process primarily as an aesthetic-phenomenological process – how satellite data is circulated, displayed or concealed.

Sources range from how television programs were aired, war zones presented and ancient gender constructed. US satellite monitoring of genocides in the 1990s Balkan wars did not only report on the events but also framed Yugoslavian’s as the ”other”, hence hindering the killings to cease. Archaeological findings of Cleopatra’s ancient Egypt were selected based on tropes of a femme fatale as described by Roman, later Christian and Renaissance commentators. Satellites and GIS were part of reinforcing these gender ideas when they could have been used to portray other aspects of Egyptian society and of its queen.

These are all parts of how satellites constitute a culture in orbit, and the examples serve as case studies for Parks’ argument. But both the oppressive aspects of Western ideas and the resistance are so to speak chosen, and what I would like to see are the components of the televisual going on before the dispersion and display come into question. Namely the connections between military and industrial interests, the linkage to aerial photography. There is some discussion regarding the traditions of espionage technology in the 1960s Corona programme and the natural resource usage of Landsat in 1970s, later by SPOT in the 1980s. Parks also suggest that digitization have dramatically increased the means by which imagery is processed (78). Parks elaborates on William Mitchell’s notion that since 1962, Earth ”ceaselessly shed skins”. Old satellites become space garbage and new ones fill their place. Meanwhile, the data-sets amassed become larger, more detailed and frequent in updates (137). This skin is both path and text, written all over and around the face of the Earth.

Parks’ sources and research touches not the beginning, but at the end of an orbit. It explains little of interests behind satellite technology, except through secondary literature. Again, Mitchell has given an exposé of how digital imagery came about and implications of digitization for politics, news, culture (Mitchell, 1992).

Parks gives little regard for  innovation, visions or visioneers of satellites. An example of how it could have been done is Granqvist and Laurila (2011) who methodologically outlined how to identify and measure (quantify) the impact of visions, futurists and fiction on emergence of innovation (in this case concerning nanotechnology). A similar approach regarding the emergence of satellites would easily have found its full share of futurists, to name only Arthur C. Clarke who as early as 1945 envisioned satellites to one day form a global infrastructure for communication:

The science fiction and magic of today are the science and technology of tomorrow.

Again, this is not part of Parks story; neither is that her claim. What Parks does instead is to analyse the dissemination of the televisual, and the injustices connected to whose knowledge this concerns. We find such processes at the end of the chain of events in making and using satellites.

This presents the cause and impact of the televisual in a somewhat abstract mode. It concerns the hegemonic ideas of the West to be, as Denis Cosgrove suggested, to see and use globe as means for modernism, control and empire (Cosgrove, 1994). In Apollo’s Eye he elaborates further on this idea:

The Apollonian view is omniscient, detached but never disconnected from the Earth – the knowledge is never separated from earthly powers – Cosgrove, 2001

Parks continues this narrative of how the shadow of Enlightenment remains towering over the world by increasingly panoptic tools of power. But with the caveat that those same tools also enable resistance.

What strikes me at this point is that ”global” has little meaning phenomenologically unless the infrastructure of satellite communication is maintained. It is precisely because satellite orbit can outdo Earth’s axis-rotation that news and events can be connected within the same day. This makes our perception similar. Parks’ critical comment of this globalisation is that we may be one, but we are not the same.

Underpinning Parks work is an assumption that what is visual and mobile also holds power over knowledge. This sounds close enough to Latour’s notion of immutable mobiles (Latour, 1987), though no reference is made to the Gaulish giant, which in itself might be refreshing but left me puzzled.

Coming across another writer on aesthetics of satellites, Trevor Paglen, one could discuss the  culture of geostationary satellites (fixed in an equatorial orbit at 35,786 kilometres distance from Earth). Geostationary pictures and satellite presence would likely be the last, and lasting, cultural trace of humanity (Paglen & Weisberg, 2012).

Parks is not this aloof in her reasoning but challenges us to gaze back at satellites as were they mirrors. What is portrayed depends on the gaze. And although the odds are in the favour of Western(ized) power groups, tracks and footprints could be trodden differently. Imparja is enabling, not determining.

 

References

Cosgrove, Denis, Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

——— Contested Global Visions: One-World, Whole-Earth and the Apollo Space Photographs, in Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Volume 84, Issue 2, June 1994.

Granqvist, Nina., Laurila, Juha, Rage against Self-replicating Machines: Framing Science and Fiction in the US Nanotechnology Field, in Organization Studies 32, 2011

Latour, Bruno, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society, Harvard University Press, 1987.

Mackenzie Donald A. and Wajcman, Judy, eds., The social shaping of technology, Open University Press, 1985.

Mitchell, Williams J, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, MIT Press, 1992.

Paglen, Trevor and Weisberg, Joel M, A Temporal Map in Geostationary Orbit: The Cover Etching on the Echostar XVI Artifact, in Astronomical Journal, August 2012.

Parks, Lisa, Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual, Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.