on the moon

In a recent discussion with Amy Goodman and Slavoj Zizek, Julian Assange describes the vision that he has for Wikileaks to provide a full historical archive. He stated:

It has been my long term belief that what advances us as a civilization is the entirety of our international record, the entirety of our understanding about what we are going through, what human institutions are actually like and how they behave.

Assange described, in terms that are not so dissimilar to socialist realism, the method of collecting, not just some stories, but all stories. The narrative about civilization bounds his observations here that something like an entirety is possible. Not just an individual or two highlighted for a special narrative or spotlight and then taken as representative, but all individual stories and cases, exhaustively compiled. The fantasy of entirety is powerful and compelling--since it still takes place here as a countermeasure, as a negative, dystopian aspect of critical work. The fantasy of entirety is maintained by another idea that goes without saying in this discussion: the idea that representation, or the ability to be representative, is not longer a necessity in such a model. This is a compelling, if Brechtian moment, because it returns us to considerations about what constitutes the nonverbal and the impact that such modes of production can have on relations in society.

Assange goes on to discuss how the idea of entirety is related to communication, and although it seems at first like he posits an ideal of open communication, it is not necessarily clear that this is what he means (although he might, and he might make this clear elsewhere). But here, the emphasis seems to be on the impotence of speech, itself, as action:

Once we’ve gotten that type of volume and concretize and protect the rights of everyone to communicate with each other, which – to me – is the basic agreement of civilized life. It is not the right to speak. What does it mean to have the right to speak if you’re on the moon and nobody is around. It doesn’t matter. Rather the right to speak comes from our right to know.

The two of us together, someone’s right to speak and someone’s right to know, produce a right to communicate, so that is the grounding structure for all that we treasure about civilized life, and by civilized I don’t mean industrialized. I mean people collaborating not to do the dumb thing. To, instead, learn from previous experiences and pool with each other together to get through the life that we live in a less adverse way.

Assange contrasts civilized life with industrialized, but the negative example does more to indicate that the discontents of industrialization are also close at heart to those of civilization. His vision is grand, and one of hope: that civilization will win out over barbarism, the dumb thing. He emphasizes collaboration and pooling, actions which would not be possible on the moon. But I think behind these more overt calls for transparent collectivity, there is the implication that forms of communication that take place on the moon, ones that are decidedly nonverbal, might however be the forms that constitute the right to communicate. In other words, the right to communicate would be about communicating things that are not necessarily understood to be communicable, things which cannot be said, perhaps, or which are more effective not as said things but as shown things.

dark times for the wholly recent

One of the things that Dipesh Chakrabarty does not capture in his essay, "The Climate of History" (Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009) 197-222), is the tone of scientists Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, coiners of the term "Anthropocene" (to describe the epoch in which the human has become an agent of geological change (following the Holocene--the "wholly recent" last 12,000 years); later notes say that Stoermer named it, while Crutzen popularized it?). It's possible that the tone of the more recent paper, "Living in the Anthropocene: Toward a New Global Ethos," authored by Crutzen and Christian Schwagerl, does not reach back to these earlier papers. Of course, there is some intended irony in the triumphant invocation of "We humans," but there also remains an excessive amount of the unintended. They argue that accepting the "reality" of "high speed" anthropomorphization of the world will help us change the world for good, as well as bad--laws governed by an economics of cost/benefit. In addition to several other suggestions for developing technology, they write:

"Finally, we should adapt our culture to sustaining what can be called the “world organism.” This phrase was not coined by an esoteric Gaia guru, but by eminent German scientist Alexander von Humboldt some 200 years ago. Humboldt wanted us to see how deeply interlinked our lives are with the richness of nature, hoping that we would grow our capacities as a part of this world organism, not at its cost. His message suggests we should shift our mission from crusade to management, so we can steer nature’s course symbiotically instead of enslaving the formerly natural world."

If indeed, as Crutzen wrote in 2002, "The Anthropocene could be said to have started in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when analyses of air trapped in polar ice showed the beginning of growing global concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane" (cited in Chakrabarty 209), then we'd also have to think that instead of now adapting our culture from "crusade" to "management," that we've already been long undergoing this process. It is this that Charkrabarty points to, in aligning the history of freedom with the history of the Anthropocene. If there is nothing celebratory about the Anthropocene for Chakrabarty, there is however, something about freedom that is. Humanity as an agent of geological change is a contingency, something we have "stumbled into," a stumbling which makes all actors equal participants, connected in the way that "different life-forms connect to one another, and the way the mass extinction of one species could spell danger for another" (217). The "shared" nature of the catastrophe puts a limit on the experience of freedom in modernity, according to Chakrabarty. This means, not that freedom is experienced differently or differentially, this is not one of the outcomes of the fact of the imposed "equity" of catastrophic ecological change, but that the idea of freedom, as a universal (?), must also take the history of the species, its deep history, into consideration. It's a devastatingly shallow conclusion, for all the notions included, since in effect, we don't ever get around to thinking about how this situation, if it is "reality," moves us to think about the realities of unfreedom that would seemingly be exponentially exacerbated in such a case. In the ambiguous parallel between the histories of contingency in the non-Western world and mass extinction, the assumption is that diversity is the value of freedom (Chakrabarty earlier quotes from Gadamer: "Diversity... was itself a figure of freedom" (207)). Encouraging diversity, rather than accentuating difference becomes all to familiar, as a call to arms. The history of "freedom" that Chakrabarty recounts has, according to him, been devoid of ideas of geological time, and what characterizes the early years of the Anthropocene is the transition from wood and renewable fuels to fossil fuel. This piece, the materialist-historical core of fossil fuel, which occupies the work of Timothy Mitchell (for example, in "Carbon Democracy"), becomes in Chakrabarty's argument, that which carries the weight of making all equivalences between political systems, between capitalism and socialism ("there was never any principled difference in their use of fossil fuel" (217)), and for example, between the West and developing countries, whose guilt is shared, the only difference being whether it is "retrospective" or "prospective." Putting aside for now the question of whether the idea of prospective guilt in the end calls the lie of even less ideal notions of freedom, Chakrabarty also says that critiques of capitalist globalization have "not, in any way, become obsolete," and he notes, democratically, that what all of this means anyhow is that inequalities will become exacerbated. Still, he does not move towards examining how these so-called parallel theories overlap to produce the exponential growth of inequality. In her discussion of the debate over the naming of the Epoch, Elizabeth Kolbert finds that those who are convinced of the significance of human impact find that it's a matter of the "degree of change" effected by humans (see "The Antrhopocene Debate: Marking Humanity's Impact" in Yale Environment 360). The logic of cost-benefit, the economics of the Anthropocene, thus sets up its ethos in this unsurprising way, seeking to reverse the footprint of "change," for which we have up to now been paying for political freedom, by recasting structural, social inequalities as shared catastrophe.