Orbital Poetics: Literature, Theory, World 9781350075085, 9781350075115, 9781350075092

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgements
1 20 November 1998: Dawn
Part 1 World Literature in Orbit
2 Dante in Space
3 What Counts as Literature?
Part 2 A Literature of the Ultramundane
4 The Space of Electronic Writing
5 Global Catastrophe
Part 3 Being-in-orbit
6 Kosmotheoros in Tears
7 ‘A Machine, Fallen from the Sky’
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Orbital Poetics

Also published by Bloomsbury The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, edited by Jeffrey R. Di Leo Critical Practice, Martin McQuillan Ecocriticism on the Edge, Timothy Clark Literature after Globalization, Philip Leonard Literature and Capital, Thomas Docherty Literary Criticism in the 21st Century, Vincent B. Leitch Literary Theory, Mary Klages

Orbital Poetics Literature, Theory, World Philip Leonard

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Copyright © Philip Leonard, 2019 This work is published subject to a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives Licence. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher. For permission to publish commercial versions please contact Bloomsbury Academic. Philip Leonard has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image © Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be glad to hear from them. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-7508-5 ePDF: 978-1-3500-7509-2 eBook: 978-1-3500-7510-8 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Acknowledgements

vi

1

1

20 November 1998: Dawn

Part 1  World Literature in Orbit 2 3

Dante in Space What Counts as Literature?

41 59

Part 2  A Literature of the Ultramundane 4 5

The Space of Electronic Writing Global Catastrophe

87 107

Part 3  Being-in-orbit 6 7

Kosmotheoros in Tears ‘A Machine, Fallen from the Sky’

143 163

Bibliography 184 Index195

Acknowledgements Probably like most books, Orbital Poetics changed in unexpected ways as it moved from being scattered thoughts and loosely connected enthusiasms to something that hopefully has gained a little more coherence. Suggestions made by colleagues and friends have allowed this book to consider directions in literature and theory that were not originally anticipated. Their support has meant that the unanticipated did not become overwhelming. Those who have generously given their time, provided inspiration and offered advice and encouragement include Zayneb Allak, Daniel Bilton, Richard Bromhall, Ellie Byrne, Diletta de Christofaro, Lynda Clark, Liam Connell, Daniel Cordle, Martin Crowley, Tom Cumming, Becky Cullen, Jo Dixon, Danuta Fjellestad, Joanna Hodge, Sarah Jackson, Laurens ten Kate, Arin Keeble, Maebh Long, Thomas Mantzaris, Enda McCaffery, Philip Martin, Doug Millard, Sharon Monteith, Sharon Ouditt, Rob Pope, Tatiani Rapatzikou, Amy Rushton, Berthold Schoene, Andrew Thacker, Tim Youngs and Nahem Yousaf. Working with researchers attached to both Nottingham Trent University (NTU’s) English department and the AHRC Midlands3Cities/Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership has been, and continues to be, inspirational and a privilege. I’m grateful to NTU, and to Yvonne Barnett in particular, for generously providing the funding that allowed Orbital Poetics to be published as an Open Access book. Jennifer von Mayrhauser and Winifred Hart graciously agreed to allow ‘For a Space Prober’ by their father – Thomas Bergin – to be reproduced in full in Chapter 2. I’m especially grateful for their kind comments about this book. Orbital Poetics started as an article – ‘A Secret Dispersal: Derrida’s Satellites’ – that was published in a special issue of Parallax. A rewritten version of this article forms part of Chapter 7. I’m grateful to Taylor & Francis and the Editorial Board of Parallax for granting permission to reproduce this article, and to Rebecca Starr in particular for her help with securing this permission. It has been a pleasure to work again with David Avital, and I very much appreciate the support that he has given since our first conversation about whether this book might find a home with Bloomsbury. I’m also grateful to

Acknowledgements

vii

Clara Herberg, Shamli Priya and Lauren Crisp for their care in taking it through the various stages of production. One idea shaping Orbital Poetics is that the world is not inertly ‘there’ but is continually produced as more than itself. This book is dedicated to Sam, Esme and Theo, who make my world as a place that is always more.

1

20 November 1998: Dawn

two sounds you can hear at this tucked-up hour first this: the sound of everything repeating … then this: the sound of everything repeating Alice Oswald, ‘Tithonus: 46 Minutes in the life of the Dawn’

In the closing years of the twentieth century a strange nativity took place, a miraculous conception that occurred when Russia launched the first module of what would eventually become the International Space Station (ISS). Like Gabriel whispering to Mary, conveying God’s word that she would bear a child who would unify the heaven and earth, US Vice President Al Gore in 1993 breathed into Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin’s ear the words that allowed Russia to gestate and deliver this module. Named Zarya – usually translated as ‘Dawn’ (though also known more prosaically as the ‘Functional Cargo Block’) – this module promised an age of international co-operation that would transcend the mundane and conflicted space of the world, allowing us to rise above and beyond the territorialism that has maintained an earthly disharmony. What the world had the potential to be was, in the moment of Zarya’s launch, therefore seen to be finally within reach for humanity, not only because it provided new opportunities – a new space – for international collaboration but also because polity could become detached from the ground. At last, it seemed, humanity would be able to look down and see itself as a population united by a shared planetary inhabitation. After a long age of darkness, illumination and enlightenment had come.1 If we want to identify the moment at which the world

2

Orbital Poetics

was born for the first time then we could do worse than point to the genesis that occurred – the dawn that was announced – on the date that Zarya was launched: 20 November 1998. This nativity is strange for a number of reasons. First, despite the idea that the arrival of inhabited orbital space would allow national divisions to dissolve, the agreement between Gore and Chernomyrdin nevertheless left the principle of national sovereignty firmly intact: Russia and the United States were to be held accountable to their particular contractual responsibilities, and the principle of the proprietary nation-state was reasserted in the agreement that the United States would own Zarya. Second, the narrative of unprecedented globality associated with this module’s launch suggests a kind of phenomenological or ontological tension, since it would seem that it is necessary to leave the earth if we are fully to experience or perceive its unity; it suggests that the world arrives in the moment that the ground is left behind. Third, this nativity is strange because it had happened before and continued to happen afterwards. If the world was born for the first time on 20 November 1998, then it was also born for the first time on 12 April 1961, when Yuri Gagarin became the first person to orbit the planet. The ground stations with which Gagarin communicated were named Zarya 1, 2 and 3; the name of his craft, Vostok, can be translated as ‘East’, but also ‘Dawn’ and the press conference following Gagarin’s flight was headlined ‘The Dawn of a New Era’.2 The world was also famously born for the first time on 10 August 1966, when NASA’s robotic Lunar Orbiter 1 briefly turned its cameras away from mapping the moon’s surface to capture the earth within a single frame for the first time, apparently providing visual authentication of the earth as a determinate planetary body, but also establishing the cognitive foundations for conceiving the world as a complete entity that is in possession of itself. It was born again for the first time on 21 December 1968, with Apollo 8’s image of the earth coming into sight over the moon’s horizon, an image subsequently and memorably named ‘Earthrise’. Seen for the first time in this manner – with a more advanced camera and, in what appeared to be an important development, one held by a human hand – the world once again suddenly appeared as itself. When Time magazine reproduced this image in 1968, Denis Cosgrove points out, ‘it gave the image the caption “Dawn”’.3 Perhaps because the earth that is captured here remains incomplete (it is partly obscured and becomes an accessory to the moon that appears in the foreground of this photo), the world was born again for the first time on 7 December 1972 with image AS17-148-22727, the ‘Blue Marble’ photo taken by the Apollo 17 mission, which was widely treated as revealing the earth as an isolated and vulnerable biosphere, an integrated and organic ecology that

20 November 1998: Dawn

3

is threatened by the population that is seeing this precarity for the first time.4 This birth of the world for the first time happened again on 18 December 1999, with the launch of the Earth Observing Satellite Terra which monitors changes to surface and atmospheric conditions over time; and it happened again for the first time on 14 May 2010, with the launch of the Rassvet ISS module which two days later was joined to the Zarya module. In a strange recognition that the world did not successfully emerge when the Zarya module was placed in orbit, the name of the Rassvet module also translates as ‘dawn’. Further complicating this strangely repeated conception are the perplexing names that have been assigned to some of the ISS’s other modules. In 1998 and 2007, the Unity and Harmony modules were added to the expanding architecture of the ISS, forging a narrative of togetherness that is not fully cohesive in its announcement of the world’s unification from above. Dawn – Zarya – begins without unity, this nomenclature suggests. If the ISS promised a new dawn for humanity, then the universal or co-operative condition that it announced could not have existed beforehand, even though its construction was celebrated as the culmination of an almost decade-old, post–Cold War, internationalism. Zarya’s dawn was, in other words, detached from the idea of an established global actuality, intimating a dawn that was to be the inspiration for, rather than the expression of, a world coming together. Furthermore, the names of the ISS modules indicate that unity arrives without harmony. And, when the togetherness and concord that the Unity and Harmony modules proclaim are eventually accomplished, a new beginning is needed. At this culminating point, the Rassvet module arrives and the promise of a transformative dawn is renewed. The conception and delivery of the world by the ISS are therefore repeated in acts of self-duplication or self-supplementation that constantly ground and reground earth from orbit. As well as the tension that shapes the notion of an original and total vision that is both immediately complete and ceaselessly perfectible, the ultimate machine that facilitates such a vision is similarly understood as being at once fully operative and requiring further additions that endlessly postpone its purpose of bringing the world together. There are many other instances in which the ascent of vision to orbit is associated with the world’s unprecedented appearance. Gagarin’s flight is often treated as the moment in which the human eye first regarded the earth from beyond its atmosphere. ‘As his spacecraft slowly rotated’, Henry Vaughan writes, ‘Gagarin looked at the Earth below him … It was not lost on him that he was seeing the Earth as spherical, with his own eyes – the first time any human had been able to do so’.5 The first observation of the earth from orbit and the

4

Orbital Poetics

corresponding sense that the world could at last be seen fully have been traced to the satellites of the late 1950s6 and to the Telstar satellite’s global TV transmission in 1962. The persistence of this narrative of the world’s orbital origination can be found in claims that high-resolution satellite imagery and live streaming from orbit finally allow the world to be viewed intensively and as an entity that moves in time. This narrative has perhaps become most recognizable as a feature of recent debates about the tools through which global society flows. Satellites, Lisa Parks rightly notes, ‘are now at the core of our global telecommunications infrastructure, and they have become a principal means through which we see and know the world and the cosmos beyond’.7

II In spite of its persistence – or perhaps because of the tenacity with which it has remained essential to the discourse of seeing and being in orbit – this narrative needs to be challenged; it has never successfully launched and it cannot endlessly circulate as an account of how the world is revealed. In each instance, images from orbit deliver a world that is complete in time but incomplete in space. First, this world is born from a neglecting of the temporality through which it is revealed and in which it moves. It appears in images from orbit as an immobile object, but also there is no sense of the perceptual precedents that establish the conditions for its visualization: it is as though the immediacy of seeing the world for the first time is the same as seeing for the first time – there is no acknowledgement that the idea of the world as suddenly present requires either an existing mode of perceiving or a process of coming to presence. Second, all we see in these images is a single aspect of the earth that is delivered on a two-dimensional plane: much of the planet remains unobserved and must be assumed independently of experience and without confirmation from visual evidence. In this manner, the Apollo photos and images of earth from orbit provide an example of the ‘certain inadequacy’ that for Edmund Husserl belongs to ‘the perception of physical things’. A fundamental condition of consciousness, this perceptual inadequacy for Husserl means that things can be observed, but only from one aspect. ‘Of necessity’, he writes in the first book of Ideas, ‘a physical thing can be given only “one-sidedly”; and that signifies, not just incompletely or imperfectly in some sense or other, but precisely what presentation by adumbrations prescribes. A physical thing is necessarily given in mere “modes of appearing”’.8 Rather than presenting itself as a total entity – indeed, even as a complete sphere –

20 November 1998: Dawn

5

the world gives itself to representation in these photos, but only in one aspect. Even if something of its immanence becomes visible – ‘a core of “what is actually presented”’9 according to Husserl’s understanding of perception – this appearance is made unreliable by how it becomes comprehensible. It is observed not as an internal self-disclosing entity that can be isolated from everything else that surrounds it but as something that is seen and understood in relation to external entities. This is what Husserl describes as a ‘mode of appearance’: it ‘is apprehended as being surrounded by a horizon of “co-givenness”, which is not givenness proper, and of more or less vague indeterminateness’.10 Husserl therefore warns that we should be cautious of treating images of earth from above as capturing the fullness of something that is fixed within its own space. In Ideas, he also notes that repetition is fundamental to the perception of a thing, since each time it appears it acquires a new character. Although observation is unable to determine what is perceived – although it can produce only shadowy outlines and faint images – it is engaged in a perpetual effort to see fully and to know finally. For Husserl, this indeterminateness ‘points ahead to possible perceptual multiplicities which, merging continuously into one another, join together to make up the unity of one perception in which the continuously enduring physical thing is always showing some new “sides” (or else an old “side” as returning) in a new series of adumbrations’.11 Images of earth from above should, then, test our credulity because they cannot provide an authentication of a world that is fully encompassed within the field of vision. But they are also not to be trusted because the world changes each time that it is conveyed by an image that is credited with finally revealing it. Despite assertions that the world as a stable facticity is revealed, this thing takes on a different character each time that it is seen to appear. A recurring production of the world’s sameness occurs in the discourse of the world’s arrival. Indeed, such a repetition is the condition of the possibility of the world’s appearance; as with all acts of repetition, however, something different is always at work, changing the thing that is treated as permanently present to itself. In Apollo’s Eye, Cosgrove documents some of the ways in which a variable character has been assigned to the world following its photographic capture from orbit. ‘The lunar view of the earth’ provided by Apollo 8’s ‘Earthrise’ image was seen finally to allow ‘a true gauging of human proportion and relations with the planet’.12 As Chapter 3 argues, the idea that such a measurement discloses the actuality of the world needs to be placed within the persistent quantification of the earth as a home that is spherically at one with itself, nurturing its populations, and retaining its own astronomical self-presence. This is an

6

Orbital Poetics

image of a complete space, but also one that surpasses the mundane interests and conflicts that preoccupy those on the ground; it produced, he writes, ‘an unconscious but perhaps predictable set of responses – marvel at a vast yet tiny earth, reflection on the insignificance of self, and yearning for human unity’.13 However, as much as the earth is here projected as a single space that is shared by its human inhabitants, for Cosgrove ‘Earthrise’ also triumphantly conveys the exceptionality of those who were able to make the world appear for the first time. This image ‘frees its imperial inclusiveness from all contingency’; it establishes the sovereign right to envisage a shared planet by providing ‘visual confirmation of American democracy’s redemptive world-historical mission, namely, to realize the universal brotherhood of a common humanity’.14 In contrast, Apollo 17’s ‘Blue Marble’ photo appeals to a familiar sense of how the world has been imagined, locating and illuminating ‘a perfectly circular earth within a square frame, mimicking the mappa mundi or the hemispheric planisphere’.15 Recalling images of the earth depicted in medieval maps or in star charts that situate the world in astral space, ‘Blue Marble’ has become so celebrated because it represents the world as a collection of recognizable geographical features. However, Cosgrove notes that ‘while the photo can readily be matched to the mapped image of the earth, it upsets conventional Western cartographic conventions’.16 Stripped of the cartographic graticule – the grid used by geographers and map makers to divide the world into linear co-ordinates – the earth ceases to conform to the notion of a containable and measurable regularity that earlier images have sought to establish. Appearing ‘to float free as a sui generis organism’,17 it has become a smooth, vital, and autonomous place, a self-governing ecology rather than captured and revealed by the exceptional and heroic efforts of a particular nation. Furthermore, Cosgrove points out that the ‘Blue Marble’ has Africa and Antarctica at its centre and removes Western regions from view. This aspect therefore displaces the centres of global social and political authority, coinciding, he writes, ‘with a broader political and cultural thrust to imagine and articulate a globe without a privileged center and subordinated periphery, in which all voices across a decolonized globe, regardless of location, claim equal rights to announce their unique place, memory, and vision’.18 This symbolic function shifted when ‘Blue Marble’ was subsequently taken up as the image that would accompany the emerging environmentalism of the 1970s. What Cosgrove suggests, then, is that between these two images – between Apollos 8 and 17 – the world changed. If it appeared in 1968 as a distributed and shared space (although one where seeing from above is claimed as an exclusive right by those who first gain this

20 November 1998: Dawn

7

perspective), then it arrived in 1972 with a different character, as the motivation for a politics that both refused the co-ordinates of power and set a new course for social action and intervention. Similarly, although Gagarin’s flight was proclaimed as the moment in which the earth was first viewed from orbit, the earth that he witnessed does not match that of other accounts by those who have ascended beyond the atmosphere. During the flight, Gagarin triumphantly declared that he had indeed gained an unprecedented perspective – ‘I see Earth’,19 his flight transcript records – but subsequent comments by him point to a less complete vision. ‘The Earth’s surface looks approximately the same as seen from a high-flying jet plane’, Gagarin reported after returning to the ground, ‘Clearly distinctive are large mountain ranges, large rivers, large forest areas, shorelines, and islands’.20 Gagarin’s voyage has also been understood not as the moment in which a human eye first regards the earth, but as the point at which humanity became celestial. ‘Humans, for the first time, caught a god’s eye view of the planet they live on’,21 Shawn William Miller remarks, suggesting that visualization of the earth makes people less worldly. Rather than gaining a new sense of proportion, seeing ourselves merely as inhabitants of a larger ecosystem or as well-intentioned internationalists who are seeking a solution to nationalism and regionalism in the realm above the planet, the divine gaze attained by those in orbit renders the world containable by the human eye. It therefore establishes an order of mastery and subjection that becomes refigured by the Apollo 8 and 17 images, both of which work ambivalently both to contain the world as a grounded positivity and to convey the sense of something greater than its human inhabitants. It would be possible, of course, to reach for a technical-evolutionary explanation of the difference in perspective between Gagarin’s description of the earth and the sense of a planetary wholeness that is associated with the Apollo images. Gagarin’s flight reached an altitude of between 300 and 400 km, Apollo 8 orbited the moon and Apollo 11 was the final mission to place astronauts on the lunar surface. In other words, we might suppose that as the technology of space travel advanced and greater distances were travelled from the earth, it became possible to attain a more complete picture of the planet in its entirety. What troubles such an explanation is that leaving the earth is no longer (or, at least, not currently) associated with intrepid missions to other astronomical bodies and going further is no longer treated as a condition for seeing better.22 If anything preserves the association of heroic odyssey – and exceptional world unification – with travelling into space then, as this chapter has observed, it is the ISS that fulfils this function. Embedded in the assembling of this station is the

8

Orbital Poetics

promise of a new internationalism that takes as its premise the idea that the world is globalized from above and proceeds on the assumption that only this station can deliver such a shared sense of planetary community. And yet, the narrative of orbital image-making that has emerged in the context of the ISS is closer to Gagarin’s vision than to the insight that has been attached to the Apollo images. The pictures that descend from this place are not of the earth captured by a human eye that has gained a sovereign or divine perspective; they are not of the world itself, but of partial fragments and topographical details, of features rather than an ecosphere, of clouds and oceans, of coastlines and horizons, of deserts and glacial plains, and of the chiaroscuro effects of light and shade. The world that they indicate is not selfevident or orderly but an atomized composition that is repeatedly forged from bits of planet. Often, these images evoke a sense of the uncanny by making the earth both recognizable and outlandish, showing its familiar contours but also revealing places that seem fantastic and improbable. And, whereas missions of the 1960s and 1970s delivered only a few iconic images, photography on the ISS has resulted in an abundant array of images that are just as captivating to those who view them even if, ultimately, they cannot be seen to capture the earth as a decolonized globe, fragile organism, sanctuary or world. Chris Hadfield, the Canadian astronaut who became commander of the ISS in 2012 and 2013, is perhaps most often credited with this sudden proliferation of photos from orbit. Across various social media platforms, in particular Twitter, Hadfield has distributed many striking photos (about 45,000, according to his own estimate23) that have revealed the world as a hypnotically weird place. When introducing these images, Hadfield indicates that the world does not immediately present itself to the orbital gaze, but is a ‘strange’24 place that can be caught only through ‘methodical planning’.25 ‘Some places eluded me’, he remarks, proposing not a vision that encompasses, but a non-absolute and inessential perspectivism: ‘I didn’t want my pictures to look like satellite images … I wanted them to have a human element, to express a point of view’.26 As with other beginnings, the sudden production and mass distribution of a profusion of images from orbit had occurred previously, and certainly before Hadfield started to post pictures to social media platforms. NASA astronaut José Hernández in 2009 used Twitter to distribute photos of the earth from the ISS, as did JAXA astronaut Soichi Noguchi between 2009 and 2010. As with those taken by Hadfield, the images produced by Hernández and Noguchi document only fragments of the world. This sense of a partial or impossible vision continues in Tim Peake’s 2016 collection Hello, Is This Planet Earth? My

20 November 1998: Dawn

9

View from the International Space Station, which describes a planet that ‘reveals itself as a vast geological puzzle’,27 is marked by divisions and permits both seeing and not seeing. This world stuns, overwhelms and mesmerizes. Dominating Peake’s account is not the celebration of an encounter with the earth itself, but an explanation of the practical and technical considerations that apply when taking photos in orbit. Lenses, reflections, lighting conditions, radiation and camera degradation, Internet speed and the unavailability of Google Earth shape this view from the ISS. Peake defers to the legacy of Apollo 8’s ‘Earthrise’, and he reproduces the idea of a unique perspective from above, but more pronounced here is ‘the discovery of a new-found passion for photography’. Less a declaration of the earth’s epiphanic revelation, this is more a story of personal development: ‘Looking back now’, Peake writes, ‘it seems strange that I didn’t expect taking pictures to have a major impact on me. How wrong I was’.28 Peake’s account seems almost to have given up on the idea of a world that is disclosed in its full actuality, and instead it seems to resonate with Marshall McLuhan’s claim that with ‘the capsule and satellite … the planet has become an anti-environment, an art form, an extension of consciousness, yielding new perception of the new man-made environment’.29 Peake’s narrative is not of a world caught within an astronautic gaze, but of image-making, of the artifice of seeing, recording and conveying. It is reflexively captivated by the procedures for recognition that need to be observed before looking can take place in orbit. Accompanying the recent proliferation of images of the earth from orbit is, therefore, a departure from the mythification of the world that occurred with Apollo-era photography and a return to the partial vision that Gagarin describes.30

III The term orbit, according to the OED, is an ambivalent signifier, deriving from the Latin orbita (the course of a celestial object) and the Middle French orbite (the eye socket). Present-day usage retains both the astronomical and anatomical roots of this term: it continues to refer to ‘the bony recess of the vertebrate skull that contains the eye and its associated structures’ and to ‘one complete circuit made by an object around the orbited body’; it is also used figuratively to refer to ‘a fixed course or path; (also) the sphere of activity, influence, or application within which a person or thing normally moves or operates’. Furthermore, its morphology points to a collision of meanings. This term has functioned as a nominalized adjective: it describes a movement and denotes an entity, it has (in

10

Orbital Poetics

a now-obsolete usage) been the name for a celestial sphere and it is used (mainly in poetic contexts) to refer to the eyeball. These senses collide in the current association of planetary circumnavigation and observation of the world, and the ambivalence of this term reflects the uncertainty that seems to result from perception from above. Declarations of a new dawn in orbit appeal to the notion of the world’s dramatic disclosure, and yet they do so anxiously. The world that appears in orbit is a disjunctive and unencompassable place; the proliferating images of the earth’s spectacular appearance indicate a world that is, in or of itself, impossible to see; and it is the eye and its supplementation by optical instruments that fascinates the orbital gaze. When we look from this place, we hear what Alice Oswald describes as ‘the sound of everything repeating’;31 this sound resonates with Jacques Derrida’s observation that ‘Death is at the dawn because everything has begun with repetition’.32 For these reasons, a more cautious watchfulness is needed in narratives of the world’s revelation from above. To associate knowledge of the planet with a newly achieved orbital perspective is to neglect the deep conceptual bond between the concepts of dawn and world. ‘In a dawn that took centuries’, Peter Sloterdijk writes, ‘the earth rose as the only and true orb, the basis of all contexts of life’.33 To associate knowledge of the world with its visualization in orbital photography is, of course, to preserve the long history of an ocularcentrism that privileges sight as the primary source of knowledge. Among the earliest, and most cited, examples of where the world’s observation is seen to coalesce with its comprehension are Plato’s middle and later dialogues. In Timaeus, for example, he formulates a cosmology that conceives planetary bodies as spherical, rather than flat as pre-Socratic thinking had largely assumed. The earth is ‘subjected to the revolution of the Same and uniform’,34 Plato writes, although (as Chapter 7 will argue) this dialogue does not consistently describe the earth as a planetary body that moves within its own orbit. Furthermore, for Timaeus, planetary rotation bifurcates time (‘day and night came into being’35 because of the earth’s revolution), but this movement also provides us with a single numerical unit that acts as the guarantor of measurement and calculation. Turning within its own space, then, the earth’s character becomes disclosed not in the revelation of a new dawn – through the uncertain and inexact experience of being between darkness and light – but in the repetitive daily cycle that comprises two separate states which combine to forge a perfectly quantifiable unit in time. In Phaedo, Plato similarly asserts that the earth exists ‘in a uniform state’;36 it is ‘round and in the centre of the heaven’,37 although humanity does not possess

20 November 1998: Dawn

11

the perspective that would allow this spherical sameness to be recognized. Dwelling on the surface of the world limits our capacity truly to see and understand the shape and dimensions of this place, and to disclose this confined condition Phaedo proposes an analogy. We are oblivious to the fact that we live in the earth’s ‘hollows’ and mistakenly assume that restricted experience of our surroundings allows us to fully know the world. This misrecognition, Plato writes, can be compared to that of someone who lives on the seabed, seeing the sun and stars through the water but assuming that the sea is heaven. Because of ‘slowness and weakness’38 this person does not attempt to rise to the surface, and so does not gain a true vision of the world. ‘Now this is just what has happened to us’, Phaedo continues: Living in some hollow of the earth, we think we live above it, and we call the air ‘heaven’, as if this were heaven and the stars moved through it; whereas the truth is just the same – because of our weakness and slowness, we are unable to pass through to the summit of the air; for were anyone to go to its surface, or gain wings and fly aloft, he would stick his head up and see … and if his nature were able to bear the vision, he would realize that this is the true heaven, the genuine light, and the true earth.39

Gaining wings and flying aloft would permit a vision of the earth as an absolute ground and essential finitude. Put otherwise, only transcendence can expose the world’s immanence. Surpassing the distractions of sensory experience would allow us to escape the corroded and imperfect realm of stones, rocks, sand, mud and mire that seduces us into a misplaced understanding of where truth and being are to be found. Such a perspective, Plato proposes, would endow us with an awareness of the actuality of heaven and earth. Plato does not, however, conclude these cosmological speculations with the assertion that we will come to know the one true earth after we have abandoned mere empiricism and risen above. He conjectures still further by imagining how the earth would look to those who have soared to this privileged place: ‘The true earth, if one views it from above, is said to look like one of those twelve-piece leather balls, variegated, a patchwork of colours, of which our colours here are, as it were, samples that painters use. There the whole earth is of such colours, indeed of colours far brighter still and purer than these … its general appearance is of one continuous multi-coloured surface’.40 From above, then, the global sphericity of the world comes into view: it can be regarded, Plato speculates, in a manner that is inaccessible on the ground. It becomes recognizable as a place adorned with beauties and wonders (trees, flowers, fruit, mountains, islands, landmasses) that exist in a state of orderliness

12

Orbital Poetics

and in proportion to each other, corresponding to the realm of pure being that exceeds the domain of grounded experience. Imagining a determinate planetary body, a collection of topological features that combine to form an ecosphere and a place that communicates a sense of universal being, Phaedo in this manner prefigures both the total planetary vision and discovery of its various features that are associated with the more recent observation of the earth. Plato’s account suggests that a new perspective has not been gained as a result of travelling beyond the planet’s atmosphere. Rather, a sense of the world’s shape and character was in place long before the first view of it descended from orbit; rather than discovered because it has been seen from above, ‘the true earth’ was known before it was seen. Looking down on the planet from Vostok, the Apollo spacecraft, or the ISS has merely confirmed what Plato’s speculative act of perceptual displacement had apparently already established: the earth as both a uniform domain and an integrated biospherical system. Accounts of orbital vision, including those by astronauts who reflect on what they have seen, often reference moments in the long history of the world’s circumnavigation and observation, providing compelling counter-narratives to the established story of a dawning recognition in the mid to late twentieth century. Jay Apt, Michael Helfert and Justin Wilkson open their volume Orbit: Nasa Astronauts Photograph the Earth with the acknowledgement that observing the world from above begins with the cosmological vision that Plato describes in Phaedo: Socrates said that if we could rise above the Earth we would realize ‘this is … the true Earth’ – and only then would we fully understand the world in which we live. Now, in our time, 25 centuries after Socrates, we have built ships that fly hundreds of miles above the planet … and no astronaut has been without a camera since.41

In Apollo’s Eye, Cosgrove too finds in images from orbit a recent manifestation of a deeper and more archaic conceptualization of the world. For him these images extend the long history of a cosmography that begins with the figure of Apollo, the sun god in whose celestial eye the earth becomes a harmonious regularity. ‘The Apollonian gaze, which pulls diverse life on earth into a single vision of unity, is individualized’, he writes, a divine and mastering view from a single perspective. That view is at once empowering and visionary, implying ascent from the terrestrial sphere into the zones of planets and stars. The theme of ascent connects the earth to cosmographic spheres, so that rising above the earth in flight is an enduring element of global thought and imagination.42

20 November 1998: Dawn

13

If such a fantasy of ascent, mastery and perceptual unification insistently returns in the images produced by NASA’s Apollo missions, then this fantasy begins in Greek mythology, cosmology and theology. It continues, Cosgrove proposes, in Cicero’s dream of cosmic unity, Seneca’s projection of an empire that would reach to the ends of the earthly sphere (ad termini orbis terrarum), Ortelius’s 1564 map of the world Typus orbis terrarium and in modernity’s development of a cartographic sensibility that would chart, encompass and know the world. In addition to continuing this long Apollonian tradition, Apollo 8’s mission in December 1968 – spanning the Christmas period – is notable for Cosgrove because it allows pagan cosmology to be appropriated by a Christian understanding of universal order. The timing of this mission allowed audiences watching on earth to harness ‘to the Apollo mission the complex meanings attached to this key Christian festival – of peace and good will among all peoples, of domesticity and harmony, of rebirth and renewal’.43 This mission’s assimilation into a Christian discourse of universal kinship might be explained as the result of chance and an incidental timing that aligned it to one of the major dates in the Christian calendar. However, any such explanation must be dismissed because of the decision of Apollo 8’s crew to establish the significance of their journey in terms of a Biblical account of the origins of the universe. Taking turns to read from the opening passages of Book of Genesis, William Anders, James Lovell and Frank Borman ‘recit[ed] from lunar orbit the Genesis cosmogonic narrative’ that, Cosgrove writes, reaffirmed ‘the same lines conventionally illustrated in the opening pages of medieval chronicles and Renaissance cosmographies’.44 In Hadfield’s You Are Here, it is Ferdinand Magellan’s 1519 voyage from Spain and nautical circumnavigation of globe, rather than a Platonic or Apollonian imaginary, that provides the conceptual frame within which orbital travel is to be situated and understood. Hadfield briefly points to the discovery of the world as a result of this voyage (‘Logbooks from the voyage were a revelation, the most complete record yet of our planet’s infinite variety’45), challenging the claim that observation of the earth only truly begins when humanity rises above the confines of the planet. He continues this rejoinder by suggesting that orbital circumnavigation is not qualitatively different to Magellan’s voyage. Rather, it is speed – the acceleration of an established trajectory – that distinguishes today’s passage around the planet. ‘Nearly 500 years later, the International Space Station completes an orbit of our planet every 92 minutes – 16 circumnavigations a day’,46 Hadfield writes, and the impulse to document this world-encompassing experience ‘is one that Magellan and his crew would recognize: to record – and share – the wonders of the Earth’.47

14

Orbital Poetics

It would seem, then, that a strange and unsettling ambivalence accompanies announcements of the world’s unprecedented observation from orbit. For the first time it appears to the eye as a complete planetary body, and yet this perception is meaningful only insofar as it confirms earlier accounts of the earth as a uniform state that moves within divinely ordered space. Its appearance is once immediately captivating and the culmination of an ancient cosmotheology. It is forged for the first time when observed from above, and yet such a perspective is claimed millennia before the first satellite or cosmonaut left the planet. Perfectly capturing this ambivalence is the name given by the UK Space Agency to the first mission by a British Astronaut to the ISS: ‘Principia’.48 Simultaneously conjuring the sense of an origin or fundamental beginning and referring to canonical thinking about the nature of the universe (Newton’s 1687 study of motion and gravity, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica), this name once again suggests a dawn that has been witnessed before.

IV As well as providing Hadfield with a context that allows orbital circumnavigation to be conceptualized, Magellan’s voyage is also the point of departure for Joyce E. Chaplin, whose Round About the Earth assembles an expansive history of how around-the-world travel has produced many perceptions of the earth as a planetary space. Pointing to how this expedition was itself not an origin, Chaplin notes that Magellan’s attempt to circle the globe was only possible because of the untested assumption that the world was spherical. The legacy of this voyage continues, she writes, in ‘accumulating round-the-world voyages’ that resulted in the idea that ‘a definitive, total knowledge of the world’ can be achieved: Certainly, the overlapping routes and repeated observations of the eighteenthcentury navigators gave that totalizing impression. For the first time, and with growing force, ‘around the world’ implied a complete vision of the planet, as if the multiple tracks that individual ships had laid around it had collectively generated the most detailed image of the globe ever seen.49

As well as the cartographic, trade and social changes that resulted from this journey and the world’s subsequent visualization, Round About the Earth also traces some of the many literary responses to circumnavigation that followed

20 November 1998: Dawn

15

Magellan’s voyage. An imaginary circuit of the world is proposed by Puck, the mischievous imp in Shakespeare’s 1595/96 A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Puck’s promise to ‘put a girdle round about the earth/In forty minutes’ is ‘a timely joke’ for Chaplin, perhaps pointing to mathematical theories of acceleration that were circulating among Shakespeare’s contemporaries, or possibly ‘wonderfully loopy nonsense’ about the geographical co-ordinates of longitude but not latitude, where there are minutes but not degrees.50 For Daniel Defoe’s 1725 A New Voyage around the World, circumnavigators ‘were ten-a-penny’,51 and Jules Verne’s 1873 Around the World in 80 Days ‘merged several literary genres, including the circumnavigator’s just-the-facts narrative, to create the first novel that … made readers consider the costs, human and material, of constructing a globe capable of sustaining such fast travel’.52 And, she writes, travel writing of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (by, among others, Ivan Bunin, Lewis Carroll, Jean Cocteau, Jack London and Mark Twain) conveys the sense of a planet that could be traversed because it had become a space that was open to tourists seeking to become more worldly.53 On other occasions, writers have reflected on circumnavigation in ways that extend from Magellan’s voyage, but also on the concept of orbit that Plato compellingly invoked centuries earlier. Cosgrove’s Apollo’s Eye emphasizes the cartographic imagination that shaped perceptions of the world, but he also describes a ‘poetics of the globe’54 – what might be termed a cosmologography or a cosmographopoeisis – that includes John Donne, John Milton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Joseph Conrad. He cites Donne’s ‘Good Friday 1613. Riding Westward’ as an example of how this poetics contributes to the cosmic (and imperial) dream of a world that is grasped and held within an encompassing gaze: Could I behold those hands which span the Poles, And turn all spheres at once, pierced with those holes? Could I behold that endlesse height which is Zenith to us, and to our Antipodes Humbled below us?55

Alongside the examples that are cited by Cosgrove, Alfred Tennyson’s 1849 elegy to his friend Alfred Hallam, ‘In Memoriam A.A.H.’, similarly ruminates on the theme of a heightened regard. This poem adheres to the idea of a cosmos that is ordered hierarchically; within this order, orbital observation is both transcendent and allows a more profound view of an earth and a humanity that are both beneath and enclosed:

16

Orbital Poetics So mayst thou watch me where I weep, As, unto vaster motions bound, The circuits of thine orbit round A higher height, a deeper deep.

Tennyson’s poem proceeds in part as a study of the relationship between consciousness and religious understanding. It yearns for a higher understanding, but for ‘In Memoriam’ to be on the ground is to be in the realm of restricted knowledge. Such a confinement – being at the centre of an orbit that can be attained only after a withdrawal from the secular world – is formally confirmed by the simple abba structure that circumscribes each quatrain and circulates throughout Tennyson’s poem. Images of encirclement return with the figure of the circumference that regularly appears in Emily Dickinson’s poetry. ‘No matter where the Saints abide/They make their Circuit fair’,56 she writes in poem 1576, preserving the association of orbital movement with a celestial being that occupies ‘a higher height’. This circumferential poetics continues in Hart Crane’s 1930 ‘Cape Hatteras’, a poem that synthesizes a defence of Walt Whitman’s writing with a celebration of the potential for technology to restore humanity’s wholeness. Scientists and engineers possess technical ability for Crane, but the domain of the poet is abstraction and sublimation. This means that the poet alone is able to render technical achievements in the form of the universal. Aviation provides ‘Cape Hatteras’ with one such achievement; although conscripted into the service of warfare, aviation is an expression of a will to connect with the infinite. ‘Stars scribble on our eyes the frosty sagas,/The gleaming cantos of unvanquished space’,57 Crane writes. Inscribed by the verses of the infinite, this elevated vision is able to access the celestial realm and discern the spherical nature of the cosmos – to perceive ‘that star-glistered salver of infinity,/The circle, blind crucible of endless space’.58 In moments such as these, the idea of an ultimate vision provides writing with an imaginary perspective and the sense of an encompassed world. This idea has subsequently become literalized in texts which reflect on how the satellite as a technical apparatus seems to actualize the possibility of earth observation. In Chapter 4, this book will consider some instances in which satellite imagery has been drawn into the production of a multimodal textuality which functions as another manifestation of the poetics of the globe because it is the satellite that now scribbles on our eyes. The association of the earth’s circumnavigation by ships, planes and satellites with a sense of complete understanding of the world needs to be questioned for

20 November 1998: Dawn

17

various reasons. As this chapter has noted, there is something unreliable about claims that the world appeared for the first time when photographed from space. The world’s appearance has repeatedly been assigned to captivating images (and, indeed, continues to be attached to the multitude of images that now descend from orbit), but this appearance was also projected before Sputnik’s celebrated journey. Rather than providing an exceptional revelation of the world, satellite photography offers yet another epiphanic revelation of the world: it confirms an ancient philosophical vision of the world’s shape, dimensions and character. It also extends the epiphanic revelation of the world that, as Chapter 2 notes, can be traced back to a medieval collision of poetry and cosmology, and in particular to Dante’s separation of the world from the universe. The association of the earth’s circumnavigation with the world’s disclosure also troubled Martin Heidegger (for whom satellite broadcasts and images can only result in a dangerously flawed and deracinating cosmology) as well as others who, like Heidegger, associate being in orbit with the deficiencies and dangers of technical thinking. The satellite as a technical instrument is mentioned only rarely – and on each occasion, very briefly – by Heidegger, who proposes that the satellite should not be treated as merely one technology among others. This device occupies a particular function in the intensification of technoscientific understanding and epitomizes a moment in which humanity has sacrificed its relationship with the world. Heidegger’s most famous remarks about the satellite are to be found in his 1966 interview with Der Spiegel, ‘Only a God Can Save Us’. In this interview, Heidegger seeks to clarify his association with National Socialism while rector of Freiburg University between 1933 and 1934, and in the context of this discussion he offers an elaboration of the technicity that, for him, defines modernity. ‘We have not yet found a way to respond to the essence of technicity’,59 he proclaims, and this essence for him takes the form of a logic that would disclose being and subject the world to a systematized and rationalist determination. In the modern epoch, this technoscientific condition has reached its apotheosis. In this moment, the earth is becoming congealed, hardened and regulated, and technicity is proceeding to alienate humanity from the unresolved relationship with the ground that it once experienced. Orbit for Heidegger (and for others, as discussed in Chapter 5) is therefore the site of a catastrophe. Technicity today ‘increasingly dislodges man and uproots him from the earth’,60 and its capacity to effect an unearthly displacement is exemplified by the alarming event of the world’s observation from space:

18

Orbital Poetics I was shocked when a short time ago I saw the pictures of the earth taken from the moon. We do not need atomic bombs at all [to uproot us] – the uprooting of man is already here. All our relationships have become merely technical ones. It is no longer on an earth that man lives today.61

The timing of this interview suggests that Heidegger is referring to photos taken by Lunar Orbiter 1, and he finds such images to be particularly disturbing because of the functionalist perspective that they produce. With these photos, humanity becomes detached from the vital provocation of being on an earthly ground; they provide visual evidence of a humanity that is no longer thinking about what it is but is instead captivated by the impression that it has conquered space. With the ascent of perception to orbit, and with the images of the planet that these devices offer, the earth becomes lost as a primordial site that casts beings into the world.62 ‘Only a God Can Save Us’ condemns the coercive force that this technical perception has come to exercise over the earth. Such a perception needs to be understood as the elevation and intensification of what he describes in his earlier writings as ‘the law of machination’63 that requires ‘the accordance of everything with producibility’, and in which ‘the unceasing, unconditioned reckoning of everything is pre-directed’.64 This systematized production – this measuring, making manifest and encoding – of the planet is, he writes, an ‘ongoing annihilation’.65 However, while ‘Only a God Can Save Us’ is notable because it situates orbital photography within a despotic rationalism, this interview is also significant because, immediately after issuing this condemnation, it associates orbit with writing. What Heidegger sees as annihilated by technicity’s victorious assumption of power is a poetic thinking that would not seek to contain and know the earth. ‘Recently I had a long dialogue in Provence with René Char – a poet and resistance fighter’, he remarks, in the same moment aligning himself to those who fought Nazism and lamenting the decline of the poetic: In Provence now, launch pads are being built and the countryside laid waste in unimaginable fashion. This poet, who is certainly open to no suspicion of sentimentality or of glorifying the idyllic, said to me that the uprooting of man that is now taking place is the end [of everything human], unless thinking and poetizing once again regain [their] nonviolent power.66

For Heidegger, the bond between orbit and writing is both essential and conflictual; satellites and poetizing are placed in apposition in a state of structural dependence that this interview understands as the expression of an archaic tension between creation and control. The tragic loss of home – the ontological

20 November 1998: Dawn

19

crisis – that Heidegger laments is a direct consequence of the ascension of technicity and the attendant imperative to crush the poetic. Writing continues, he recognizes, but it no longer allows a new sense of the world; the conclusion that he reaches is that ‘Contemporary literature … is largely destructive’.67 ‘Only a God Can Save Us’ is where Heidegger’s most recognized comments about orbit are to be found, although his 1962 lecture ‘Traditional Language and Technological Language’ provides a more elaborate overture on the relationship between the satellite and the poetic. One of the principal tasks of this lecture is to arrive at concepts of language and technology that do not succumb to the pitfalls of instrumentalist thinking. According to this lecture, received thinking about language finds its distinctiveness in a human capacity to speak; underpinning this principle is the proposition that ‘only language enables humans to be those living beings which they are as humans. As the one who speaks, the human being is: the human being’.68 Against the doctrine that has developed around this association of human being with language (in which speech is understood as a tool that either externalizes thoughts or allows the nature of reality to be communicated), Heidegger offers an alternative definition: ‘speaking is properly saying’.69 ‘Saying’ – an active verb – does not point to the accomplishment of the true or the proper in language. Instead, its operations are indicated by the infinitive form – to say (Sagen) – which more precisely reveals the repeated and perpetual articulation or projection of actuality: ‘“Sagen” means to show … It means to let something be seen and heard, to bring something into appearance … what is present [Anwesendes] comes into appearance through saying, that and how it presences [anwest]’.70 Saying as bringing-forth exposes showing not as a revelation of what is, but as a constitutive process that ceaselessly attaches sense to what presents itself. Furthermore, he states that ‘what is absent [das abwesende] as such also comes into appearance in saying’. Speech therefore reveals that things are shaped in thought, but it also discloses an unsayable beyond of language.71 ‘Traditional language’ is the name that Heidegger gives to such a bringingforth by speech. This language is traditional not because it would establish a permanent, and perfectly referential, system of communication; it is traditional because it operates as a ‘non-technologized everyday language’ that ‘grants the unspoken’.72 Preserving this ordinary and original language – ‘safeguarding ... the new possibilities of the already spoken language’, and protecting the ability for ‘the human being to say the world anew’ – is, Heidegger proposes, ‘the poet’s task’.73 However, just as ‘Only a God Can Save Us’ laments the departure from the poetic, so this lecture too describes a contemporary moment so captivated

20

Orbital Poetics

by technology that language can no longer say the world anew. Heidegger rejects the idea that all technologies function in essentially the same way as tools that assist human action – what he describes as ‘anthropological-instrumentalist conception of technology’74 – as well as the idea that technological progress is resulting in a greater capacity for human action. The instruments of modernity have a specific – though not evolutionary – function and effect, and to illustrate this claim he refers to a satellite that had been launched a little over a week before he delivered this lecture: One can claim … within the horizon of the anthropological-instrumental conception of technology that there is fundamentally no essential difference between a stone ax and the newest product of modern technology, the ‘Telstar’. Both are instruments, means produced for definite ends … The former, the stone ax, serves for splitting and hewing a few of the hard bodies that can be found in nature. The latter, the satellite, serves as a switch station for a direct transatlantic exchange of television programs.75

Comparing these devices at the instrumental level can result only in a ‘general and vacuously grasped’ understanding of their character, and such a banal approach would fail to determine ‘what is peculiar to modern technology and its products’.76 There is something distinctive about the satellite, and about modernity more generally for Heidegger, and it is in the corruption of traditional language that this distinctiveness is to be observed. No longer the realm of a saying which allows new possibilities for both speech and sense, language has become the domain of machinic communication. It has become technological, Heidegger contends, because ‘it is from the technological possibilities of the machine that the instruction is set out as to how language can and shall still be language’.77 This means that, in the age of automation, technology holds dominion over nature and language has become merely an instrument for conveying data and declarations relating to nature. More alarmingly, however, putting language in the service of information means that speech and saying – that is, conceptual invention and an awareness of the possibilities that are offered by conceptual invention – are no longer permitted. This intensification of the technological is ‘the severest and most menacing attack on what is peculiar to language: saying as showing and as the letting-appear of what is present and what is absent’.78 To resist this attack – to fight the rise of the satellite – a return to the poetic is needed, for ‘a poem does not, on principle, let itself be programmed’.79 If, with the satellite, the world has become encoded and mechanical then a restoration of the poetic would allow it again to be a site of becoming.

20 November 1998: Dawn

21

The challenge to technology and technicity that unfolds in Heidegger’s interview and lecture (as well as elsewhere in his writing) has shaped a critical legacy that inherits the same sense of both a social and an ontological disaster, and in which the question of technology is the question of being (and of being in the world).80 Often, a similar disaffection for the satellite persists. For Paul Virilio, satellites work to enhance state authority: they are, for him, among the various vision machines that are industrializing and militarizing sight, displacing the power to see from the body onto machines and peripheralizing the human as the agent of knowing, but also altering the speed at which perception and cognition occurs.81 A sense of uprooting from the world appears when Jean Baudrillard diagnoses a contemporary condition of atomized living, a ‘private “telematics”’ in which ‘each person sees himself at the controls of a hypothetical machine, isolated in a position of perfect and remote sovereignty, at an infinite distance from his universe of origin’.82 This machine is Sputnik’s descendent, and for Baudrillard it encapsulates the detachment that we now experience; no longer understood as an immanence that is defined by the world’s interiority, the subject is ‘in the exact position of an astronaut in his capsule, in a state of weightlessness that necessitates a perpetual orbital flight and a speed sufficient to keep him from crashing back to his planet of origin’.83 This projection of an elevated, isolated and accelerated condition places the private sphere in an ungrounded domain, but it is also an eviction of actuality from the mundane space of the world. ‘This realization of a living satellite, in vivo in a quotidian space, corresponds to the satellitization of the real’, Baudrillard writes, and this is ‘the end of metaphysics’.84 Heidegger’s association of satellites with a despotic technicity that disrupts the relationship between humanity and the world resurfaces in Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Creation of the World or Globalization. Nancy opens by considering how modernity has abandoned the Christian concepts of world and the city, orbi and urbi, and he describes a ‘network cast upon the planet – and already around it, in the orbital band of satellites along with their debris’. This network deforms the orbis as much as the urbs. The agglomeration invades and erodes what used to be thought of as globe and which is now nothing more than its double, glomus. In such a glomus, we see the conjunction of an indefinite growth of techno-science, of a correlative exponential growth of populations, of a worsening of inequalities of all sorts within these populations … and of a dissipation of the certainties, images, and identities of what the world was with its parts and humanity with its characteristics.85

22

Orbital Poetics

Where the world was once understood as a changeable space that acquires meaning through a sense of belonging and attachment, it is now experienced as an ordered and unvarying totality. For Nancy (as Chapter 6 discusses), the distinction between globe (here indicating a space produced by sense) and glomus (a spherical self-presence) points to a transformation that has resulted both in an ontological error and in the degradation of the social sphere. Luce Irigaray also extends Heidegger’s account of technicity’s coercive operations when she refers to ‘the domination of the world by all the technologies which aim to get a general view of it from on high, the most obvious example being that of satellites sent to observe the earth and its planetary system’.86 Again, this for her is both a cosmological and an ontological threat, but it also extends a theological and paternal tradition – ‘The father is a kind of meta-man – God being here the model’87 – in which authority is attached to observation. Against the conception of satellites as instruments that reveal the ground of being, these devices are therefore seen after Heidegger to have a technical function that allows anything but world disclosure. Their purpose is to circumscribe, determine and command the world, and as such they intensify the delusion of grounded being. They also maintain the world as a discrepant space in which orbital observation operates as a governing or regulatory mechanism. What they do not do is forge a planetary community or establish a generalized cosmopolitanism that surpasses the territorialism and geopolitical interests that delineate terrestrial space. Initial responses to the world’s appearance from orbit resulted in a sense of the co-presence of populations and spaces, and of an environment and an ecology that provides humanity with a shared home. Satellites have been seen, in other words, as the instruments through which global community is attained. Anthony Giddens, for example, states that ‘if one wanted to fix [globalization’s] specific point of origin, it would be the first successful broadcast transmission made via satellite. From this time onwards, instantaneous electronic communication across the globe is not only possible, but almost immediately begins to enter the lives of many millions’.88 Clearly, such a perspective is at odds with the description of satellites as the tools of an ontological coercion, but it is also contested by claims that these instruments preserve the uneven distribution of global power and normatively uphold an order in which the world is divided. When viewed in terms of transnational exchange, orbit is often seen not as a place where power becomes dispersed, but where power is heightened, not where authority is transcended but where authority becomes transcendent. They are devices through which the globalizing West or North broadcasts

20 November 1998: Dawn

23

its vision of the world, its sense of the relative status of nations, of cultural influence in the new transnationalism and of the ethics, politics and structure of global governance. For Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, satellites transmit values unidirectionally. In Death of a Discipline she offers a reminder that relates to how transnational authority is broadly configured: ‘Borders are easily crossed from metropolitan countries, whereas attempts to enter from the so-called peripheral countries encounter bureaucratic and policed frontiers, altogether more difficult to penetrate’.89 Spivak is primarily concerned in this text with how this discrepant transfrontierism shapes definitions of World Literature in Comparative Literary Studies (the discipline for which this book serves as a requiem), although she describes how it is consolidated by other cultural instruments, including those that circulate above the planet: ‘In spite of the fact that the effects of globalization can be felt all over the world, that there are satellite dishes in Nepalese villages, the opposite is never true’.90 Peter Dicken and James S. Ormrod similarly associate satellites with the escalation of global divisions. ‘The benefits that satellite technology offers to Western businesses and social organizations’, they write in Cosmic Society: Towards a Sociology of the Universe, ‘heighten the “digital divide” or “information gap” between North and South, exacerbating inequalities between the two’.91

V The term satellite derives in the first instance from the Latin satelles, and when used in a way that is faithful to its etymology this term suggests (as Chapter 7 discusses) a secondary or peripheral position in relation to (sometimes guarding) a core or centre that possesses primacy and power. Such a usage is invoked by Spivak (the idiom of a marginalized culture ‘does not come up into satellite country’,92 she writes) as well as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who in 1968 described the treatment of Africa and African writing ‘as an appendix or satellite of other countries and literatures’.93 This peripheralization can be seen in acts of self-satellitization that occur when colonial and formerly colonial nations attach themselves to the modernity that the satellite symbolizes. The field of astrophilately is intriguing here, since stamps have often been used to mark the status of those countries – in particular, China, Russia and the United States – that have the power to reach orbit. But satellites are also celebrated by countries that would appear not to be served by these machines: in 1965, the Wallis and Futuna Islands, a French overseas territory, issued stamps that

24

Orbital Poetics

commemorated the launch of first French satellite (albeit one that was launched in Algeria). The Democratic Republic of Congo in 1981 celebrated the principle of conquest (‘Conquête de l’espace’) on stamps that carried images of a Space Shuttle orbiter launching a satellite. Sometimes these images seem to declare a national independence that is attained through attachment to orbital and international space; Djibouti, for example, marked its entry to the UN in 1980 with stamps that commemorated the Apollo-Soyuz test project that acted as a forerunner to the ISS. The Station itself provides Palau with confirmation of the principle of sovereign internationalism, a principle that frames its status as both a presidential republic and in a relationship of free association with the United States. As this chapter has indicated, and this book will continue to propose, the idea of a controlling and globalizing technicity is not wholly convincing: both images from orbit and a more enduring orbital imaginary themselves confirm that the world cannot be contained as an entity that occupies in its own space. ‘We must question our investments in the whole earth fantasy’,94 Kelly Oliver writes. Moreover, just as being and writing in orbit must be seen as denying the technical operation that for Heidegger represents the height of modernity, so the claim that satellites function exclusively as the tools of remote governance needs to be questioned. That satellites operate as instruments of global surveillance and regulation should not be disputed, but what must be challenged is the idea that power can be fully systematized, possesses a unitary character or, indeed, is able fully to realize the control that it incessantly seeks. These instruments function not only unilaterally to fortify a global North which, despite its domination of the international sphere, can successfully eliminate a minoritarian or interventionist recoding either of the satellite’s function or of what orbit signifies for the world. Global power results not from a consistent articulation and regulation of planetary space, and authority is not attained after the world has been successfully fixed as a unitary concept or representation. This power is not effected through the banishing of discourses that refuse either the image of the world that descends from orbit or the mastery that the satellite is seen to signify. If the satellite is to be associated with the production of authority then this must be understood as an equivocating production: it is through acts of peripheralization and domination, rather than a purging of other identities and perspectives, that the world becomes established as an orderly and uniform domain, even when the eradication of populations, languages or traditions is attempted. Global authority, in other words, results from a doubled and divided discourse that integrates nations into a standardized narrative of transnational community and

20 November 1998: Dawn

25

sanctions the orthodox sense of an observed (and therefore governed) world, but which must also maintain the world as a variable and discrepant space in order for power to take the form of mastery and subjection. This is not power dissolved or authority dispersed, but power divided at its point of origin and authority as a conflictual site of adversarial articulations. Such a structural necessity prevents orbital circumnavigation from operating as an unassailable governance, with the world captured as a wholeness within the satellite’s potent gaze. Indeed, it is this essential equivocation that allows authority to be resisted and displaced, since it confirms both that the satellite’s ascendant power and apparent omnipotence can be contested and that alternative conceptualizations of the world are possible. It opens a space in which both orbit and the satellite are able to acquire a different symbolic value. Examples of this disruptive recoding of the world circulate throughout literature, theory and cultural criticism. Before the launch of the first orbiting instrument, Walter Benjamin records a disquieting episode in his childhood in which he experienced the unsettling effects of the moon. The light cast by the moon produced in him an anxious sense of the unearthly and the uncanny. ‘The terrain it illuminates so equivocally seems to belong to some counter earth or alternate earth’, he writes, ‘It is an earth different from that to which the moon is subject as a satellite, for it is itself transformed into a satellite of the moon’.95 This perverse reversal results in Benjamin’s surroundings becoming unrecognizable to him, and yet, although the strangeness of this episode initially makes him apprehensive, it eventually results in a reassessment of the world that he had assumed as merely there. The moon’s light provokes in him a fundamental question: ‘Why is there anything in the world, why the world? With amazement I realized that nothing in it could compel me to think the world. Its nonbeing would have struck me as not a whit more problematic than its nonbeing’.96 For Emmanuel Levinas too, the satellite wrests us from our habitual treatment of the world as the site of our groundedness. In his 1961 essay ‘Heidegger, Gagarin, and Us’, Levinas provocatively asserts that ‘the enemies of industrial society are in most cases reactionary’, and he associates this enmity with ‘Heidegger and Heideggarians’ who ‘would like man to rediscover the world’.97 Rather than seeking nostalgically to reacquire our proximity to world or place, Levinas acknowledges the potential of technology as a force that ‘wrenches us out of the Heideggarian world and the superstitions surrounding Place’.98 Gagarin is an exemplary figure for him because ‘he left the Place. For one hour, man existed beyond any horizon – everything around him was sky or, more exactly, everything was geometrical space. A man existed in the absolute of homogenous space’.99

26

Orbital Poetics

According to Parks, the satellite’s disruptive potential is to be found not in an ontological displacement, but in seizing the social power that is granted by the ability to observe from above. For her, images produced in, and dispersed from, orbit should not be understood wholly in terms of the application of force by those who regulate global society. ‘As satellite use expanded to other parts of the world’, she writes in Cultures in Orbit, ‘those who programmed and watched satellite television adopted tactics for ameliorating some of its imperializing tendencies and effects’.100 Among the tactics that Parks describes are the development of satellite television networks by Chicago’s Chinese community, Aboriginal Australians and indigenous groups in Canada. Similarly recognizing that the satellite should not be understood solely in terms of a panoptic assertion of power, David Howard describes how this device has been used to contest the imperial cartographies of the world: Over the last five years, new community initiatives have meshed local qualitative and quantitative data collection with satellite imagery, building collaborative projects to remap local spaces … Maps first produced by colonial authorities have been independently redrawn using Global Positioning Systems to incorporate local learning and to recognize incorrectly delineated indigenous territories.101

Media responses in South Africa to Sputnik, according to Thembisa Waetjen, demonstrate an appropriation of narratives of modernity and innovation, drawing Cold War space technologies ‘into local struggles and rivalries over ecclesiastical authority and political rights and power’ and ‘both confirm[ing] and subvert[ing] boundaries between secular and enchanted readings of nature and their respective attribution to colonial and colonized subjects’.102 In his 1986 Nobel prize acceptance lecture, Wole Soyinka situates the satellite in the history of the ‘jealously guarded sovereignty of Nature and Cosmos’.103 And yet, he writes, ‘From the heart of jungles, even before the aid of high-precision cameras mounted on orbiting satellites, civilizations have resurrected, documenting their own existence with unassailable iconography and art’.104 There is, in other words, something like an orbital perspective that not only anticipates the satellite’s remote gaze but also provides an alternative visualization and another memory of places that Europe had sought to know. Like Soyinka, Derek Walcott is not so much interested in how the satellite might be repurposed as an instrument that can be activated otherwise. He too is concerned with how the concept of the satellite might be thought otherwise, but also with how this term signifies an ambiguous relationship between centre and periphery. ‘North and South’, a poem written in 1981 following Walcott’s move

20 November 1998: Dawn

27

from Trinidad to the United States, displaces the term satellite by shifting it from an astronomical to a colonial context: Now, at the rising of Venus – the steady star that survives translation, if one can call this lamp the planet that pierces us over indigo islands – despite the critical sand flies, I accept my function as a colonial upstart at the end of an empire, a single, circling, homeless satellite.105

In this poem, the satellite provides an image of neither circumferential containment nor a remote and authoritarian monitoring, but of an unruly nomadism that does not know its place. Indeed, this figure – the satellite as itinerant colonial subject – in ‘North and South’ is simultaneously formed in the context of imperial subjection, a witness to the failure of a social order that would encompass the world, and a disruptive outsider who dismantles narratives of transnational power. If the satellite in literature and theory becomes an equivocating signifier of authority and resistance then the concept of orbit functions in a similarly ambivalent manner. Orbit exerts a gravitational force on writing.106 It shapes visions of spherical orderliness and of a grounded home, but it also provokes the uncanny sense of a world that is not at home with itself and cannot be subjugated either by circumnavigation or remote observation. Donne’s ‘Good Friday 1613. Riding Westward’, this chapter has already noted, meditates on the spherical oneness of a self and world that are observed from an ‘endlesse height’. But this poem also offers an account of planetary motion that departs from Donne’s Platonic sympathies, and from a conception of the world as a geocentric, selfgoverning and self-identical unity. ‘Good Friday’ opens with the solicitation ‘Let man’s soul be a sphere’, but as this poem proceeds it indicates a state of spherical co-dependence and incompleteness: ‘As the other spheres, by being grown/ Subject to foreign motion, lose their own/ … so, our souls admit/For their first mover, and are whirl’d by it’.107 Dickinson invokes a sense of celestial orbit in the image of a saintly arc that encompasses the world, although she is perhaps most renowned as a poet who celebrates the oblique. ‘Tell the truth but tell it slant –’, she writes in poem 1263, and this negation of language as a referential system extends to her contention that ‘Success in Circuit lies/Too bright for our infirm Delight/ … The Truth must dazzle gradually/Or every man be blind –’.108 Circumferential – orbital – knowledge for Dickinson is possible, then, only with a perspective that regards indirectly. Crane’s ‘Cape Hatteras’ looks to Whitman

28

Orbital Poetics

when associating technology with human perfectibility, although this poem also recalls Whitman’s assertion that ‘this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter’s compass’109 when it states that the sphere (as the symbol of cosmic perfection) can be ‘subjugated never’.110 Orbit, in these instances, refers not to a determinate and determining domain from where the world is surveyed, governed and standardized as a global terrestrial sphere. Rather, preserving and extending the morphology attached to the term orbit, these texts work to dismantle the association of this term exclusively with a controlling circumnavigation or an authoritative observation. In them, orbit becomes a signifier of both knowing and unknowing, of perception and the imperceptible. Indeed, there is something like a tradition of writing in which such a vertiginous sense of orbit – as a movement and a place that at once demand representation and remain unsayable – is evident. For example, one chapter of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda opens with an epigraph that floats above this story’s narrative and reflects on the limits of the writing. In this moment, Eliot asks readers to look to the cosmos: Men, like planets, have both a visible and an invisible history. The astronomer threads the darkness with strict deduction, accounting so for every visible arc in the wanderer’s orbit; and the narrator of human actions, if he did his work with the same completeness, would have to thread the hidden pathways of feeling and thought which lead up to every moment of action, and to those moments of intense suffering which take the quality of action.111

Writing in this passage is equated with astronomy, and for Eliot this means a shared need to weave a text that is an ‘account’ of what meets the eye. As much this novel petitions for a reliable stitching together of the evidence available, it also points to the impossibility for any narrative – literary or astronomical – fully to calculate the extent of the real. To document ‘the hidden pathways of feeling and thought’ is to combine analysis with speculation, and to do this ‘the narrator of human actions’ is obliged to engage in the act of interpretation. ‘Threading’, in other words, is fabrication. Eliot’s epigraph (as with other moments in her writing) discloses the novelistic staging of the real and departs from the factualist account of the past that is often attached to the nineteenth-century historical novel. As such, Daniel Deronda anticipates a burgeoning fin-de-siècle perspectivism and Modernism’s insistence that nature will fend off rationalism’s efforts to subdue it. Orbit is central to this meditation on writing and the real, signifying for Eliot the threshold between representation and what the novel cannot see. The theme of orbit as threshold is picked up again in James Joyce’s Ulysses: ‘Ever would he wander, selfcompelled, to the extreme limit of his cometary

20 November 1998: Dawn

29

orbit’,112 he writes of Leopold Bloom. Orbit works thematically here to indicate a journey away from astronomical charts and cosmological measurement (Bloom moves ‘beyond the fixed stars and variable suns and telescopic planets’) and from distinctions between earthly and unearthly space (these excursions take him ‘to the extreme boundary of space, passing from land to land, among people, amid events’113). After ‘incalculable eons of peregrination’, Bloom travels home, although his passage back is associated not with the consistency, order or uniformity of the world. Instead, he ‘reappear[s] reborn’ and as ‘an estranged avenger’.114 Furthermore, Joyce’s novel itself undertakes an uncanny orbital journey, circling around many mythical and other textual sources but (contrary to Modernism’s experiments with machine aesthetics) without enclosing the texts that motivate it. Like Bloom’s journey, Ulysses traces an arc that does not submit literary history to exposition, and this novel does not ground being in a world that is subject to technical comprehension. In his unfinished story ‘Agathe’, Paul Valéry also turns to the figure of orbit when considering the disjunction between what thought seeks to know and what can be known. This story describes a yearning for ‘some entity exceedingly desired by the mind’ which ‘once seen … would ingest into its own splendid mutability every thought capable of pursuing it’.115 Valéry’s narrator moves hesitantly around the idea of this entity, as though orbiting it but never coming into contact with it. ‘I have seemed to linger about the rim of an impenetrable circle within which I feel sure that there is something that would provide me with long enjoyment’, she or he writes, ‘something brief, something universal’.116 Indeed, this elusive something is seen to be undeniable as a spectral presence that insistently haunts, but never fully appears to, this story’s narrator. ‘Whether it be a great brightness, always in the tail of the eye, or a being as inviolate as the center of an orbit, its dwelling yields neither image nor doubt … it lies buried in simple certitude outside all metaphor and resemblance’.117 Yielding neither image nor doubt, assuredly there but refusing attempts to unearth it, a hidden entity that eludes both mimesis and symbolism, this ‘imminent pearl’118 is within an orbit that for Valéry (like Joyce) signifies the limits of the visible and the measurable.

VI With Eliot, Joyce and Valéry, as with other writers, references to satellites and orbit point to a different poetics of the world than the one associated with planetary circumnavigation or efforts to determine the dimensions and contours

30

Orbital Poetics

of the earthly sphere. This other cosmographopoeisis certainly contrasts with what is often considered to be significant in the relationship between writing and technologies of orbit. Most technical histories of the emergence of space travel trace its roots to the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cosmonautics and astronautics, and specifically to work by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Hermann Oberth and Robert Goddard that formulates principles for rocket design and calculates the velocity needed to reach orbit. What such accounts often emphasize is that these visionaries found their primary inspiration not in precursor work in the fields of chemistry, mathematics, physics or engineering (the disciplines that together allow the building of extra-planetary craft). Doug Millard explains that ‘Verne had kindled Tsiolkovsky’s curiosity as a boy with stories of space flight’.119 According to David Meerman Scott and Richard Jurek, ‘The “founding fathers” of modern rocketry … drew inspiration from fictional tales of interplanetary travel’, and they record Tsiolkovsky’s remark that ‘My interest in space travel was first aroused by the famous writer of fantasies Jules Verne’, as well as the fact that ‘Oberth read Verne’s lunar voyages so many times he finally knew them by heart, and Goddard read and re-read From Earth to the Moon’.120 For Margaret Lazarus Dean, it is this shared obsession with Verne that explains the apparently coincidental appearance in different countries of the idea of rockets as the vehicle for reaching orbit and beyond. Tsiolkovksy, Oberth and Goddard, she writes, ‘were following what they had learned from a French science fiction writer’.121 Writing, according to these accounts, carves out an imaginative space that inspired innovators who possessed the technical knowledge to actualize this vision and for the first time to reach space beyond the terrestrial world. Such a sense of the relationship between writing and orbital space is significant because it acknowledges the role of writing in the development of orbital instruments, and in acknowledging that the world is viewed as though from orbit before the first flights by Gagarin, John Glenn and others. One possible reading of this alternative archaeology of the relationship between orbit and writing is that literature functions as a prehistory to planetary circumnavigation, projecting the new territories for human inhabitation (including orbital space itself as a new territory) that subsequently become realized as a result of technological progress. However, as this chapter has argued, and as subsequent chapters of this book will maintain, writing does not only inspire new experiences. Literature also forces us to consider how we visualize and conceptualize the world. Verne and other writers not only prophesy orbital technologies of the twentieth century. They also contribute to the long history of thinking and writing that establishes the conditions for how we make sense of the world. Put otherwise, the heights of

20 November 1998: Dawn

31

orbit are reached because of literature: it is only after the production of orbit as an imaginative space that planetary circumnavigation became possible. There may indeed be a literary inspiration for the first circuits around the world, but orbit moves through and around literature over a longer and more sustained history, not only anticipating the work of visionary engineers and technologies but interrupting the technicity that would observe and know the world. It engages in an elevated making of the world before Sputnik, Telstar or Lunar Orbiter 1 or the Apollo missions left the ground. It is this creation and recreation of the world that Orbital Poetics traces.

Notes 1

2

3 4

5

6

The development of the ISS, particularly with regards to early discussions between US, Canadian, Japanese and European space agencies prior to Russia’s involvement, is documented in John M. Logsdon, Together in Orbit: The Origins of International Participation in the Space Station (Washington, DC: NASA, 1998). Also see Peter Bond, The Continuing Story of the International Space Station (Chichester: Springer/Praxis, 2002), 122ff; and David M. Harland and John E. Catchpole, Creating the International Space Station (Chichester: Springer/Praxis, 2002), 168ff. Joseph L. Zygielbaum ed., The First Man in Space: Soviet Radio and Newspaper Reports on the Flight of the Spaceship, Vostok, trans. Joseph L. Zygielbaum (Pasadena: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 1961), 5. Denis Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 260. Referring to both ‘Earthrise’ and the ‘Blue Marble’ images, Sean Gaston writes: ‘Even without the recent emphasis on globalization or global climate change, which were no doubt given a tangible authority by these famous images from the 1960s and 1970s, one could treat this visualization of the earth from afar as the Copernican revolution of the twentieth century. Today, we can encircle the globe.’ Sean Gaston, The Concept of the World from Kant to Derrida (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013), 1. Henry Vaughan, ‘First to Fly’, in Into That Silent Sea: Trailblazers of the Space Era, 1961–1965, ed. Francis French and Colin Burgess (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 21. See, for example, Gordon de Q. Robin on 1957–58, the International Geophysical Year: ‘The success of the IGY satellites – first with the launch of Sputnik 1 on 5 October, 1957, then of the US Explorer series starting in 1958 … will go into

32

Orbital Poetics

history. This remarkable achievement enabled man to view Earth for the first time from a distance’. Gordon de Q. Robin, ‘Curtain Up on Polar Research’, New Scientist 95, no. 1323 (1982): 760. 7 Lisa Parks, Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 3. 8 Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology First Book, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983), 94. 9 Husserl, Ideas, 94. 10 Husserl, Ideas, 94. 11 Husserl, Ideas, 94. 12 Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye, 259. 13 Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye, 259. Cosgrove quotes Frank Borman, astronaut on the Apollo 8 mission that produced the ‘Earthrise’ photo: ‘When you’re finally up at the moon looking back at the earth, all those differences and nationalistic traits are pretty well going to blend and you’re going to get a concept that maybe this is really one world and why the hell can’t we learn to live together like decent people’ (258). 14 Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye, 260. 15 Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye, 260. 16 Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye, 261. 17 Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye, 261. 18 Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye, 261. 19 ‘Star Flight: Yuri Gagarin. Documents of the First Manned Flight into Space’. Available online: http://www.firstorbit.org/media/pdfs/Gagarin_Vostok-1Transcript.pdf, 12 (accessed 19 February 2018). 20 Zygielbaum ed., The First Man in Space, 10. 21 Shawn William Miller, An Environmental History of Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 193. 22 See, for example, Margaret Lazarus Dean’s chronicle of the direction taken by NASA following the Apollo missions, including the decline of the Shuttle programme, Leaving Orbit: Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2015). 23 Chris Hadfield, You Are Here: Around the World in 92 Minutes (London: Macmillan, 2014), 2. 24 Hadfield, You Are Here, 5. 25 Hadfield, You Are Here, 2. 26 Hadfield, You Are Here, 3. 27 Tim Peake, Hello, Is This Planet Earth? My View from the International Space Station (London: Century, 2016), 10. 28 Peake, Hello, Is This Planet Earth?, 13. 29 Marshal McLuhan, ‘The Emperor’s Old Clothes’, cited in McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography, ed. Richard Cavel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 95.

20 November 1998: Dawn

33

30 Writing in The Guardian in anticipation of Peake’s mission, Edward Bloomer similarly rejects the idea of an encompassing celestial regard: ‘The space station itself is a significant source of light pollution for the crew, making it extremely difficult to take good pictures of the dim astronomical objects surrounding them (although the human eye, a more advanced device, will still afford amazing views every day). In a suitable location, Earth-bound observers will actually have quite an advantage over astronauts observing stars and deep-space objects: the vantage point may not be quite as exotic, but a dedicated astrophotographer can still capture something unique’. Edward Bloomer, ‘The Third Brightest Object in the Sky’, The Guardian, 15 November 2015. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/ science/2015/nov/15/international-space-station-astronaut-starwatching (accessed 19 February 2018). 31 Alice Oswald, ‘Tithonus: 46 Minutes in the Life of the Dawn’, in Falling Awake (London: Jonathan Cape, 2016), 48. 32 Jacques Derrida, ‘Ellipsis’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 299. 33 Peter Sloterdijk, In the World Interior of Capital: For a Philosophical Theory of Globalization, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), 4. 34 Francis MacDonald Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1937), 118. 35 Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, 115. 36 Plato, Phaedo, 109a, trans. David Gallop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 68. 37 Plato, Phaedo, 108e, 68. In his notes on this section, Gallop points to the controversy among scholars about how Plato’s term περιφερής should be translated. ‘At 108e5 the translation “round”, rather than “spherical”, avoids prejudging the question of whether the earth is, in fact, thought of as spherical’. Plato, Phaedo, p. 223 n.108c5–109a8. Intervening in this debate, William M. Calder III submits that ‘spherical’ best conveys Plato’s usage of περιφερής elsewhere. ‘περιφερής applied to solids means spherical, globular’. William M. Calder III, ‘The Spherical Earth in Plato’s Phaedo’, Phronesis 3, no. 2 (1958): 122. 38 Plato, Phaedo, 109c–d, 69. 39 Plato, Phaedo, 109d–110a, 69. 40 Plato, Phaedo, 110b–d, 70. 41 Jay Apt, Michael Helfert, and Justin Wilkson, Orbit: Nasa Astronauts Photograph the Earth (Washington, DC: National Geographical Society, 1996), 11. 42 Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye, xi. 43 Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye, 257. 44 Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye, 258. 45 Hadfield, You Are Here, 1. 46 Hadfield, You Are Here, 1. 47 Hadfield, You Are Here, 1.

34

Orbital Poetics

48 On the morning of 15 December 2015, Tim Peake’s journey to the ISS was triumphantly announced by news and social media in the UK as a unique and historic moment, since (it was claimed) this was the first time that a British astronaut had travelled to space. As ever, however, the narrative of novelty attached to being in orbit is curious and unreliable. Peake was not the first British person to have undertaken spaceflight. Among the other British astronauts are Helen Sharman, who in 1991 visited the Mir space station, Piers Sellars (a UK meteorologist who gained US citizenship in order to train as an astronaut), who served on three NASA missions to the ISS between 2002 and 2010, and Michael Foale (born with dual UK-US citizenship), who flew on Space Shuttle missions from 1992 to 2003 and was Commander of the ISS from 2003 to 2004. 49 Joyce E. Chaplin, Round About the Earth: Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012), 134. 50 Chaplin, Round About the Earth, 67. 51 Chaplin, Round About the Earth, 102. 52 Chaplin, Round About the Earth, 189. Also notable here is Verne’s less-acclaimed 1879 novel The Begum’s Fortune, which imagines a device that can circumnavigate the world: ‘A projectile, animated with an initial speed twenty times superior to the actual speed, being ten thousand yards to the second, can never fall! This movement, combined with terrestrial attraction, destines it to revolve perpetually round our globe’. Jules Verne, The Begum’s Fortune, cited in Doug Millard, Satellite: Innovation in Orbit (London: Reaktion, 2017), 22. 53 Chaplin, Round About the Earth, 255–90, passim. 54 Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye, 26–8. 55 John Donne, ‘Good Friday 1613. Riding Westward’, cited in Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye, 28. Cosgrove mistranscribes the second line that he quotes. This should read ‘And tune all spheres at once, pierced with those holes?’. John Donne, ‘Good Friday 1613. Riding Westward’, in John Donne: Selected Poetry, ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 208. 56 Emily Dickinson, ‘No Matter Where the Saints Abide’, in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. R.W. Franklin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 581. 57 Hart Crane, ‘Cape Hatteras’, in Hart Crane’s The Bridge: An Annotated Edition, ed. Lawrence Kramer (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999), 75. 58 Crane, ‘Cape Hatteras’, 72. 59 Martin Heidegger, ‘“Only a God Can Save Us”: The Der Spiegel Interview’, trans. William J. Richardson, in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan (Chicago: Precedent, 1981), 56. 60 Heidegger, ‘“Only a God Can Save Us”’, 56. 61 Heidegger, ‘“Only a God Can Save Us”’, 56. 62 The terms ‘earth’ and ‘world’, Kelly Oliver comments, function differently in Heidegger’s work. ‘Earth comes to play a central role in Heidegger’s thought

20 November 1998: Dawn

35

insofar as it conceals itself from us, resists, and refuses our attempt to conquer it. In this way earth resists technological framing in the sense of mastering or managing … Earth is associated with the past as given, our native ground and rootedness in history … World, on the other hand, is associated with the future as an engagement with this past and history through which, in decisive moments, we can transform our experience or be transformed by it’. Kelly Oliver, Earth and World: Philosophy after the Apollo Missions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 112. 63 Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1999), 89. 64 Martin Heidegger, Mindfulness, trans. Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary (London: Continuum, 2006), 12. 65 Heidegger, Mindfulness, 12. 66 Heidegger, ‘“Only a God Can Save Us”’, 56. 67 Heidegger, ‘“Only a God Can Save Us”’, 57. 68 Martin Heidegger, ‘Traditional Language and Technological Language’, trans. Wanda Torres Gregory, Journal of Philosophical Research 23 (1998): 138. 69 Heidegger, ‘Traditional Language and Technological Language’, 140. 70 Heidegger, ‘Traditional Language and Technological Language’, 140. 71 Relevant here is the place of the satellite in Jacques Lacan’s distinction between linguistic and technical communication: ‘Many people talk nowadays about messages everywhere, inside the organism a hormone is a message, a beam of light to obtain teleguidance to a plane or from a satellite is a message and so on; but the message in language is absolutely different. The message, our message, in all cases comes from the Other, by which I understand “from the place of the Other”’. Jacques Lacan, ‘Of Structure as an Inmixing of Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever’, cited in Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (London: Routledge, 1990), 204. 72 Heidegger, ‘Traditional Language and Technological Language’, 142. 73 Heidegger, ‘Traditional Language and Technological Language’, 142. 74 Heidegger, ‘Traditional Language and Technological Language’, 134. 75 Heidegger, ‘Traditional Language and Technological Language’, 134. 76 Heidegger, ‘Traditional Language and Technological Language’, 134. 77 Heidegger, ‘Traditional Language and Technological Language’, 140. 78 Heidegger, ‘Traditional Language and Technological Language’, 141. 79 Heidegger, ‘Traditional Language and Technological Language’, 141. 80 For a detailed account of the emergence and development of this legacy, see Don Ihde, Heidegger’s Technologies: Postphenomenological Perspectives (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 1–27. 81 Paul Virilio, Strategy of Deception, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2000), passim.

36 82

Orbital Poetics

Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’, trans. John Johnston, in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (New York: New Press, 2002), 147. 83 Baudrillard, ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’, 147. 84 Baudrillard, ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’, 147. 85 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization, trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (New York: SUNY Press, 2007), 33–4. 86 Luce Irigaray, Way of Love, trans. Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluháček (London: Continuum, 2002), 20. 87 Irigaray, Way of Love, 20. 88 Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Right, cited in Parks, Cultures in Orbit, 5. Also see Peter Dickens and James S. Omrod, ‘Globalization of Space: From the Global to the Galactic’, in The Routledge International Handbook of Globalization Studies, ed. Bryan S. Turner (London: Routledge, 2010), 531–53. 89 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 16. 90 Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 16. 91 Peter Dicken and James S. Ormrod, Cosmic Society: Towards a Sociology of the Universe (London: Routledge, 2007), 107. 92 Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 16. 93 Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o, ‘On the Abolition of the English Department’, in The Postcolonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (London: Routledge, 1995), 441. 94 Oliver, Earth and World, 23. 95 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Moon’, in Berlin Childhood around 1900, trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 161. 96 Benjamin, ‘The Moon’, 163. 97 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Heidegger, Gagarin, and Us’, in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Seán Hand (London: Athlone, 1990), 231. 98 Levinas, ‘Heidegger, Gagarin, and Us’, 232–3. 99 Levinas, ‘Heidegger, Gagarin, and Us’, 233. 100 Parks, Cultures in Orbit, 47. 101 David Howard, ‘Cartographies and Visualization’, in A Concise Companion to Postcolonial Literature, ed. Shirley Chew and David Richards (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), 157. 102 Thembisa Waetjen, ‘Sputnik from Below: Space Age Science and Public Culture in Cold War South Africa’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 18, no. 5 (2016): 705–6. 103 Wole Soyinka, ‘This Past Must Address Its Present’, Nobel Lecture, 8 December 1986. Available online: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/ laureates/1986/soyinka-lecture.html (accessed 25 August 2017).

20 November 1998: Dawn

37

104 Soyinka, ‘This Past Must Address Its Present’. 105 Derek Walcott, ‘North and South’, in The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948–2013, ed. Glyn Maxwell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 287. 106 Discussions of some literary references to the astronomical figure of orbit are provided in, for example, Frédérique Aït-Touati, Fictions of the Cosmos: Science and Literature in the Seventeenth Century, trans. Susan Emmanuel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); David H. Levy, The Sky in Early Modern English Literature: A Study of Allusions to Celestial Events in Elizabethan and Jacobean Writing 1572–1620 (New York: Springer, 2011); and Anna Henchman, The Starry Sky Within: Astronomy and the Reach of the Mind in Victorian Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 107 Donne, ‘Good Friday 1613. Riding Westward’, 208. 108 Emily Dickinson, ‘Tell the Truth but Tell It Slant’, in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, 494. 109 Walt Whitman, Song of Myself: With a Complete Commentary, ed. Folsum and Christopher Merrill (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016), 67. 110 Crane, ‘Cape Hatteras’, 73. 111 George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (London: Penguin, 1995), 164. 112 James Joyce, Ulysses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 680. 113 Joyce, Ulysses, 680. 114 Joyce, Ulysses, 680. 115 Paul Valéry, ‘Agathe’, in Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Volume 2: Poems in the Rough, trans. Hilary Corke (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 210. 116 Valéry, ‘Agathe’, 210. 117 Valéry, ‘Agathe’, 210. 118 Valéry, ‘Agathe’, 210. 119 Millard, Satellite, 26. 120 David Meerman Scott and Richard Jurek, Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 2. 121 Dean, Leaving Orbit, 15.

Part One

World Literature in Orbit

2

Dante in Space

In 1308 Dante Aligheri started to write The Divine Comedy, an adorational allegory of the passage through sin to salvation, from a sickening journey through the repugnant abominations of the underworld to a rapturous deliverance into the heavenly splendour that the faithful should anticipate. When he started to write this visionary tale, Dante opened with a Latin incipit: Ultima regna canam, fluido contermina mundo, Spiritibus que lata patent, que premia solvent pro meritis cuicunque suis.

The most widely cited English translation, from 1898, renders this triplet as: The furthest realms I sing, coterminous with the flowing universe, stretching afar for spirits, paying the rewards to each other after his merits.1

In 1990, a less elaborate translation is proposed: I shall sing of the farthest realms coterminous with the moving universe Stretching wide for spirits, where each one receives Rewards according to his merits.2

A 1997 translation of the first line proposes: I shall sing of far-away kingdoms, located at the edges of the watery world3

In 2010 we are offered yet another version: I shall sing of the kingdoms distant, bordering on the changing world, which open wide for souls, which provide rewards to each according to their merits.4

The significance of these efforts to render Dante’s Latin into English extends beyond debates about fidelity in translation – about whether the rhythm of Dante’s words can be successfully captured in another language, or whether these opening lines signify something that can be conveyed to modern readers.

42

Orbital Poetics

Most commentators on these lines take their direction from Boccaccio’s The Life of Dante, written between 1348 and 1373, which tells us that this triplet – and the Latin poem that would have followed from it – was discarded by Dante. The reason for this departure, Boccaccio tells us, is Dante’s preference for the vulgarity of the vernacular over the lofty refinements of Classical verse; it is in the Florentine idiom (what Erich Auerbach describes as ‘the common everyday language of the people’5), rather than in the hexameter verse of the Classical tradition, that Dante is better able to reach his fellow citizens. Dante began with ‘Ultima regna canam’, Boccaccio writes, but ‘there he stopped; for he thought that it was vain to put crusts of bread in the mouths of those who were still sucking milk, and so began his work again in a style fitted for modern ears, and continued it in the vulgar tongue’.6 This story of the palimsestic act of auto-translation that initiates The Divine Comedy is a familiar one, and it points to questions that continue to preoccupy literary studies today – questions about what authentic writing might be, about whether literature should be accessible only to those who observe the correct critical rituals and protocols or about whether all should be able to participate in the recording of lived experience. This is a story that has power and authority at its centre: who, it asks, is permitted to receive, and participate in the transmission of, the word? By excavating the roots of this poem, and by emphasizing how it begins by declining the gaze of the high-born, Boccaccio positions it as a work that emerges from an apprehensive privileging of the secular over the sacred.7 However, precisely what the secular constitutes is uncertain in Dante’s Latin. This uncertainty is demonstrated by the decisions made when translating Dante’s mundo: this place, where the poet sings and where the worthy will find a home, is either the universe or the world. The abandoned incipit revolves around a term which, in its Latin form, refers to two domains or spheres of existence. It is in the working out of this ambivalence that The Divine Comedy’s significance is also to be found. Marx views The Divine Comedy as a work that is grounded in worldly affairs, and in 1843, in the first volume of Capital, he looks to Paradiso, the final Cantica of Dante’s poem, when describing the mysterious act of transubstantiation that allows one commodity to be compared with another. As he approaches the gates of heaven, Dante’s familiarity with the doctrine of Christian faith is tested by St Peter; satisfied with the responses he receives, St Peter replies, ‘In alloy … and legal weight,/the coin you produce has passed assay’.8 For Marx, this moment perfectly captures the function of money as a mechanism that mediates exchange by establishing universal equivalence; just as the faithful are permitted

Dante in Space

43

to enter Paradise when they have cast off their physical form, so a commodity that is taken to market and acquires exchange-value ‘must divest itself of its natural physical body and become transformed from merely imaginary into real gold’.9 As such, Dante’s poem is accommodated into the broader project of Marx’s thinking. Since the supernatural enchantments of religion and theology have established an imaginary sense of orbital containment (‘Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself ’,10 Marx writes in Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right), the world needs to become the site of a secure and resolute analysis of things as they truly are; here, ‘the critique of heaven turns into a critique of the earth’.11 Despite its metaphysical and theological adornments, The Divine Comedy’s significance for Capital is to be found in its contribution to such an earthly critique. The worldly quality of Dante’s poem continues to be asserted with the reemergence of the concept of world literature in the twentieth century. While Marx and Engels anticipate a world literature that will arise as ‘national onesidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible’,12 the first appearance of this concept is usually traced to Goethe’s prophetic announcement in 1827 of a coming Weltliteratur. Indeed, Marx and Engels’ projection of such a writing would seem to be derived from their debt to Goethe’s internationalism.13 Goethe’s petition is for an inclusionary literature that would transcend the historical separation of nations and cultures and accelerate the realization of humanity’s essentially cosmopolitan character. ‘National literature is now a rather unmeaning term’, Goethe famously writes, ‘the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach’.14 This petition, for literature’s evolution to engender both intercultural understanding and a sense of collective community, has shaped subsequent entreaties to bring the world’s regions and populations into dialogue with each other. In recent years, this concept has tended to refer to efforts to track the travel of texts and literary practices across the earth’s territories. For David Damrosch, in What Is World Literature?, the definition of this concept needs to extend beyond the sense of a burgeoning internationalism that characterized Goethe’s (and Marx’s) proposal for a literature that expresses the world’s unity. ‘The dramatic acceleration of globalization since their era … has gradually complicated the idea of a world literature’,15 he writes. In what is now established as one of the standard definitions, world literature for Damrosch does not signify a writing that binds humanity together. Rather, he takes ‘world literature to encompass all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language’.16

44

Orbital Poetics

Any literature that travels into and across the world therefore by default becomes (in a specific sense) world literature, and according to Damrosch The Divine Comedy is one example of this kind of writing: ‘Dante’s poem changes shape as it crosses borders: it is a fundamentally different work abroad, and even in Italy it was a very different work for Italo Calvino and Primo Levi in the twentieth century than it was for Boccaccio in the fourteenth’.17 Essential for Damrosch, however, is that texts that travel take on a worldly quality when they take up residence elsewhere and influence the aesthetic practices that have operated in these newly acquired locations. ‘In its most expansive sense, world literature could include any work that has ever reached beyond its home base’, he writes, but ‘a work only has an effective life as world literature whenever, and wherever, it is actively present within a literary system beyond that of its original culture’.18 The Divine Comedy deserves the title of ‘World Literature’ because it opens itself to mutation and enables acts of textual hybridization. It reveals not only that individual texts enter into dialogue with each other but also that aesthetic traditions are transformed by the circulation of texts: ‘When we read Dante, we are aware that we are encountering a major work of world literature, one that draws on a wealth of previous writing and that casts its shadow ahead onto much that will follow it’.19 The Divine Comedy for Damrosch, then, is a formative example of world literature because it transforms literary practices as it moves beyond its home and is itself transformed by this aesthetic migration. But it also functions as world literature because it undertakes an act of world formation: ‘We are also immersed within Dante’s singular world, an imagined universe very unlike any envisioned by Virgil or Saint Paul, and one that Milton, Gogol, and Walcott will radically revise in turn for very different purposes of their own’.20 Retaining the uncertainty of Dante’s mundo, what The Divine Comedy gives us according to Damrosch is at once a world and a universe. Auerbach too takes Weltliteratur as the seminal foundation for a model of both aesthetic production and comparative literary analysis that would overcome the exclusive fixation on particular national cultures that has been a customary feature of philological criticism. Against Philology’s atomizing separation of writing into disjunctive traditions, his 1952 essay ‘Philology and Weltliteratur’ sketches a mode of interpretation that would be capable of tracing the many syntheses through which aesthetic practices connect, combine and coalesce. The distinctiveness of the world’s cultures is steadily diminishing, for Auerbach, because of the intensity of social and cultural exchange across regions and borders. As a result of this irresistible and transformative exchange, he writes,

Dante in Space

45

aesthetic practices are merging to forge a textual conversation that is overcoming the futile nationalism that seeks to contain writing traditions in a state of artificial isolation. The notion of Weltliteratur in Auerbach’s thinking is inflected with a universalism that takes human interaction as both axiomatic and a force for unification. The comparative reading that is initiated by Weltliteratur ‘considers humanity to be the product of fruitful intercourse between its members’,21 and this intercourse points to the ‘fateful coalescence’22 of world culture. As the notion of Weltliteratur becomes more timely, he writes, Philology should retain its historicist roots by remaining attentive to how national writing practices have emerged and become hardened. But this historicism would serve the more urgent task of charting the inexorable passage towards aesthetic standards and forms that are increasingly distributed across the world’s territories. The version of world literature promoted by Auerbach ‘provides a model of how to read a text at the level of the planet’, Jane O. Newman observes, ‘that is, both for the world that it contains within itself and for its ability to “radiate out” into “world history” and into an all-embracing world literary universe too’.23 What ‘Philology and Weltliteratur’ draws out of Goethe’s notion of Weltliteratur is, then, a dualistic critical model that is able to document the singularity of diverse traditions while also attending to the arrival of global standards and practices. Today, Auerbach’s account of the contraction and fusion of the world’s numerous aesthetic practices is often encountered through comments in The World, the Text, and the Critic, where Edward Said questions the universal reach of the humanism and historicism that motivate ‘Philology and Weltliteratur’. Auerbach’s essay concludes by situating Weltliteratur in planetary space – ‘our philological home is the earth, it can no longer be the nation’, he writes. However, Auerbach’s almost exclusive focus on Latin and European writing leads Said archly to note that ‘his earthly home is European culture’.24 This brief comment is part of Said’s broader excavation of the unacknowledged investment in European tradition, value and authority that shapes Enlightenment and postEnlightenment humanism. But it also points to how Auerbach understands the place of world literature. The world in which Weltliteratur is situated for Auerbach is not merely the location of a cultural or social coalescence; it is, more fundamentally, fixed by the earth itself. Auerbach’s fascination with literature’s earthly dwelling first becomes evident in his 1929 Dante: Poet of the Secular World. This book profoundly re-reads the status of Dante’s vision; rather than an allegory which seeks to disclose a realm beyond the mundane space of the secular – rather than a worldly imagining of the kingdom of Heaven – The Divine Comedy is significant because it explores

46

Orbital Poetics

the possibility of seeing the earth from above, as though through God’s eyes. This poem expresses a medieval sensibility – for Dante, a cosmology derived from the melding of Aristotle, Aquinas, St Augustine and Ptolemy; according to Sloterdijk, ‘a cosmic-supracosmic bastard model that fuses Aristotelian and Neoplatonic motifs’25 – in which the world is newly conceived as a distinct entity, even if it is still viewed as a manifestation of divine creation. Auerbach situates The Divine Comedy as a formative text in the articulation of this sensibility because it translates perceptions of a divinely ordered universe into the image of a world that is coherently meaningful to a humanity that is also created. He arrives at this insight in a passage which seems almost to equivocate about the dualism that is evident in Dante’s poem. ‘Even though the ancient characters of the Comedy have been changed in passing through the medium of medieval interpretation’, Auerbach writes: even though they have been transposed into a world order that is not always appropriate to their actuality, nevertheless with Dante for the first time, that ordering, reinterpreting spirit of the Middle Ages provides something more than systematic edification. With Dante a new and imponderable element – compounded of poetry, experience, and vision – was gained for all time: but that should not make us forget that the force which guided him in his achievement sprang directly from the universalism of the rational doctrine he was striving to demonstrate by embodying it in a divine vision. The question: how does God see the earthly world? – and its answer: with all the particularities ordered with a view to the eternal goal – are the foundation of this profoundly passionate poem, and in its fifteen thousand lines there is not a scene or a magical chord which did not draw life from that rational foundation.26

Dante’s poem therefore preserves a sense of the inscrutability of the celestial universe, but for Auerbach what is most distinctive about it is the idea that humanity can attain a providential perspective. Conveying and extending a nascent medieval geocentrism, The Divine Comedy defines a moment in which it seems possible to see the world as it truly is. Auerbach discovers in Dante’s poem what Emily Apter terms a ‘terrestrial humanism’27 in which the world remains an entity that communicates the sublime order of things, but is also becoming viewed as possessing observable features, moving within its own orbit, and a knowable terra firma for those who dwell in it. Rather than offering what Damrosch describes as a ‘singular world, an imagined universe’, The Divine Comedy is to be understood only in terms of its determination of a singular world and the emergence of a planetary consciousness. In Auerbach’s reading of this text we perhaps find an explanation that accounts for Dante’s abandoning

Dante in Space

47

of the original Latin incipit, ‘Ultima regna canam, fluido contermina mundo’. Perhaps the ambiguity of the Latin mundo was no longer suited to a new cosmology in which the world was becoming visible as an entity that possesses itself.

II For Auerbach, the world comes into view for the first time in The Divine Comedy, but the idea of a literature that can aspire to a divine perspective becomes literalized when poetry is launched into orbit. Etched into an instrumentation panel on the Transit Research and Attitude Control (TRAAC) satellite that was launched from Cape Canaveral by the United States Navy in 1961, Thomas Bergin’s ‘For a Space Prober’ was the first poem to leave the earth. Still circling the earth at an altitude of 600 miles, and expected to remain there for another 800 years, Bergin’s poem takes distance and time as its principal themes: From Time’s obscure beginning, the Olympians Have, moved by pity, anger, sometimes mirth, Poured an abundant store of missiles down On the resigned, defenceless sons of Earth. Hailstones and chiding thunderclaps of Jove, Remote directives from the constellations: Aye, the celestials have swooped down themselves, Grim bent on miracles or incarnations. Earth and her offspring patiently endured, (Having no choice) and as the years rolled by In trial and toil prepared their counterstroke— And now ’tis man who dares assault the sky. Fear not, Immortals, we forgive your faults, And as we come to claim our promised place Aim only to repay the good you gave And warm with human love the chill of space.28

This poem is shaped by the idea that humanity possesses the ability to rise above and apprehend its earthly home. Before the world’s appearance in the ‘Earthrise’

48

Orbital Poetics

and ‘Blue Marble’ photos, it dares to suggest that poetry can offer a vision of the whole world. Just as audacious as this poem’s formative circumscription and inscription of the world from orbit is that it offers a rejoinder to the US–USSR adversarialism, and the subsequent fears about the weaponizing of space, that followed Sputnik’s journey around the earth. Remarkably, the first poem in space petitions for the decommissioning of weapons in orbit and calls for universal peace. Bergin’s poem seems improbable because its message of earthly unity is attached to a United States Navy satellite. ‘For a Space Prober’ is also uncanny because Bergin, as professor of Romance Languages at Yale University from 1945 to 1973, translated The Divine Comedy into English in 1955,29 and this poem corroborates Dante’s primacy in the orbital writing of the world. The ability to leave the confines of the planet and to attain the heights of orbit is here seen to be a monumentally transformative power, one that allows humanity to enter the realm of the Gods. But the assault on the sky that it announces is also an incursion launched against the immortals’ exclusive rights to, and authority over, earth and its inhabitants. Bergin’s poem does not reproduce the Christian version of the sublime that The Divine Comedy offers: the figures that populate it are too recognizable, and their offensive actions merge the earth with the constellations from which the Olympians issue their directives; they are, in other words, too Greek. However, it is precisely the ability for humanity to rise above and comprehend its mundane home that is at the centre of Bergin’s poem. Here, orbital culture arrives as a cosmological counter-offensive that allows humanity to gain control of a planetary perspective. The ability to look down on the earth is of theological significance for this poem, and the shift in authority that it describes is to be found in its earth-forging shattering of the heavens’ dominion over the world. Nevertheless, this latter-day intensification of Dante’s humanism is also conciliatory in its response to the Gods and in its announcement of a new earthly autonomy. The humanism of ‘For a Space Prober’ extends beyond a sense of what happens when we observe the earth from above. The final line suggests that a beneficent transmission also occurs when satellites are launched into orbit and assault the sky. These craft not only look down at the earth, they also face outwards to the stars and the Gods. What they convey, for Bergin, is the compassion and tenderness of human love. In 1971 astronauts on the Apollo 15 lunar mission provided a sense of what this human love might look like when they marked their departure from the surface of the moon with some stirring music. Despite having a recognizably military arrangement, the piece that they played would probably have seemed

Dante in Space

49

uncontroversial to many witnessing the live broadcast of this event. Apollo 15’s musical valedictory was, however, taken from the official anthem of the US Air Force – the ‘Air Force Song’ – that was written and composed in 1938. Absent from the recording played by the Apollo astronauts were the lyrics of this song. The first stanza of the ‘Air Force Song’ establishes its sense of what it means to ascend above the ground, with the concluding line introducing a refrain that is repeated throughout the rest of the song: Off we go into the wild blue yonder, Climbing high into the sun Here they come zooming to meet our thunder At ‘em boys, Give ‘er the gun! (Give ‘er the gun now!) Down we dive, spouting our flame from under Off with one helluva roar! We live in fame or go down in flame. Hey! Nothing’ll stop the U.S. Air Force!30

In 1961 Bergin proposes that humanity has triumphed over the Olympians by replacing missiles with tender messages of peace, friendship and affection. Ten years later, by transmitting the ‘Air Force Song’ to the world, the Apollo 15 mission promised a weaponizing of space that would again allow ‘man’ to assault the presumed authority of celestial divinities. This time, however, rather than the earth’s love radiating from orbit into the universe, orbit is the new place of war. ‘Hands of men’ have ‘blasted the world asunder’,31 the song continues, and the ‘crate of thunder’ that these men have created permits an armed ascent ‘high into the blue’, equipping and empowering the ‘souls of men dreaming of skies to conquer’. The Apollo 15 mission in this manner takes cavalier bellicosity and the reach of the boys who give the gun beyond both surface and aerial combat. When the ‘Air Force Song’ was broadcast by the Apollo 15 Lunar Module, the effect was to confirm that orbit is indeed a place to which terrestrial combat has risen. The Apollo programme is best known for the first lunar landing and for heightened assertions of the earth’s cohesive planetarity. Apollo 8 produced the ‘Earthrise’ photo, and in 1969 Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin of the Apollo 11 mission installed a plaque on the Moon’s surface that reads, ‘Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969 AD. We came in peace for all mankind’.32 Almost exactly two years later, Apollo 15 replaced such a pacific intent with a narrative of nation-centred belligerence: preserving the striations of a divided world, it provides the reminder that NASA’s elevated ‘Flying men’ will remain dedicated to ‘guarding the nation’s borders’.33

Orbital Poetics

50

NASA swiftly sought to dissociate itself from the decision to transmit this song by attributing its global airing to a technical error. As part of its efforts to disavow the idea that orbiting instruments and space exploration express a will to dominate from the heavens, NASA has continued to send poetry into space. Poems in these moments have become part of a cultural payload that would, by virtue of their presence on spacecraft, confirm NASA’s professed ethic to establish communication, rather than to establish a new domain in which to pursue a hostile territorialism or to promote the idea of its exceptionality. The poems that have been chosen for spaceflight convey an aversion to aggression and conflict. For example, over 1,100 haikus were sent on NASA’s 2013 Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution probe, or MAVEN. These poems were selected by public vote following a competition that invited submissions from around the world. The winner, by Benedict Smith, parodies the martial spirit that was saluted during the Apollo 15 mission lunar lift-off: It’s funny, they named Mars after the God of War Have a look at Earth34

In the aphoristic form of the haiku, NASA’s declared pacific intentions are here confirmed by the notion that, rather than displaced onto a realm beyond the earth, conflict is more properly to be understood as a worldly fault. In 2014 NASA once again sent poetry into space when Maya Angelou’s poem ‘A Brave and Startling Truth’ (written in 1995 to commemorate the UN’s 50th anniversary) was carried on the first test flight of the Orion spacecraft. When NASA Administrator Charles Bolden announced that this poem would be carried on Orion’s inaugural flight (two orbits of the earth), he described it as a visionary work that reveals the function and significance of art: It is fitting that Maya Angelou’s prophetic words be flown not only outside the bounds of our Earth, but on the maiden voyage of a spacecraft that represents humanity’s aspirations to move beyond our planet, to reach higher, and become more than we have ever been. Through art, and the unique perspective of people like Maya Angelou, our discoveries, and the new facts and expanded understanding brought to us by exploration, are transformed into meaning.35

This ovation to Angelou suggests that her poem features on Orion’s first flight not to represent the breadth of human achievements by placing the cultural and the technological alongside each other in a state of mutual dependence. This ovation offers a different perspective of this relationship because it also troubles

Dante in Space

51

the idea that the world or universe can be held securely in thought. The truth exposed by ‘A Brave and Startling Truth’ is that technical knowledge by itself is unable to disclose things as they truly are; in order for such a disclosure to occur, facts require supplementation by the aesthetic. It is interpretation rather than unveiling – it is the transformative act of imaginative working and shaping, rather than the mimetic delivery of the object – that allows humanity to see beyond its familiar planetary environment. And this encounter with the transcendent also reaches beyond the calculable. Literature, Bolden submits, rises above the realm of analytical thinking and beyond perceptions of a quantifiable world; with it, we become ‘more than’ our mundane past might suggest. Bolden’s speech on the launch of the first Orion spacecraft therefore positions Angelou’s poem not as a work that derives from the tradition of writing that is fascinated with aerial flight or jurisdiction over the atmosphere,36 nor as a poetic extension of the effort to master atmospheric space – what Sloterdijk describes as the ‘ecologization of warfare’37 that modernity conducts in the air. Rather, this poem is placed in a literary tradition that speaks to a spirit of universal – otherworldly and unearthly – curiosity. It is to be associated with the spirit of Dante that is channelled in Bergin’s poem, rather than with the ethic of the United States Navy that is repeated by the Apollo 15 crew. However, ‘A Brave and Startling Truth’ is perhaps not as captivated by the transcendent as Bolden assumes. Its focus is an apparently isolated earth and those who occupy this place, a ‘people, on a small and lonely planet … on this small and drifting planet … on this wayward floating body’.38 This trifling and solitary entity is seen to be following a nomadic astronomical passage through space; its inhabitants, in contrast, are more purposefully undertaking a journey ‘to a destination where all signs tell us/It is possible and imperative that we learn/A brave and startling truth’.39 Although structured principally in free verse form, ‘A Brave and Startling Truth’ also proceeds iteratively towards a disclosure of this truth as the poem conceives it. The journey that it navigates is, initially, a wholly earth-bound one, and the reader is taken on a tour through some of the many errors in human history that have occluded the discovery of a universal verity: ‘the minstrel show of hate’, ‘battlefields and coliseum’, ‘the screaming racket in the temples’, rifles, land mines, the bomb, the dagger, ‘cankerous words’ and the abuse of children.40 It also travels past fabricated edifices (the Pyramids and the Gardens of Babylon) and nature’s pageant (the Grand Canyon, Mount Fuji, the Amazon and Mississippi rivers and ‘all creatures in the depths and on the shores’). After traversing these various worldly disturbances and distractions, humanity will, this poem

52

Orbital Poetics

proposes, arrive at an understanding of its celestial purpose. This moment – ‘when we come to it … When we release our fingers/From fists of hostility’ – will be ‘the day of peacemaking’.41 Angelou’s poem therefore offers an inspirational vision of humanity’s deliverance from the depredations of history and a reconciliation with itself. There are notable resonances here between such an eschatological image of the utopia – indeed, the paradise – to come and the vision of the passage to the kingdom of God in the Paradiso Cantica of The Divine Comedy. Like Dante’s poem, ‘A Brave and Startling Truth’ describes this passage not only as an overcoming of the world’s troubles, but also as a journey beyond the bodies that circulate in the space beyond the earth. In Paradiso, the Soul’s ascent to the Empyrean takes it through the heavenly bodies which, according to the Ptolemaic geometry that defines The Divine Comedy’s cosmology, orbit the earth: the Moon (realm of angels), Mercury (realm of archangels), Venus (realm of principalities), the Sun (realm of powers), Mars (realm of virtues), Jupiter (realm of dominations), Saturn (realm of thrones), fixed stars (realm of cherubim) and the Primum Mobile (realm of seraphim). Similarly, in Angelou’s poem, the route to peacemaking takes humanity ‘past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns’.42 Auerbach’s warning not to treat The Divine Comedy primarily as an allegory in pursuit of the heavenly is therefore poetically restaged in Angelou’s poem. ‘A Brave and Startling Truth’ is, just as Auerbach writes of The Divine Comedy, devoted to the human attainment of a providential perception that is focused on the world. At the culmination of this poem, such a sense of the autonomous capacity to comprehend the ordered particularities of the world is promised by the day of peacemaking. ‘When we come to it’, for Angelou: We, this people, on this wayward, floating body Created on this earth, of this earth Have the power to fashion for this earth A climate where every man and every woman Can live freely without sanctimonious piety Without crippling fear

And, in its final stanza, this poem conjectures that an epiphanic event will allow humanity to come to a state of self-knowledge: When we come to it We must confess that we are the possible

Dante in Space

53

We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world That is when, and only when We come to it.

In this revisionary narrative, those who inhabit the world are not the issue of a supernatural deity, and the idea of the miraculous here is turned against its origins in notions of a divine power that surpasses secular agency. Despite looking beyond the skies and itself attaining an extra-terrestrial height, this poem’s gaze is almost entirely focused on the human and the earthly; the exceptional creation that it depicts not only takes place on the ground but is of the world too. Aspiring to a position outside of the world that it regards, ‘A Brave and Startling Truth’ seeks not to convey the mysterious order of things. Rather, it is motivated by a question that is at once more mundane and of greater technical complexity: where in the world are we?

III Poetry that has been sent beyond the earth’s planetary limits therefore contributes to the perplexing philosophical and literary (as well as photographic, astronomical and mediatic) premise that it is necessary to leave the earth in order to see and know it adequately. According to such a view, it is not necessary to touch the earth in order to be connected with it; indeed, from this habitualized perspective, intimate contact with the world would prevent those on the ground from seeing or understanding it fully. This unstable hypothesis has been a prominent feature of the discourses that have accompanied efforts to conceptualize the ascent to orbit (and beyond) in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As well as intensifying this ambivalent thinking of the world, poems carried on spacecraft also continue the trajectory taken by the tradition of critical thinking that has emerged around the notion of world literature. Certainly, literature that is sent into space would strangely fit the definition of world literature, not only because these texts provide a literary context in which the world becomes visible, but also because they are transported outside of the social, geographical and cultural environment in which they were produced. More than any other writing that moves away from national traditions or escapes circumscription by national borders, poetry in orbit does not merely cross from one territory to another; this literature travels in a space beyond the territorial lineaments that striate the world as a site of social action

54

Orbital Poetics

and interaction. As this chapter has noted, the idea of world literature has been decisively elaborated in Damrosch’s emphasis on ‘works that circulate beyond their culture of origin’; above all other writing, poetry in orbit fulfils such a sense of a writing that circulates in the beyond. If poetry in orbit extends and heightens the space in which world literature revolves then it also prompts a return to ontological and cosmological questions that have been neglected in recent critical work on the transnational movement of writing. Such criticism accents the transcultural and trans-territorial passage of writing, and it provides a literary-historical cartography that maps the many mutations and metamorphoses that transform particular texts, as well as aesthetic genres more broadly. In this focus on literary practices, the world’s immanence tends to be taken as axiomatic; at best, the idea of the world – as an incontestable finitude that grounds aesthetic production – is given only marginal consideration. Writing that has been sent into orbit troubles such a focus because it is animated by the act of reflecting on the world as an astronomical and cosmological body. In it, the notion of a planetary habitus is itself of primary concern, and this return to the perception of the world as a terrestrial location (rather than as a surface etched by cultural practices) suggests a rejuvenation of the origins of world literature. ‘Ultima regna canam, fluido contermina mundo’. I shall sing of realms that are coterminous with the flowing and moving universe; I shall sing of kingdoms that are at the edges of the watery world or bordering on the changing world. These translations, from 1898 to 2010, of Dante’s abandoned Latin incipit can be read in terms of their historical contexts, and the recent rendering of mundo as world might be treated as further evidence of a twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury desire in Europe to move away from theological and cosmological thinking and towards a sense of planetary space. In other words, the continued translation of Dante’s Latin opening phrase would appear to demonstrate a broader and longer sacrificing of the celestial to the mundane, and a greater appetite today for thinking about globalization. While such an appetite might be attributable in part to Auerbach’s ‘Philology and Weltliteratur’, and its insistence in the mid-twentieth century that literature can work as a force for humanity’s unification, his earlier writing on Dante points to a prior and more profound moment in which the world takes on a distinctive character. By situating The Divine Comedy as the text that inaugurates a new sense of the world, Auerbach anticipates the claim made in respect of Angelou’s poem that literature makes the world comprehensible. But, locating Dante’s poem at the source of this earthly sensibility, Auerbach also offers an alternative history of the world’s

Dante in Space

55

conceptualization to the one that shapes the arrival of the idea of world literature. For Goethe, Of all discoveries and convictions, nothing may have produced a greater effect on the human spirit than the doctrine of Copernicus. The world had scarcely been acknowledged as round and complete in itself when it was obliged to forgo the tremendous privilege of being the centre of the universe. Never, perhaps, has a greater demand been made on mankind: for through this recognition so many things went up in smoke: a second paradise, a world of innocence, poetry and piety, the evidence of the senses, the conviction of a poetic-religious faith.43

Auerbach looks to Goethe as the figure who first describes literature’s worldly attachments, and he revives Goethe’s prophetic announcement of a writing that will transcend the limitations of national culture. The proposal that this literature will emerge with the continued unfolding of the sixteenth-century shift from anthropocentric geocentrism to heliocentrism is, however, disputed in Auerbach’s account of a more embryonic cosmological dislocation. Of decisive significance here is not the Copernican displacement of an earth or its inhabitants44 that had been at the centre of the cosmos and creation, nor the ensuing distrust in the idea that the world itself can be touched or that the task of literature task is to convey a sense of the world’s divine purpose. For Auerbach, it is with medieval poetry’s attempt to capture the world, and to make earthly existence a primary concern, that so many things melt in the air. At the centre of these competing humanisms – at the origin of world literature – there is therefore a dispute over the nature of orbit, over what orbits and what is orbited; over what is sovereign and what is the satellite.

Notes 1 Giovanni Boccaccio, The Life of Dante, trans. Philip H. Wicksteed, in Dante: The Critical Heritage, ed. Michael Caesar (London: Routledge, 1989), 166. 2 Giovanni Boccaccio, The Life of Dante, trans. Vincenzo Zin Bolletino, cited in Guyda Armstrong, ‘Review of Giovanni Boccaccio, Life of Dante, J.G. Nichols trans.’, Heliotropia 2, no. 2 (2004): 28. 3 R.J. Schork, Latin and Roman Culture in Joyce (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997), 231. 4 James M. Houston, Building a Monument to Dante: Boccaccio as Dantista (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 124.

56

Orbital Poetics

Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 186. 6 Giovanni Boccaccio, A Translation of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Life of Dante, trans. G.R Carpenter (New York: The Grolier Club of the City of New York, 1900), 129. 7 Dante scholarship often describes how this preference for the idiomatic and vernacular over Latin is also the conduit for a critique of the church and its imperial ambitions in the fourteenth century. For a discussion of how this challenge unfolds in the third Cantica, Paradiso, see, for example, Massimo Verdicchio, The Poetics of Dante’s Paradiso (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 6–11. 8 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Paradiso, trans. Robin Kirkpatrick (London: Penguin, 2012), XXIV, 83–4. 9 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 197. 10 Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’, trans. Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 132. 11 Marx, Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’, 132. 12 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, trans. Samuel Moore (London: Penguin, 1967), 84. 13 If Marx’s humanist internationalism is partly attributable to his affinities to Goethe then it is necessary to note that Marx also, contentiously, in his 1853 essay ‘The British Rule in India’ reproduces Goethe’s claim that the passage to the world’s unification will be energized by Asia’s forced incorporation into transnational polity and production. For a discussion of this essay’s debt to Goethe, see Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 17–20. Also see S.S. Prawer, Marx and World Literature (London: Verso, 2014). 14 Goethe, cited in David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 1. 15 Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, 4. 16 Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, 4. 17 Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, 140. 18 Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, 4. 19 Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, 298. 20 Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, 298. 21 Erich Auerbach, ‘Philology and Weltliteratur’, trans. Maire and Edward Said, The Centennial Review 13, no. 1 (1969): 2. 22 Auerbach, ‘Philology and Weltliteratur’: 2. 23 Jane O. Newman, ‘Auerbach’s Dante: Poetical Theology as a Point of Departure for a Philology of World Literature’, in Approaches to World Literature, ed. Joachim Küpper (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 44. 5

Dante in Space

57

24 Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (London: Vintage, 1983), 7. The preference for European traditions that Said finds in Auerbach’s essay can be seen as a continuation of the literary historical prioritization that occurs in Goethe’s comments on Weltliteratur. These comments, Robert J.C. Young notes, ‘remain fundamentally European in orientation, and are addressed to the prospect of the accession of Germany and German literature onto the European literary scene’. Robert J.C. Young, ‘World Literature and Language Anxiety’, in Approaches to World Literature, ed. Küpper, 30. 25 Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres Volume 2. Globes: Macrospherology, trans. Wieland Hoban (South Pasedena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2014), 456. 26 Erich Auerbach, Dante: Poet of the Secular World, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: New York Review Books, 2007), 150. 27 Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (London: Verso, 2013), 211–27. 28 Thomas G. Bergin, ‘For a Space Prober’, Advances in Geophysics 15 (1971): 136. 29 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Thomas Bergin (New York: Appleton Century Crafts, 1955). Bergin also published a biography of Boccaccio in 1981. 30 Robert MacArthur Crawford, ‘The U.S. Air Force Song’, in A Civilian’s Guide to the U.S. Military: A Comprehensive Reference to the Customs, Language, & Structure of the Armed Forces, ed. Barbara Schading (Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest Books, 2007), 180. 31 Crawford, ‘The U.S. Air Force Song’, 181. 32 See also Dean’s remark that Armstrong’s first words on the moon can be treated as another example of poetry taken into space: ‘Some people suspect that NASA hired a team of copywriters, or poets, to come up with the historic first words to utter along with [Armstrong’s] first step’; she also notes that ‘in fact no one told him what to say’, though only ‘if all accounts are accurate’. Dean, Leaving Orbit, 49. 33 Crawford, ‘The U.S. Air Force Song’, 181. 34 Going to Mars with Maven: Contest winners. Available online: http://lasp.colorado. edu/maven/goingtomars/send-your-name/contest-winners/ (accessed 3 August 2016). 35 ‘Poem by American Matriarch Flown on Orion Presented to NASA Administrator’, 7 April 2015. Available online: http://www.nasa.gov/content/poem-by-americanmatriarch-flown-on-orion-presented-to-nasa-administrator (accessed 18 August 2016). 36 See, for example, Laurence Goldstein, The Flying Machine and Modern Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); M. Christine Boyer, ‘Aviation and the Aerial View: Le Corbusier’s Spatial Transformations in the 1930s and 1940s’, diacritics 33, nos. 3/4 (2003): 93–116; and Piero Boitani, Winged Words: Flight in Poetry and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

58

Orbital Poetics

37 Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, trans. Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009), 53. 38 Maya Angelou, ‘A Brave and Startling Truth’, in Celebrations: Rituals of Peace and Prayer (London: Virago, 2010), Kindle edition. 39 Angelou, ‘A Brave and Startling Truth’. 40 Angelou, ‘A Brave and Startling Truth’. 41 Angelou, ‘A Brave and Startling Truth’. 42 Angelou, ‘A Brave and Startling Truth’. 43 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gespräche, cited in Duncan Large, ‘Nietzsche and the Figure of Copernicus: Grande Fantaisie on Polish Airs’, New Readings 2 (1996): 68. 44 Nietzsche, for example, famously remarks that ‘since Copernicus, man seems to have been on a steep slope – from now on he rolls faster and faster away from the centre – in what direction? towards nothingness? towards the “piercing feeling of his nothingness”?’. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 130.

3

What Counts as Literature?

Located on the northern hemisphere of Mercury, the Goethe impact basin is a large depression on the planet’s surface that was caused by an ancient meteor strike. Mercury’s surface is punctured by a large number of such craters and, although some of the features that cover this planet take their names from astronomers and mythological figures, the nomenclature adopted for its many impact craters draws upon celebrated writers, artists and composers, from Apollodorus, Berlioz and Calvino to Villa-Lobos, Warhol and Zola. Boccaccio, Giotto and Petrarch each has a crater named after him; curiously, their contemporary Dante does not. Goethe is both a fitting and an unfortunate choice for the name of one of these craters. As the previous chapter has noted, one of Goethe’s remarks on astronomy associates enlightenment with the departure both from the pieties of religious thought and from the pre-modern empiricism in which immediate sensory information is associated with comprehension of the world. Such an association suggests that Goethe is indeed an appropriate figure in the naming of Mercury’s impact craters. According to the Copernican model that he salutes, planetary bodies are not autonomous astrophysical entities, but are dependent on the Sun’s celestial pre-eminence; stamped and reshaped by countless encounters with falling objects, Mercury’s surface offers a compelling testimony to the humbling recognition that no planet moves in sovereign space. And yet, in his tribute to Copernicus, Goethe does not dispute the integrity of astronomical bodies or the pre-Copernican conceptualization of the world as a spherical plenitude; it is only the notion of the earth’s primacy that is contested in his description of the monumental shift from geocentrism to heliocentrism. Meteors catastrophically rupture the sense of abundant self-containment that neither Copernicus nor Goethe question: when these extraterrestrial projectiles descend and strike the surface of a planet, they dramatically alter both its surface and substance. What the Goethe impact crater on Mercury bears witness to, then, is a remaking of

60

Orbital Poetics

planetary bodies by objects that traverse orbital space. These global spheres do not revolve in a sequestered and indivisible state but are revealed by the Goethe crater to be both inescapably tied to the stuff of the universe and neither whole nor complete because of this attachment. ‘Ultima regna canam, fluido contermina mundo’. As the previous chapter has discussed, this abandoned incipit for The Divine Comedy points to the uncertain and impermanent condition that is revealed by the Goethe impact basin. I shall sing ambiguously, this poem suggests, of an uncertainty about where we are, about the ground below or the stars above, about materiality and transcendence. Because mundus, like the Greek cosmos, can be rendered in English as, among other things, ‘universe’ and ‘world’, Apter places this term in ‘the longer sequence of Untranslatables’ which also includes Welt, Terre, Chôra, Globe and Planetarity.1 Efforts to overcome this untranslatability have resulted in the selection of English terms which, despite suggesting equivalence, sacrifice the elaborate cosmology that Dante’s phrase conveys. Translating mundo as ‘universe’ suggests an undifferentiated universe that is at one with itself; translating this term as ‘world’ separates the remote domains and kingdoms of Dante’s song from the fluid territories of the inhabited planet. Dante’s Latin preserves the sense of a world and a universe that belong together and actualize each other; the world signified here is not complete in itself, and neither is the space of the universe seen to reside beyond the earth’s orbit. Unlike Goethe, Dante might not have an impact basin on Mercury named after him, but he launches world literature with a phrase that is just as devastating to the idea of planetary identity as the craters that signify the impossibility of orbital containment. When Auerbach’s ‘Philology and Weltliteratur’ opens with the description of a world that is contracting, becoming ever closer to itself, and increasingly uniform (‘Our earth, the domain of Weltliteratur, is growing smaller and losing its diversity’2), it risks neglecting the expansive cosmological and metaphysical reach of such works as The Divine Comedy. Auerbach’s essay, the previous chapter has noted, is primarily given to tracking literature’s diminishing attachment to national traditions, and his earlier book, Dante: Poet of the Secular World, anticipates such a sense of the worldly context of writing by re-reading The Divine Comedy as a poem that regards the earth from a celestial perspective (rather than one that looks at the divine from below). Apter observes that Ralph Manheim’s translation of Auerbach’s title – Dante als Dichter irdischen Welt – substitutes Secular for irdisch, for her another term in the sequence of ‘Untranslatables’ that also includes mundus and cosmos. The German term,

What Counts as Literature?

61

she notes, is ‘normally defined in English as earthly, temporal, or transient’.3 Preserving the possibility of a sacred domain that complements the concrete realm of human affairs, Manheim’s choice of Secular detracts from the earthly trajectory of Auerbach’s book. ‘As distinct from the philosophical ascriptions of Abgrund, or the Heideggerian terms Grund and Erdherrschaft (tainted by a nationalist rhetoric of nation and soil)’, she writes, ‘irdisch connotes spirit imbued with the terrestrial, the fleshly, the material, the mundane’.4 This elaborate history of translation and mistranslation suggests that world literature, as it opens with Dante’s discarded incipit (‘Ultima regna canam’) and continues in Auerbach’s reading of literature’s terrestrialization of the world, begins in, and remains shaped by, the untranslatable. In his 1929 essay on Joyce’s Work in Progress, Samuel Beckett equates this question of translation and untranslatability with the question of calculation and incalculability. In the first paragraph of this essay, Beckett makes an uncompromising declaration: ‘Literary criticism is not book-keeping.’5 This assertion is motivated in part by Beckett’s aversion to the mode of literary scholarship that has surrounded Dante’s work – often a mania for numerology that has been preoccupied with counting the various elements of The Divine Comedy, or with trying to determine how and what numbers signify in this poem. Against such efforts to systematize literary interpretation and to quantify the value of writing, Beckett finds in Joyce’s Work in Progress a series of abstractions that refuse classification or arrangement into well-ordered categories. For this reason, Beckett tells us that there are parallels to be observed between Joyce and Dante. Whereas commentators have sought to distinguish Joyce’s unfamiliar and unspeakable English (‘The language is drunk. The very words are tilted and effervescent’, Beckett writes) from the daily language of The Divine Comedy, for Beckett we need to acknowledge that there is something elusive about both Joyce’s and Dante’s work: It is reasonable to admit that an international phenomenon might be capable of speaking [the language of Work in Progress], just as in 1300 none but an interregional phenomenon could have spoken the language of the Divine Comedy. We are inclined to forget that Dante’s literary public was Latin, that the form of his Poem was to be judged by Latin eyes and ears, by a Latin Esthetic intolerant of innovation, and which could hardly fail to be irritated by the substitution of ‘Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita’ with its ‘barbarous’ directness for the suave elegance of ‘Ultima regna canam, fluido contermina mundo’.6

Drunk, tilting and effervescent, the language of Joyce’s Work in Progress might justifiably be seen as resisting interpretation (which is to say, resisting translation

62

Orbital Poetics

into daily language). But for Beckett, Dante’s poem too needs to be seen as defying comprehension. Describing the effect that Dante’s Florentine vernacular would have had at the time of this poem’s appearance (a ‘barbarous directness’), Beckett suggests that this idiomatic language would have been received not only as unpolished, unsophisticated and illiterate. It would also have been seen as having something foreign or outlandish about it. Even as this poem reached most candidly to readers, like Joyce’s writing it also sought out those versed in linguistic and cultural difference and appealed to the sense of an uncanny elsewhere. It is this unsettling otherworldliness that, for him, places The Divine Comedy alongside Work in Progress as texts that defy both the perception of linguistic equivalence and the idea that they will surrender to the kind of criticism that would merely enumerate their various features. It is difficult to dispute much of what Beckett writes, if only because of his resistance to ratiocination (or, more precisely, to deliberation as calculation). But he does need to be questioned on the issue of whether literary criticism is bookkeeping. ‘Clearly Beckett’s own literary criticism is nothing like the marketplace symmetries of book-keeping or the slow measure of the ledger’, Laura Salisbury writes, ‘it lurches untidily from impersonal exposition, through expressions of a personal reluctance to partake in criticism … into a sarcastically superior attack on those … unable to recognise Mr Joyce’s achievements’.7 Even if ‘good criticism (in its twentieth-century modernist manifestation) does have a fair amount of book-keeping in it’, Beckett’s criticism cannot be ‘be tidied up into book-keeping’, because ‘like art, [it] refuses to “work”’.8 On the other hand, according to Peter John Murphy, in his story ‘Assumption’ – published in the same year as Our Exagmination – Beckett offers a fictional calculation and quantification of the value of Dante, Bruno and Vico: his ‘first creative venture in this very short story seems, in large part, to consist of “book-keeping”’.9 Steven Connor recalls one critic who finds in the work of Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett the evidence of a specifically typographic writing that is mathematical in two senses. First of all, it has, like mathematics, liberated itself from the occasion of utterance … The second feature of this kind of writing is that it consists of finite quantities, closed sets of information, from which the text selects, rather than seeming to emerge out of nothing in an unbroken, sourceless stream.10

Extracting the finite and measurable from an indistinct flow shapes Beckett’s cosmological announcement, in his 1932 novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women, that ‘the greatest triumph of human thought was the calculation of Neptune from the observed vagaries of the orbit of Uranus’.11 This planetary calculation

What Counts as Literature?

63

‘re-merges several times Beckett’s writing’,12 Peter Boxall notes, suggesting both the revelation and retreat of hidden movements: ‘There is beauty to be found … in the way that an unseen heavenly body makes a legible mark on the unseen universe, something compelling about the deduction of the unknown, undreamt thing, from the slight distortion it causes in the path of the known’.13 It would appear, then, that Beckett’s own writing adheres to the principle and practice of accounting even as it appeals to a sense of unquantifiable artistry. The known in this novel becomes actualized and is maintained (it adds up) through a subtraction of the unknown. Beckett’s effort to align criticism with a non-propositional art that is removed from reason, rationality and quantification operates in the register of the normative rather than the descriptive: this is a declaration not of what criticism is, but of what it ought to be. Book-keeping is precisely the method of analysis that literary criticism has often adopted. Perhaps not immediately recognizable as an exercise in calculation, efforts to establish the greater value of literature in the pursuit of understanding nevertheless demonstrate an appetite for quantification. With Philip Sidney’s 1595 ‘Defence of Poesy’, the English critical tradition begins with a description of poetry as a mode of understanding that surpasses the merely technical knowledge that develops in astronomy, philosophy and mathematics. Despite attending to the order of things, these disciplines are limited by their inattention to the pitfalls of being human or worldly: ‘The astronomer, looking to the stars, might fall in a ditch’, the philosopher ‘might be blind in himself ’ and the mathematician ‘might draw forth a straight line with a crooked heart’.14 And yet, in order to establish poetry as the most noble discourse, Sidney turns to the act of comparative measurement: the poet, he writes, ‘doth draw the mind more effectually than any other art doth’.15 For Marx too, literature’s significance is to be found in its comparative value: in a review of 1854, he celebrates ‘the present splendid brotherhood of fiction-writers in England, whose graphic and eloquent pages have issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together’.16 The singularity of literature is therefore a matter of calculation; its exceptionality is derived from the greater quantity or degree with which it reveals truths and essences. More than lawyers, historians, grammarians or physicians, more than politicians, publicists and moralists, more than astronomers, philosophers and mathematicians, the writers of literary works are, according to both Sidney and Marx, equipped to disclose the nature of the world. As well as authorizing declarations of literature’s power and primacy, calculation is more readily observable in the acts of quantification that have

64

Orbital Poetics

often provided criticism with primary data for analysis. ‘The act of counting has always been central to literature, in the sense that poetic measure relies on number and pattern’,17 Baylee Brits writes. Despite its position today as a familiar term in the lexicon of organizational management and associated with audit culture, for the OED ‘metric’ is to be defined primarily as ‘Senses relating to poetic metre’ and ‘The branch of study that deals with metre, esp. in poetic metre (now superseded by metrics)’; only in its secondary sense does it refer to ‘Senses relating to measurement generally’, ‘A system or standard of measurement; a criterion or set of criteria stated in quantifiable terms’ or ‘Measurement, figures, statistics’. The legacy of this sense of quantification is to be found in the statistical, computational or structural analysis of particular literary works, where the counting of textual elements is seen to yield a sense of what a text means, or of how its signifying elements are arranged in a manner that allows it to appear meaningful. Calculation and enumeration are also fundamental to the more recent practice of producing data visualizations – word clouds, network and information graphics, and other graphical representations – that are often associated with a reliable disclosure of what is most essential to a text. Quantification continues in cartographies of world literature which track not only the movement of texts over territories and beyond national cultures, but also the historical and geographical efflorescence of particular literary genres and the trafficking of cultural forms. Such a data-driven tracking of literary practices across the world is most evident in the cartograms; scatterplots; and line, radar and Gantt charts that are often produced in the analysis of statistical information and data relating to the migration of aesthetic practices.18

II Beckett’s misgivings about criticism as measurement and enumeration arise because of the quality of non-systemizable abstractions that, for him, characterizes literature. Similar objections are voiced about the turn towards data analysis in the tracking of world literature. ‘When we … strip the world of motley, fractal texture through large-scale data mining’, Newman writes: what we lose is the sense of the ways in which any one of World Literature’s intriguingly dense and detailed texts both contains its own universe and fits into an equally as variegated world-literary whole that is ‘unified’ precisely in its heteronomous ‘multiplicity’, as another great theorist of World Literature, Erich Auerbach, once wrote.19

What Counts as Literature?

65

Vilashini Cooppan writes that ‘world literature is not an ontology, but an epistemology, not a catalogue of literary data but a way of reading and even, dare one suggest, thinking: a philosophy in, and of, motion’;20 according to Sarah Lawall, ‘The more data we collect, the harder it is to coordinate a reading of the world’.21 Responses such as these point to more a generalized context in which misgivings are stated about the use and social function of data. The idea of the ‘quantified self ’, for example, has emerged in recent years as a mode of subjectivity in which data and devices (including GPS wearables) are used to monitor and measure the daily functioning of the body.22 As Btihaj Ajana notes, this shift has been regarded as another moment in the long history of biopolitical control in which the self continues to be subjected to management and regulation techniques: the quantified self is ‘often seen as a key illustration of a neoliberal attitude towards the self and its governance … encourage[ing] individuals to become rational entrepreneurs of themselves and embrace its metric culture of self-improvement’.23 Recent efforts to comprehend world literature through acts of tracking and data analysis are vulnerable to the similar claim that these methods are determined to make the literary text untroublesome: in their pursuit of the text’s worldly significance and location they risk discarding the variability of writing, as well as neglecting earlier critical work that seeks to maintain a sense of literature’s simultaneous condition of becoming unified in the world and remaining external to this unity. For Michel Foucault, the relationship between calculation and knowledge needs to be approached in terms of its place in the history of European thought. In The Order of Things, he describes how this relationship arrives forcefully with the coming of systematized rationality in the Classical Age and becomes entrenched as a core element in the emerging science of order that takes mathematical calculation as essential to the comprehension of actuality. Mathesis is the ‘science of calculable order’,24 Foucault writes, ‘a science of equalities, and therefore of attributions and judgements; it is the science of truth’. This science combines with taxinomia, a practice that ‘treats of identities and differences; it is the science of articulations and classifications; it is the knowledge of beings’.25 Both of these elements work in conjunction with genesis, ‘the analysis of the constitution of orders on the basis of empirical series’.26 Mathesis separates entities into units and calculates their character or quality, taxinomia arranges these entities into a catalogue of comparable characteristics and genesis provides a narrative of the past that conjures away the emergence of this system as a particular moment in the history of knowledge. These three elements for Foucault coalesce to

66

Orbital Poetics

forge the Classical episteme, and what this system seeks to know are the various elements that combine to produce the perception of the world as a finitude. In this moment of technical thinking, ‘The sciences always carry within themselves the project, however remote it may be, of an exhaustive ordering of the world’.27 Mathesis and taxinomia are often taken to be the major features of the analysis that Foucault sets out in The Order of Things: the calculability of actuality and the classifiability of things in the world are the conceptual operations that structure thinking in the Classical Age. But this system is possible only because of the genetic element that legitimizes it: the ideas and assumptions that guide this age become established only through the elimination of the thinking that it replaced. For Foucault, the order of knowledge that the Classical Age displaces is configured around the notion of similitude. Things in the world are not, in the pre-Classical period, understood as inherently meaningful and yielding themselves to measurement, quantification and categorization. Rather, they are seen to be invested with significance from an elsewhere that they resemble; instead of being immanently meaningful and referring to themselves, things in the world in this earlier age are treated as signs that metonymically indicate the sublime order of a creation that includes the world but also extends beyond it. In pre-Classical thought, Foucault writes, the ‘ancient notion’ of the microcosm reappears and becomes central to the conceptualization of the earth as a planetary body, albeit one that interacts with a higher order. Examination of the world does not result in a sense of its isolation or self-sufficiency. Instead, it affirms … that the visible order of the highest spheres will be found reflected in the darkest depths of the earth … It indicates that there exists a greater world, and that its perimeter defines the limit of all created things; that at the far extremity of this great world there exists a privileged creation which reproduces, within its restricted dimensions, the immense order of the heavens, the stars, the mountains, rivers, and storms.28

Of crucial importance here is that the world as microcosm and the greater world of which it is part do not make themselves immediately recognizable. Instead, they are hidden from view. They form part of an occult or secret substratum, the meaning of which is encoded or encrypted both in things in the world and in language about creation. ‘There is no difference’, Foucault writes, between the visible marks that God has stamped upon the surface of the earth, so that we may know its inner secrets, and the legible words that the Scriptures, or the sages of Antiquity, have set down in the books preserved for us by tradition. The relation to these texts is of the same nature as the relation to things: in both cases there are signs that must be discovered.29

What Counts as Literature?

67

Because these inner secrets lie behind signs that communicate obliquely, we cannot access them directly. Disclosure will not come through acts of quantification, measurement, calculation or enumeration, or between the cataloguing of things according to their shared characteristics. In this period, it is the work of decipherment and interpretation – in other words, translation – that will provide a route to knowledge of the larger scheme of which the world is only a fragment. This hermeneutics of the miraculous Foucault terms divinatio, and it is this mode of thinking that is made obsolete by the Classical Age. Mathesis and taxinomia displace divinatio, and the narrative that accompanies the arrival of this Age – for Foucault, the thinking of its genesis – is what allows this particular structuring of knowledge to be treated as the one that finally accesses the true.

III Foucault’s account of the transition to the principle of calculable order hints at the thinking that irritates Beckett: the notion that enumeration or quantification can reveal what resides eternally at the heart of literature and is able to solve the problem of what writing means. Following Foucault, the book-keeping that Beckett dismisses is contestable because it can be seen as belonging to a particular moment in which calculation becomes equated with truth; its claims to truth are made contingent by the recognition that they emerge and take root, rather than being based on an ability to extract something intrinsic and permanent that is encoded within the text. Two further consequences extend from this challenge to counting. First, Foucault’s account of the shift from preClassical thought to the Classical Age – from divinatio to mathesis, taxinomia and genesis – troubles the way in which counting is central to what is now a canonical approach to world literature. Responding to Goethe’s plea for a writing that transcends national tradition, Franco Moretti devises a criticism that proceeds through a combination of interpretation and data analysis. The categories that shape criticism need to change, he writes, if the asymmetrical movement and dissemination of literary forms – and their relationship to the hierarchical distribution of cultural authority and transnational power – are to be grasped. To address this asymmetry, Moretti recommends not a theory of textual dispersal, where stylistic differences are seen to develop as a result of local or regional influences, transforming writing into an infinite (and innumerable) miscellany of diverse literatures. Rather, he proposes a bifurcated criticism that recognizes both the system that shapes the emergence of world literature and

68

Orbital Poetics

the discrepancies that exist within (and, indeed, are required by) this system. In his famous initial formulation of this hypothesis, Moretti looks to ‘the worldsystems school of economic history’, according to which: International capitalism is a system that is simultaneously one, and unequal: with a core and a periphery … that are bound together in a relationship of growing inequality. One, and unequal: one literature (Weltliteratur, singular, as in Goethe and Marx), or perhaps, better, one world literary system (of interrelated literatures); but a system which is different from what Goethe and Marx had hoped for, because it’s profoundly unequal.30

Tracing the unfolding of this hypothesis across Moretti’s work, Apter states that ‘what he means by “system” often remains elusive’; it too is an Untranslatable, ‘a loose name for a practice of World Literature shaped by quantitative analysis and computational skills’.31 Apter notes what are, for her, several problems with this model, including a tendency towards Eurocentrism, but also ‘its push to reconcile literary history with ecology’.32 This model is limited, she proposes, because the ecosystem that it maps recognizes only the relationship between literary and technical systems. It ‘spell[s] out less concern with ecosystems (and their organicist, genetic, evolutionary applications) and more concern with computational systems tout court, albeit in the service of literary and social history … the expansive “world” of this quant-driven ecosystem tends towards contraction of the economy of interpretation’.33 The idea of system is therefore a non-systematic one because it moves elusively through Moretti’s work, but also because its operations are contrary to the method that it promotes. However, it is also necessary to situate this modelling of a system in the epistemic history that Foucault describes. Mathesis and taxinomia structure this work of literary critical measuring and quantification, which is to say that it describes how writing practices combine to produce a system of interacting and integrated textual units that are transplanted and displaced across social and economic space. The world that appears through this method is presented as a complete and inherently meaningful entity that becomes disclosed through computational analysis of data relating to the transmission of texts and practices. That this association of measurement and calculation with the revelation of the real and the true belongs to a particular moment in intellectual history is not, however, sufficiently acknowledged. In other words, this model presents mathesis and taxinomia as essential to the analysis of literary data, but because it does not contextualize the emergence

What Counts as Literature?

69

of this analytical mode, it does not acknowledge its own genesis. And, because this method does not reveal its own situatedness in epistemic history, the world surfaces in it only as a field of socio-cultural practices. What the world itself might be – what divinatio might tell us about how the world as a cosmological or ontological entity – is not a consideration here. This means that when world literature is made comprehensible through data analysis, the question of what the world is becomes overlooked. It turns into a remainder that is left over when the world is counted as one. The idea of an incalculable remainder preoccupies Giorgio Agamben in his seminar series on the Epistle to the Romans, The Time That Remains. In the third seminar, Agamben’s commentary echoes Auerbach’s Dante: Poet of the Secular World and Mimesis by focusing on the state of being separated. Agamben’s interest in this idea is triggered by its appearance in the opening sentence of Romans, which establishes Paul’s exceptional capacity to convey the divine word. The Latin Vulgate translates this opening sentence as ‘Paulus, servus Jesu Christi, vocatus Apostolus, segregatus in Evangelium Dei’; in the King James translation, this sentence becomes ‘Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated unto the gospel of God’.34 For Agamben, the proposition that Paul should be set apart in this way is curious because it is at odds with the idea of Paul as ‘the apostle of universalism’.35 Agamben’s commentary on Romans defends this tension by focusing on the term for separation or setting apart that is used in the Epistle: Aphōrismenos. ‘Aphōrismenos is nothing more than the Greek translation of the Hebrew term parush or the Aramaic p’rish, that is, “Pharisee”’,36 he writes. The Pharisees, he notes, differentiated themselves from the masses, ‘not only and as much from the pagans, but also and above all from the “am-ha’aretz”, the people of the earth, meaning, the ignorant farmers who do not follow the law’.37 What Paul separates himself from is not ‘the people of the earth’ – he does not claim an exceptional position apart from the multitude – but from his own past as a Pharisee. This separation, Agamben writes, is a separation from the principle of division, distinction or setting apart, and in this separation from separation he is able to embrace the messianic idea of community. Agamben’s remarks on the remainder that is produced by such an act of separation speak directly to the idea of a writing that can be counted and quantified, and of a world literature that communicates the oneness of the world. The condition of being separated – the Aphōrismenos that opens Romans – does not allow an entity, an identity or a community to be fully at home or at one with itself. The wholeness to which Paul’s universalism aspires can only

70

Orbital Poetics

ever be partial – a remnant – because it needs to be distinguished from the particularism that it negates. Universalism must be incomplete – community is always divided – because the remnant, Agamben writes, inserts itself ‘between every identity and itself ’.38 These comments relate not only to Romans, or to the division between Jew and non-Jew that is the focus of the third seminar of The Time That Remains. They also apply to the notion of a shared world that inhabits its own space, and to Auerbach’s reading of The Divine Comedy in which world literature emerges as a secular writing that places the world in a particular astronomical or cosmological space. But where Auerbach finds in Dante a separation of the world from the universe or the immensity of the heavens, Agamben suggests that the otherworldly or celestial cannot be forsaken so easily. While the otherworldly or celestial appear as conceptual leftovers to be discarded by secular thinking, they remain essential to the formation of the idea of the world as a finite entity. By the same token, the more recent description of world literature as a quantifiable (though unequal) system of production is also troubled by the notion of the remnant. Here, counting is seen to reveal the passage of aesthetic and social practices, but even though these practices are understood as a manifestation of the world itself, counting does not yield a world that can be quantified as a oneness that is in fully possession of itself. The separation that occurs here is between world literature and the world, one fully subjected to the notion of calculable order, the other uncountable. World literature must therefore be treated as something partial, rather than complete; something divided and unequal, rather than one and unequal. What is missing from world literature – what cannot be translated into a number or into thinking – is the world.

IV For Foucault and Agamben, calculation must always be frustrated in its quest to determine the one. It is, however, important to consider modes of quantification and measurement that depart from notions of accountability, standardization or arithmetical determination. Alternative numerologies, counting but finding something more or less than calculable at the heart of calculation, circulate in abundance. Reading Edmond Jabès’s Book of Questions, Derrida describes how repetition requires a ‘ternary essence’ that multiplies, rather than duplicates, sense:

What Counts as Literature?

71

Once the centre or the origin have begun by repeating themselves, by redoubling themselves, the double did not only add itself to the simple. It divided it and supplemented it. There was immediately a double origin plus its repetition. Three is the first figure of repetition. The last too, for the abyss of representation always remains dominated by its rhythm, infinitely. The infinite is doubtless neither one, nor empty, nor innumerable. It is of a ternary essence.39

In Philippe Sollers’s Numbers we are, Derrida writes elsewhere, caught in a ‘mathematicogenetic theory of groups’ and ‘a kind of writing of innumerable number’.40 Invoking a silent instrument that circulates above, Sollers hints not only at orbital observation but also at the world’s enumeration from orbit: ‘Night is turning and forming itself above the cities – where the mute machines are henceforth capable of reading, deciphering, counting, writing, and remembering’.41 The notion of a machinic production of meaning guides Derrida’s commentary on Numbers, a novel that seeks a break in representation (which would allow ‘a pure appearance of appearing through which the present seems to free itself from the textual machine’42) but also exposes the making present that must occur when this break is articulated. ‘“Presence,” or “production,” is but a product’, Derrida writes, ‘The product of an arithmetic operation’.43 In this perpetually ambivalent operation, measuring and counting (like naming and enciphering) disclose both sense and the impossibility of sense: ‘E-numeration, like de-nomination, makes and unmakes, joins and dismembers’.44 Derrida’s description of number as both one and more than one, as well as his account of the proliferating effects of the double, is therefore at odds with the idea that arithmetical operations are to be avoided. It also radically challenges earlier work that appeals to the notion of an unsystematizable innumerability, such as Roland Barthes’s declaration that ‘the narratives of the world are numberless’.45 The idea of a ‘writing of innumerable number’ in this manner both extends the earlier rethinking of number and anticipates the uncanny numerology that has emerged in recent theory. For example, Derrida’s comments echo ‘ … Poetically Man Dwells … ’, where Heidegger puzzles over the significance of measurement in Friedrich Hölderlin’s poem ‘In Lovely Blue’. In this poem, dwelling is taken as ‘the basic character of human existence’, and Hölderlin ‘sees the poetic … by way of its relation to this dwelling, thus understood essentially’.46 One of the primary concerns of this poem, then, is to establish a connection between dwelling and the poetic; indeed, Heidegger writes, ‘Poetry is what really lets us dwell’.47 ‘Poetically man dwells’ is the fragment from Hölderlin’s poem that detains Heidegger, although what preoccupies him most are the words that follow: ‘on this earth’. Poetry, Hölderlin suggests, is what grounds us; it departs from the

72

Orbital Poetics

aspiration to achieve a cosmological – or orbital – perspective that would allow us to look down upon, and fully to see and know, the earth. ‘Poetry does not fly above and surmount the earth in order to escape it and hover over it’, Heidegger writes, ‘Poetry is what first brings man back onto the earth, makes him belong to it, and thus brings him into dwelling’.48 In Hölderlin’s poem, making sense of this dwelling occurs through measurement. Our eyes are lifted from the ground and in the act of looking up to the sky we assess the distance between the ground and the beyond. ‘This between is measured out for the dwelling of man’49 for Heidegger. Reflecting on this ‘measuring out’ is not, however, the same as undertaking an act of precise mathematical calculation that would determine the dimensions and character of the earth. It is ‘measure-taking’, rather than measurement, that concerns Hölderlin. Measure-taking not only takes the measure of the earth, ge, and accordingly it is no mere geometry. Just as little does it ever take the measure of heaven, ouranos, for itself. Measure-taking is no science. Measure-taking gauges the between, which brings the two, heaven and earth, to one another. This measure-taking has its own metron, and thus its own metric.50

With its own metric, the measure-taking that Heidegger refers to here is not the simple act of enumeration. According to Stuart Elden, measure-taking ‘is not a question of understanding nature as res extensa’, nor is it ‘a simple earthmeasuring’ or ‘earth-writing’51; for Christopher Yates, ‘The “hands” that measure and build … do not belong to ideas of presence and do not serve the security of categorical knowing’.52 Measure-taking is, instead, a ‘rethinking of measure’53 because it stands apart from the act of measuring by considering the nature of gauging and calculation. Poetry provides us with an image of the calculation through which we make sense of the earth as a dwelling, but it does not itself participate in such a calculation. ‘The poet’, Heidegger writes, ‘does not describe the mere appearance of sky and earth. The poet calls, in the sights of the sky, that which in its very self-disclosure causes the appearance of that which conceals itself ’.54 The earth is not, then, a self-revealing body that makes itself known to us but discloses itself as something that remains concealed. Poetry provides us with an insight into the earth’s ambivalent appearance and concealment; it is a writing of the measurement that, in Derrida’s terms, ‘makes and unmakes, joins and dismembers’. Attention to knowledge as a mathematical operation continues more recently in work that, according to Apter, emphasizes ‘the existentialization … of

What Counts as Literature?

73

calculation and the count’.55 These tendencies Apter finds in the work of Alain Badiou, Bruno Latour, Frédéric Gros, Luc Boltanski and Quentin Meillassoux. ‘These authors diverge to be sure’, she writes, ‘but what draws them into orbit is their common focus on calculated existence’.56 When thinking about the acts of planetary and global individuation that have, at least since Plato, shaped ideas about the world, Badiou’s work on the determination of oneness is particularly significant. Apter cites Number and Numbers, where Badiou elaborates on his earlier claim in Being and Event that it is necessary to think with and through number to conjecture on a multiplicity that will not yield to calculation. ‘Philosophers … have placed mathematics, ever since Plato, as a model of certainty, or as an example of identity’, Badiou submits in Being and Event, and in Number and Numbers he describes this tradition of associating calculation with certainty as tyrannical: ‘We live in the era of number’s despotism; thought yields to the law of denumerable multiplicities’.57 This despotism functions to secure and maintain thought as calculable truth, and is a ‘numerical exegesis’ that ‘governs our conception of the political [because] … Every “political” convocation … is settled with a count’.58 Number’s despotism also provides the foundation for a cosmology in which the notion of an infinite oneness becomes attached to the world. Like Foucault, Badiou finds this cosmology evident in modern science’s overturning of medieval Christian metaphysics, where nature is replaced by God as the manifestation of infinity. For Badiou, this process of actualization produces the world as a corporeal finitude that is an element in nature’s infinity (i.e. as ‘a being-of-the-one’59). And yet, this process fails in its efforts to distinguish between quantifiable being and an infinity that is both otherwise than being and beyond calculation because it regards infinity not as pure multiplicity but as a oneness. It is, he writes, a ‘mathematical ontologization of infinity’.60 For Badiou, then, the world is not an observable corporeal facticity, but is manufactured in a conceptual tradition that insists on the oneness of entities. ‘What has to be declared is that the one, which is not, exists as operation’, he writes, ‘there is no one, only the count-as-one. The one, being an operation, is never a presentation’.61 Or, as Peter Hallward explains, ‘Only mathematics can think multiplicity without any constituent reference to unity’; this is because ‘the theoretical foundations of mathematics ensure that any unification, any consideration of something as one thing, will be thought as the result of an operation, the operation that treats or counts something as one’.62 What is also notable about this account of the world’s production as a finite oneness, however, is that it attaches primacy to the act of counting. The world is made in thought not as a concept of home or following the geocentric

74

Orbital Poetics

detachment of secular space from the celestial realm of the universal or the divine. Philosophy’s search for the absolute therefore begins as mathematics, and it is as an expression of this essential and original pursuit of the calculable that the world is forged in the operation of the count-as-one.

V A more sustained account of how this quantifying operation relates specifically to the conceptualization and quantification of the world is provided by Sloterdijk in volume two of his Spheres trilogy, Globes: Macrosphereology. This book charts a course through many accounts of ‘world’, describing a vector that remains persistent despite the apparent differences of these accounts. This vector originates, according to Sloterdijk, in Greece between the sixth and third centuries bce with the arrival of what he variously describes as ‘spheropoietic’, ‘spherological’ and ‘monospherical’ thought: ‘The representation of the worldwhole through the orb was the decisive act of the early European Enlightenment. One could, by way of definition, say that original philosophy was a shift to monospherical thought’.63 Following this emergence, monospherical thought has mutated to operate in three principal modalities, each dominating a particular moment in history. In the first moment – of classical and medieval metaphysics – the orb appears as a cosmological motif for all that is, with everything encompassed intimately and endospherically within its own domain. This orb is ‘the origin and archetype of all things its contains, it is the necessary, sufficient, and excessive reason for itself and its contents … [it is] animated everywhere from its centre, and … infused with magical symmetries, is capable of revolving around itself by its own agency’.64 Second is the moment that Sloterdijk names ‘terrestrial globalization’. Characterized by a determination to circumnavigate and encompass the earth, terrestrial globalization turns away from cosmology and becomes fascinated by the planetary. The orb that it celebrates is the telluric earth at one with itself, an immanent ground to be described and circumscribed by narratives and images of traversal, expansion and capture. ‘In the Modern Age’, Sloterdijk writes, ‘the task of designing the new image of the world no longer fell to the metaphysicists, but rather to the geographers and seafarers’.65 This modernity extends into the late twentieth century, taking the form of different social practices and enabled by different technologies that maintain, intensify and accelerate the perception and experience of a contained world:

What Counts as Literature?

75

Half a millennium after the four voyages of Columbus, the circumnavigated, uncovered, depicted, occupied and used earth presents itself as a body wrapped in dense fabrics of traffic movements and telecommunications routines. Virtual shells have replaced the imagined ethereal sky; thanks to radio-electronic systems, the meaning of distances has effectively been negated in the centres of power and consumption. The global players live in a world without gaps. In aeronautical terms, the earth has been reduced to a flying route of fifty hours at most; for the orbits of satellites and the Mir station, and recently the International Space Station (ISS), units of ninety minutes became the norm. For radio and light messages, the earth has shrunk to a static point – it rotates, as a temporally compact orb, in an electronic layer that surrounds it like a second atmosphere.66

This attainment of such a ‘synchronous world’67 is also, however, the culmination of monospherical thought, and for Globes we are currently witnessing the end of terrestrial globalization as the enclosure and individuation of the corporeal earth. For Sloterdijk, we live in the period of ‘the last orb’68 and are experiencing the emergence of the third moment of spherical thought where ‘there will be no more sphere of spheres – neither an informatic nor a world-state sphere, let alone a religious one’.69 Rather than a smooth – shared and undifferentiated – space, according to Globes the world is now becoming an assemblage of microspheres.70 Globes offers a striking revision of globalization as a historico-ontological condition. In the most obvious sense, its morphology of the concept of the world is rooted in a radical rethinking of globalization’s historicity. Challenging what he describes as the ‘noisy monotony of the current sociological and political literature on globalization’,71 Sloterdijk proposes that ‘globalization or spheropoiesis on the grandest scale is the fundamental event of European thought, which, for two and a half thousand years, has not ceased to provoke radical changes in human thinking and living conditions’.72 This means not only that globalization begins in the conceptual recesses of the past (rather than with the intensification of social relations at the end of the twentieth century, or with the punctual isolation of the now as an unprecedented moment) and will come to an end, but that the world has emerged as a fixed and finite body. It is not simply there, inertly waiting for us to discover it, but has had meaning and significance bestowed upon it; ‘world’, in other words, is the name for that which presents itself to being and must somehow be comprehended. In this manner, Globes points to and extends another motif of Sloterdijk’s work: a rethinking of being that magnifies the sense of being-in-the-world that Heidegger substantially

76

Orbital Poetics

undertakes, but does not complete, in Being and Time. For Willem Schinkel and Liesbeth Noordegraaf-Eelens, the Spheres trilogy asks not the question ‘who or what is man?’, but ‘where is man?’ and it finds the answer in the creative building of spheres as psycho-social containers in historically varying shapes. Being-in-the-world is being-in-spheres. That is to say that it is always already both spatial and social.73

Being-in-the-world is, then, a spacing: to be human is to be positioned in relation to the world as an environment (regardless of the particular cosmological or terrestrial location of the world). This being-in is social because it is also a beingwith or a being-together for Sloterdijk. ‘Spatial being is always a co-existence’,74 since the world is never experienced by subjects in isolation. Sloterdijk’s account of world’s appearance therefore corresponds with Badiou’s claim that the world always arrives through an operation, rather than as a presentation. A further correspondence can be seen in Sloterdijk’s association of spherology with mathematics, and with geometry in particular. ‘Globalization began as a geometrization of the immeasurable’,75 he writes, echoing Badiou’s account of the ‘mathematical ontologization of infinity’. This geometrization unfolds in the repeated determination of the world as an entity that is not only measureable but can be counted as one. Globes opens with a reading of a mosaic (probably from the first century bce) that shows a group of philosophers who are gathered around ‘a sphaira, an orb of the earth and the heavens, that symbol of totality that has been revered by geometricians and metaphysicians alike since the days of Empedocles and Parmenides’.76 What is notable about this mosaic for Sloterdijk is that it depicts the orb – the earth and the heavens – as quantifiable: The sphaira, the One as a form, is the God who makes humans think. It is not through prayers and invocations that this One can be reached, but rather through analysis, measurements and proofs … The orb wants to be viewed and honored as much as calculated and assessed. Its interior demands a congenial spirit to enliven it – and enlivening here means producing and gauging.77

This sense of the world as an entity that is conceptualized through early acts of quantification often returns in Globes. It describes how Parmenides celebrates ‘the unanimous “structure” of the universally round’, and how this ’simplest geometric form ascends to the rank of the absolutely valid ideal, which would be the measure of all things’.78 It proposes that ‘mathematical globalization preceded its terrestrial variety by over two thousand years’.79 And it observes that ‘when Greek philosophers and geometricians began to measure the universe mathematically two and a half thousand years ago, they were following an

What Counts as Literature?

77

irresistible formal intuition: their interest in the world was kindled by the easy constructability and symmetrical perfection of the spherical form’.80 At the point at which the world became subject to a spherical determination of all that is, it was also, therefore, subject to a mathematical determination of the one. Put otherwise, if globalization begins as a geometrization of the immeasurable then it is necessary to record this as an operation in number as well as space.

VI If, for Badiou, ‘we live in the era of number’s despotism’, then thinking through the numerical systematizing of thought allows us not only to accept that we live in the domain of the count-as-one, but also to subtract from this domain a realm of the ‘not-one’. Because determination of the one is a mathematical operation, we can ‘presume that whatever was thus counted, or unified, is itself not-one’.81 The number zero, or more precisely the figure Ø, is the name for this not-one. Derived from Parmenides and the pre-Socratics, as well as Frege, Lacan and set theory, this figure allows us to conjecture on a nothingness or void – an emptiness or pure absence that contrasts with the world that we invest with ideas or propositions. Zero/Ø for Badiou is the number of the unthinkable, unclassifiable, incalculable and uncountable. In Being and Event, he writes: To write it, this name of being … the mathematicians searched for a sign far from all their customary alphabets; neither a Greek, nor a Latin, nor a Gothic letter, but an old Scandanavian letter, Ø, emblem of the void, zero affected by the barring of sense.82

A zero affected by the barring of sense: what we do not see, touch, taste, smell, hear or think – this void is beyond what we experience in the world and it will always be inaccessible to us. This non-number for Badiou allows us to think beyond the world of the count-as-one and to arrive at an articulation of being as pure multiplicity. Departing from the tradition of transcendental thinking that seeks to identify a foundational or essential unity (such as God, Nature or the World), Ø is a symbol of erasure that ruptures circumferential or spherical thought. According to Badiou, the not-one as Ø or pure multiplicity is not revealed in the world of knowledge or experience. It is not to be confused with the multitude of voices and meanings that collide, merge and deviate to produce an abundance of signification and sense. The idea of a plural many – of a

78

Orbital Poetics

multiplication of discrepant things in the world – is not to be equated with the being that is beyond enumeration. For Sloterdijk too, plurality does not represent an escape from the realm of calculable or measureable. When, in Foams: Plural Spherology (the third volume of the Spheres trilogy), he sets out the decline of modernity’s persistent attachment to monospherical thought and describes our age as the epoch of ‘the last orb’, he does not associate today’s world of micro-spheres with the arrival of an infinitely diverse and innumerable condition. In the present age, “‘life” unfolds multifocally, multiperspectivally, and heterarchically … Life articulates itself on nested simultaneous stages’.83 According to Foams, one such stage is orbital space. This is a place where individuation or isolation appears to be absolute, but it is also where beingwith is most evident. Sloterdijk rejects the idea of space travel as the latest manifestation of a human yearning to journey and explore: From a philosophical perspective, the meaning of space travel is not that it offers the means for a possible exodus of humanity to outer space or is allied with the supposed human need to keep pushing the boundaries of what is possible; we can safely pass over the romanticism of exodus.84

Against the association of space travel with an expansive moving beyond, a detachment from the earth or a floating free from the constraints of planetary life, space travel should instead be understood as the disclosure of how we live on the ground. Being-in-orbit is the encapsulation of being-in-the-world, Sloterdijk writes, because this place reveals that we exist in a state of dependency: Manned space stations are anthropological demonstration fields because the being-in-the-world of astronauts is no longer possible except as being-on-thestation … the station, far more than any terrestrial island, constitutes a world model, or more precisely an immanence machine, in which existing or beingable-to-reside-in-a-world becomes completely dependent on technological world givers.85

Inverting Heidegger’s description of orbit as the site of technicity’s triumph, Sloterdijk here describes technology and humanity as co-constitutive, and orbit is where this essential bond is exposed: to be without prostheses in this place is not to be. Furthermore, for Sloterdijk, the need to attend to the conditions of life – to be focused on how life is to be maintained – puts those in orbit in an inescapably philosophical mode. Space travel is the hardest school of naiveté-breaking procedures with regard to the human condition, for through its radically eccentric replacement formations for

What Counts as Literature?

79

the coexistence of humans with their own kind and others in a shared whole it enforces an unrelenting spelling course for even the most details of the immanence machine.86

Being-in-orbit therefore reveals that constitution of a world and coexistence with others are primary needs. This act of world formation is not, according to Sloterdijk, to be understood as the extension of planetary space; it does not reflect an expansionist drive to magnify the reach of earthly space. It is not a continuation of Dante’s determination of the world as a separate cosmological entity or a place from which the travel of social and cultural practices can be mapped and measured. Rather than the intensification of terrestrial globalization and the enlargement of the monospherical world – rather than confirming the notion that the world can be encompassed within or as a single orb – being-in-orbit reveals our age as the moment in which the concept of the world whole collapses. The space station and other orbital capsules are where humanity’s explication is taking place, demonstrating today’s condition of ‘“connected isolation” in a very pure form’.87 This is not the pure multiplicity that Badiou discerns through the thinking of a number beyond calculation or measure. Another occurrence of ‘the mathematical ontologization of infinity’ or another instance of the ‘geometrization of the immeasurable’, orbit is a zone of interdependent isolation that bears witness to the production of the one and the many. In other words, orbit is where measure-taking can be observed; it is the space of poeisis, where the making of number is disclosed.

Notes 1 Apter, Against World Literature, 216. Intriguingly, for the book – Barbara Cassin’s Dictionary of Untranslatables – from which Apter derives this term, ‘satellite’ is drawn into the semiotic chain that unfolds around another such ‘Untranslatable’, the Russian term Drugoj: ‘The old Slavic root drug is still found in most Slavic languages: in the Russian drug …, the Polish druh, “friend”, the Serbo-Croatian drug, “companion, comrade”, the Czech druh, “species, kind”. It has in addition a number of derived forms that express, in one way or another, the idea of association: Russian družba …”friendship”, Serbo-Croatian družba, “organization, group, coterie”, Czech družice, “satellite”’. Barbara Cassin (ed.), Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, translation edited by Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 236. 2 Auerbach, ‘Philology and Weltliteratur’, 2.

80

Orbital Poetics

3 Apter, Against World Literature, 216. 4 Apter, Against World Literature, 216. James Porter makes a similar observation: ‘The rendering [of irdisch as Secular] is unfortunate, as it gets the accent wrong. Of concern to Auerbach in this study is not the world as a secular entity, but the earthly character of the world in its experiential particularity, vividness, and proximity to life’. James Porter, Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), xviii. 5 Samuel Beckett, ‘Dante… Bruno. Vico… Joyce’, in Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, ed. Samuel Beckett et al. (New York: New Directions, 1962), 4. This peremptory rejection of quantifying criticism returns in 1936, when Beckett distinguishes art from criticism: ‘The chartered recountants take the thing to pieces and put it back together again. They enjoy it. The artist takes it to pieces and makes a new thing, new things.’ Samuel Beckett, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment (London: John Calder, 1983), 89. Further discussion of Beckett’s writing on numbers is provided by Steven Connor in Living by Numbers: In Praise of Quantity (London: Reaktion, 2016), passim. 6 Beckett, ‘Dante… Bruno. Vico… Joyce’, 19. 7 Laura Salisbury, Samuel Beckett: Laughing Matters, Comic Timing (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 58. 8 Salisbury, Samuel Beckett, 58–9. 9 Peter John Murphy, Beckett’s Dedalus: Dialogical Engagements with Joyce in Beckett’s Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 31. 10 Steven Connor, ‘The Horror of Number: Can Humans Learn to Count?’ Available online: http://stevenconnor.com/horror.html (accessed 30 March 2018). 11 Samuel Beckett, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, cited in Peter Boxall, ‘Still Stirrings: Beckett’s Prose from Texts for Nothing to Stirring Still’, in The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, ed. Dirk Van Hulle (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2015), 37. 12 Boxall, ‘Still Stirrings’, 37. 13 Boxall, ‘Still Stirrings’, 37. Boxall also notes that Beckett came to relax his early separation of an art beyond measure from a criticism that sees only a balance sheet of regularities, and correspondences, and equivalences. ‘As his work matures’, Boxall writes, ‘one can see an increasingly tight focus being brought to bear on the movement of the creating mind, and an increasingly powerful analysis of the ways that the resources of the literary tradition allow for the imagination not only to test and locate the limits of what it is possible to see and to say, but also to exceed those limits’. 14 Philip Sidney, ‘Defense of Poesy’, in Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. Gavin Alexander (London: Penguin, 2004), 13.

What Counts as Literature?

81

15 Sidney, ‘Defense of Poesy’, 25. 16 Karl Marx, ‘The English Middle Class’, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Collected Works, Volume 13 Marx & Engels 1854–1855 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2010), 664. 17 Baylee Brits, Literary Infinities: Number and Narrative in Modern Fiction (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 1. 18 See, for example, the website for the ‘Europe: A Literary History’ project. Available online: http://www.english.upenn.edu/~dwallace/europe/about.html (accessed 27 March 2018); also see the volumes that accompany this site: David Wallace, ed., Europe: A Literary History, 1348–1418 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Also see pamphlets published by the Stanford Literary Lab. Available online: https://litlab.stanford.edu/pamphlets/ (accessed 27 March 2018). 19 Newman, ‘Auerbach’s Dante’, 42. 20 Vilashini Cooppan, ‘World Literature between History and Theory’, in The Routledge Companion to World Literature, ed. Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir (London: Routledge, 2012), 200. 21 Sarah Lawall, ‘Preface’, in Reading World Literature: Theory, History, Practice, ed. Sarah Lawall (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), ix. 22 See, for example, Deborah Lupton, The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self-Tracking (Cambridge: Polity, 2016). 23 Btihaj Ajana, ‘Digital Health and the Biopolitics of the Quantified Self ’, Digital Health, 3 (2017): 4. 24 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Anon (London: Tavistock/Routledge, 1970), 73. 25 Foucault, The Order of Things, 74. 26 Foucault, The Order of Things, 74. 27 Foucault, The Order of Things, 74. 28 Foucault, The Order of Things, 31. 29 Foucault, The Order of Things, 33. 30 Franco Moretti, ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, New Left Review 1 (2000): 55–6. 31 Apter, Against World Literature, 45. 32 Apter, Against World Literature, 52. 33 Apter, Against World Literature, 55–6. 34 Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Daley (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 7. 35 Agamben, The Time That Remains, 51. 36 Agamben, The Time That Remains, 45. 37 Agamben, The Time That Remains, 45–6. 38 Agamben, The Time That Remains, 52. 39 Derrida, ‘Ellipsis’, 299.

82

Orbital Poetics

40 Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 335. 41 Philippe Sollers, Numbers, cited in Derrida, Dissemination, 336. 42 Derrida, Dissemination, 308. 43 Derrida, Dissemination, 308. 44 Derrida, Dissemination, 364. 45 Roland Barthes, ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives’, in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), 79. 46 Martin Heidegger, ‘… Poetically Man Dwells … ’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (London: Harper and Row, 1975), 215. 47 Heidegger, ‘… Poetically Man Dwells… ’, 215. 48 Heidegger, ‘… Poetically Man Dwells… ’, 216. 49 Heidegger, ‘… Poetically Man Dwells… ’, 220. 50 Heidegger, ‘… Poetically Man Dwells… ’, 221. 51 Stuart Elden, Speaking Against Number: Heidegger, Language and the Politics of Calculation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988), 174. 52 Christopher Yates, The Poetic Imagination in Heidegger and Schelling (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 152. 53 Elden, Speaking Against Number, 174. 54 Heidegger, ‘… Poetically Man Dwells … ’, 225. 55 Emily Apter, ‘Shareholder Existence: On the Turn to Numbers in Recent French Theory’, Textual Practice 28, no. 7 (2014): 1324. 56 Apter, ‘Shareholder Existence’: 1324. 57 Alain Badiou, Number and Numbers, cited in Apter, ‘Shareholder Existence’: 1326. 58 Badiou, Number and Numbers, cited in Apter, ‘Shareholder Existence’: 1326. 59 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2006), 144. 60 Badiou, Being and Event, 145. 61 Badiou, Being and Event, 24. 62 Peter Hallward, ‘Introduction: Consequences of Abstraction’, in Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, ed. Peter Hallward (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), 4. 63 Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres Volume 2. Globes: Macrospherology, trans. Wieland Hoban (South Pasedena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2014), 48. 64 Sloterdijk, Globes, 32–3. 65 Sloterdijk, Globes, 773. 66 Sloterdijk, Globes, 935. 67 Sloterdijk, Globes, 935. 68 Sloterdijk, Globes, 948. 69 Sloterdijk, Globes, 948. 70 In Globes, Sloterdijk begins to set out the shape and character of this third age. For a full account of this moment, see the final volume of the Spheres series: Spheres

What Counts as Literature?

83

Volume 3. Foams: Plural Spherology, trans. Wieland Hoban (South Pasedena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2016). 71 Sloterdijk, Globes, 951. 72 Sloterdijk, Globes, 46. 73 Willem Schinkel and Liesbeth Noordegraaf-Eelens, ‘Peter Sloterdijk’s Sphereological Acrobatics: An Exercise in Introduction’, in In Medias Res: Peter Sloterdijk’s Sphereological Poetic Being, ed. Willem Schinkel and Liesbeth Noordegraaf-Eelens (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011), 11. 74 Schinkel and Noordegraaf-Eelens, ‘Peter Sloterdijk’s Sphereological Acrobatics’, 12. 75 Sloterdijk, Globes, 45. 76 Sloterdijk, Globes, 15. 77 Sloterdijk, Globes, 16. 78 Sloterdijk, Globes, 49. 79 Sloterdijk, Globes, 46. 80 Sloterdijk, Globes, 765. 81 Hallward, ‘Introduction: Consequences of Abstraction’, 4. 82 Badiou, Being and Event, 69. 83 Sloterdijk, Foams, 23. 84 Sloterdijk, Foams, 299. 85 Sloterdijk, Foams, 299. 86 Sloterdijk, Foams, 301. 87 Sloterdijk, Foams, 307. Sloterdijk’s In the World Interior of Capital makes a similar claim. If modernity’s major urban projects such as the Crystal Palace in London and the Arcades Project in Paris represented the expansion of the interior space (endowing ‘the outside world as a whole with a magical immanence transfigured by luxury and cosmopolitanism’), then today ‘a fundamental reorientation’ is needed if we are to understand today’s interiorities. Other modes of architectural and urban criticism are prompted by ‘the shopping malls … exhibition centres, major hotels, sports arenas and indoor amusement parks. Such studies would then bear titles closer to The Crystal Palaces Project or The Hothouses Project, or ultimately even The Space Stations Project’. Sloterdijk, In the World Interior of Capital, 170; 174–5. The transformation that Sloterdijk indicates here might otherwise be described as the shift from the Crystal Palace to the Heavenly Palace (or Tiangong -1), China’s space station that was launched in 2011 and dramatically de-orbited in Spring, 2018. That China had lost control of this station, and that some parts of it survived re-entry and crashed in the spacecraft cemetery in the Pacific Ocean, seems to confirm Sloterdijk’s claim that today’s interiorities are both connected to and separate from each other.

Part Two

A Literature of the Ultramundane

4

The Space of Electronic Writing

Where, or when, or what is a beginning? Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method When responding to his own question about the nature of origins, Edward Said replies that a beginning ‘is often that which is left behind; in speculating about beginnings we often resemble Molière’s M. Jourdain, acquiring retrospective respect for what we have always done in the regular course of things’.1 As with Molière, so too with electronic literature. When commentators on electronic literature consider its history, one text above others tends to be located as its source and inspiration: Vannevar Bush’s 1945 essay ‘As We May Think’. This essay is motivated by a desire to understand the future for, and social contribution of, scientific work in the wake of the Second World War. Where scientists’ efforts in the preceding years had been focused on the machinery of warfare, Bush writes, the end to hostilities provides them with an opportunity to develop instruments of peace. Of the various devices that he anticipates for this new period of enlightenment, one is typically singled out as particularly prophetic. The ‘memex’, the name that Bush gives to this instrument, would be ‘a sort of mechanized private file and library’,2 a storage device that would supplement and augment memory by capturing and granting universal access to the totality of human knowledge, allowing users to navigate documents according to the textual routes that they prefer to follow. Anyone wishing to improve their understanding of something would begin by consulting an article in a pre-installed encyclopedia; after leaving this information projected on the memex’s platen, the user then ‘finds another pertinent item, and ties the two together. Thus, he goes, building a trail of many items. Occasionally he inserts a comment of his own, either linking to the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item’.3 In this manner, Bush believes, the operations of the memex would duplicate in part how the human mind functions: it would build

88

Orbital Poetics

knowledge and allow access to information through a process of information association. Bush’s vision for a configurable and dynamically accessible repository of information is regularly cited as the inspiration for – indeed, the beginning of – interactive and mutable writing spaces in which user or reader participation is integral to the act of textual production. In 1974, Ted Nelson draws upon Bush’s vision when formulating the term hypertext to name the non-sequential organization of information that digital media make possible. ‘Hypertexts were foreseen very clearly in 1945 by Vannevar Bush’, Nelson writes, and he describes ‘As We May Think’ as ‘the starting point for the field of Information Retrieval’.4 Nelson also reprinted ‘As We May Think’ in his 1983 Literary Machines, which is often regarded as a pivotal text in the development of the notion of a nonlinear system of interconnected texts. Doug Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse and designer of human–computer interfaces and text-linking protocols, in a letter to Bush describes ‘As We May Think’ as one of his principal influences.5 Bush is ‘widely credited with the invention of hypertext’,6 N. Katherine Hayles observes, and for J. Yellowlees Douglas, the idea of hypertext ‘was born’ with Bush, ‘who envisioned a system that could support and improve human memory more efficiently than the printed word’.7 An archaeology of electronic literature is, however, a risky undertaking, one that risks leaving behind its many beginnings. For Johanna Drucker, only an impoverished history of writing would position the memex as the foundational instrument that sets in motion the principle of non-sequentially ordered information. ‘Ways of thinking about knowledge as an interlinked field have been a part of the mythology of networked knowledge systems since their invention’, she writes, ‘and earlier, paper-based diagrammatic organizations of knowledge and argument can be traced to Ramus and his method in the late Middle Ages’.8 Drucker’s intervention here certainly raises troubling historiographical questions about the origins of non-linear writing, and she persuasively observes that beginnings always have a precedent. But Drucker also raises a further concern that tends to be peripheralized when the memex is viewed as digital media’s primogenitor. Nelson takes the memex as the inspiration for conceiving an apparatus that is rooted in the idea of user-generated textual association, but he also claims that such a device needs to operate as part of an interconnected network. Information storage and retrieval – indeed, textual production – at this point emerge as both an interactive and a distributed technology. Hypertext takes shape not only as a system that seeks to replicate the associative operations of human memory, but also as a tool that reproduces a fundamental need for

The Space of Electronic Writing

89

association between people; it is an instrument that reveals the ontological condition of being-with, rather than suggesting the solitary detachment of the user-as-agent. For Nelson, the need to develop a distributed information network arises from the atomized diversity of tools and procedures that characterize computing in the 1960s and 1970s. To overcome the ‘mutual incomprehensibility and disconnected special goals’ that are intrinsic to this fragmented condition, tools for information storage and retrieval must, as they evolve, allow a return to the essential unity of human culture: Now we need to get everybody back together again. We want to go back to the roots of our civilization – the ability, which we once had, for everybody who could read to be able to read everything. We must again become a community of common access to a shared heritage.9

With the opportunity to actualize Bush’s vision of the memex there is also, therefore, the need to embrace a heritage that extends across the lands and languages of the world. The tools that Nelson proposes to facilitate this universal connection would be rooted in an ethics of mutuality, open exchange and an unrestricted cosmopolitanism; founded on these principles, hypertext would not only make the world’s knowledge available in an open and interactive manner. It would, more fundamentally, effect a monumental synthesis that would put the world back in touch with itself. Curiously, Nelson does not claim to be the originator of this universalist vision; rather, he credits Bush with the idea of diffused information and communication system. ‘This was of course what Vannevar Bush said in 1945ʹ,10 Nelson writes. However, such a claim overstates the degree to which Bush’s essay proposes either a worldwide community of readers or a mechanism for accessing a universal social and cultural inheritance. ‘As We May Think’ comes closest to proposing this idea when it briefly remarks that science has allowed us to develop a ‘record of ideas’ that can be managed ‘so that knowledge evolves and endures throughout the life of a race rather than that of an individual’.11 This implied reference to a shared and transnational repository of human knowledge then becomes eclipsed by Bush’s primary focus on the technical possibilities that the memex would offer to each user. Nelson’s concept of hypertext envisages a system of networked exchange that is, at best, implicit in Bush’s essay, and ‘Dream Machines’ anticipates the emergence of a shared informationalism in ways that are absent from ‘As We May Think’. And yet, tracing the development of a transborder and distributed

90

Orbital Poetics

system of information exchange to Nelson would again risk the pitfalls of history as archaeology. As much as it would be an error to describe Bush as the source of non-linear writing, it would also be a mistake to describe Nelson as the principal figure in the conceptualization of a knowledge commons that would reach all of humanity. More than ten years before Nelson, in a 1963 memorandum to his colleagues, J.C.R. Licklider (often treated, alongside Engelbart and Nelson, as one of the architects of digital connectedness) proposes an ‘Intergalactic Computer Network’.12 Even earlier, Joseph Tabbi notes, ‘The worldwide collaborative potential of collecting documents, not lost on these [Bush and Nelson] American information specialists after World War II, had already been expressed by the Belgian Paul Otlet in his Traité de documentation (1934)’.13 In the Traité, Otlet proposes a workstation that comprises a screen and a telephone: All knowledge, all information could be made compact enough to be contained in some works deposited on this workstation, within reach, and indexed in a manner that would make consulting them as easy as possible. In this case, the World described in the collection of books would truly be accessible to everyone. The Universal Book formed from all of these books would have become something like a supplement of the brain, itself the foundation for memory, a mechanism and an instrument that is external to the mind, but so close to it and so able to be used by it that it would truly be a sort of additional organ, an appendix beyond the skin.14

Such an appendix would offer a means to navigate the information that was close to hand, but it would also, Otlet proposes, provide remote access to the immense and dynamic physical archive of the world’s information that he named the ‘Mundaneum’. This institution, Alex Wright explains, was to be more than just a networked library … Otlet envisioned it as a central component of a much vaster scheme to build a utopian World City … Otlet believed in the inevitable progress of humanity toward a peaceful new future, in which the free flow of information over a distributed network would render traditional institutions – like state governments – anachronistic. Instead, he envisioned a dawning age of social progress, scientific achievement, and collective spiritual enlightenment. At the center of it all would stand the Mundaneum, a bulwark and beacon of truth for the whole world.15

To Licklider’s and Otlet’s predictions of distributed networks it is possible to add works which similarly offer projections that antedate the formation of a digitally connected society: Claude Shannon’s 1948 ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’, Marshall McLuhan’s 1962 The Gutenberg Galaxy or Paul

The Space of Electronic Writing

91

Baran’s 1964 On Distributed Communications. If this tradition of thinking established an association between the computer and the world, then this association continues in the instruction that has become a customary feature of coding. ‘“Hello World”’, Mark C. Marino notes, ‘is one of the first programs that computer scientists write in a programming language’.16 Not merely the output of test program for those new to coding, this message suggests that the world can only be greeted as a result of computing code. However much it is possible to track the post–Second World War development of the idea of a global information network through these and other formative works, and to trace the rush during this period to embrace digital computing as the tool that would act as the conduit for a networked society, such a history provides only one account of the devices that have shaped the emergence of electronic literature. This normative sense of beginning leaves behind other technologies that have both shaped a planetary consciousness and been essential to some of the textual advances that are associated with electronic writing. The year 1945 is pivotal in this history, although not simply because Bush proposes the memex at this point. Bush’s vision is of a device that would supplement memory, but in the same year Arthur C. Clarke envisaged a network of orbital relays that would allow information exchange to surpass territorial limitations and move information across the world to produce a single media and information environment. Clarke’s vision takes shape over two short pieces. In the first, a paper circulated in 1945 to his colleagues at the British Interplanetary Society, Clarke speculates on how a future space station could have uses beyond acting as a staging post for vessels journeying from the earth to the further regions of space. Such a station could, he hypothesizes, enable ‘the provision of world-wide ultra-highfrequency radio services’.17 In addition to television, these services could, Clarke writes, include remote transmission of documents, monitoring meteorological conditions and providing navigational information. A chain of these stations – fixed in geosynchronous orbit – would offer total coverage of the earth, allowing ‘simultaneous television broadcasts to the entire globe’ and the ability to relay ‘programmes between distant parts of the planet’.18 Clarke’s second (published) paper in 1945 emphasizes the prospects for social unity that such a network of geosynchronous stations would offer: ‘A true broadcast service, giving constant field strength at all times over the whole globe would be invaluable, not to say indispensable, in a world society’.19 In contrast with land-based communications transmitters, which are able to cover only limited areas, orbiting satellites would not, Clarke advises, be limited by atmospheric conditions, and would therefore convey information across the planet in a more efficient manner.

92

Orbital Poetics

Clarke is not the first, nor even the first writer of fiction, to conceive an artificial device in orbit. According to Joseph N. Pelton: The Russian theorist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was the first to note that a satellite orbiting 22,300 miles above the Earth’s surface would travel at a speed that would make it appear to be stationary from Earth because its orbital velocity would be the same as the speed at which the Earth was rotating. In 1928, Herman Potôcnik, an Austrian Imperial Army officer, writing under the pseudonym Noordung, proposed a crewed space station in such a ‘geosynchronous’ orbit, to be used for meteorology, reconnaissance, and Earth mapping.20

Clarke does not conceive orbiting devices for the first time, but he is the first to propose the use of geosynchronous satellites to transport information around the world. What is also notable about these texts is the momentous topographical displacement that they promote: only with the establishing of an orbital network, Clarke writes, will worldwide communication be possible. The informational demands associated with the second half of the twentieth century require a departure from earlier methods of global circumnavigation, and the exchanges that Clark describes could not result from a terrestrial network of storage and retrieval devices, or from transmission across the earth’s surface. ‘A relay chain several thousand miles long would cost millions’, he writes, ‘and transoceanic services would still be impossible’.21 Neither impractical nor prohibitively costly, a network of orbiting stations would be ‘the only way in which true world coverage can be achieved for all possible services’.22 Extraterrestrial relays are, therefore, understood by Clarke as exceptionally suited to establishing a global society that is complete and fully in touch with itself. Only the satellite, unencumbered by any attachment to the ground, is able to make the world observable and knowable. A network of these relays promises a world that is cohesive and unitary, rather than assembled from discrete informational spaces. If the beginnings of electronic literature are to be traced not only to the development of techniques for non-linear textual production and navigation but also to a writing that ranges beyond literature’s national contexts, then its emergence needs to be associated with the orbital relay as much as the memory expander, with the satellite as much as the computer. And if 1945 should not, strictly speaking, be identified as the moment in which computing – or, indeed, a distributed information network – was first conceived, then it can nevertheless be viewed as the year in which two formative visions collide to catalyse proclamations of a connected world. The prospect of a planetary writing therefore acquires momentum because of the convergence at this point of two

The Space of Electronic Writing

93

technologies that appeared unrelated: a tool for documentary storage and an extraterrestrial mechanism for information transmission. Those associated with the arrival of the digital computer appear not to share Clarke’s sense of the satellite’s exceptional capacity to create a globalized world. In 1962, another formative year for digital computing and satellite technologies, Licklider and Welden E. Clark describe time-sharing and remote access to largescale networked computers as pre-requisites for a functional ‘man-computer symbiosis’23 that would benefit humanity in its entirety. However, although this was also the year in which the first Telstar communications satellite was launched into orbit, Licklider and Clark make no reference either to this event or to the appetite at this time for globalized communication technologies beyond the digital computer. Nelson refers to Philip Klass’s 1971 Secret Sentries of Space, an early and influential analysis of the United States’s use of satellites for intelligence gathering, although only as part of a broader consideration of how computers make image manipulation possible. ‘You can get pictures of any area you want from ERTS (Earth Resources Observation Systems) satellites’,24 Nelson notes, although he does not elaborate on how pictures from orbit might contribute to the perception of the world or the emergence of a planetary consciousness. Curiously, Clarke is present as an incidental figure in ‘Dream Machines’. Nelson discusses him in the context of the description in ‘Dream Machines’ of hypertext as a multidimensional simultaneity that erases the distinction between text (Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey) and paratext (Clarke’s account of the ideas that were left out of 2001): Arthur C. Clarke wrote a book entitled The Lost Worlds of 2001 … about the variants and alternatives of that story that did not find their way to the screen. In a hypertext version, we could look at them all in context, in collateral views, and see the related variants – with annotations.25

What is particularly notable here is not the suggestion that the relationship between 2001 and The Lost Worlds of 2001 is somehow exemplary – that it illustrates a layered and differentiated literary condition that can only become apparent in the emerging medium of hypertext – but that it makes no reference to the narrative that is the subject of Clarke’s book. The concept of an orbiting transit station that Clarke introduces in ‘Extra-Terrestrial Relays’, as well as the idea of a device that monitors the earth from space (the focus of his 1948 short story ‘The Sentinel’), is developed in 2001. These texts share a fascination with instruments in orbit, yet Nelson does not acknowledge these instruments in his proposal for a mechanism that would both permit navigation of complex documentary resources and provide a shared system of exchange.

94

Orbital Poetics

Bush, too, seems to attach little value to satellites in comparison with other technological opportunities that were on the horizon following the end of the Second World War. In his testimony to a US Special Senate Committee on Atomic Energy in 1945, Bush voices doubts about the technical feasibility of a delivery vehicle that would put a satellite into orbit. ‘There has been a great deal said about a 3,000-mile high-angle rocket’, he states, ‘In my opinion, such a thing is impossible and will remain impossible for many years’.26 Bush continues to express reservations about these instruments in the following decades. ‘In his statement to the House Committee on Science and Astronautics recently’, Dallas Smythe writes in 1961, Bush objects to how ‘the United States is unreasonably enthusiastic about using its resources for development of space technology and is neglecting its other objectives, such as health and culture, to do so’.27 And, although he came to adopt a different position on the need to compete with the USSR in orbit (‘he had initially seen Sputnik as a ‘wake-up call’ for Americans who had grown too smug’28), in this period he nevertheless remains resistant to proposals that space should become a primary area of scientific research in the United States. ‘Bush favored a more balanced approach to space R&D’, Kay writes, ‘throughout the 1960s, he wrote numerous articles decrying Project Apollo’.29 It is perhaps with a roguish sense of irony, then, that Clarke looks to Bush when naming the principal character (Vannevar Morgan) of his 1979 novel The Fountains of Paradise, a novel that is most renowned for imagining a space elevator which tethers the ground to a satellite in geosynchronous orbit. Morgan, perhaps like his namesake, is ‘one of those rare people who are completely unaffected by heights’.30

II How are we, inhabitants of a modernity in which computer and satellite networks are closely associated, to understand this early adversarialism? For Clarke, Bush’s misgivings about the ability to develop long-range rockets illustrate the risks attached to predicting future technologies,31 but there is more to be made of this difficult relationship than a simple warning about unreliable speculation on machines and instruments to come. Rather than arriving as apparatuses of military surveillance and governmental subjugation, satellites were – in the United States, at least – themselves, in a manner that today might seem perverse or counter-intuitive, subordinated in narratives of technological relevance that were developing in what was increasingly becoming defined as the age of

The Space of Electronic Writing

95

globalization. The denial of the satellite’s capacity to compress and consolidate the world can be explained in relation to the scarcity of resources in the years after the Second World War. An alternative explanation is that this moment illustrates how conflict is often simulated in a political and economic system that values the idea of perfectibility while also preventing its attainment. Capitalism, for Slavoj Žižek, is branded by a crippling contradiction, discord, by an immanent want of balance: this is exactly why it changes, develops incessantly – incessant development is the only way for it to resolve again and again, come to terms with, its own fundamental, constitutive, imbalance, ‘contradiction’.32

Discord between instruments that compete over the promise of world unification would, then, set the stage for a future resolution of this conflict. This discord prepared the ground for the ensuing narrative of the world’s reconnection with itself, but it also permitted the resulting discourse that positioned technological instruments as the means to accessing and knowing the world as a space of human community. Electronic literature allows an alternative reading of the arrival and subsequent fortunes of technologies that compete for the right to unite the world. The early schism between computing and orbital devices has not only fashioned a sense of how particular technical instruments might forge global relations. It has also shaped perceptions of how technologies transform the literary landscape, and, as this chapter has noted, typologies of electronic – especially digital – writing have often regarded it as the literary legatee of the computing architecture envisaged by Bush, Engelbart, Licklider and Nelson. When J. David Bolter describes the contemporary moment as ‘the late age of print’33 – an age in which, for him, the codex and other printed forms are being displaced by digital communication – he places hypertext at the centre of this irrepressible departure from the mechanical media of the industrial age. It is hypertext, rather than any other instrument, that for Bolter is effecting this monumental transformation of writing, and it is hypertext that has facilitated a global connectedness: ‘The World-Wide Web was an explicit hypertext system from the start’, he notes, and its ‘great innovation … was to define a protocol to make hypertext global’.34 Within this story of how the world has become networked, the satellite continues to be given an incidental role, acting merely as one of several intermediaries that tie a network together: ‘Each host or computer is a router or node’, Bolter writes, ‘and the hypertextual relationships among these nodes are defined by the cables and microwave or satellite links’.35 If, in this manner, writing in general is understood as becoming

96

Orbital Poetics

globalized because of largely ground-based digital networks then literature’s passage across the world too has been associated with its shift into electronic media. There have, in recent years, been some early signs that this situation might be changing, in the first instance as a result of the growing influence of locationaware technologies that utilize GPS (Global Positioning System) data. Evidence that these technologies now constitute an intimate part of our interactions can be found, Adriana de Souza e Silva and Jordan Frith note, in how they have ‘entered the discourse of mass media outlets and have become common topics of popular conversations’.36 Although little has been made of how these technologies are restructuring the public sphere, they propose that there is an emerging awareness of how locative media are shaping ‘artistic and research projects’.37 The aesthetic dimensions of this transformation are evident in the treatment of locative literature, although it is these texts’ capacity to produce an enhanced sense of the situatedness that is seen to be a primary characteristic of this writing. Jason Farman, for example, in The Mobile Story maintains that site-specific narratives developed for mobile devices can provoke in readers a profound sense of attachment to particular places: Storytelling with mobile media takes the stories of a place and attaches them to that place, offering an almost infinite number of stories that can be layered onto a single site. Readers of these stories can stand at a location, access the stories about that site, and gain a deep connection to that space (and the various histories of that space).38

Rita Raley similarly writes that locative narratives ‘gesture toward a cartography of the intimate and the quotidian, with users navigating the landscape via a subjective atlas or “deep map” that renders the ephemeral monumental’.39 Literature that explores the locative opportunities of mobile phones and computers needs, then, to be approached in terms of how they open writing to new narrative, poetic and other representational possibilities. But they also need to be approached in terms of what is specific to this new aesthetic: not just a renewal of literature by digital media, and not even simply a renewal of electronic literature as a result of the media-specific affordances of mobile computing and telephony. Rather, what is seen to be specific to locative textuality is a different relationship to space: a different experience of local environments, a different mode of exploring unknown places,40 but also, and more importantly, a different encounter with the world itself. Embedding the new cartography of orbital mapping – the images that cascade from satellites – into locative texts is requiring us to look again at how the earth has provided a ground for understanding.

The Space of Electronic Writing

97

The idea that locative writing can provide both a more sensitive, and a more reliable, understanding of particular environments is explored in Jeremy Hight, Jeff Knowlton and Naomi Spellman’s 34 North 118 West. This is an early, and now canonical, example of locative writing in which the idea of a site-specific narrative interaction is built on the notion that images from orbit can provoke a better understanding of how we interact with the world. Originally developed in 2002, and republished in 2016 in the third volume of the Electronic Literature Collection, 34 North 118 West is frequently mentioned in studies of digital media as an example of the inventive use of mixed media – text, images, audio narrative – which engage readers/users in the production of narrative (here relating to an early twentieth-century railroad depot in downtown Los Angeles that has since been replaced by other structures). The place of this story becomes the page on which it is written: as those who use this tool move through the landscape in the vicinity of the depot, they activate audio narratives and sound effects which have been excavated from this area’s forgotten antecedents. Indeed, Hight, Knowlton and Spellman describe 34 North 118 West as an exercise in ‘narrative archaeology’ which conjures up spectres of the past and brings them evanescently into the present. The project’s website in this manner invites us to ‘imagine wandering through a space inhabited with the sonic ghosts of another era … Like ether, the air around you pulses with spirits, voices, and sounds’.41 The effect of such a haunting encounter with this site would be a passage through the immediate experience of degeneration – this place has become almost derelict – to a greater understanding of how the urban landscape is mutable, constantly referencing the past but also holding open the possibility for a similar transformation in the future. What motivates this site-specific text, then, is the notion that the narrative reinvention of place permits a more tangled spatialized experience, one that unearths the stories that are buried in the ground. Christoph Benda’s 2012 novel Senghor on the Rocks similarly appeals to the idea that location-aware technologies allow a writing that is more rooted in the landscape than other texts that do not make use of these instruments. Benda’s novel uses satellite imagery taken from Google Maps to illustrate a story that is set against Senegal’s qualification for the 2012 World Cup at the same time that the death of its first president, Leopold Senghor, is announced. Proclaimed as the first geo-referenced novel, this text places its narrative alongside satellite imagery that allows readers to track characters’ movement across Dakar. This story is significant partly because it navigates a complex moment in which Senegal is seeking energetically to detach itself from the idea that it remains a postcolonial nation by embracing an ethic of globalized nationhood. Central to this text is the documenting of a difficult national sensibility in which recognition of the past –

98

Orbital Poetics

in the form of mourning and commemorating Senghor – sits uneasily alongside the promise of a new transnationalism that would finally allow Senegal to escape the burdens not only of colonialism but also of postcoloniality by competing in a global arena. If this locative fiction promotes the notion of site-specific narrative, then this specificity should not be understood in local, national or regional terms. Rather, Benda’s geo-referenced novel embraces the idea that we now regard geographical and political spaces in terms of their place in both a global society and a consistent planetary space. It is the world, in other words, that is apparently conveyed in this story about place. And, as with 34 North 118 West, what is seen to permit such worldly connection is not the interactivity of electronic writing; these are not stories that simply celebrate the capacity of computational devices to animate the reader in the renewal of literature. Rather, these stories take as their premise the assumption that location awareness – that a global perspective – needs more than networked computing. They are, in other words, part of a literature which looks to Bush in its realization of a usergenerated passage through documents. But is upon the instrument envisaged by Clarke that it relies when producing a narrative of worldly connection and comprehension. Because images from orbit are so essential to them, locative narratives appeal to the notion that they – more other writing – are the beneficiaries of a truly global perspective. And yet, any such appeal is troubled by how, in both 34 North 118 West and Senghor on the Rocks, the world does not submit to panoptic observation. As much as they suggest a rewriting of the planet from a newfound height and with the benefit of an unprecedentedly commanding perspective, in these texts the satellite’s lens is not consistently seen to capture the ground below. Indeed, in them, the world retreats from view in the moment that it is surveyed from above. Despite the significance that they attach to the satellite’s gaze, both 34 North 118 West and Senghor on the Rocks also suggest that orbital monitoring and cartography must produce an uncertain relationship with space. The project 34 North 118 West predates the development of cartographic tools such as Google Maps, which allow viewers to move smoothly from the visualization of the planet to a highly localized image of a particular place. As a result, this narrative is unable to situate the place marked by these co-ordinates within the generalized field of planetary space; pointing to the geographical limitations of site-specific narrative, 34 North 118 West is able to provide only an incomplete and fragmentary perspective. Raley too questions the suggestion that the locative qualities of this text translate to a writing that conveys the actuality of space. ‘The audioscape’ of 34 North 118 West, she writes,

The Space of Electronic Writing

99

with its jammed phrases and overlapping voices, produces a sense of dynamism and flux. Aural and visual perspectives alike are neither singular nor stable. And without a stable perspective, narrative representation cannot construct a distance between participant and territory, cannot allow for an objective, and objectivizing, zenith perspective, a privileged vantage point from which to perceive the whole of the city.42

Senghor on the Rocks too is unable to construct a privileged and objectivizing vantage point. Benda’s novel is principally focused on the meeting of two social and historical moments – Senghor’s death and Senegal hosting the World Cup – but it interrupts the historiographical trajectory that this convergence might imply. In addition to indicating a historical tension in this moment – commemorating Senegal’s colonial past at a time when this country is seeking to move through postcolonial nationhood to a global future – this novel also proceeds through the minutiae of streets and buildings, rather than across the world as a territory. Senghor on the Rocks does not deliver a complete and authoritative perception of the earth from height, and technology does not operate according to a historical progression that has culminated with the world becoming contained within the field of vision and cognition. Instead, satellite imagery works to invoke a sense of geographical and spatial particularity. What we see is not globality but location, not space transcended or overcome but reaffirmed as the site of cartographic inscription, not the harmoniously complete realm of cosmos but atomized instances of topos and locus. In this novel, then, technologies are seen not to reveal the smooth consistency of global space, but become the source of a locative dislocation, interrupting the idea that the global can be imaged or imagined technologically in the moment that they look closely at the surface of the world. A similar fascination with, and ambivalent response to, observation and images from above can be found in print-based writing. In Salvador Plascencia’s 2005 novel The People of Paper, one character imagines that he is being monitored from space. Preventing these acts of surveillance, another character – a baby with uncanny powers of perception – is able to shield thoughts both from those who are watching from above and also from readers. This novel therefore allies the act of reading with the invasive spectatorialism that we associate with the satellite, but it also suggests that the satellite is not always able to see. In Michael Joyce’s 2007 Was: Annales Nomadique: A Novel of Internet, the satellite features briefly as a metonym for the world’s networking by data. However, for Joyce this process does not forge an unprecedented global unity. When it describes an ‘invisible lattice of mist across the valley manna of information descending from satellites

100

Orbital Poetics

like tiny angels on parachutes’,43 this novel suggests a landscape that has long been filtered by literary and theological images of a natural and cosmological sublime that resists comprehension even as it is rendered recognizable. This troubled relationship between orbital hardware and seeing the world is also evident in Where You Are, a collection of stories and other documents published in 2013, some of which build literary geographies around satellite imagery. Geoff Dyer’s ‘The Boy out of Cheltenham’, an autobiographical narrative about growing up in the town of this story’s title, includes a large, highresolution grid-referenced map – an image produced by a satellite – with an accompanying directory that indexes the roads, buildings and amenities that are documented in the text. However, Dyer’s narrative is very much in the tradition of the literary autobiography, and events in his childhood are presented as subject to the perspectivalism of reminiscence, and to recoding by writing. This text does not merely describe places and events; it organizes them according to a taxonomy (which includes Homes, Schools, Relatives, Beer, Drugs and Trouble) that attaches a non-spatial significance to them. This text therefore proceeds according to the principle of location awareness, but it does not promise an intimate – archaeological – connection with place or offer a sense of how this place might be situated in the world. Other pieces in this collection are also built around satellite imagery. John Simpson’s ‘Nature’s Valley’ combines images from orbit with graphical maps in a travel narrative about journeying across urban and rural spaces on the Western Cape of South Africa. Chloe Aridjis’s story ‘Map of a Lost Soul’ is organized around indexed satellite images of, and photographs of locations in, Mexico City. Valeria Luiselli’s ‘Swings of Harlem’ is enclosed within a fold-out, sepia-coloured geolocation image that is overlaid with photos of the places that feature in the story. Introducing Where You Are, James Bridle situates this collection against the historical, technical and operational attributes of the GPS. The GPS system, Bridle writes, has become ‘a monumental network that provides a permanent “You Are Here” sign hanging in the sky, its signal a constant, synchronised timecode. It suggests the possibility that one may never be lost again’.44 As Bridle continues, however, he claims that not being lost is not a mere suggestion or possibility. This cartographic system is part of an apparatus that allows us to observe orbital perception: these devices allow us to see how we see the world. ‘Mapping’, he states, is a process of understanding: in order to be able to act fully and decisively in the world, we must render it legible, because only by reading the world are we capable of writing into it. Maps are powerful; they gift to those who commission

The Space of Electronic Writing

101

them a greater agency than those who operate in ignorance of the true shape of the terrain. As that terrain extends into the virtual, the electromagnetic, the invisible, so cartography must work to illuminate these dimensions as well.45

With orbital visualization of the planet, then, we are provoked into understanding that the act of mapping is a process of perceptual, cognitive and taxonomic imposition; this process makes the world not only readable and navigable but also narratable, with our inscriptions extending from it and casting light upon it. Knowledge and writing, he suggests, take root in the landscape of the world because our new condition of being encircled by instruments allows the world to be contained for us. GPS is, he writes, ‘a grand asymmetric architecture composed of space-hardened signallers and radio waves, and us, no longer lost, suspended in its ever-shifting embrace’.46 Such claims are curious, not least because the subtitle of this collection – ‘A book of maps that will leave you completely lost’ – indicates less confidence in cartographic and literary representations of space. Indeed, the stories and other texts in Where You Are continually trouble the notion that the satellite’s celestial gaze recentres us, creates a better connection with the world itself or produces a perceptual system that reliably captures the world’s immanent character. In them, the world remains in abeyance, not suddenly and finally revealed as an intelligible ground, but a site that continues to be rendered intelligible and is perpetually written and rewritten.

III In addition to describing orbital networks as enhancing agency and grounding perception, the introduction to Where You Are departs from the idea of a functional technological architecture that nurtures us in its embrace. In Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s thinking, Bridle writes, there are the resources for conceptualizing the devices that surround the earth. ‘The GPS system is part of what Deleuze and Guattari termed the “abstract machine”’, he writes, the sum of all machines which in their terminology includes the body, society, language, interpretation and technology. So the network too is one of these abstract machines: a mainframe, a terminal, a handheld device, a wireless LAN, a diadem of satellites, and us.47

The concept of the abstract machine does indeed provide a frame in which GPS, and the satellite in general, can be understood as part of the technical machinery

102

Orbital Poetics

that situates cognition. Insofar as these devices contribute to the formalization and stratification of sense they render the world legible; in this manner, they work with other instruments (including tools and other artefacts, modes of signification, and social, institutional and subjective practices) which collide, collaborate and connect to each other to structure and stabilize relationships between things in and beyond the world. But, for Deleuze and Guattari, as much as stability is forged in the production of these assemblages, intrinsic to structure is the primordial, inexorable and regenerative act of production. The source, rather than the expression, of this formative process, the abstract machine cuts across all stratifications, develops alone and in its own right on the plane of consistency whose diagram it constitutes, the same machine at work in astrophysics and microphysics, in the natural and in the artificial, piloting flows of absolute deterritorialization.48

Operating on what Deleuze and Guattari describe as ‘the plane of consistency’, abstract machines are not reducible to devices in the world but ‘surpass any kind of mechanics’.49 Although they are essential to the forming of assemblages (such as the GPS system and orbital networks, as well as the perceptual schema that these instruments generate and maintain), these machines ‘cut across stratifications’, which is to say that they interrupt attempts to subject the world to cartographic categories. These machines are not, in other words, like the instruments that we use when interacting with the world. Two principal consequences follow from this association of the satellite, the assemblage and the abstract machine. First, to return to Said’s observation that beginnings are what get left behind, the story of the devices that shape electronic literature needs to be revisited, and the role of instruments in orbit needs to be written into this story. Beginnings are never determinable as the initial or unprecedented inauguration of the new, Said advises, but should be treated as moments of coalescence which at once produce the future and reach into the pasts that they seek to discard. The instruments envisaged in 1945 – Bush’s memex and Clarke’s orbital relays – contribute to one such coalescence, since both have been essential to the narrative of a modernity in which the world is connected by – is assembled through – communication and the transfer of information. This narrative has been sustained by the repression of a longer and more expansive history of thinking about the techniques of universal connection, but it has also been defined by a contest over which instruments will truly connect us to each other and put us in touch with the world. In the regular course of thinking about literature, and in the assertion of electronic literature’s

The Space of Electronic Writing

103

capacity truly to be in touch with the world, the curious co-incidence that occurs in 1945 has been left behind. Second, the association of the satellite, the assemblage and the abstract machine prevents the separation of print and paper from born-digital literature. ‘Print and electronic textuality deeply interpenetrate one another’, Hayles notes: Although print texts and electronic literature – that is, literature that is ‘digital born’, created and meant to be performed in digital media – differ significantly in their functionalities, they are best considered as two components of a complex and dynamic media ecology.50

Although differing in their technical properties, The People of Paper, Was, 34 North 118 West, Senghor on the Rocks and Where You Are prevent a rudimentary and evaluative separation of digital and print-based fiction because of what they share. Components of an ecology that incorporates images and navigational data that are transmitted from orbit, these texts share a fascination with the opportunity to create locative and cartographic narratives that are sensitive to places (and their own place) in the world. They are among the constituent parts of a media ecology that is creating different experiences of the literary, but these texts are also components in the larger assemblage that produces knowledge of the world from orbit. As this chapter has noted, however, these texts also exhibit a shared departure from familiar claims about what satellites allow us to see and know. Important though it is to consider the singular ways in which the codex and born-digital writing effect an experience of the literary, it is just as important to attend to how their fascination with the satellite results in a confused ontology of the world. What brings these texts together is not a confidence in the technical apparatus of orbital observation and mapping but a recognition that the satellite is always frustrated in its efforts to formalize, stratify and contain the territory below. What they reveal is not how the assemblage operates as system of tools, but how the abstract machine interrupts our sense of where we are.

Notes 1 2

3

Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention & Method (London: Granta, 1997), 29. Vannevar Bush, ‘As We May Think’, The Atlantic Monthly (July 1945). Available online: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-maythink/303881/ (accessed 8 April 2016). Bush, ‘As We May Think’.

104 4

5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16

17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Orbital Poetics Theodore Nelson, ‘Dream Machines’, in Computer Lib: You Can and Must Understand Computers Now/Dream Machines: New Freedoms through Computer Screens – A Minority Report (self-published, 1974), 45. Douglas C. Engelbart, ‘Letter to Vannevar Bush and Program on Human Effectiveness’, in From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s Machine, ed. James M. Nyce and Paul Kahn (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1991), 235–44. N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002), 31. J. Yellowlees Douglas, The End of Books – or Books without End? Reading Interactive Narratives (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 25. Johanna Drucker, SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 93. Nelson, ‘Dream Machines’, 45. Nelson, ‘Dream Machines’, 45. Bush, ‘As We May Think’. J.C.R. Licklider, ‘Memorandum for Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network’. Available online: http://www.kurzweilai.net/memorandumfor-members-and-affiliates-of-the-intergalactic-computer-network (accessed 8 April 2016). Joseph Tabbi, ‘Electronic Literature as World Literature; or The Universality of Writing under Constraint’, Poetics Today 21, no. 1 (2010): 21. Paul Otlet, Traité de documentation. Le livre sur le livre: Théorie et pratique (Brussels: Editions Mundaneum, 1934), 428. Alex Wright, Cataloguing the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 9. Mark C. Marino, ‘Critical Code Studies’, Electronic Book Review (4 December 2006). Available online: http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/ codology (accessed 8 April 2016). Arthur C. Clarke, ‘The Space-Station: Its Radio Applications’, in Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in the History of the U.A. Civil Space Programme, Vol. 3: Using Space, ed. John M. Logsdon et al. (Washington, DC: NASA, 2009), 12. Clarke, ‘The Space-Station’, 14. Arthur C. Clarke, ‘Extra-Terrestrial Relays: Can Rocket Stations Give World-Wide Radio Coverage’, in Exploring the Unknown, ed. Logsdon et al., 16. Joseph N. Pelton, ‘The History of Satellite Communications’, in Exploring the Unknown, ed. Logsdon et al., 11. Clarke, ‘Extra-Terrestrial Relays’, 16. Clarke, ‘Extra-Terrestrial Relays’, 21. J.C.R. Licklider and Welden E. Clark, ‘On-Line Man-Computer Communications’, AFIPS Proceedings 21 (1962): 113. Nelson, ‘Dream Machines’, 10.

The Space of Electronic Writing

105

25 Nelson, ‘Dream Machines’, 45. 26 Bush, cited in W.D. Kay, Defining Nasa: The Historical Debate over the Agency’s Mission (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2005), 32. 27 Dallas W. Smythe, ‘Communications Satellites’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: A Magazine of Science and Public Affairs 17, no. 2 (1961): 65. 28 Kay, Defining Nasa, 77. 29 Kay, Defining Nasa, 77. 30 Arthur C. Clarke, The Fountains of Paradise (London: Gallancz, 2000), 34. 31 In The View from Serendip, Clarke cites Bush’s 1945 testimony to the US Special Senate Committee on Atomic Energy as evidence of the fact that even the most eminent scientists misjudged the development of rocket technologies. Arthur C. Clarke, The View from Serendip: Speculations on Space, Science, and the Sea, Together with Fragments of an Equatorial Autobiography (London: Random House, 1977). 32 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 52. 33 J. David Bolter, Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print, 2nd ed. (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc., 2001), 2ff. 34 Bolter, Writing Space, 39. 35 Bolter, Writing Space, 38–9. 36 Adriana de Souza e Silva and Jordan Frith, Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces: Locational Privacy, Control, and Urban Sociability (New York: Routledge, 2012), 14. 37 De Souza e Silva and Frith, Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces, 14. 38 Jason Farman, The Mobile Story: Narrative Practices and Locative Technologies (New York: Routledge, 2014), 6. 39 Rita Raley, ‘On Locative Narrative’, Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 41, no. 1–2 (2008): 129. 40 See also de Souza e Silva and Frith’s claim that ‘locational privacy concerns can be traced back to two major developments: the growth of databases … and the popularization of technologies that can track users’ location. The most prominent locative technology has been GPS, at least since the U.S. government stopped degrading the satellite signal in 2000’, De Souza e Silva and Frith, Mobile Interfaces in Public Places, 119. 41 Jeremy Hight, Jeff Knowlton, and Naomi Spellman, 34 North 118 West. Available online: http://jeffknowlton.info/index.php/projects/1-34-north-118-west (accessed 8 April 2016). 42 Raley, ‘On Locative Narrative’, 142. 43 Michael Joyce, Was: Annales Nomadique: A Novel of Internet (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007), 127. 44 James Bridle, ‘You Are Here’, in Where You Are: A Book of Maps that Will Leave You Completely Lost, ed. Chloe Aridjis et al. (London: Visual Editions, 2013), n.p.

106 45 46 47 48

Orbital Poetics

Bridle, ‘You Are Here’, n.p. Bridle, ‘You Are Here’, n.p. Bridle, ‘You Are Here’, n.p. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone, 1988), 56. 49 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 511. 50 N. Katherine Hayles, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2008), 160.

5

Global Catastrophe

The end of the world, Shakespeare’s Lear tells us, will come when a vengeful nature overwhelms all that is known: Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout Till you have drench’d our steeples, drowned the cocks! You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts, Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder, Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world, Crack Nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once That make ingrateful man! (3.2.1–9)

At this moment in the play, Lear has descended into madness following the catastrophic collapse of both family and kingdom. The bonds of blood and the principle of sovereign authority have been betrayed, and as a result civilization as he understands it has fallen into disarray. ‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks’ is his desperate apostrophe to an enraged nature that is unmoved by the plight of a humanity that struggles with its place in the world, and Lear addresses the unruly storm that engulfs him not to seek deliverance or absolution, but to yield to a greater authority. This is a revelatory experience, but not a redemptive one, and the awareness that Lear ultimately attains is of the world as a place of unthinkable horror and chaos that surpasses even the sovereign’s mighty power. Often read as a play in which insight and insanity coalesce, King Lear is also notable because it refuses to separate environment from culture. ‘Read with an eye to contemporary climatology’, Todd Borlik writes, ‘King Lear depicts microcosm and macrocosm as mutually fashioning each other’.1 The notion of humanity’s possession of the world, and therefore of its ability to resist and control a nature that is external to it, is denied by Lear’s characterization of a wrathful and obdurate force that will devastate human life. Being alive is a contingent

108

Orbital Poetics

condition, and it depends on forces that will not be reasoned with and cannot be overcome by a heroic determination to survive. If the deluge and ‘all-shaking thunder’ of the wilderness for Lear threaten life, then this threat exists because there is no opportunity for life to extract itself from the nature with which it is intimately connected. In A.C. Bradley’s influential reading of King Lear, this play reveals such a bond by emphasizing the perceptual acts through which Lear makes sense of the onslaught that surrounds him. The storm scenes, he writes, are ‘the explosions of Lear’s passion, and the bursts of rain and thunder, are not, what for the senses they must be, two things, but manifestations of one thing. It is the powers of the tormented soul that we hear and see in the “groans of roaring wind and rain” and the “sheets of fire”’.2 The magnitude of nature’s turbulent forces are overwhelmingly affective for Lear, but they can only be conveyed in the mode of a relation, as forces made comprehensible by cognitive acts that constantly move between different manifestations of these forces, not in terms of what they are but in terms of how they are experienced and perceived. Indeed, this passage emphasizes the failure of knowledge to stand outside of nature and understand it fully. Singeing Lear’s head and executing his thoughts, this storm – this ‘tempest in my mind’ (3.4.13) – is catastrophic because it devastates life, but also because it reveals the world to be unthinkable for the humanity that claims both knowledge and possession of it. Bradley’s reading of King Lear suggests that Shakespeare anticipates a phenomenological treatment of nature as a force that intrudes on and is encoded by consciousness, and yet cannot be captured by either thought or language. More recently, Robert Markely situates this sense of a disjunctive coalescence of nature and culture in ‘a broadly Latourian understanding of the natural world’ where ‘“Ecology” and “culture” ultimately are never distinct entities’.3 For such a conception of nature, ‘climate and culture are mutually constitutive entities’, and Markley finds evidence of the hazards attached to this co-emergence and co-dependence in Lear’s encounter with hurricanes, thunderbolts and downpours: Lear is not wandering through a metaphoric storm that marks his poetic madness and signals the disruption of the natural order; he is an all-too recognizable figure who registers the complex connections between climatic instability and its potential consequences: the loss of agricultural harvests and the fracturing of ideologies of national unity, patriarchal authority, and socioeconomic stability.4

What this play points to, then, is a precarious condition of being with that conjoins nature and humanity, rather than a perceptual encounter with nature

Global Catastrophe

109

manifesting its sublimely malevolent character. It suggests an ecology that is assembled of interoperating parts. As well as bearing witness to forces that overpower humanity and obliterate its delusions of world mastery, Lear’s cry reveals that this is an ecological disaster that devastates everything. This is the end of the world because the world as an ecology, as Lear understands it, has become systemically unsustainable. Human culture and civilization – ‘ingrateful man’ – turn against themselves in this play, but this self-destructive impulse becomes magnified by a storm that turns against all life and ‘cracks Nature’s moulds’. Indeed, this event is so devastating that the idea of world as a planetary space with fixed and determinable dimensions – the world conceived from Timaeus to the Blue Marble as spherical and uniform – collapses. ‘Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ th’ world’ signals forces that are of such a magnitude that they spark a cosmological shift: no longer conceivable as a global body, the world takes on a different geometric character, and it is for this reason that Lear struggles to comprehend the world as a shifting ground. What follows this frenzied self-annihilation – whatever the world might be after the storm shatters and crushes the world – would not be recognizable according to the concepts of planetary home that had previously held for Lear. This storm is a cataclysmic event that drowns, incinerates, poisons and electrocutes, and this scene generates ‘a counter-image of Nature that successfully resists human attempts to construct survivable narratives’.5 However, this is not simply a case of the world or ‘Nature’ continuing after humanity has been successfully eradicated. The foundations for the renewal of Lear’s world – the seeds (‘germens’) from which new life would come – are themselves sacrificed. If Nature or the flat world live on after this apocalypse then they would be devoid of the life that Lear knows. The world that follows such an apocalypse would not, this play tells us, be animated in a way that is recognizable to us. This place is, instead, unimaginable. King Lear contrasts with how Shakespeare elsewhere figures the geometric regularity of the world. Certainly, it confounds Puck’s aspiration in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to ‘put a girdle round about the earth’ (2.1.175). The notion of a spherical world that can be encircled by modern travel in King Lear becomes an unattainable fantasy: this fantasy must fail because it impertinently construes the world as a finitude that can be encompassed by humanity’s sovereign authority. This play also offers an antecedent disclaimer to more recent conceptions of the world as an entity that is being united by new tools and instruments. As the last chapter has shown, contrasting accounts have been offered about precisely which technological devices will bring the world together. What King Lear suggests,

110

Orbital Poetics

however, is that attending to the world’s global completion either by computers or by satellites neglects the possibility of the world’s annihilation by forces that intrude upon humanity but cannot be managed either by humanity or by the tools that it deploys. Put otherwise, it denies that technicity can successfully subdue the world.

II Disclosing forces that are both beyond control and exceed comprehension, the storm of Shakespeare’s play anticipates a trajectory in recent criticism that seeks to situate climatic catastrophe in a non-anthropocentric conception of the world. As noted above, for Markley King Lear aligns with ‘a broadly Latourian understanding of the natural world’ in which climate and culture are reciprocally constitutive in a disjunctive series of relations that will not produce or yield to a global perspective. Latour proposes a return to ‘Gaia’ as the name for these relations, although his restoration of this concept involves a reworking of how it has previously figured in thinking about world and climate change. According to mythological narratives, Latour notes, Gaia is a tumultuous and threatening character figure. ‘Gaia, Ge, Earth, is not a goddess properly speaking, but a force from a time before the gods’,6 he writes in Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. In Theogony, Hesiod’s poem on the birth of the gods, she is the first being to exist and the origin of life. And yet, she is neither maternal nor the basis for harmonious relations between the gods or between the world and the divine realm. ‘Prolific, dangerous, savvy’, for Latour, ‘the ancient Gaia emerges in great outpourings of blood, steam, and terror, in the company of Chaos and Eros’.7 This foundational narrative of Gaia’s character is important because it points to qualities that differ from those that are typically attributed to her in the late twentieth century. Rather than divinely nurturing and protective, she ‘plays the role of a terrifying power and an astute advisor’.8 Not beneficently tender, she is instead ‘a chthonic power’ and ‘a figure of violence, genesis, and trickery, a figure that is always antecedent and contradictory’.9 In the contemporary period, Gaia’s role has been established by a tradition of ecological criticism which, taking its inspiration from James Lovelock, describes the earth as a vital organism that cares for us and needs our care. Here, Gaia is conceived as ‘a single, unique, coordinating agent’,10 and Latour mentions that Lovelock fuelled this tradition in his description of Gaia as a ‘planetary life system’ that functions as a balanced equilibrium. Such a description, for Latour, attaches the wrong designations to Gaia: ‘“System”, “homeostasis”, “regulation”, “favorable levels”, these are all quite treacherous terms’.11 While Lovelock does indeed assign

Global Catastrophe

111

these qualities to Gaia, elsewhere he is careful to avoid the pitfalls of treating the earth as a totality or possessing agency, and for Latour it is with Lovelock’s caution around these notions that we can begin to understand our catastrophic relationship with the earth. Gaia is not reducible to the category of embodied or organic existence: ‘We cannot apply to it any technological or religious model. It may have an order, but it has no hierarchy; it is not ordered by levels and it is not disordered either.’12 Gaia instead needs to be understood as ‘the name of the process by which variable and contingent occurrences have made later events more probable’.13 Variable and contingent, this name indicates a terrifying rupture in our sense of place in the world. Gaia gives itself to perception as a force that cannot be encompassed within the spherical conceptualization of a planet that contains and protects both itself and its inhabitants. No longer confident in our place in the world – we have dispensed with our conceited presupposition that the world awaits our sovereign regard – we are now conscious of a potency that obliges us to recognize the effects of our actions in the world: What is coming, Gaia, has to appear as a threat, because this is the only way to make us sensitive to mortality, finitude, ‘existential negation’ – to the simple fact of being of this Earth. This is the only way to make us conscious, tragically conscious, of the New Climate Regime. Only tragedy can allow us to measure up to this event.14

The threatening appearance of, and inescapable collision with, this figure therefore demands a tragic materialism in which we are grounded in an earthly space that requires more from us. For Isabelle Stengers too, ‘Gaia’ is the name for forces that are not subject to willed governance by humanity; indeed, once unleashed, these forces will not be pacified by a humanity that holds tenaciously (though ineffectually) to its sense of primacy in the world. That these forces will be unleashed is not a matter of speculation for Stengers, and in In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism she describes an imminent disaster that is increasingly regarded as inescapable and irreversible. ‘Over the last few years’, she writes, ‘one has had to cede to the evidence: what was lived as a rather abstract possibility, the global climatic disorder, has well and truly begun … the most pessimistic of predictions produced by the simulations become increasingly probable’.15 This coming disorder for Stengers will result from how we have come to situate ourselves in relation to forces that were once viewed as greater than humanity. Whereas the earth and its climate were once honoured by its human inhabitants, and whereas in the past there has been a perception that humanity should not abuse the

112

Orbital Poetics

tolerance that has been granted to it, such a deferral to and fear of greater forces no longer hold. The violence that we now bring systematically to bear on the world means that ‘a margin of tolerance has been well and truly exceeded’,16 and our newfound ability to regard the planet from orbit is, in part, where evidence of the coming disorder is to be found. Our abuse of the climate is resulting in a world that no longer tolerates us: ‘This is what the models are saying more and more precisely, that is what the satellites are observing’.17 Orbit is therefore producing an undeniable image of what is happening to the world. How we are living on the planet – how we are abusing the climate and consuming the earth’s resources – is, we now see, inherently destructive. Despite coming to this awareness, we refuse to think in fundamental terms about how we relate to the planet and, rejecting the imperative to cultivate an alternative ontology that displaces humanity’s primacy in the world, we persistently refuse to change our assumptions about our being in the world. This refusal will mean that the current generation will become reviled as the terminal consequences of our intolerable actions are finally grasped. ‘I belong to a generation that will perhaps be the most hated in human memory’, she writes, ‘the generation that “knew” but did nothing or did too little (changing our light bulbs, sorting our rubbish, riding bicycles … ). But it is also a generation that will avoid the worst – we will already be dead’.18 We will become hated by our own species because of our collective inaction in the face of certain devastation, but Stengers’ concern is neither to exculpate our generation from the causes for this devastation nor to promote a praxis that would allow us to avert it. Her concern, instead, is with how we might understand differently the forces that have been set in motion as a result of our species’ brutal treatment of the place that previously tolerated us. This place is not a home from which we have become estranged, and with which we should seek to re-establish a connection. We cannot forge a harmonious belonging with an ecology that contains humanity because this would presuppose that we both belong (i.e. are rightfully situated in a world that is proper to itself) and have the power to negotiate our place in this system. Gaia, as it has been conceived following Lovelock’s resurrection of this figure, possesses such a character: it is an entity that functions systemically, with the potential for humanity to correct the imbalances that it produces. This is Gaia as a ‘good, nurturing mother’ whose ‘health’19 needs to be safeguarded. Against the scientific identification and enumeration of the elements of the world (‘living things, oceans, the atmosphere, climate, more or less fertile soils’) in an inventory of atomized entities and processes, ‘Gaia’ has become the name for a vital ecology that has developed through the co-evolution of ‘entangled’ entities and processes.20

Global Catastrophe

113

Such a conception of Gaia, as a sustaining environment that needs to be protected, no longer holds because it remains attached to the idea that this system can be stabilized. In Stengers’ non-naturalistic and non-anthropocentric materialism, ‘Gaia’ is the name for an assemblage that ‘intrudes’ and is unmoved by the fate of species that are threatened by this intrusion. We are now forced to confront the climate’s responses to our actions – this is Gaia’s intrusion – but we mistakenly assume that humanity has the right or power to remedy its aggressive history or is able homeostatically to restore an equilibrium that would ensure its survival. Although our conduct provokes Gaia to react, it is not because this assemblage is endangered: ‘It is precisely because she is not threatened that she makes epic versions of human history, in which Man, standing up on his hind legs and learning to decipher the laws of nature, understands that he is the master of his own fate, free of any transcendence, look rather old’.21 Stengers’ conception of Gaia therefore displaces humanity as a species that possesses a Promethean ability to influence and control the forces of the world. In Catastrophic Times does not simply challenge ‘epic versions of human history’. Just as significant for Stengers is the need to recognize that Gaia denies containment by thought. This assemblage cannot be conceptualized as a knowable environment that yields to thinking, although for her it does demand to be named and for In Catastrophic Times it is this demand that provokes us into recognizing that we are subject to forces that we can neither control nor comprehend. Stengers proposes that ‘To name is not to say what is true but to confer on what is named the power to make us feel and think in the mode that the name calls for’.22 ‘Gaia’ orients thought towards something that arrives irrepressibly as a transcendence that imposes itself upon experience and consciousness, even though content or character cannot be attributed to this eruption in knowledge. ‘The intrusion of this type of transcendence, which I am calling Gaia, makes a major unknown, which is here to stay, exist at the heart of our lives’,23 Stengers writes. This entity cannot be known, then, but it cannot be ignored as a force that not only responds to human action, but is also indifferent to whether humanity should survive the coming changes.

III Evidence that such an intrusive unknown can no longer be ignored is provided by the many cultural texts that seek to make sense of climate change and the ecological crisis that now imposes itself on mainstream thinking. Documenting

114

Orbital Poetics

the intensification of this tradition, Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro point to ‘a growing proliferation of new and old variations on a theme that we shall call … “the end of the world”’.24 Across multiple sites of cultural production, this catastrophist tradition confirms the sense of severity that is now attached to the generalized perception of an approaching crisis. The end of the world, they point out, has come to preoccupy blockbusters of the fantasy genre, History Channel docufictions, scientific popularization books of varying complexity, videogames, art and music pieces, blogs of all shades across the ideological spectrum, academic journals and specialized networks, reports and pronouncements issued by world organizations of all kinds, unerringly frustrating global climate conferences … theology symposia and papal pronouncements, philosophical tracts, New Age and neo-pagan ceremonies, an exponentially rising number of political manifestoes – in short, texts, contexts, vehicles, speakers, and audiences of all kinds.25

Before and after Latour, at least from King Lear until the contemporary proliferation and intensification of disaster narratives, the end of the world is seen to provoke the realization that humanity’s extinction is not the end of all things, but that a world will persist despite our species’ ruinous actions. Succeeding the Anthropocene, the entity that the term ‘world’ anxiously seeks to capture will live on, even if its scarred surface bears witness to the reach of human violence or its buried sedimentary layers provide a record of humanity’s entrenched cruelty. The designation ‘world’ cannot be attached to this space because such a name refers to a territory that is made comprehensible by its human inhabitants. The world after humanity is not imaginable as a stable terrestrial uniformity because the eye that produces spherological perception will no longer be fixing its gaze on the world from above or as though from above. The coming crisis provides an intimation of this unimaginable futurity: the discovery that the climate will not bend to our will reveals also that there is something unknown at the centre of our experience and perception of the world. Indeed, the fact that contemporary disaster narratives speculate in discrepant ways about the cause and effect of the coming catastrophe reveals both a shared conviction that such an event will occur and the anxious recognition that we are unable to grasp the form that this event will take. For Latour and Stengers, it is what humanity is doing on the earth and to the earth that is resulting in Gaia’s fatal intrusion, and the emerging canon of contemporary apocalyptic literary and filmic texts similarly situates the coming catastrophe as something that will happen on the ground: 28 Days Later, Oryx

Global Catastrophe

115

and Crake, The Day After Tomorrow, The Flood, 28 Weeks Later, The Road, World War Z, Station Eleven, Mad Max: Fury Road. In these texts, the end of the world takes the form of an extinction or near-extinction event that is usually attributed to global movements or exchanges and has devastated our capacity to experience the world as a globalized whole. According to Danowski and Viveiros de Castro: Such a demographic and civilizational disaster is sometimes imagined as the result of a ‘global’ event, a sudden extinction of all human or terrestrial life resulting from either an ‘act of God’ (a lethal supervirus, a massive volcanic explosion, a collision with a celestial body, a giant solar storm), the cumulative effect of anthropic interventions on the Earth System … or finally a good oldstyle nuclear war. On other occasions, the disaster tends to be … depicted … as a process, a deterioration of the conditions that presided over human life during the Holocene, in which droughts follow hurricanes and floods, human and animal pandemics follow colossal crop losses, and genocidal wars take place against the background of extinctions that affect whole genera, families, and even phyla.26

The world ends either because there is no-one left to perceive it or because those who survive forge atomized communities and are unable to connect with others across planetary space. However, focused as it is on contagion, the climate or war, this proliferating tradition neglects what should be essential to any assessment of the deformation and destruction of the world, namely the risks that are associated with the orbital extension of the planet. Danowski and Viveiros de Castro acknowledge that extinction might result from an event that occurs beyond the atmosphere of the planet (‘a collision with a celestial body, a giant solar storm’), but their focus remains firmly on earthbound disasters and does not include the consequences of humanity’s departure from the planetary ground. ‘Intensifying changes in the terrestrial macro-environment’ are what contemporary cultural texts register when they imagine a coming ecocatastrophe. Latour’s Facing Gaia offers a justification for such a focus on the terrestrial ground. He insists that we need to position ourselves as ‘Earthbound’ rather than aspiring to become part of a whole that is universal space. Latour again looks to Lovelock when formulating this injunction. While working at NASA, Lovelock contributed to early planning about how life on Mars might be detected. In contrast with engineers who were focused on technical questions about travelling to Mars, Lovelock advised that such an objective would be better served by staying on earth. His report, published in Nature in 1965, states that ‘it is possible, by accepting a limited phenomenological definition of life, to design simple experiments from the general recognition of life phenomena, including that with which we are familiar’.27 All that is needed,

116

Orbital Poetics

Lovelock proposes, is an instrument on the Earth that can detect whether the Martian atmosphere is in a state of equilibrium. Latour compares this proposal with Galileo’s description of the earth as part of an elaborate, non-geocentric, astrophysical system. Observing shadows on the lunar surface, Galileo deduces that the moon is of the same order as the earth. Both are components of the same system, are made of the same matter and are subject to the same physical laws. This observation triggered a monumental cosmological shift: ‘Undifferentiated space could henceforth be extended everywhere’, Latour writes: The Earth was no longer relegated to the lower depths of a sublunary world surrounded by circles of dignity each more elevated than the one before, from the supralunary planet to the spheres of the fixed stars, distant only by a few degrees from God himself. The Earth henceforth had the same importance as all the other celestial bodies, without any hierarchy among them; as for God, he could be encountered anywhere in the vast immensities of the world.28

Unlike Galileo’s telescope, which produced the perception of cosmological uniformity, the instrument that Lovelock imagines would project a sense of differentiated space. Detecting atmospheric equilibrium on Mars would allow us to see that it has a different planetary character to the Earth, which exists in a state of atmospheric disequilibrium and therefore requires the presence of a force that keeps it alive. In this moment, for Latour, Lovelock ‘diminished the similarity between the Earth and all the other bodies’.29 This thought experiment provokes in us the recognition that our planetary home is shaped and sustained by a ground or materiality that is greater than the planet itself and which is beyond our apprehension. If we are to understand the relationship between being and this ground then our starting point should not be to look beyond the earth, or to seek to leave it in order to situate ourselves as part of a sublimely universal order. For Latour, we need to begin by recognizing the primacy of the earth and our place in it: Lovelock brought his reader down to what should be viewed once again as a sublunary world. Not that the Earth lacked perfection, quite the contrary; not that it hid the sombre site of Hell in its entrails but because it held – alone? – the privilege of being in disequilibrium, which also meant that it possessed a certain way of being corruptible – or … of being, in one form or another, animated.30

Latour appeals for a criticism that shifts its centre of gravity by returning to the planet, not in a pre-Galilean or pre-Copernican positioning of the earth at the centre of cosmotheological order, but in an earthbound understanding of what dwelling means in relation to place. Essential to this criticism is a refutation of the notion that looking from orbit allows us to see the world:

Global Catastrophe

117

The highly celebrated ‘blue planet’ has poisoned thought in a lasting way. It is a composite image that blends the ancient cosmology of the Greek gods, the old medieval form given to the Christian God, and NASA’s complex network for data acquisition, before being projected within the diffracted panorama of the media. What is certain is that the inhabitants of Gaia are not those who view the blue planet as a Globe.31

Perhaps implicit in this reorientation of the world towards a sublunary attention to grounded being is a criticism of the decision to reproduce the Blue Marble image on the cover of Lovelock’s 1979 Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth.32 Regardless of whether such a criticism is directed specifically at Lovelock’s use of this image, for Latour the ecological and environmental thinking that emerges with the ‘Blue Marble’ photo is shaped by a confusion of non-terrestriality with transcendence: We could always spend huge budgets on what used to be called the ‘conquest of space’, but we would succeed at best only in transporting a half-dozen encapsulated astronauts across inconceivable distances, from a living planet toward some dead ones. The place of the action is here below and right now. Dream no longer, mortals! You won’t escape into space. You have no dwelling place but this one, this narrow planet. You can compare the celestial bodies to one another, but not by going to see for yourselves. For you, Earth is the place, what is called in Greek a hapax, a name that appears only once, and this name pertains to the members of your species, the Earthbound.33

If Danowski and Viveiros point to stories in which celestial collisions and astronomical climate change are the cause of human and planetary extinction, then the scant attention that they give to these stories makes sense in the context of Latour’s remarks, as does their claim that we need to attend to changes in the macroenvironment. This extended place, for them as for Latour, does not reach beyond the atmosphere into the celestial, astral or even orbital domain. It is, rather, the planetary ground that both allows us to exist and threatens our species life. In this modelling of earth and the unruly forces that shape it, narratives of our potential demise are instructive because they provoke us into looking again at how we walk on the earth.

IV Heidegger, as Chapter 1 has noted, considers the first images of the earth from orbit and early transatlantic satellite transmissions to be the disastrous elevation of a technicity that displaces the creative act of world-forming. This ability to move beyond earth’s atmosphere is built on both the destruction of nature

118

Orbital Poetics

(‘launch pads are being built and the countryside laid waste in unimaginable fashion’34) and an ontological devastation (‘the uprooting of man is already here’35). For Heidegger, this ascent of perception and communication is more ruinous than other systematizing productions of the world as a grounded space; if we are to accept Heidegger’s diagnosis then it would therefore be an error not to situate perceptions of a coming crisis in the context of the rise of the satellite. For Bernard Stiegler, it is not the satellite but the technicity that it metonymizes that is catastrophic. In the second volume of his Technics and Time series, Disorientation, Stiegler considers a familiar perception of the satellite’s function. This device, he notes, has effected a specific conjunction of power and knowledge. Collapsing time into the immediacy of a present in which the transmission of data is not restricted by physical or geographical space, it has prompted a profound shift in the status of the nation-state: ‘In overcoming the limitations of earthbound networks, satellite transmission wrests control of transmission systems from all territorial powers, opening a communication space dominated by those with the most efficient technologies beyond all the constraints of national laws’.36 The consequence of this ‘overcoming’ is that ‘the state no longer has any guarantee of being its own master’.37 Essentially a tool for the globalization of information, the satellite in such an account is associated with a reconfiguration of social power and political authority across the world. Stiegler does not dispute the idea that the satellite operates as an instrument of global authority, although his treatment of this operation needs to be situated in relation to his understanding of technics. In The Fault of Epimetheus, volume one of Technics and Time, he derives two conclusions from the reading of Herodotus that Maurice Blanchot offers in The Infinite Conversation. First, there is Blanchot’s account of the cause of globalization. ‘If, reading Herodotus’, Blanchot writes, we have the sentiment of a turning point, do we not have, reading our times, the certainty of an even more considerable change, such that events offering themselves to us would no longer be linked in a way according to what we are used to calling history, but in a way still unknown.38

For Blanchot, we are only now transferring to our time Herodotus’s sense of a turning point that transforms history. We are only now starting to recognize the extent to which technicity dominates us. ‘Modern technology’, Blanchot writes, ‘includes collective organization on a planetary scale for the purpose of establishing calculated planning, mechanization and automation, and, finally, atomic energy’.39 Stiegler takes up this idea of a globalizing technics:

Global Catastrophe

119

This world is now common to all humanity, it is ‘accomplished’, culminated in its movement of planetary extension … This world whose bearings are now planetary is that of Western science and technics in a new configuration … that has become the world of technoscience.40

Globalization is not the recent establishing of a mutual connectedness across territories and frontiers, or the emergence of unprecedented levels of mobility and exchange. It is, rather, the expansion of a tradition and a thought that would establish the world as a place that is both a known uniformity and known uniformly. It is a ‘global Western culmination’.41 If, in Disorientation, Stiegler describes the satellite as an instrument that deterritorializes information (and, as a consequence, has initiated new configurations of power and knowledge) then in The Fault of Epimetheus such an instrumentalizing of knowledge is understood both as Western technicity’s dissemination throughout the world and as the culmination of its efforts to gain mastery over the world. Second, Stiegler looks to how, in Blanchot’s reading of Herodotus, the human becomes sublimated because of its planetary extension. ‘What hitherto the stars could accomplish, mankind does. Mankind has become astral’,42 Blanchot writes. Modern technics does not represent an evolutionary development of the technical thinking that defined earlier moments in history. Instead, it constitutes an unprecedented moment – a re-initializing of history – because humanity now understands itself to have surpassed the worldly constraints that once inhibited its ability to act. For Stiegler, this monumental shift in humanity’s relationship to the world is also, necessarily, a transformation of humanity’s ontological character. Whereas being was once conceived anthropocentrically as an independent and self-accomplishing entity, it is now understood as accomplished through its deliberative interactions with tools and technologies. This shift Stiegler describes as a passage from the ‘first origin’ of the human (exemplified in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s notion of the human as wholly interior and self-sufficient) to the ‘second origin’ of the human (exemplified by André Leroi-Gourhan’s account of the human as an entity that is identified by its external interactions). Humanity in this second moment becomes understood as homo faber, a user of technical devices that allow us to think that we make and shape both ourselves and things in the world. The continued intensification of this technicity means that it operates today not as we typically assume, as a force for the re-unification of a formerly dispersed humanity, but as a mode of mastery that subjects the world to the regulative idea of a stable and enduring uniformity.

120

Orbital Poetics

For Stiegler, this age of the second origin – where external instruments are seen to bestow upon us a sovereign power to determine both ourselves and the world – is not merely a catastrophe as Nancy defines it, as ‘upheaval, reversal, overturning, collapse’.43 It is, rather, a disaster in the sense of a dis-astrum: a condition of becoming ill-starred, a separation from the stars. ‘Disaster’, he writes, ‘does not mean catastrophe but disorientation – stars guide. A loss of guides that would have affirmed itself only in its difference, god, regulating idea, eschatology of emancipation’.44 Attaching to ourselves celestial authority, by placing ourselves within the sphere of the stars, by launching satellites, we have engendered conditions in which humanity’s essential relation to the stars has been annihilated. The threat to humanity comes not from machines or technologies that will replace us as the governing force on the planet. Rather, we have already sacrificed ourselves to a technicity that forecloses any thinking that would look beyond orbit to a realm that can only ruin our treatment of the world as a comprehensible and docile place. Echoing this sense orbit as a place of disaster, apocalyptic narratives have started to turn against the tradition in which orbital circumnavigation and observation are associated with the birth of the world as a complete and completely knowable entity. Perhaps the best-known of these narratives, Alfonso Cuarón’s 2013 film Gravity provides a cinematic coding of the condition named as the Kessler syndrome, in which debris in orbit collides with other objects to produce a cascading effect that makes orbital space unusable and uninhabitable.45 The disaster that unfolds in Cuarón’s film follows Russia’s attempt to launch a missile to destroy a disused satellite; the cloud of remains that proliferates after this act soon destroys other orbiting objects, including the International Space Station (ISS), to produce an even greater field of hazardous orbital waste. Earlier narratives (such as Ken MacLeod’s 1999 novel The Sky Road) have focused on the consequences of such an event for the future of space travel: a ring of satellite wreckage would separate the earth from the cosmos and end humanity’s space-going capability. Historical time, understood as the evolutionary advancement of the species across the planet and beyond its earthly roots, would therefore cease. Like Arthur C. Clarke’s 1979 novel The Fountains of Paradise, Gravity speculates not on the collapse of space travel but on the civilizational disaster that would follow the loss of the satellite network that surrounds the earth. Clarke’s character Vannevar Morgan (named, as Chapter 4 notes, for Vannevar Bush) describes the dire consequences of such a loss from a future in which these instruments have become essential to the functioning of life:

Global Catastrophe

121

The Space Age is almost two hundred years old. For more than half that time, our civilization has been utterly dependent upon the host of satellites that now orbit Earth. Global communications, weather forecasting and control, land and ocean resources banks, postal and information services – if anything happened to their space-borne systems, we would sink back into a dark age. During the resultant chaos, disease and starvation would destroy much of the human race.46

Gravity adjusts the timescale that Clarke’s novel imagines: rather than a hundred years, this film confirms that it has taken half that time for the earth to become dependent on satellites. And, rather than voicing anxiety about the potential collapse of this orbiting system, Cuarón’s film imagines how such a collapse might unfold for two characters (Shuttle astronauts Ryan Stone and Matt Kowalski) who experience it. Nevertheless, for Cuarón as for Clarke, this collapse would constitute a civilizational disaster. ‘Expect a communication blackout at any moment’, the astronauts are told, leading Kowalski wryly to remark that ‘Half of North America just lost their Facebook’.47 Gravity therefore indicates that an orbital disaster would deglobalize the world; without satellites’ facilitation of planet-wide communication, the world would cease to be in contact with itself. Closing with the only surviving astronaut’s (Stone’s) successful return to earth, this film does not explore the chaos, disease and starvation that for Vannevar Morgan will inevitably ensue. It does, however, point to humanity’s need to reconceptualize itself following the destruction of the globalized world. Emerging from the water in which she lands, and without the devices (even the spacesuit) that allowed her to survive in orbit, Stone – the solitary representative of human life at this point in the film – is born again from the earth’s nurturing and protective fluid. As her bare feet make landfall and as she takes her first faltering steps, this character becomes connected to a ground from which orbital life has become essentially estranged. Our species lives through this disaster, then, but only after it has been torn away from its ambitions to transcend the planet. For Latour, ‘What no longer makes any sense is to transport oneself in dreams, without obstacles and without attachments, into the great expanse of space’ and in Cuarón’s film, he writes, ‘Dr Ryan Stone summed up the situation nicely for us: when she finally made it back down onto the muddy earth, she confessed: “I hate space!”’.48 The association of orbit with catastrophe emerges in an array of other literary and filmic texts, including Michael Crichton’s 1969 novel The Andromeda Strain (and its film adaptation by Robert Wise in 1971), John Nance’s 2006 novel Orbit, Oliver Hirschbiegel and James McTeigue’s 2007 film The Invasion, Neal Stephenson’s 2015 novel Seveneves, Daniel Espinosa’s 2017 film Life, Dean

122

Orbital Poetics

Devlin’s 2017 film Geostorm and Julius Onah’s 2018 film The Cloverfield Paradox. In Don DeLillo’s short story ‘Human Moments in World War III’, the catastrophe of being in orbit is a perceptual one. The future war that precedes the events of this story means that the vision of earth as a spherical ecosystem has collapsed. The principal character of this story no longer describes the earth as a library globe or a map that has come alive, as a cosmic eye staring into deep space … The war has changed the way he sees the earth. The earth is land and water, the dwelling place of mortal men, in elevated dictionary terms. He doesn’t see it any more (storm-spiralled, sea-bright, breathing heat and haze and colour) as an occasion for picturesque language, for easeful play or speculation.49

For Buzz Aldrin and John Barnes’s 2000 novel The Return, it is the elevation of war to orbital space that will be disastrous. Like Cuarón’s film, this novel takes an orbital missile strike as the threshold event in a story about the escalation of the fight for economic and political authority. Here, a localized war between India and Pakistan, having taken the familiar form of ground- and air-based conflict, dramatically changes when Pakistan detonates a nuclear bomb in orbit. This effort to destroy India’s orbiting military, commercial and social communications infrastructure has unintended consequences, however: instead of being regionally limited, this detonation is of an unanticipated magnitude, with its effects extending across orbital space: The Pakistani government was loudly proclaiming that they had intended only to destroy satellites in the immediate vicinity of the detonation and to create a cloud that would wipe out satellites passing through low Earth orbit above that part of the world for a few hours … If that had been their intention, somewhere they had gotten their numbers wrong. They hadn’t realized how rapidly the highenergy protons and electrons would accelerate in the Earth’s magnetic field, or how long they would remain trapped in the field … That radiation would remain there for weeks, extending from 80 to 30,000 miles from the Earth’s surface. While it lasted, all of the near Earth orbits would be bathed in enough radiation to destroy the electronics on satellites within an hour or two.50

As well as destroying remotely operated satellites, this radiation field soon affects the ISS, and much of The Return is dedicated to imagining how the crew of this station would be rescued in a context in which NASA (following an attempt by China to sabotage the Shuttle programme) had also ceased to function. In an attempt to ameliorate its treatment of Pakistan as a nation that cannot count, Aldrin and Barnes’s novel attributes this country’s catastrophic miscalculation

Global Catastrophe

123

to deceptive manoeuvrings by the Chinese government (which in this story provides technical support with the weapon launched by Pakistan). Alongside the attempt to disable NASA’s shuttle programme, this orbital cataclysm, Aldrin and Barnes’s characters speculate, was designed to position China as the only supplier of orbital launch vehicles in a moment of high demand. Following the construction of the ISS, orbit has become associated with the idea of nations working collaboratively to benefit the planet and its populations, but The Return offers an alternative image of a realm in which certain nations deceitfully attempt to disrupt the orbital pursuit of a shared internationalism. Indeed, this novel suggests that countries like China will always sabotage efforts to enhance and heighten the ethic of collaborative transnationalism, so the notion of a functional globalization needs to be treated as a naïve and unattainable fantasy. Other narratives locate the world’s unification in orbit, but for The Return this is a place of territorial conflict; what this conflict demands, it proposes, is the return of the United States as a sovereign power that can restrain unruly nations and preserve the social values that this novel regards as axiomatic. The Return begins as a story about the disastrous effects of military incompetence, but at its centre is the proposition that the principle of global polity will inevitably collapse in orbit. In Tess Gerritsen’s 1999 novel Gravity, the prospect of a social and civilizational catastrophe combines with the possibility of humanity’s extinction. Looking to orbit as the place from which death will descend, this novel envisages a biowarfare experiment on the ISS that the United States conducts without informing either its international partners or the crew members who monitor the results of this experiment. In the scenario that follows, a minor accident triggers the viral transmission of the organism that this experiment produces, rapidly infecting those on the Station and the Shuttle crew that is dispatched to recover the corpse of a dead Station crew member. When this rescue mission returns to the earth, it carries with it the lethal biological agent, transporting this organism from the supposedly secure and secluded environment of an orbiting laboratory to a world that struggles to prevent its dispersal. Human life, Gerritsen’s Gravity therefore proposes, is fatally threatened because of what might secretly be produced in orbit. Several aspects of Gerritsen’s novel mean that it is more provocative than the genre bio-thriller that such a summary suggests. First, the politics that shape this text are strikingly different to those that inform Aldrin and Barnes’s novel. Whereas The Return proposes that private corporations will save the United States as a space-faring nation, Gerritsen’s Gravity associates NASA with an ethic

124

Orbital Poetics

of publicly funded, socially responsible and non-militarized research. And, in contrast with Aldrin and Barnes’s image of the United States as the only nation that can protect the world from unruly and dangerous governments, in this novel it is the United States that threatens. Although this nation is ultimately seen to contain the viral threat that descends from the ISS, Gerritsen’s Gravity also firmly establishes America as the place from which such a threat is most likely to come. Second, and perhaps more substantially, what this alternative sense of national responsibility and global threat points to is a failure of the ethic of international collaboration and co-operation that has structured the licit and official description of the ISS as the site of a heightened internationalism. If, as Chapter 1describes, the world was born with the launch of the Station’s first module, Zarya, then Gerritsen’s novel suggests that the narrative of globalization’s accomplishment no longer gravitates towards the ISS. Seen for the first time from the Atlantis shuttle by one of this novel’s characters, ‘the ISS looked like a majestic sailing ship soaring through the heavens. Built by sixteen countries … it had taken five years to assemble her, piece by piece, in orbit’.51 And yet, when this character is given a tour of the Station, both it and what it promises to the world are seen to be tarnished: ‘As they passed through Zarya … she saw smudges on the walls, the occasional scratch and dent … The station was more than just a maze of gleaming labs; it was also a home for human beings, and the wear and tear of constant occupancy was evident’.52 Tired, damaged and reduced to just another place in which people go about their daily lives, Zarya here no longer seems conceivable as heralding the dawn of an immaculate and intact world.

V Against the sense of disaster that is often associated with earth-bound contagion, climate change or war, Cuarón, Aldrin and Barnes, and Gerritsen situate orbital space at the centre of the coming catastrophe. These texts share the anxiety that a coming catastrophe might begin above the atmosphere, but they also appear to share a questionable investment in the possibility of redemption. The figures who populate these fictions are seen to encounter unmanageable crises and an unimaginable chaos, and yet they appear to possess the ingenuity and fortitude that allows them to endure and overcome catastrophic events. When taken as metonyms for humanity more generally, they suggest that our species has the audacity, skill and creativity that will allow it to analyse, comprehend and avert any civilizational or biological extinction event. Human life will continue, these

Global Catastrophe

125

texts insist, even if our understanding of life in the world has been profoundly altered. When narratives such as these assume that humanity both can and should survive, they maintain the humanist orthodoxy in which the world and the forces of nature are seen to answer to the will and authority of one species that is produced by, and inhabits, this place. Restaging what Claire Colebrook describes as ‘a common motif in science fiction narratives of alien invasion’, in these texts ‘the judgment of humanity as life-denying and life-unworthy is neither refuted nor answered but set aside as the plot hurtles towards redemption’.53 Stories of orbital catastrophe do consider whether human activity might result in specific instances of disaster. However, dedicated to confirming humanity’s active sovereignty in the world and its capacity for self-preservation, narratives such as these not only refuse to consider the severity and full extent of human conduct. They also set aside the question of whether humanity should be judged as unfit to live. For Colebrook, this avoidant attitude has become established as a recurring feature of disaster and post-apocalyptic film and literature ‘precisely when our energies ought to be focused on what humans have done to the planet and how they might desist from so doing’.54 Because they refuse to consider either planetary destruction or auto-annihilation as immanent to our species’ current mode of being, stories of orbital catastrophe share with related narratives the unquestioned assumption that humanity can and should prevail. As a consequence, they fail to consider the possibility that radically adjusting the anthropo–planetary relationship – including a fundamental reconception of species being – might be the only way in which humanity (or, more accurately, a version of it) can survive. Agamben and Kant provide Colebrook with the conceptual resources for beginning this project of radical conceptual adjustment. Agamben describes modernity as a final moment of hope for humanity because it makes our ‘impotentiality’ acutely apparent. Rather than something that is able to actualize an inner capacity to become whole and complete, being human has only ever been the pursuit of an unrealizable potential, but in modernity this impossible endeavour is intensified to a critically transformative level. The two defining aspects of this moment for Agamben are totalitarianism (‘where humans are reduced to so much manageable and disposable matter or animality’) and democratic hedonism (‘where we become nothing more than the targeted consumers of dazzling spectacle’55); both of these moments, Colebrook writes, demonstrate ‘our essential capacity not to actualize’ what is distinctively human. Modernity in this manner eradicates the association of being human with the

126

Orbital Poetics

pursuit of an immanent potential, although at the same time it ignores this operation. What this doubled manoeuvre produces is a sense of humanity’s extinction: It is at this point of exhaustion, when we have become frozen spectators in a world in which images appear as ready-mades, that we can see both that there is no guarantee that we will be human and that it is human to forget oneself.56

Rather than realizing a latent essence, all that modernity has produced is the debasement of subjective and social life, either converting us into commodities to be consumed by this social order or placing us in a domain of captivatingly empty appearances. A defining feature of our historical moment, this heightened degradation should provoke in us the awareness that our deeply held notion of the human is unactualizable; this is the extinction that is at the heart of modernity. Embracing this tragic vision – accepting that humanity cannot survive in the form that it currently takes – is our only chance for some sort of continued life. To this possibility of a reanimating loss of substance and essence Colebrook adds Kant’s association of visual perception with both illusory understanding and the speculative opening of thought. Kant ‘drew upon a tradition of philosophical wonder’, she writes, ‘when he isolated man’s capacity to look into the heavens as both a source of delusion that would draw him away from grounded knowledge into enthusiasm, and as the necessary beginning of a power of thinking that would not be tied solely to sensation’.57 Standing on the earth’s surface, we become distracted from reflecting on our worldly situation when we gaze fancifully to the firmament that extends beyond the perceptual ground. At the same time, for Kant it is only through this kind of distraction that thinking will be renewed and we will be able to break with habitualized perceptions of being in the world. Put otherwise, Colebrook finds in Kant’s analysis of looking and observing an account of immanence and transcendence that is centred on a perceptual shift that moves between planetary ground and celestial space. Colebrook does not mention celebrations of the world’s spectacular arrival through orbital photography, although her reading of Kant points to how such a notion of encompassing vision must interrupt itself: There is something essentially self-destructive about the human theoretical eye: our very openness to the world – the very relation that is our life – is precisely what seduces us into forgetting that before there is an eye that acts as a camera or window there must have been something like an orientation or distance, a relation without relation.58

Global Catastrophe

127

Responses to perception of the world from orbit are typically premised on the idea that this elevated perspective permits an unprecedented vision of completeness. What Kant offers, Colebrook proposes, is a counter-memory that seeks not to remember the world fully but to recall the forgotten act of coming to perception that always precedes comprehension. With regards to orbital photography, this means that before the world is apparently revealed in Gagarin’s celestial vision or the Apollo missions’ arresting images, it comes to the eye or camera in a manner that demands the work of sense- and image-making. Rather than sanctioning either the idea that the world reveals itself to those who look down from orbit, or the assumption that the world is captured in the arresting images that have been produced beyond the earth’s atmosphere, Kantian and post-Kantian thinking calls us back to the orientation that precedes perception. This recollection of orientation requires us to think again about how we comprehend the world; as a result, it represents a disaster for the tradition in which the eye is associated with the stable accomplishment of knowledge. In the context of ecocatastrophe, this recollection for Colebrook should provoke us not only into a fundamentally different – metaphysically ruinous – approach to perception. It should also make us think differently about whether we should continue to exist. ‘Today, we might start to question the appropriate point of view from which we might observe and evaluate the human viewing eye’, she writes, ‘from our own greater will to survive, or would it not be better to start to look at the world and ourselves without assuming our unquestioned right to life?’59 Recognizing the eye’s function as an organ of constitutive looking is essential to forging an epistemology that refuses the assumption that things reveal themselves when observed. But, as well as looking again at how perception functions, it is necessary for us also to consider the possibility that the human eye may not always be able to look at the world. The task of imagining a future in which the human species no longer exists generally falls today to work on the Anthropocene, and for Colebrook too the idea that we should speculate on a world in which we remain only as a geological record is a compelling one. The idea that we can imagine a world without our species is, obviously, questionable because ‘the positing of the anthropocene era relies on looking at our own world and imagining it as it will be when it has become past’.60 Imagining a world without us denies the futurity of the future because it anticipates and determines in advance what this world will look like, but also because it subjects the world to come to the kind of geological reading that is currently applied to strata that were forged in the past. ‘Not only do we imagine what would be readable for a world without readers’, she proposes, ‘we also have

128

Orbital Poetics

to deploy and imagine (from within geology) a different mode of stratigraphic imaging’.61 Put otherwise, speculating on life after the Anthropocene requires a vision that is not rooted in modernity’s fantasy that the human eye is the organ of all observation. However, despite this historico-perceptual impasse, the need to think the world beyond human life for Colebrook remains imperative. What matters is not the content that is attached to the vision of life after our species has disappeared but the acknowledgement of the possibility of our disappearance and the recognition that something (‘a world’) will live on after our demise. Thinking this futural time and place beyond the Anthropocene is motivated by a resistance to the perception of humanity’s ‘self-willing self-annihilation in which consciousness destroys itself to leave nothing but its own pure non-being’; rather than restaging such an anthropocentric error, with the idea of our extinction ‘we can begin to imagine imaging for other inhuman worlds’.62

VI Both the literature and film that Colebrook discusses and narratives of orbital catastrophe are disinclined to engage in this thought experiment. They fail to entertain the possibility that the world might outlive its human inhabitants, but they also fail to the address the ethico-climatological question of whether humanity can justifiably claim a right of survival. What they appear to take as axiomatic is the principle of living on; the task of those who return to earth after the devastation of orbiting instruments and habitations, of those who survive a manufactured-in-orbit species-threatening virus or of those who have to reinvent global society following the destruction of the orbiting communication infrastructure is to figure out what biological and social life is to become. Significantly, Cuarón’s Gravity, Gerritsen’s Gravity and Aldrin and Barnes’s The Return close at the point at which humanity’s tenacity is rewarded and its continued existence is guaranteed. They also therefore avert their gaze from even the minimal task of reflecting on how ethical and political modes of being – as well as modes of being in relation to the world – might be reinvented after the threat of extinction. Narratives of orbital disaster set aside humanity’s destructive attitude towards the planet, and they are structured by the presupposition that our species possesses the capacity and sovereign right to survive. But, although it operates as an undeniable principle for these narratives (and for disaster and post-apocalyptic cultural texts more generally), this principle cannot be fully or

Global Catastrophe

129

unequivocally realized. Stories of orbital catastrophe, like all narrative and social discourses, are ambivalent. However much they affirm the idea of a Promethean humanity that possesses the ability, will and entitlement to survive, these stories are unable to shake off the suspicion that survival is impossible. What troubles these texts is not the suspicion that biological life will end, but the fear that what it means to be human, and what it means to be human in the world, is about to be extinguished. Polarizing the consequences of orbital disaster and ecocatastrophe as merely biological (as either the survival or extinction of our organic life) does not sufficiently convey the fracturing of species-being that must necessarily follow the kinds of events that are depicted in Cuarón’s, Gerritsen’s, and Aldrin and Barnes’s texts. The critical question posed by this literary and cinematic body relates not to biology but to ontology: what will humanity become if our current mode of shared or worldly being can no longer be sustained? Cuarón’s Gravity provides an example of how such an anxious sense of extinction persists against the grain of this film’s concluding image of the persistence of life. Much of this film is devoted to the spectacle of calamity that unfolds following the destruction of a defunct satellite. Ecstatically documenting the scale of this disaster, Cuarón’s film catalogues its effects on the majority of other orbiting instruments and vehicles. And yet, the catastrophe that we witness relates not to satellites, a shuttle or the ISS. Instead, this film dramatizes the loss of our capacity to observe the world from above. Millard points out that ‘a calamitous cascade of collision detritus … could significantly degrade the many services that society now depends upon from satellites – communication, navigation, Earth-observation and so on’,63 and Cuarón’s Gravity stages such a destruction of the place from which the world has been seen spectacularly to appear. The heightened vision that has been associated with being in and looking from orbit will come to an end because of reckless human action, this film proposes. Stone’s return to earth needs to be understood in terms of this loss of our heightened perspective: no longer able to define ourselves from orbit, we will, it proposes, need to look again at being in the world. In this manner, Cuarón’s film echoes Colebrook’s comments on looking again. For Bergson, she points out, the eye needs to be understood as an organ that immobilizes what it regards in the pursuit of comprehension; in this process, it forsakes ‘intensity – the infinitesimally small differences and fluxes that the eye edits out’.64 For an alternative to this association of vision with fixity, Colebrook turns to Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of perception as repetition: rather than attaining a final and encompassing perception, the eye for them returns to what it sees. This is the eye not as the organ of organic observation but as a synthesizing

130

Orbital Poetics

instrument that can only produce multiple versions of the same because it can never see completely. ‘It is the cutting power of the eye that needs to be thought’, Colebrook writes, ‘the eye does not free itself from imposed distinctions to return to the flow of life, but should pursue ever finer cuts and distinctions, beyond its organic thresholds’.65 In this repeated visualization and individuation, differences and fluxes are presented to the eye, provoking it constantly to look again. Beyond Cuarón’s film, the literature and cinema of orbital disaster reveal this perceptual catastrophe. Gerritsen’s Gravity questions the notion of a planetary self-sufficiency revealed from orbit, and it forces us to look again at how planetary observation operates. This novel reminds us that departure and separation from the world cannot take place. Even when moving in the celestial heights of the Space Station, even when vicariously looking down on the earth through the surrogate eye of the satellite, inhabitation and vision remain worldly. Recurring constantly in Gerritsen’s novel is a sense of conjunction, of movement between and across spaces that are never out of touch with each other, of a convergence which tethers above to below. As much as the crew on the ISS look down on the earth, people below look up to it in moments of spectatorial co-observance that deny the detachment of one place from the other. Acts of repeated and displaced therefore produce a sense of an uncertain world in Gerritsen’s Gravity. The conjunction of earth and orbit is a disaster for the idea of a globalized world, and this disaster becomes literalized when this novel imagines a global pandemic that would result from the relationship between these supposedly separate places. Although the virus that is central to this novel is engineered on the Space Station, its origins lie below – not simply on the ground, but at one of the lowest points of the seabed; despite suggesting that the human becomes threatened when it dares to leave the ground in which it has been rooted, Gerritsen’s Gravity situates the origin and source of contamination, contagion and corruption within the earth. Tracking the aetiology and outbreak of this pathogen, Gerritsen’s novel suggests that the terrestrial and the unearthly constantly infect each other in ways that will result in the end of the world.

VII Other texts share with Gerritsen’s Gravity such a sense of the end of the world. They too find such a crisis to be inseparable from the world’s orbital extension. The principal events in Christian Kiefer’s 2012 novel The Infinite Tides are

Global Catastrophe

131

focused on a former ISS crew member whose time on board the Station is curtailed following the death of his daughter. What was once measurable and determinate – place, family, nationality, globality and universality – in this character’s state of mourning becomes incalculable and inconceivable; what once grounded this character, even in orbit, begins to float uncontrollably away from sense. Saturating this novel is the unravelling of faith in what might be termed an astronautic mathesis, the idea that the world belongs to a quantifiable system. The idea of calculability initially suggests to this character the possibility to perceive cosmological order and a technical circumscription of all that is: After the fractals there remained within him a source of gravity he had never conceived or comprehended, a force that seemed to pull at him from space, from the chaos itself, from the fractal and crystalline darkness that existed everywhere beyond him, as inexplicable and indomitable and infinitely beautiful as the pull of life and death itself. And yet he remained as practical as he had ever been, perhaps even more so, and he would take that practicality with him to spin at the fringe of whatever mankind did not know, would probably never know, about the whole of the universe outside Earth’s orbit, as if the abyss itself could be placed in a frame and such a framing could make it easier to understand.66

Extending beyond the ground, the world and its orbital extension in this moment are seen to be delineated and measurable, even if the universe that is subject to perceptual framing remains disorderly and unruly. But the assurance that accompanies this notion of a worldly order – the idea of calculability and of location – catastrophically fails when the world below changes for this character: ‘The most fundamental information had been lost: trajectory, velocity, acceleration, indeed the pull of gravity itself. All he knew now was that he was unaware where such variables could be located’.67 As much as, for The Infinite Tides, orbit is the place in which planetary order is perceived and established, it is also where perception fails and where the world breaks apart. Vandana Singh’s 2004 short story ‘Delhi’ further traces a similar framing and fracturing of the world. Unlike The Return, Cuarón’s Gravity, Gerritsen’s Gravity or The Infinite Tides, this story reflects on what happens when the satellite’s gaze is displaced onto regions of the world that use it to look by proxy at themselves. Aseem, the character around whom this story is organized, experiences his home city Delhi across time (he is haunted by those who lived before and will live after him) and as a disharmonious space – it ‘is a place of contradictions – it transcends thesis and anti-thesis’,68 Singh writes. The satellite is the instrument that provides this character with a sense of how to approach what this story

132

Orbital Poetics

describes as Delhi’s sublime incomprehensibility. First, it allows him to see Delhi not as part of an ordered and harmonious ecology – the world as a unified space or undivided (global) community; this city is, instead, a place that can be seen but not known: He recalls a picture he saw once in a book when he was a boy: a satellite image of Asia at night. On the dark bulge of the globe there were knots of light; like luminous funghi, he had thought at the time, stretching tentacles into the dark. He wonders whether complexity and vastness are sufficient conditions for a slow awakening, a coming to consciousness.69

Such a slow awakening does not occur, however, and Aseem comes to realize that Delhi’s constant transformation means it is a place that refuses to be captured within the orbital gaze: The city’s needs are alien, unfathomable. It is an entity in its own right, expanding every day, swallowing the countryside, crossing the Yamuna which was once its boundary, spawning satellite children, infant towns that it will ultimately devour. Now it is burrowing into the earth, and even later it will reach long fingers to the stars.70

In Singh’s story, the world picture that orbital vision provides reshapes the world as an image made unstable by its reinscription across the world; this picture is never, Singh’s text suggests, seen finally, and neither is it consummated by those who put sight machines in orbit. Against the familiar treatment of satellites as instruments which maintain a technologized and global hegemony, in ‘Delhi’ perception – of location, of urban space, of national and transnational belonging – is reclaimed and displaced by the images that descend from these devices. Rather than confirming the world as a continuous space, and rather than functioning as instruments through which a spectatorial or panoptic authority is effected and remains self-sustaining, satellites in Singh’s story instead become tools for the improper – perhaps even impertinent – seizing of sight and sovereignty. According to Singh’s story, as with Cuarón’s, Gerritsen’s, Aldrin and Barnes’s, and Kiefer’s texts, there is therefore something catastrophic about orbit. Even if they do not provide the same sense of what catastrophe might be – a global pandemic and biological annihilation, technological destruction and civilizational ruin or the failure of systemic thinking and the collapse of perception – what draws these texts together is the shared recognition that being in orbit is profoundly threatening to how the world is conceived as a complete and uniform place. If being human is now defined as a condition of planetary connectedness, and if this condition is seen paradoxically to emerge from our

Global Catastrophe

133

recently acquired ability to leave the earth, then destruction of orbital being must also result in the destruction of our ability to see the world as a globalized whole. This is the catastrophic event that these texts anticipate, even if such an anticipation is masked by a manifest endorsement of the humanist presumption of our capacity and right to succeed in the face of species-threatening crises. These texts therefore confirm Nancy’s claim that we are turning away from the idea of a world that is complete and completely knowable. In ‘The End of the World’, he declares that ‘there is no longer any world: no longer a mundus, a cosmos, a composed and complete order (from) within which one might find a dwelling’.71 No longer is it possible, Nancy writes, to conceive of a ‘down here’ that can be framed and differentiated from ‘a beyond or outside of this world’.72 This is not an apocalyptic vision of a species or planetary death. We are witnessing an end according to Nancy, although it is the realm of ‘signifying sense’, within which humanity and the world are conceived, is reaching its culmination: Adversaries of the thought of the ‘end’ are incorrect in that they do not see that the words with which one designates that which is coming to an end (history, philosophy, politics, art, world … ) are not the names of subsistent realities in themselves, but the names of concepts or ideas, entirely determined within a regime of sense that is coming full circle and completing itself before our (thereby blinded) eyes.73

Any regime of sense which assumes completeness and closure carries within itself its own ruinous ending, Nancy proposes here, and this observation certainly applies to how sense is assigned to the concept of ‘world’. When understood as an entity that is finally seen and known, the world is conceptualized not as a rich ground for many ways of being or multiple perceptions of humanity’s home. It becomes a fixed space in which meaning has come to an end. Or, as he writes in After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes, ‘The present has its end in itself in both senses of the word end: its goal and its cessation’.74 We no longer need to think about what the world is because it is now finally and fully revealed to us: the ‘end’ of ‘the end of the world’ on the one hand therefore needs to be understood as the telos that technical thinking treats as attainable. On the other hand, Nancy’s reading of this teleology does not conclude with the idea that conceiving the world as complete represents an end to thinking. By arriving at such a determination, the system of technical thinking must also come to an end. This does not mean that we are moving from one moment in world history to another, or that the concept of world is being modified to fit changing modes of perception or thinking. It means that any regime of

134

Orbital Poetics

sense cannot see beyond itself and consequently cannot envisage whatever will succeed it. ‘World’ as a concept has underpinned thinking about a planetary home that is composed and complete; if such a perception of an integrated finitude does not hold (partly because of how being in and looking from orbit now appear to us to be catastrophic) then it is necessary to recognize that this perceptual system has failed, but also that it is no longer possible to assume the presence of a world that will endure and be visible to a different perception. This for Nancy is the end of an Occidental concept of world that has ‘extended this determination across the entire world’75 and seeks to encompass all that is external to it. The literature and cinema of orbital catastrophe expose this terminal condition. Singh’s ‘Delhi’ challenges the Occidentalist assumption of a worldly perspective and global power by displacing both the satellite’s panopticism and the notion that the earth moves uniformly within its own space. Cuarón’s Gravity points to orbital space as devastatingly unmanageable, and other narratives of orbital threats to bodies and consciousness similarly point to how the concept of ‘world’ cannot be sustained as a designation for the site of being. Revealing that the effort to encompass the world – and to interiorize all that is external – is an impossible undertaking, these and other narratives of orbital catastrophe confirm Nancy’s observation that sense can function only in relation to an externality: ‘There is no sense except in relation to some “outside” or “elsewhere” in the relation to which sense consists’.76 Forged in relation to an outside that is set aside in its conception, ‘world’ at once designates an entity in itself from which thought seeks not to stray and an entity that cannot be situated wholly within its own space.

VIII Haruki Murakami’s 1999 novel Sputnik Sweetheart contrasts with the literature and cinema of orbital catastrophe because it is not a story about the destruction of either the technological network that has sustained perceptions of a connected world or the assumption that the world is revealed in orbit. This novel does however explore the loss of the sense of the world that Nancy describes. Sputnik Sweetheart is a novel for which orbit is the place from which global catastrophe unfolds, and for it the satellite allows us to make sense of this loss. In the early pages of this novel, one of the main characters, Sumire, complains about her inability to write:

Global Catastrophe

135

‘My head is like some ridiculous barn packed full of stuff I want to write about’, she said. ‘Images, scenes, snatches of words … in my mind they’re all glowing, all alive. Write! They shout at me. A great new story is about to be born I can feel it. It’ll transport me to some brand-new place. Problem is, once I sit at my desk and put them all down on paper, I realize something vital is missing. It doesn’t crystallize – no crystals, just pebbles. And I’m not transported anywhere’. With a frown, Sumire picked up her 250th stone and tossed it into the pond. Maybe I’m lacking something. Something you absolutely must have to be a novelist.77

Murakami’s narrator, K, replies by making an analogy, and by recounting a practice that he says took place in China a long time ago: A long time ago in China there were cities with high walls around them, with huge, magnificent gates. The gates weren’t just doors for letting people in or out, they had greater significance. People believed the city’s soul resided in the gates. Or at least that it should reside there. It’s like in Europe in the Middle Ages when people felt a city’s heart lay in its cathedral and central square. Which is why even today in China there are lots of wonderful gates still standing. Do you know how the Chinese built these gates? ‘I have no idea’. Sumire answered. People would take carts out to old battlefields and gather the bleached bones that were buried there or lay scattered about. China’s a pretty ancient country – lots of old battlegrounds – so they never had to search far. At the entrance to the city they’d construct a huge gate and seal the bones up inside. They hoped that by commemorating the dead soldiers in this way they would continue to guard their town. There’s more. When the gate was finished they’d bring several dogs over to it, slit their throats, and sprinkle their blood on the gate. Only by mixing fresh blood with the dried-out bones would the ancient souls of the dead magically revive. At least that was the idea. Sumire waited in silence for me to go on. Writing novels is much the same. You gather up bones and make your gate, but no matter how wonderful the gate might be, that alone doesn’t make it a living, breathing novel. A story is not something of this world. A real story requires a kind of magical baptism to link the world on this side with the world on the other side.78

The story that K recounts here provides us with a lesson in writing: novels need to be invested with meaning by some mystical or supernatural process; writers gather up something that is dead and they reactivate it, bringing life to what is otherwise inert matter or material; the dead live again through an act of literary

136

Orbital Poetics

enchantment. According to this narrative, a sacrifice is needed to complete this process, though not an actual letting of blood, he is keen to point out: ‘It’s a metaphor … You don’t have to actually kill anything’.79 Here, Murakami’s novel is concerned with how we are to understand what a novel can do, describing writing as a process of infusing life into dead bones. The literary and the literary critical merge here, then, and what this passage suggests is that we need to tell stories about the making of stories if we are to understand the place of meaning in literature. K’s story about the bones and blood of literature is also, however, about globalization. His remark that ‘a story is not something of this world’ is easy to read in relation to the idea of writing as a ‘magical baptism’, as an enchantment that confers life on the dead. Such a reading would be a mistake; instead we should take K’s remark as a comment on whether writing can reveal the world. Writing is not merely about the materiality of the world, as the bones of K’s story, or the lifeless pebbles that signify Sumire’s despair over her abilities as a writer, suggest. A story according to this passage is about something that is not reducible to the world that we inhabit or experience. What literature reveals is something that cannot be revealed, something on the other side of writing that intrudes upon the idea of a knowable world. The world that we think we know is a space divided, rather than brought together through the social and cultural practices that are associated with globalization. The figure of the satellite in Sputnik Sweetheart confirms this challenge to the idea that we inhabit a world that has been successfully contained within thought. Murakami prefaces the novel with a brief passage that provides some indication about its title: Sputnik On 4 October 1957, the Soviet Union launched the world’s first man-made satellite, Sputnik I, from the Baikanor Space Centre in the Republic of Kazakhstan. Sputnik was 58 cm in diameter, weighed 83.6 kilograms, and orbited the Earth in 96 minutes and 12 seconds. On 3 November of the same year, Sputnik II was successfully launched, with the dog Laika on board. Laika became the first living being to leave the atmosphere, but the satellite was never recovered, and Laika ended up sacrificed for the sake of biological research in space. from The Complete Chronicle of World History80

As this novel begins, then, the circumnavigation of the planet is associated with death. Orbit, Murakami’s preface reminds us, is hostile to life, and it suggests

Global Catastrophe

137

that our ascent to this place will, like writing, require sacrifices. When Sputnik returns early in the novel, it is not as an instrument that provides reliable vision or knowledge. Instead, it is the source of confusion for Sumire’s companion, Miu: Miu had heard of Jack Kerouac and had a vague sense that he was a novelist of some kind. What kind of novelist, though, she couldn’t recall. ‘Kerouac … hmm … Wasn’t he a Sputnik?’ Sumire couldn’t figure out what she meant … ‘Sputnik? You mean the first satellite the Soviets sent up, in the fifties? Jack Kerouac was an American novelist. I guess they do overlap in terms of generation … ’ … Finally it dawned on Sumire. ‘Beatnik!’81

The dawn of the satellite age is here seen to converge with the literary, and for Murakami, literature is not of this world. Sputnik, this novel suggests, is not to be associated with a globalized world, but is an instrument that catastrophically takes us elsewhere.

Notes Todd A. Borlik, Ecocriticism and Early Modern English Literature: Green Pastures (London: Routledge, 2011), 128. 2 A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth (London: Macmillan, 1905), 270. 3 Robert Markley, ‘Summer’s Lease: Shakespeare and the Little Ice Age’, in Early Modern Ecostudies: From the Florentine Codex to Shakespeare, ed. Thomas Hallock, Ivo Kamps, and Karen L. Raber (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 137. 4 Markley, ‘Summer’s Lease’, 137. 5 Steve Mentz, ‘Tongues in the Storm: Shakespeare, Ecological Crisis, and the Resources of Genre’, in Ecocritical Shakespeare, ed. Lynne Bruckner and Dan Brayton (London: Routledge, 2016), 164. 6 Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), 81. 7 Latour, Facing Gaia, 81. 8 Latour, Facing Gaia, 82. 9 Latour, Facing Gaia, 83. 10 Latour, Facing Gaia, 94. 11 Latour, Facing Gaia, 94. 12 Latour, Facing Gaia, 107. 13 Latour, Facing Gaia, 106. 1

138

Orbital Poetics

14 Latour, Facing Gaia, 244. 15 Isabelle Stengers, In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism, trans. Andrew Goffey (Ann Arbor MI: Open Humanities Press/Meson Press, 2015), 20. 16 Stengers, In Catastrophic Times, 45. 17 Stengers, In Catastrophic Times, 45–6. 18 Stengers, In Catastrophic Times, 10. 19 Stengers, In Catastrophic Times, 45. 20 Stengers, In Catastrophic Times, 44. 21 Stengers, In Catastrophic Times, 47. 22 Stengers, In Catastrophic Times, 43. Emphasis in the original. 23 Stengers, In Catastrophic Times, 47. 24 Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros De Castro, The Ends of the World, trans. Rodrigo Nunes (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), 1. 25 Danowski and Viveiros de Castro, The Ends of the World, 1–2. 26 Danowski and Viveiros de Castro, The Ends of the World, 2–3. 27 J.E. Lovelock, ‘A Physical Basis for Life Detection Experiments’, Nature 4997 (1965): 568. 28 Latour, Facing Gaia, 76–7. 29 Latour, Facing Gaia, 78. 30 Latour, Facing Gaia, 78. 31 Latour, Facing Gaia, 136. 32 According to Columba Peoples, the use of the Blue Marble image on the cover of Lovelock’s Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth ‘indelibly linked [this image] to Lovelock’s thesis of Earth as a unitary system or biosphere’. Columba Peoples, ‘Envisioning “Global Security?” The Earth Viewed from Outer Space as a Motif in Security Discourses’, in The Politics of Globality since 1945, ed. Rens Van Munster and Casper Sylvest (London: Routledge, 2016), 169 33 Latour, Facing Gaia, 80–1. 34 Heidegger, ‘“Only a God Can Save Us”’, 56. 35 Heidegger, ‘“Only a God Can Save Us”’, 56. 36 Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation, trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 106–7. 37 Stiegler, Disorientation, 107. 38 Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 266, cited in Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 89. 39 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 266. 40 Stiegler, The Fault of Epimetheus, 90. 41 Stiegler, The Fault of Epimetheus, 90.

Global Catastrophe

139

42 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, cited in Stiegler, The Fault of Epimetheus, 89. 43 Jean-Luc Nancy, After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 7. 44 Stiegler, The Fault of Epimetheus, 92. Callum Watt points out that Stiegler does not hold to this separation of disaster from catastrophe: ‘By writing that the disaster is not a catastrophe, Stiegler here wants to indicate the specialized usage of Blanchot; this is somewhat confusing given that in the first volume “catastrophe” is used only in proximity to Blanchot and is apparently synonymous with the disaster. Stiegler’s quotation therefore activates a context that looks both backwards and forwards, such that “Disaster” cannot be simply delimited as referring to disorientation’. Callum Watt, ‘The Uses of Maurice Blanchot in Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time’, Paragraph 39, no. 3 (2016): 310. 45 Compelling visual and sonic responses to ‘the troubling, beautiful, dangerous, and fascinating world of space junk’ are provided by Cath Le Couteur and Nick Ryan’s project Adrift. Available online: http://www.projectadrift.co.uk/ (accessed 10 April 2018). 46 Clarke, The Fountains of Paradise, 54 47 Alfonso Cuarón, dir., Gravity, film (Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Pictures, 2013). 48 Latour, Facing Gaia, 80. 49 Don DeLillo, ‘Human Moments in World War III’, Granta (1 March 1984). Available online: https://granta.com/human-moments-in-world-war-iii/ (accessed 21 February 2018). 50 Buzz Aldrin and John Barnes, The Return: A Novel of the Human Adventure (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2000), 164–5. 51 Tess Gerritsen, Gravity (London: Harper, 2004), 90. 52 Gerritsen, Gravity, 94. 53 Claire Colebrook, Death of the Posthuman: Essays on Extinction, vol. 1 (Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing/Open Humanities Press, 2014), 199. 54 Colebrook, Death of the Posthuman, 197. 55 Colebrook, Death of the Posthuman, 13. 56 Colebrook, Death of the Posthuman, 13. 57 Colebrook, Death of the Posthuman, 13. 58 Colebrook, Death of the Posthuman, 13–14. 59 Colebrook, Death of the Posthuman, 22. 60 Colebrook, Death of the Posthuman, 24. 61 Colebrook, Death of the Posthuman, 24. 62 Colebrook, Death of the Posthuman, 27–8. 63 Millard, Satellite, 157. 64 Colebrook, Death of the Posthuman, 16. 65 Colebrook, Death of the Posthuman, 23.

140

Orbital Poetics

66 Christian Kiefer, The Infinite Tides (London: Bloomsbury Circus, 2012), 240. 67 Kiefer, Infinite Tides, 46. 68 Vandana Singh, ‘Delhi’, in The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories (New Delhi: Zubaan/Penguin, 2008), 30. 69 Singh, ‘Delhi’, 37–8. 70 Singh, ‘Delhi’, 38. 71 Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘The End of the World’, in The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 4. 72 Nancy, ‘The End of the World’, 4. 73 Nancy, ‘The End of the World’, 4. 74 Nancy, After Fukushima, 37. 75 Nancy, ‘The End of the World’, 6. 76 Nancy, ‘The End of the World’, 7. 77 Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart, trans. Philip Gabriel (London: Vintage, 2002), 16. 78 Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart, 17. 79 Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart, 18. 80 Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart, 2. 81 Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart, 7–8.

Part Three

Being-in-orbit

6

Kosmotheoros in Tears

Can a satellite cry? Can it be overcome or defeated by passion; can it be affected or suffer to the extent that its vision is impaired? Can a satellite, the apparatus that observes the world and confers a sense of certainty about its dimensions, character and content, tear up, whimper or weep? Can it break down? Two films released in 2013 hint at such questions. Gravity, Cuarón’s tale of orbital disaster, provides viewers with an intimate spectacle of tragic sorrow when astronaut Ryan Stone yields to her desperate condition and concedes that she is about to die. At this moment she begins a lament that drifts unheard into the void of space (‘Nobody will mourn for me. No-one will pray for my soul’1) and, as she cries, her tears float uncannily into the air around her. Also exploring the physics of tears, during his tenure as commander of the International Space Station, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield tests whether those who live in orbit can cry. The video of his experiment – titled ‘Tears in Space (Don’t Fall)’ – shows him simulating the act of crying by putting water into one of his eyes. Strikingly different to the effect imagined in Cuarón’s film, the result is again visually impressive for those who have not experienced zero gravity: rather than flowing downwards or away, Hadfield’s surrogate tears form a liquid mass that remains attached to his eye. It is possible to produce tears, he observes, but because the force of gravity is not applied to them, crying does not really take place. ‘Eyes can definitely cry in space’ he observes, but ‘the big difference is that tears don’t fall’.2 Hadfield’s conclusion is, then, an equivocating and unsettling one. To the question of whether crying can occur in space, his reply is perhaps or maybe. Hadfield’s observation relates to the physical properties of tears, as though crying is an act that is defined by the movement of liquids alone. However, questioning whether it is possible to cry in space risks neglecting a more interesting question than the ones posed by fluid mechanics: why would someone in such a sublime place feel the need to cry, or become inundated by tears? Why would these heroic figures take on Heraclitus’s woeful regard, weeping as they look down on

144

Orbital Poetics

the world?3 Several answers to these questions immediately present themselves, all also in the register of perhaps or maybe. Those who soar to such a supremely privileged place might be overwhelmed by the magnitude of the place that they have come to inhabit; no longer held in place by the earth, they might feel as though they’re falling into nothingness. Alternatively, perhaps there is an anticlimactic recognition of what ascendance to this unearthly place can deliver; rather than attaining an incomparable elevation or escaping to an otherworldly place, perhaps they become aware of what they take with them. Perhaps those in orbit undergo a perceptual transformation, recognizing that they picture the world below only through mediating acts of image production, rather than capturing the world in its unitary abundance. Perhaps daily routine or the minute attention to being alive makes orbital living mundane; perhaps making this place so trivial means that the heavens cease to be celestial. The anointed who ascend to this place might come to see that, as a result of their actions, the sacred has become merely technical. Or perhaps those in orbit simply miss the world. Anyone who looks up to this place can only speculate on what might trouble those who soar to such heights, but any of these comedowns is surely reason enough to produce tears.

II The association of space with crying is not limited to the recent examples that Cuarón and Hadfield provide. In The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe records the tear that John Glenn shed after being the first American astronaut to orbit the earth. Wolfe also documents the widespread outpouring of tears by those who celebrated Glenn’s successful flight. ‘What was it that moved them so deeply?’, Wolfe asks: It had to do with the presence, the aura, the radiation of the right stuff, the same vital force of manhood that had made millions vibrate and resonate thirty-five years before to Lindbergh – except that in this case it was heightened by Cold War patriotism, the greatest surge of patriotism since the Second World War.4

In Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner, it is not a sense of relief or an intense patriotic fervour that produces tears at the thought of leaving the planet. As he dies, renegade replicant Roy Batty recalls his off-world combat experiences. ‘All those moments will be lost in time’, he laments, ‘like tears in rain’.5 Weeping releases Glenn and his admirers from the anxious sense of danger that

Kosmotheoros in Tears

145

accompanies orbital travel, but in Blade Runner it is the thought of returning to the earth that produces tears. Weeping is also a recurrent theme in literature and theory: Aristotle, Aquinas, Shakespeare, Kant, Tennyson, Auden, Marvell, Nietzsche, Rousseau, Adorno, Ngugi, Rhys; the Homeric tradition of manly weeping, sentimental narratives of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; Genesis, the Zohar, Beowulf. To this lachrymology can be added the work of Derrida and Nancy, for whom it is through tears that the world is both witnessed and recedes from sight. Following the death of his fried Jean-Marie Benoist, Derrida finds ‘the world suspended by some unique tear’, and he turns to John Donne’s ‘A Valediction: Of Weeping’ to describe this feeling of loss: A globe, yea world, by that impression grow, Till thy tears mix’d with mine do overflow This world; by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolvèd so.6

Nancy’s Corpus includes tears among the projections and excrescences that move between bodies. Because of these exchanges, he writes, embodiment needs to be understood as a leaky, flaky, entangled and reticulated condition: A body is an image offered to other bodies, a whole corpus of images stretched from body to body, local colours and shadows, fragments, grains, areolas, lunules, nails, hairs, tendons, skulls, ribs, pelvises, bellies, meatuses, foams, tears, teeth, droolings, slits, blocks, tongues, sweat, liquors, veils, pains, and joys, and me, and you.7

In Listening, Nancy similarly proposes that the child’s first cry is an early moment in this offering of images to other bodies, although here he also associates the infant’s exclamatory tears with the production of (rather than entry into) the world: Perhaps we should thus understand the child who is born with his first cry as himself being – his being or his subjectivity – the sudden expansion of an echo chamber, a vault where what tears him away and what summons him resound at once, setting in vibration a column of air, of flesh, which sounds at its apertures: body and soul of some one unique. Someone who comes to himself by hearing himself cry (answering the other? calling him?), or sing, always each time, beneath each word, crying or singing, exclaiming as he did by coming into the world.8

With its fledgling utterance, the child ‘comes to himself ’, and its splitting cry also allows the world to be positioned as something that the child is not. This

146

Orbital Poetics

tear that tears therefore performs what both Nancy and Derrida term ‘spacing’ (‘espacement’): the unacknowledged, repressed or invisible act of differentiation that is required in order for identification to take place. ‘Spacing’ helps us to consider why the world might be missed by those who ascend to the exalted space of orbit, as well as why this sense of disconnection or loss might invoke tears. For Derrida, spacing is the movement that effects a distinction between one entity and another. It produces the sense of proximity and distance, the perception of the autonomous identity of things, each possessing its own, equally individuated, character. Spacing is the primary perceptual or cognitive activity. It is the projection of what is not yet conceptualized; it is the primordial process of sifting, dividing and separating; it is the imposing of form and order onto insubstantial and undifferentiated stuff and it is the expression of time as a succession of discrete instances. Carving finitude from infinity, spacing it is the forging of subjective and social spheres; it is hominization and cosmogeny. Following Saussure, Derrida proposes that language is initiated by the acts of differentiation and separation: ‘Spacing (pause, blank, punctuation, interval in general, etc.) … constitutes the origin of signification’.9 In response to Husserl, he observes that the same production of difference shapes the perception of time: ‘The temporalization of sense is, from the outset, a “spacing”’,10 he concludes in Speech and Phenomena. This forging of categories or invention of sense does not merely deny the possibility of immanence by situating categories and sense in a manufactured order of things; for Derrida spacing also requires a perpetual act of partitioning that interrupts the self-accomplishment of any entity. According to Speech and Phenomena, this continual assembling and disassembling of sense is exemplified by the setting apart of space from time: As soon as we admit spacing as both ‘interval’ or difference and as openness upon the outside, there can no longer be any absolute inside, for the ‘outside’ has insinuated itself into the movement by which the inside of the nonspatial, which is called ‘time’, appears, is constituted, is ‘presented’. Space is ‘in’ time; it is time’s pure leaving-itself; it is the ‘outside-itself ’ as the self-relation of time.11

Not only a constitutive force, spacing constantly folds the outside back onto what is seen as a pure interiority. This formation of unachievable identities and differences means that conceptual order is always in the process of being re-established, which is to say that projection and opening occur constantly. In his 1997 essay ‘The Technique of the Present: On On Kawara’, Nancy extends this primordial operation to poetry, art and cosmology. Nancy here agrees with

Kosmotheoros in Tears

147

Derrida that spacing remains irreducible to thought, since its operations are what both allow conceptualization to happen and prevent it from capturing an actuality. ‘So little is [spacing] “something” … some particular thing, that not only is it in neither time nor space, it is neither time nor space’, he writes, ‘it is the extroversion of what does not subsist in itself ’.12 But in this essay Nancy also begins to reflect on how the operation of spacing can be associated with moments of cultural and artistic production. Poetry is to be understood not as a specific literary genre that is defined by a distinctive use of language (‘verse’) or by particular compositional qualities (such as rhythmical, figurative or ambiguous language) which reside within the broader field of the aesthetic. Rather, it names artistic production in general. Poetry is ‘Techne poietike: productive technique’13 because it first emerges as a term assigned to acts of making and invention, to works of creation and procreation, that draw our gaze to the technical and artificial fabrication of what is created. ‘The word “poiesis” comes from a family that denotes ordering, arrangement, setting in position [disposition]’, this essay observes, ‘Poetry sets in position. Art is a setting into position … It is technique productive of presence’.14 The significance of poem – or, indeed, of any artistic artefact – is to be found not in its formal features or what it signifies, but in the fact that it is both engaged in the formation of sense and reveals knowledge to be the apportioning of categories to the objects of perception. Concerned in part as it is with the production of meaning, Nancy’s essay restages his efforts to rethink the passage taken by anything that acquires definition. ‘Presence’, he reminds us, is a term that does not simply borrow from praesentia (suggesting a condition of already being present, of something immediately to-hand), but needs also to be associated with prae-est (the act of bringing forth something that is before or beyond being). ‘Presence is not a quality or a property of the thing’, he writes, ‘It is the act through which the thing is brought forth: prae-est. It is brought forth or brought before its nature as a thing, before everything that thrusts this nature into the world of its various connections’.15 Although returning to this touchstone of Nancy’s thinking, ‘The Technique of the Present’ also describes how an awareness of prae-est, as bringing into presence, is provided by the work of Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara. When Nancy reflects on specific works by Kawara, it is ‘July 21, 1969’ that he singles out for particular attention. This painting, from the Today series of almost 3,000 works (each marking a particular date, from 1964 to 2013), is one of a trilogy by Kawara which records the Apollo moon landing. Often treated as one moment in a longer, elegantly minimalist, project that memorializes

148

Orbital Poetics

the contemporary moment as a sequence of revelatory events, this painting for Nancy takes on a far greater cosmological significance: July 21, 1969: the date of the first moon landing. This is the date from which timekeepers, the artists of time, open its cosmic spacing. From this point on, there is no longer a sublunary world of time and a superlunary world of pure presence. The moon is no longer the mark of the shared movement of the celestial spheres but itself merely one of the points from which the space of time opens out in all directions of the universe simultaneously, another one of those innumerable points where there is somewhere.16

Nancy is careful in this passage not to treat the moment recorded by Kawara as a wholly exceptional event in the way that he perhaps suggests. There is indeed, with the first moon landing, a shift from one cosmological perspective to another. The separation of an immanent world from a transcendent celestial sphere becomes unsustainable at this point because immediacy (as both spatiality and temporality) is no longer seen to be earth-bound. But this passage cautiously notes that the first moon landing does not initiate a wholly unprecedented transition from one epoch to another. Although an inflexion point for cosmology, this moment is described as yet another instance of the repeated opening of space and time that is fundamental to conceptualization. It becomes, Nancy writes, ‘merely one of the points’ – ‘another one of those innumerable points’ – that once more orders, arranges and sets in position a finite present by detaching it from the infinity of other places. Commemorating Apollo’s moon landing, Kawara’s painting conveys this momentous cosmological shift: what was once considered to be part of a celestial supratemporality becomes absorbed into earthly time. In this moment, it suggests, the lunar becomes worldly. But this is a presentational, as well as a representational, work: dating is both the subject of this painting and its mode of enunciation. Kawara’s painting does not convey a cosmological shift simply through an act of documentary visualization, or through an arrangement of numbers and letters on canvas that merely refers to the Apollo mission. ‘July 21, 1969’, and the series to which it belongs, exposes the spacing of time – the separation of one instant from another – as a forging of the present. Capturing this moment, Kawara’s painting is a work of artistic and poetic – technical – fabrication from which time becomes fashioned as systematic, regular and continuous. This enactment of spacing makes Kawara’s art sacred according to ‘The Technique of the Present’, though not in the sense of religious or spiritual

Kosmotheoros in Tears

149

painting, and this essay distinguishes Kawara’s work from any latter-day expression of faith or an attempt to depict the holy. For Nancy, as for Agamben, the sacred (from sacer: the accursed or consecrated) signifies a placing outside or setting apart that allows order to be established and maintained. Inscribing time and conveying Apollo’s cosmological displacement, Kawara’s painting performs such a sacred operation of ‘setting aside [mise à part], a setting apart [mise à l’écart] in so far as this act of partition [écartement] is the condition of relation or communication’.17 But it also, just as importantly for Nancy, reveals this sacred operation to be fundamentally uncertain. By exposing the act of setting apart – by revealing the present to be produced by technique – Kawara’s sacred painting serves to remind us that immediacy is never fully accomplished or finally made concrete. It ‘brings out the spacing of time as such’, Nancy writes, but it ‘also brings out – exposes – what, precisely, is not as such’.18 Brought forth by spacing, the present cannot be said to be internally creative or sufficient to itself since it always arrives freighted by something that is beyond or before the present comes to be. Whenever interiority is carved out as time and space there must always be something like an outside that thought cannot encompass (indeed, is an ‘outside of the outside’19), a pre-originary exteriority that needs to be understood as an unfolding (an ‘intimacy of opening’20) rather than as possessing its own character, dimensions and limits. Not only a bringing forth of the present, the work of spacing that Kawara’s painting conveys therefore brings with it an anxious sense of a primordiality or an elsewhere that drifts from the regular patterns that shape the thinking of time and space. Perhaps this points to one explanation for why those in orbit might cry: they recognize that perception of the world’s circumscribed finitude must always be incomplete and imperfect. Although affirming a celestial perspective, these observers of the world cannot bear to look at what is sacred about it.

III Spacing is a recurring theme in Nancy’s writing, and he often considers how the practice of differentiation and ordering informs the separation of the terrestrial earth from a non-planetary realm. In ‘Dialogue on the Philosophy to Come’, a conversation with Roberto Esposito held in 2001, Nancy describes space as the principle that we have come to recognize as fundamental to thinking: ‘What we are dealing with here is really space’, he observes, ‘For more than forty years we have known that we are living in the epoch of space’.21 This period Nancy associates

150

Orbital Poetics

with the legacy of an Enlightenment and Industrial history that is driven by territorial domination and the effort to manufacture a globally consistent planet. From the culmination of the colonial project to the construction of global communications networks, the twentieth century has subjected the planet to an overwhelmingly technical conceptualization in the assumption that the world is a measurable and knowable domain in which humanity is sovereign. Following the ‘progressive saturation of terrestrial space’, there is now a belief that ‘the surface of the planet no longer has any terrae incognitae’.22 However, although this subjection has prompted the exploration and occupation of space beyond the earth (‘Expeditions to far-off territories have achieved their mission and now give way to a conquest of interplanetary and interstellar space’23), departure from the world should not for Nancy be understood as the repetition of earlier efforts to capture and map the world’s unknown places. Whereas this expansionism had previously sought out other spaces, today the extension of humanity to other domains is concentrated on an introspective fascination with the idea of planetary oneness: The extension has ceased to be expansive and has now, if anything, become intensive: forces conjoined, powers [potenze] condensed, compressed and concentrated in small particles or fibers; billions of bytes of energy and information conveyed in a space-time that is practically nothing [nullo] … space, folded in on itself, has lost its own propensity to spaciousness and opening. It no longer appears as a place of unfolding and traversing, of passage, of paths … the earth is reduced to a point, to a point without dimensions.24

If Nancy here describes a shift towards a fixation on the punctual present, then the final chapter of his 2005 Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity again reaffirms the inherently fractured character of such a narcissistic regard. Motivated by the assumption that immanence inheres in the nature of things and is knowable, the idea that we move outside of the world in order to understand ourselves and the world better is nevertheless an ecstatic vision. For the world’s intrinsic character to be definable in this manner, a threshold or external limit that circumscribes this body must be established; this boundary must also touch on something (‘non-being’) that is beyond the body within. Dis-Enclosure, like ‘The Technique of the Present’, finds this split and equivocating constitution of interiority in the perception of non-terrestrial space: Probes and telescopes accompany the expansion of the universe as far as the nonlocalizable, where stars have been dead for immemorial light-years. The end of worlds comes back to us in the launching of our own – the end or absolute

Kosmotheoros in Tears

151

mastery of spacing itself, according to which there is a ‘world’, from that dis-enclosure that is preceded by no enclosure of being, but by which non-being is disclosed. Thus there is in the world something other than a unique point without dimensions, plunged deep into its own nullity.25

Leaving the planet has therefore not only presented us with the image and idea of world that can be captured by the eye or in thought. Enclosure necessitates that something is not within. This act of containment must therefore take us beyond the interior space of the world; it must also be an act of dis-enclosure. In other words, leaving the planet means that we are not only able to look down at the earth. We must also turn our gaze outwards, beyond the world that is defined by orbital circumnavigation. Nancy finds such a conjunction of enclosure and dis-enclosure confirmed in Ariane, the European Space Agency’s launch vehicle that is named for the mythological figure who, he writes, ‘makes possible the escape from the sinister enclosure and the return voyage on the vessel bucking the bitter waves full sail toward the open sea’.26 Two chapters of The Sense of the World – ‘Space: Confines’ and ‘Space: Constellations’ – extend the discussion of Nancy’s proposition that the world is initiated by the arrival of an exterior space – a ‘cosmic opening’27 – that encroaches on and contaminates the categorical thinking that regards the planet as whole and complete. That this opening cannot be encompassed by thought or language is conveyed by the recursive style and molten images that characterize Nancy’s description of the ecstatic encounter with space: This constellation of constellations, this mass or mosaic comprising myriads of celestial bodies, their galaxies, their whirling systems, deflagrations and conflagrations that propagate themselves with the sluggishness of lightning, the almost impossible speed of movements that do not so much traverse space as open it and space it out with their motives and motions, a universe in expansion and/or implosion, a network of attractors and negative masses, a spatial texture of spaces that are fleeing, curved back, invaginated, or exogastrulated, fractal catastrophes, signals with neither message nor destination, a universe of which the unity is nothing but a unicity [unicité] open, distended, distanced, diffracted, slowed down, differed, and deferred within itself.28

Nancy describes here a combination of forces, movements, temporalities and assemblages that appear to us as the non-terrestrial universe, a singularity or ‘unicity’ that takes on a specific character through its separation from the world. But this passage is also notable because Nancy seems to struggle to describe precisely what it is that comes from elsewhere (a ‘cosmic opening’) to interrupt

152

Orbital Poetics

efforts to arrive at the idea of an ordered and uniform world. This passage suggests that the images or descriptions that it provides are somehow insufficient or inappropriate: the infinity that they strive to signify cannot be contained by prosaic references to things or qualities.

IV Efforts to comprehend what is beyond the worldly must therefore be unsatisfactory; ‘We do not yet have any cosmology adequate to this noncosmos’,29 Nancy writes. In place of the assumption that a more rigorous thinking would disclose the universe in its full actuality, we need an ‘acosmic cosmology’30 for which the ‘constellation of constellations’ cannot be captured. ‘We need to disengag[e] from the remains of the old cosmo-theo-ontology’, Nancy proposes, and he looks to Kant’s rarely considered figure of the kosmotheoros as the starting point for a possible retreat from efforts to render the universe intelligible. The kosmotheoros appears briefly in Kant’s Opus Postumum, where he struggles to describe the relationship between matter and the experience or perception of this material substratum. Not only can the actuality of matter be presupposed, he concludes, it must be presupposed because the idea of empty space – of a nothingness or void – is contrary to thought. Kant’s conclusion is based upon a basic phenomenological assertion: to think empty space is to imbue it with content, project a character onto it and render it recognizable. Space that does not submit to knowledge cannot be treated as somehow wholly independent of thought or signification, he notes; it ‘does not exist as an object’ but ‘is merely a mode of representation, pertaining to the subject for it to represent itself as an outer object in a certain form (of pure outer intuition, not thought) – not as it is, but as it necessarily appears to the subject, and is thus given as a priori, insofar as the latter is affected by the object’.31 Space which defies comprehension is, then, not only (in a limited sense) within the orbit of thought but also ineluctably comes (or is given) to the subject; it arrives unactualized and uncontrollably as an affective externality that always touches upon knowledge. It is replete with a matter that is everywhere, all-encompassing, and produces everything. This archaic, unifying and dynamic force Kant names ‘ether’, the existence of which ‘can be proved … only indirectly: on the basis of the subjective principle of the possibility of experience, instead of the objective principle of experience itself ’.32 The kosmotheoros, or world

Kosmotheoros in Tears

153

observer, is the one who grasps this concept of an undifferentiated foundation that only hypothetical thinking can determine: This principle is subjective, for the world-observer (cosmotheoros); a basis in an idea for all the unified forces which set the matter of the whole of cosmic space in motion. [I]t does not prove the existence of such a material, however … [it] is a hypothetical material. The idea of this material, however, is what first represents (albeit indirectly) space itself as something perceptible and as an unconditional whole … this matter is, hence, to be assumed as the prime mover (primum mobile et movens), subjectively – as the basis for the theory of the primary moving forces of matter, for the sake of a system of experience.33

If science and religion have shared a predisposition for the idea that the true order of things can be fully disclosed, then Opus Postumum is an affront to both modes of thinking about the world and its place in the universe. The materiality of nature and the character of a celestial maker both retreat from knowledge, Kant proposes. And yet, the idea of both a primordial actuality and a transcendental maker of things is rehabilitated in the Opus Postumum. Neither entity is fully dismissed by Kant, only problematized as objects of cognition; they withdraw from the drama that is witnessed by human reason to become the clandestine source of all that is known. The figure that comes to take centre stage, between nature and the celestial, is, for Kant, ‘man’ who both dwells in and can visualize the world: ‘A cosmotheoros who creates the elements of knowledge of the world himself, a priori, from which he, as, at the same time, an inhabitant of the world, constructs a world-vision [Weltbeschauung] in the idea’.34 Of the world but also creating the elements of knowledge that allow it to be perceived, above the ground but below the heavenly, the kosmotheoros is, therefore, a figure of orbital vision who makes the world recognizable. Those of us who remain on the ground are world observers according to this account. But for Kant those who travel to the elevated space of orbit do not witness the world unconditionally, and neither do they come to acquire a higher understanding of the ethereal stuff of the cosmos. Even in such a sublime place occupied by the kosmotheoros, Kant reasons, the world is made in and by perception. Furthermore, it is not just the astronaut in orbit that today represents the ascent of the kosmotheoros. The satellite is now the bearer of a heightened human vision, which means that it too cannot innocently capture the planet that it regards. When it delivers images to those on the ground, this machine reproduces an earthly privileging of the ocular; when these images are viewed on the ground, they are invested with perceptual value and significance. Rather than a tool that finally shows us the world (and, indeed, the universe) as it is – rather than a

154

Orbital Poetics

technical device that is detached from the human – the satellite as kosmotheoros needs to be understood as tethered to a human eye that attaches meaning to whatever it observes. In 1976, Nancy announced that he would write a book to accompany The Discourse of the Syncope: Logodaedalus. The title of this book was to have been Kosmotheoros. Although this book was not written,35 Nancy does briefly pick up the concept of the kosmotheoros in The Sense of the World. Here, he finds in it a reaffirmation of the conviction that the world is somehow knowable, despite Kant’s efforts to establish the contingency of this knowledge. The kosmotheoros is yet another attempt to conceive the sublimity of a domain that extends beyond earthly thought, Nancy proposes, but also to entrench the world as a place that can be held immovably within thought. The ‘acosmic cosmology’ for which The Sense of the World calls would, more radically than the cosmology of Kant’s Opus Postumum, move away from the idea that the world is securely framed by the gaze of an observer who can reliably see the world’s formation by perception. This acosmic vision of the universe would ‘no longer be caught by the look of a kosmotheoros, of that panoptic subject of the knowledge of the world’.36 Detaching itself from the idea that the world can be known as a complete planetary entity, or that a mysterious and different space can be assumed to reside beyond the earth’s terrestrial boundedness, this non-cosmology would instead be attentive to what takes place at the edge of the world. It is, in other words, a thinking of the limit, or what Nancy describes as ‘a philosophy of confines’: We are at the confines of the multidirectional, plurilocal, reticulated, spacious space in which we take place. We do not occupy the originary point of a perspective, or the overhanging point of an axonometry, but we touch our limits on all sides, our gaze touches its limits on all sides. That is, it touches also – indistinctly and undecidably – the finitude of the universe thereby exposed and the infinite intangibility of the external border of the limit. It is henceforth a matter of the vision of the limit, that is, vision at the limit – according to the logic of the limit in general: to touch it is to pass it, to pass it is never to touch the other border.37

The confines that surround the world do not, then, enclose it as a place that is able to look decisively at itself. What confines the world – its boundary, edge or circumference; the threshold between it and everything else – needs to be understood as the site of an uncertain connection rather than dissociation, of an exchange and a passage between rather than a rupture that separates disparate places or entities. Perhaps this is why those who leave the planet sometimes give in to tears. These exalted figures neither observe nor make the world; for Nancy,

Kosmotheoros in Tears

155

they are ‘neither kosmotheoroi nor kosmopoietes but cosmonauts, or better still … spationauts’.38 Because they are of the world, these figures are always burdened by a vision that makes sense of what it regards. They do not create the elements of knowledge in the way that Kant proposes and, as a result, do not acquire an ‘originary point of a perspective’. For Kant, something of the world is revealed to the kosmotheoros because this figure is able to cross the threshold to the sublime beyond, even while remaining tethered to the world. Of the world but standing apart from it, more than or outside of the human, this figure is able to understand the nature of things because it can make thought anew. For Nancy, however, we do not receive such a revelation at the boundary, edge or external limit of the world. This place confirms to us that there must be an elsewhere, but it is not where this elsewhere becomes recognizable to us. The ‘spationaut’ might be able to perceive the threshold of the world, but this is not the kosmotheoretical vision that, for Kant, would provide us with some sort of access to the essential nature of the beyond.

V The question of how to conceptualize the threshold between the inside and the beyond dominates On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy, Derrida’s study of how finitude and infinity provocatively and problematically feature in Nancy’s thought. As is often noted, Derrida’s misgivings about Nancy’s formulation of this uncertain zone mostly centre on two related questions: whether this zone is in any sense thinkable or nameable and whether ‘touch’ (the principal motif in Nancy’s work) can indeed point to an encounter with the illimitable. Despite Nancy’s efforts reflexively to make the infinite something ghostly or ungraspable – despite his admission that any term for this unavowable exteriority must be rhetorical or figurative – Derrida nevertheless finds a process of rehabilitation at work in this impossible thinking of the limit and its beyond. Something of Kant persists in Nancy’s thinking, according to On Touching. Derrida finds in Nancy’s work the continuation of a ‘tactilist’ or ‘haptocentric’ tradition that ‘accords an absolute privilege to touch and does not let itself be encroached upon by the possibility … of any vicariousness of the senses’.39 According to On Touching, this tradition is not fully acknowledged by Nancy in his ontology of touch as a heteroaffective non-relation with the untouchable. When elaborating on the anthropological dimensions of this haptocentric tradition, Derrida briefly refers to Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to establish how

156

Orbital Poetics

other senses contribute to perception. ‘The tradition becomes complicated, with the risk of being interrupted, in Merleau-Ponty’s work because’, Derrida writes, he ‘seems to reinstate a symmetry that Husserl challenges between the touchingtouchable and the seeing-visible’.40 On Touching later returns to Merleau-Ponty: ‘Nancy did not cite him often’, Derrida remarks, ‘but their implicit affinities seem undeniable’.41 One of these affinities is a shared nervousness about both the authority conferred upon particular senses and the anthropological treatment of sensory experience in phenomenological thinking. Merleau-Ponty departs from Husserl’s treatment of touch as the primary sensory instrument, and he seeks to re-establish what Françoise Dastur terms the non-congruent or nonsubstitutable ‘parallelism between seeing and touching that Husserl contested’.42 This description of a non-primordial vision that develops alongside other senses allows Merleau-Ponty to engage in a ‘much richer problematic of the eye, seeing and visibility’ which ‘take[s] into account apartness, distance, tele-vision, and even the invisible, the invisible right in [à même] the visible’.43 The invisible as an immanent feature of the visible, the inability to see as inherently part of perception: this is the insight that Derrida finds in Merleau-Ponty’s refusal to replace touch with vision. On Touching finds evidence of this refusal in MerleauPonty’s reference to Kant’s figure of the world observer. For Derrida, ‘The eye’s authority is questioned, or called into question, in the eye of the world, precisely’44 when, in The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty asks ‘But am I kosmotheoros? More exactly, is being kosmotheoros my ultimate reality?’.45 Merleau-Ponty would seem, then, to be sceptical about the association of vision with the revelation of an ultimate reality and, as Derrida remarks in Memoirs of the Blind, ‘skepsis has to do with the eyes’.46 Not merely a general system of radical doubt, scepticism more precisely points to a reflexive questioning of how things are regarded: it looks at how perception unfolds. Derrida takes up this sceptical approach to the sovereignty that has been granted to sight; ‘point of view will be my theme’,47 he remarks. Memoirs of the Blind is principally concerned with the representation of drawing, and specifically with a tradition of self-portraiture that takes blindness as its central theme. This tradition, Derrida concludes, reveals blindness to be an intrinsic feature of both representation and sight. It makes the inability to see the condition of the image that it provides because it draws attention to the act of image-making and suggests that the artist is authorized to see and draw. Painting and drawing in these moments reveal themselves as the products of a failure to see (they are initiated by a blindness that is observed), but they also situate those who paint or draw as capable of seeing. This formative tension – this imagination or invention

Kosmotheoros in Tears

157

of sight – for Derrida is the underlying condition of representation. ‘Every time a draftsman lets himself be fascinated by the blind’, he writes, ‘every time he makes the blind a theme of his drawing, he projects, dreams, or hallucinates a figure of a draftsman, or sometimes, more precisely, a draftswoman. Or more precisely still, he begins to represent a drawing potency [puissance] at work, the very act of drawing. He invents drawing’.48 Derrida’s comments here offer an implicit rejoinder to Kant’s figure of the kosmotheoros. Although Kant does not associate this figure with the immediacy of complete vision, he nevertheless confers upon it the ability to see in some sense, and to see beyond its participation in the making of knowledge. This figure forges the world as an entity that is constituted in and by observation, and this visual enclosure of the world as a finitude also allows us to determine the presence of cosmic matter that is not within our sphere of vision. When Memoirs of the Blind questions such an association of seeing and knowing, it also contests the idea that those in orbit are uniquely or faithfully able to observe the world. Every time that those in orbit make the world a theme of their observations, they project, dream or hallucinate a figure of the world observer; or, more precisely, they begin to represent world observation at work. Certainly, the images and films that are made in orbit are often about the technical dimensions of capturing the earth from above, such as the technologies that are used to produce, transfer and distribute images, or (as with Hadfield’s video) the effects of orbit on perception. But, again, for Derrida the observation of the world should not be understood merely in terms of the techniques that allow representation to occur. Rather, in the moment that these orbiting observers discern the world, they undertake a spacing or separation that effects the world and world observer as distinct entities. They produce the idea of the planet as a complete space, but they also produce the idea either of a figure that can see more completely or of a position from which things can be seen more completely. Just as with blindness and image-making, however, this production of immanence is possible only because of a fundamental impossibility. If the world can be fully observed only from above then being on the ground must allow only an imperfect perspective – in other words, a blindness to the world in its full actuality. And yet, this incomplete and contaminated perspective must be carried into orbit if the world is to be seen at all; what images from above demonstrate is that the worldly work of spacing and image production continues to direct the gaze of those who have left the planet. Although orbital representation is invented through the disavowal of blindness, this blindness must nevertheless be transmitted to the place of supreme vision.

158

Orbital Poetics

This association of blindness with the ascent of vision takes on greater prominence in two further moments in Memoirs of the Blind. First, in a lengthy footnote, Derrida recalls one of Rilke’s dreams in which ‘an astral or ocular allegory as old of the sky itself ’49 is inverted. Instead of being the eyes of God or angels, stars in this dream become the uprooted eyes of those who dwell on the ground. ‘The stars are the eyes of human beings which rise out of their closed lids and become bright and regain their strength’, Rilke writes, ‘that is why all the stars are above the countryside where everyone is sleeping, and over the town there are only a few, because there are so many restless people there, weeping and reading, laughing and watching, who keep their eyes’.50 Looking down from above, this displaced secular gaze leaves those on the ground unable to see. Again, then, blindness is a precondition for sight, although the vision that descends also requires those observed to be unaware, in their unconscious state, that they are being watched. Moreover, those who ‘keep their eyes’ are not necessarily able to see clearly. Instead, they are distracted and agitated by the troubling stuff of urban living; as much as this stuff allows ‘reading, laughing and watching’ it also brings vision-obscuring tears. Second, in Sacred Allegory, a work by the sixteenth-century Flemish painter Jan Provost, Derrida finds a similar association of tears with a visionary and ascendant blindness. Steeped in the symbolism of late-medieval mysticism, Provost’s painting depicts a celestial and panoptic eye, metonym of the visio Dei, above the seated figures of Jesus and Mary, between whom there is the globus cruciger, symbol of Christ’s authority over the dominion of the world. On the lower plane of the painting is another, partly closed, eye that gazes upwards from the world below. For Derrida, this is not simply an allegory that contrasts a boundless and beneficent divine vision with the limitations of human sight since this painting more fundamentally allegorizes its own production. ‘Whatever its symbolic overdetermination’, Derrida writes, this painting ‘must always be able to be contemplated as the representation or reflection of its own possibility. It puts on the scene, it stages, the opening scene of sacred painting, an allegorical self-representation of this “order of the gaze” to which any Christian drawing must submit’.51 Such a reflexive staging of the ocular – this looking at how looking perceives sight – is, then, both productive and catastrophic: in its positioning of the heavenly and the sub-celestial, this painting simultaneously creates and erases what it depicts. This process is, for Derrida, ‘at once order and ruin’, and this impossible conjunction makes vision break down. Order and ruin – in Provost’s painting:

Kosmotheoros in Tears

159

These weep for one another. Deploring and imploring veil a gaze at the very moment that they unveil it. By praying on the verge of tears, the sacred allegory does [fait] something. It makes something happen or come, makes something come to the eyes, makes something well up in them.52

Weeping is a common theme in Rilke’s dream and Provost’s allegory, and it leads Derrida to a lengthier consideration of the crying that Saint Augustine documents in Confessions. Augustine’s tears flow or almost flow for numerous reasons. Often, they rise up because of the grief that he feels following others’ deaths (including, most famously, that of his mother), although they also flow as a result from feelings of wretchedness (‘a profound self-examination had dredged up a heap of misery … That precipitated a vast storm bearing a massive downpour of tears’53) and when he experiences overwhelming feelings of religious adoration: ‘During those days I found an insatiable and amazing delight in considering the profundity of your purpose for the salvation of the human race’, Augustine cries out to God, How I wept during your hymns and songs! I was deeply moved by the music of the sweet chants of your Church. The sounds flowed into my ears and the truth was distilled into my heart. This caused the feelings of devotion to overflow. Tears ran, and it was good for me to have that experience.54

This passage contains some contentious theological and philosophical ideas. Attunement with the divine arises from the ecstasy of mystical experience, rather than through rational contemplation, Augustine suggests here. Encountering the divine occurs as an overflowing and multisensory aisthesis, with the body’s boundaries traversed and an infusion of the inexpressible at the heart of being. Being is, in other words, a condition of being affected. Significantly, weeping is also intrinsic to this transformative epiphany, and it is such an association of tears with illumination, vision and revelation that preoccupies Derrida at the culmination of Memoirs of the Blind. Augustine’s tears are not so much an expression of grief, misery or adoration as they are the manifestation of what is fundamental to the eye: a vision that is most lucid when clouded up and covered over. In the Confessions, Derrida writes: At each step, on each page … Augustine describes his experience of tears, those that inundate him, those in which he takes a surprising joy, asking God why tears are sweet to those in misery … Now if tears come to the eyes, if they well up in them, and if they can also veil sight, perhaps they reveal, in the very course of this experience, in this coursing of water, an essence of the eye, of man’s eye, in any case, the eye understood in the anthropo-theological space of the sacred

160

Orbital Poetics

allegory. Deep down, deep down inside, the eye would be destined not to see but to weep. For at the very moment they veil sight, tears would unveil what is proper to the eye … the truth of the eyes, whose ultimate destination they would thereby reveal: to have imploration rather than vision in sight, to address prayer, love, joy, or sadness rather than a look or gaze. Even before it illuminates, revelation is the moment of the ‘tears of joy’.55

‘Perhaps’, then, tears reveal ‘an essence of the eye … understood in the anthropotheological space of the sacred allegory’. Or, put otherwise, perhaps tears reveal the character of a vision that is both human and celestial; perhaps they reveal what is intrinsic to the orbital gaze. This gaze can look but cannot see; more than this, like the staging of sight in Provost’s Sacred Allegory, it finds itself engrossed by looking at how it sees. In this ‘perhaps’ we find a possible answer to why those who ascend to the heights of orbit find themselves breaking down and giving in to tears. These flawed kosmotheoroi cry not because of a loss of grounded certainty or a desperate sense of solitude, not because they are interested in the mechanics of fluids in space. They give in to tears because the essence of the eye – to miss the world – is realized in this place.

Notes 1 Cuarón, Gravity. 2 Chris Hadfield, ‘Tears in Space (Don’t Fall)’, YouTube video, 1:24, posted 5 April 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P36xhtpw0Lg. 3 For depictions of Heraclitus’s tearful vision of the world see, for example, Rubens’s 1603 Heraclitus and Democritus, John Smith’s c.1683–1729 Heraclitus and Democritus or Egbert van Heemskerck’s 1695 Heraclitus and Democritus. 4 Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff (London: Vintage, 2005), 348. 5 Ridley Scott, dir., Blade Runner, film (Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Pictures, 1982). 6 John Donne, ‘A Valediction: of Weeping’, cited in Derrida, ‘The Taste of Tears’, in The Work of Mourning, trans. Pascale-Anne Brualt and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 107. 7 Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. Richard A. Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 121. 8 Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 18. 9 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 68.

Kosmotheoros in Tears

161

10 Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 86. 11 Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 86. 12 Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘The Technique of the Present: On On Kawara’, in Multiple Arts: The Muses II, trans. Simon Sparks (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 199. 13 Nancy, ‘The Technique of the Present’, 191. 14 Nancy, ‘The Technique of the Present’, 191. 15 Nancy, ‘The Technique of the Present’, 191. 16 Nancy, ‘The Technique of the Present’, 195. 17 Nancy, ‘The Technique of the Present’, 196. 18 Nancy, ‘The Technique of the Present’, 199. 19 Nancy, ‘The Technique of the Present’, 199. 20 Nancy, ‘The Technique of the Present’, 199. 21 Roberto Esposito and Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Dialogue on the Philosophy to Come’, trans. Timothy Campbell, Minnesota Review 75 (2010): 72. 22 Esposito and Nancy, ‘Dialogue’, 73. 23 Esposito and Nancy, ‘Dialogue’, 73. 24 Esposito and Nancy, ‘Dialogue’, 73–4. 25 Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 161. 26 Nancy, Dis-Enclosure, 161. 27 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 37. 28 Nancy, The Sense of the World, 37. 29 Nancy, The Sense of the World, 38. 30 Nancy, The Sense of the World, 38. 31 Immanuel Kant, Opus Postumum, ed. Eckhart Förster, trans. Eckhart Förster and Michael Rosen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 80. 32 Kant, Opus Postumum, 79. 33 Kant, Opus Postumum, 82. 34 Kant, Opus Postumum, 235. 35 Saul Anton, translator of The Discourse of the Syncope notes, however, that ‘readers familiar with the broader arc of Nancy’s work might well recognize the motif of the cosmological submerged underneath the notions of space, spacing, and world that figure so prominently in his later writings, especially in The Sense of the World and The Creation of the World: Or Globalisation’. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Discourse of the Syncope: Logodaedalus, trans. Saul Anton (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 144, note 4.

162

Orbital Poetics

36 Nancy, The Sense of the World, 38. 37 Nancy, The Sense of the World, 40. 38 Nancy, The Sense of the World, 40. 39 Jacques Derrida, On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 41. 40 Derrida, On Touching, 41. 41 Derrida, On Touching, 184. 42 François Dastur, ‘World, Flesh, Vision’, cited in Derrida, On Touching, 203. 43 Derrida, On Touching, 200. 44 Derrida, On Touching, 207. 45 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, cited in Derrida, On Touching, 207. 46 Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pasale-Anne Brualt and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 1. 47 Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 2. 48 Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 2. 49 Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 40, n. 42. 50 Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘The Seventh Dream’, cited in Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 40, n. 42. 51 Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 121. 52 Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 122. 53 Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 152. 54 Augustine, Confessions, 164. 55 Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 126.

7

‘A Machine, Fallen from the Sky’

You know everything, guard us.

Jacques Derrida, ‘Envois’ In his response to the launch of Lunar Orbiter 1, Heidegger steadfastly denounces satellites because these devices intensify the destructive idea that we can comprehend all that is. And yet, prefiguring Derrida’s association in ‘Envois’ of perception and knowledge with guardianship, an often-neglected piece published by Heidegger in 1957 arrives at the strikingly different conclusion that orbit is a place of protection and preservation. When celebrating the work of the early nineteenth-century writer Peter Hebel, he commends the moon as ‘the highestranking official night watchman’ that ‘stays awake the whole night through’.1 The poet’s role is similarly to watch over, Heidegger writes: the poet ‘guards what is essential, to which humans as dwellers are entrusted, yet of which they are all too oblivious in their slumbers … he watches out for what threatens and disturbs’.2 Heidegger returns to these themes in ‘The Guardians’, a poem written in 1938/39: Away rolls the subterranean storm, inaudible to all the many, into spaces above worldly – remote thrust of be-ing. The world and the earth blended long since disturbed in their law of strife withdraw from things any destiny. Number raves into empty quantity no longer bestows bonds and likeness. What counts as a ‘being’ is what ‘lives’, but ‘living’ lives only by the uproar of a noisy presumption, which is already late to the ones that follow.

164

Orbital Poetics

But they guard – the secret guardians of an unrisen transformation: remote thrust of be-ing between the turbulent making and contrivance.3

There is, then, a vision from above or beyond that can observe the world without subjecting it to a coercive rationalism or counting it as an ‘empty quantity’. The moon watches over us while we are not ourselves watching; the poet keeps a lookout while we are not alert to the dangers that put us at risk. Both are satellites and their role is to act as sentinels that, from their position of being ‘between the turbulent making and contrivance’, preserve the bringing forth of appearance and protect the ‘remote thrust of be-ing’. Similarly, Oliver recalls that In Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event), ‘Heidegger describes Dasein’s “proper role” as “the grounding stewardship [Wachterschaft] of the refusal”’. Heidegger’s term ‘Wachter’ has the sense of guard or watcher … Unlike the weaponized military guard, guarding or watching the earth, while a defensive position that connotes vigilance, is a matter of restraint and listening, a passive power that moves beyond any moral directives, universal principles, or dialectical resolutions that come from on high.4

Rather than associating observation from above with a technical objectification of the earth or the annihilation of poetic thinking, Heidegger here describes a watching over that protects and preserves us. They are also for him the secret guardians of being. The association of satellites with watchful guardianship emerges at least as early as Timaeus, where Plato describes the earth as ‘the guardian [φύλαka, Phulakē] and maker of day and night’.5 The earth’s spherical character and its revolution in space are regarded here as properties of a stable equilibrium that allows time to be experienced as differentiated (as either day or night) but also as regular and uniform (day and night as ‘the period of the single and most intelligent revolution’6 of the heavens). This association of earthly time with measurement prompts DeLillo to suggest a tension between different perspectives on the world. According to his 1983 short story about two orbiting astronauts, ‘Human Moments in World War III’, the world’s inner essence seems to appear to those who succumb to the delirium of a sublime vision. It is ‘as though’ the astronautic gaze is able to witness complete order:

‘A Machine, Fallen from the Sky’

165

A note about the earth. The earth is the preserve of day and night. It contains a sane and balanced variation, a natural waking and sleeping, or so it seems to someone deprived of this tidal effect … To men at this remove, it is as though things exist in their particular physical form in order to reveal the hidden simplicity of some powerful mathematical truth. The earth reveals to us the simple awesome beauty of day and night. It is there to contain and incorporate these conceptual events.7

Circling the earth aboard a space station, the characters in DeLillo’s story are tasked with guarding against enemy satellites and nuclear weapons that threaten the United States. David Mitchell’s 1999 episodic novel Ghostwritten also reflects on the power of the military satellite to intervene in world affairs. Whereas in DeLillo’s story orbit has become the place to which warfare has ascended, in Mitchell’s novel it is the place from which the earth is protected. When an artificial intelligence comes to inhabit a satellite, it then appoints itself as the custodian of the planet and preserver of its future ecology. Naming itself ‘Zookeeper’, this guardian comes to despair at the conduct of the species that dominates and damages the planet: ‘The visitors I safeguard are wrecking my zoo’,8 it comes to realize. The ethical dilemma with which it struggles – the irreconcilable imperatives to protect the earth and not to kill – lead it ultimately to conclude that it should not intervene to prevent a comet from colliding with the planet. It is, in other words, the guardian of what Latour and Stengers name as ‘Gaia’ rather than an ecosystem which the human species can rightfully claim as its own.

II The idea of the satellite as guardian and the more general sense of a protective overseer emerge at different points and with different effects in Derrida’s writing. Certainly for him, as for Heidegger, there is something secretive about satellites. Despite the heights from which they observe the world, these devices are often held in low regard by Derrida. Scattered across his writing is the suggestion that he finds satellites to be machines of tyrannical rule: moving silently over the earth, they are for him the circumambient relays through which power moves and is transmitted, the circulating inhabitants of an unworldly place to which perception and control have secretly ascended.9 Above all, they are seen to extend conflict beyond the terrestrial, allowing the struggle for global authority and governance to take place in a realm that once escaped the world. Satellites

166

Orbital Poetics

provide new and unobserved opportunities for omniscient inspection and for militarized surveillance. Specters of Marx in this manner situates them as part of a ‘postmodern excess of arms’ in which conflict both escalates to a higher domain and is rendered phantasmatic in this place.10 As well as providing a new domain for the world’s militaries, orbit has also, he proposes, come to maintain a familiar onto-theology. With satellites an archaic and recognizably redemptive narrative of hostility persists, since the heavens continue to direct the conduct of war and dictate the fate of combatants. Just as in earlier wars, he writes in ‘Faith and Knowledge’, ‘the “new wars of religion” are released over the human earth (which is not the world) and struggle even today to control the sky with finger and eye’.11 If satellites heighten surveillance, control and combat, then the vigilant and enveloping gaze that they maintain is magically conjured away in the idea that they are tools of communication and connection. Rather than being viewed as orbiting panopticons that watch without themselves being watched – rather than having become a substitute for the God which, according to The Gift of Death ‘holds me in his gaze and in his hand while remaining inaccessible to me’12 – they are largely viewed as remote devices that guarantee proximity, forging a smooth planetary immediacy and establishing a transparently universal inhabitation. Like language, the telephone or the television, satellites promise a telepathy or a transpatial touching that would allow instant and immediate communing with others. They have become the exalted instruments of sublimation. This relay as relever ‘in one and the same moment’ can ‘combine to relieve, to displace, to elevate, to replace, and to promote’.13 The world that these devices image seems to be fixed from a heightened perspective as a contained and unitary space. In this manner, they elevate existing perceptions of the world as whole and complete, but at the same time they supersede and replace these perceptions. Satellites also make the world appear as an untimely place. They produce images in which the world becomes homeostatically arrested. As well as collapsing space, Derrida writes, ‘the panopticization of the earth – seen, inspected, surveyed, and transported by satellite images – even effects time, nearly annuls it’.14 Acting as conduits for accelerated contact and the promise of instantaneity, satellites would seem, then, to establish the world as a non-temporized temporality: the movement into the world that they effect produces both a cessation of movement and the non-passage of time. Such a response to orbital panopticism contributes to the diagnosis of politics as a version of what Derrida, with increasing alarm, in his later writings describes as techno-science. Often appearing to depart from his attention to

‘A Machine, Fallen from the Sky’

167

the conceptual foundations for political thought (to le politique rather than la politique, as the now-familiar distinction has it15), Derrida’s remarks on satellites point to a style of deconstructive politics that emphasizes the mechanisms that facilitate the functioning of sovereign power. Satellites are here seen to fix and subdue the world; they determine its limits and conduct its affairs; they are, in a word that pulls itself apart, cosmocentric. They work to determine the world as an interior space that has moved beyond the terrestrial and, in so doing, seek to capture the transcendence that was once seen to lie beyond the territorial limits of the world. By treating satellites in this manner – as the devices through which power moves and authority is transmitted, as machines that make the world – Derrida appears to confirm Heidegger’s association of a supraterrestrial communication and circumferential vision with the world’s objectivation by technical thought. The imaginary connection of the world by satellite broadcasts in the early 1960s, Heidegger writes, cannot be understood according to the ‘anthropologicalinstrumentalist conception of technology’,16 since these machines are not simply tools that extend a long history of instrumentality. Rather, they allow control to be exercised over ‘nature … in its energy, instead of making way for it’.17 Here, the idea of the world as a space into which we are cast becomes lost; the earth and nature are no longer an energy to which we need to defer. Rising above this void, and in the process misrecognizing the ground as a meaningful place that is waiting to yield its secrets to us, satellites and our orbital elevation have provided us with concept of the world that replaces our former sense of an unfathomable foundation for being. This analysis of loss Derrida seems to endorse when he treats satellites as the instruments of both social power and spatio-temporal determination. In the act of circumnavigating the world, they also circumscribe it, providing images that would configure it as a geometric regularity, ecological consistency, connected surface or uniform place. An act of composition therefore occurs when these devices work to situate the world within itself. In the context of this composition, satellites have become the writing instruments of our time, codifying, reproducing and archiving what they observe. And, according to this treatment of their constitutive power, they function to confirm the authority of a controlling scrivener who would be in a position properly to combine and order what has previously escaped synthesis or circumscription. However, although satellites style the world and shape it as a place that can be measured and quantified, their unblinking panopticism is unseen, allowing them to rise above the banal limits of territorial space. They conjure away the idea that

168

Orbital Poetics

they are engaged in the work of worlding. Style withdraws in the moment that they compose and circumscribe: rather than revealing the founding, bestowal or casting forth of the world from above, these devices announce the world as a ground that has yielded itself fully to perception. When he treats satellites as the devices of hypostatizing authority, Derrida seems to turn away from the possibility that style is at work in their arresting vision of the world. Satellites appear to be devices that, for him, hypostasize authority, rather than being the extension of a technicity that cannot fully achieve its vision of a world disclosed to the eye.

III As devices that announce the co-presence of the earth’s populations and territories, instruments in orbit were, at least in the first instance, firmly associated with the idea that particular nations possessed the right and responsibility to guard and govern the world. These ‘clandestine spaceships “that pass in the night”’ have, according to Philip J. Klass ‘changed the ground rules under which the game of geopolitics must be played’.18 If, before Sputnik’s launch, there was a race to dominate in and from orbit then following its successful circumnavigation the USSR was ‘vaulted to a preeminent position atop the global hierarchy’.19 Against this claim to preeminence, Lyndon Johnson defended the United States’s claim to be the first custodians of world liberty (a claim conveyed by ‘Project Vanguard’, the name of its counterpart to the Sputnik programme): Control of space means control of the world … From space the masters of infinity would have the power to control the earth’s weather, to cause drought and flood, to change the tides and raise the levels of the sea, to divert the Gulf Stream and change the temperatures to frigid … Our national goal and the goal of all free men must be to hold that position.20

Subsequently, however, an orthodoxy has been built around the principle of a shared custody of the earth from orbit, and around a professed disaffection with boundaries and borders. The ensuing tension between polity and orbital space that results from this disaffection is often understood as establishing the conditions for a shift in power from states to corporations, with the inevitable reinvention of politico-juridical space – of citizenship, governance, rights and ownership – that such a shift would effect. ‘Suppose, for example, that a firm such as IBM is authorized to occupy a belt in the earth’s orbital field and

‘A Machine, Fallen from the Sky’

169

launch communications satellites or satellites housing data banks’, Lyotard conjectures in 1979, ‘Who will have access to them? Who will determine which channels or data are forbidden? The State? Or will the State be one user among others? New legal issues will be raised, and with them the question: who will know?’.21 It would be hasty to assume that the scenario imagined by Lyotard has arrived: orbital space has not yet become a wholly corporatized or privatized domain that escapes the State’s authority and influence. Despite their apparent detachment from the ground, and despite their apparent function as the facilitators of a participatory global connectedness, satellites consolidate not only techno-scientific thinking but also the disciplinary knowledge that reinforces societies of control. Indeed, the idea that they act as the new conduits for a long-established system of governance and order has become something of a consensus in cultural theoretical responses to these instruments. For example, following Deleuze’s ‘Postscript on Control Societies’, which describes the saturation of daily life by the new mechanisms of state regulation, Patricia Pisters writes that ‘CCTV screens, satellite tracking grids, Sat Nav positioning on mobile displays, webcams, and internet polling constitute a new kind of visual system, to the point where we can speak of a complete surveillance apparatus’.22 For Parks, ‘the military-industrial-information complexes of the West have been quite effective at concealing and using their most strategic technologies to assume global domination in the post-cold war period’.23 Certainly, the interests of nation-states remain served by the devices that look down on the earth. The cartography that satellites now facilitate does not just result from the images that fall to earth from them; rather, the principle of national authority has ascended to them, projecting the gaze of the nation-state into orbit. A response today to Lyotard’s question ‘who will know?’ should point to the persistence of the nation-state’s authority, a persistence attributable in part to the extension of national territoriality to orbital space. Such an extension and ascension of the nation-state’s influence for Derrida are to be found in surveillance technologies that confirm its reach and authority, as well as allowing it to monitor and survey with greater conviction. These technologies have, he writes in volume one of The Beast and the Sovereign, come to act as the conduits for a sovereignty that is once again guarded and guaranteed from above: Today, the sovereign power, the international power of a national sovereignty is also proportionate to its power to see, power to have under surveillance, to

170

Orbital Poetics

observe, take in, archive from a superterrestrial height, by satellite, the whole globalized surface of the earth, to the centimeter, and this in the service of the economic strategy of the market as well as of military strategy. This erection towards height is always the sign of the sovereignty of the sovereign.24

The domain that satellites observe is, then, not the world as cosmopolis, but a divided surface consisting of dominions that remain shaped by ideas of regional distinctiveness and national self-determination. It is a world in which protecting national security remains essential, and departure from the ground is now essential to safeguarding the land. Satellites observe, measure, map, magnify and analyse, but they are locative in ways that reinvest the world with a sense of a sovereignty that is, perversely, national. What they facilitate and protect, The Beast and the Sovereign suggests, is not an unconditionally global vision, but a exceptionalist internationalism that preserves the principle of a selective right to ascend to a position of global authority. In Apollo’s Eye, Cosgrove describes the preservation of the nation-state’s authority from above as part of the enduring mission to construct the world according to the Western imaginary. Orbital photos, he writes, ‘incorporate and frame the Western inheritance of global meanings, from the Ciceronian somnium and Senecan moral reflection, through Christian discourse of mission and redemption, to ideals of unity and harmony’.25 Derrida’s cautionary note in The Beast and the Sovereign to an extent endorses this idea that the world, as it is imagined from above, cannot be conceived as one that fully abandons or surpasses orthodox ideas about the juridico-political ‘right of inspection over everything’.26 But the sovereign power to which he refers is not necessarily that of a West which imposes from within its globally aspirational vision on the world. The idea that orbiting observation technologies exemplify technicity as mastery – that they effect a successful disciplining of the world – seems uncharacteristic of Derrida. The idea that technology can be equated with technicity is not one that he advocates. ‘Tekhnē … does not arrive’,27 he writes in ‘Envois’. Similarly, the idea that it is possible to construe the world as an accomplished biosphere that can immunize itself against an intrusive exteriority is not reflected elsewhere in Derrida’s work. It is not his style. Indeed, it is style in Derrida’s writing that prohibits the idea that satellites reliably metonymize the techno-science that he repeatedly challenges in his later work. This is the style that Ned Lukacher finds in ‘Derrida’s idiom’: a restless resistance to the predicative or constative that must also extend to his own analytic of technicity that situates authority in the tools of vision. ‘Style’, Lukacher writes, ‘is what philosophy can’t hear, what defers

‘A Machine, Fallen from the Sky’

171

voice from reference, and what renders the identity of sense into the drift of difference’.28 Refusing to sense the ornamental or the superfluous – the decorative or rhetorical touch, ‘that supplementary frill of discursive thought’29 – philosophy fails to hear truth as either technique or style, or the act of image formation that supports the production of truth. Although Derrida often treats satellites as a mechanism for surveillance, the tools of religious warfare or the devices through which a sovereign internationalism fixes its superordinate authority, he also finds in them a movement that denies the stasis that is associated with the imaging of the world. With them, he suggests elsewhere, circumnavigation does not guarantee circumscription. For The Beast and the Sovereign, authority is effected as an ‘erection towards height’, but for Spurs ‘L’érection tombe’.30 Derrida acknowledges this conjunction of rising and falling when he refers to the etymological, penal and psychical history of the satellite. Used for the first time in 1936 to imagine machines orbiting the earth, satellite (from the Latin satelles) has referred to a guardian (including a bodyguard) or an attendant (whether the servant who attends a person of importance or a country that is dependent on another); in both cases, satellites guard, serve and support as custodians of life. Derrida conjures up this other history of the satellite when, in ‘Envois’, he considers Plato’s and Freud’s remarks on guards in Philebus and ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, respectively. Phulakē (the Greek root of satelles) is the term that Plato uses when ‘he speaks of the best “safeguard”, of the best “guard”: not to write but to learn by heart’.31 Not to write and to learn by heart, Plato proposes, is to avoid corruption, decay and death. However, whereas Plato relates phulakē to a protection against language, it provokes for Derrida a sense of the poetry of speech: The word guard [garde]: at this second I love it, I tell it that I love it, I like to say it to myself, make it sing, let the a drag on for a long time, stretch it out at length, it is the voice, my vowel, the most marked letter, everything begins with it. In Greek it is also a superb word, Phulakē: la garde but also le garde, the sentinel.32

This association of guarding with the figure of the sentinel for Derrida brings to mind Freud’s description of the death drive, not as an instinctual drive for selfpreservation, but as a series of ‘detours’ which the organism seeks to manage in order to ensure its desired death. He wants to relate this to what is said in Beyond … about the Lebenswachter, the guardians of life who are also the satellites of death … Phulakē also says the place of guarding, the prison for example, and then surveillance, defense, protection, etc. The law and the police are not far off.33

172

Orbital Poetics

The death drive is, in other words, about being (as being-towards-death) rather than the desire for an end, and for Freud the Lebenswachter is the psychical mechanism that allows us to stand apart from ourselves and to look down on how we are living in the face of death. It is the guardian of a life that must end. When ‘Envois’ brings together the phulakē and satellites of Plato’s and Freud’s thought, he associates these terms with the conjunction of both death and life, both surveillance and protection, rather than with the elevation of sovereign authority or the power to take the world into its controlling gaze. Derrida’s attention to this conjunction can be further associated with the astronomical and cosmological positioning of the earth which, although continuing to confirm the dimensions of a place that is to be measured and managed, reconstitutes both sense and the world. According to the Copernican conception of the earth as itself a satellite – as an attendant that turns its regard upwards – the earth is not the ultimate repository of power, but confirms the authority of the higher body in whose grip it is held. Such a celestial dependence also means that the principal of sovereignty apparently maintained by satellites must become displaced and disorientated. Although orbital machines might act as conduits for terrestrial order, what they serve is itself an authority that is beyond the earth. If, as The Beast and the Sovereign observes, sovereignty is always seen to be granted and guaranteed from without, then the source of the power conducted by satellites is not to be found in the world; rather, the power they serve originates in, and is authorized from, an unearthly place. To conceive them only as the orbital servants of a worldly or a secular internationalism is, then, to treat satellites as prostheses of a power that begins and ends below, of a power that remains grounded even as it moves beyond the atmosphere.

IV As well as being part of the machinery of war and social control, satellites also, for Derrida, belong to an alternative metaphysics of the orbital gaze and a different instrumentalizing of the earth. They produce a cosmology which, if not always escaping technicity or panopticism, nevertheless confuses sovereign power. As well as finally providing a sense of the world as an enclosed and accomplished finality, satellites also announce the end of the world. In other words, there is something exorbitant about the way that satellites style the world. Certainly, these projectiles deviate from their programmed and proscribed paths. They corrode, fail and die, becoming orbital waste or remains in an auto-

‘A Machine, Fallen from the Sky’

173

thanatocosmography that threatens both vision and life in orbit. They are often earth-bound in the most obvious sense that they frequently fall out of orbit and reacquaint themselves with the atmosphere and the ground. They are also earthbound because they struggle to detach themselves cognitively and symbolically from the earth even, as is the case with astronomical satellites, when they attempt to look at what is not earthly.34 But satellites also move eccentrically beyond the terrestrial in ways that expand the principal of place and extend the world as grounded home. While the technicity of orbital sight might be seen to sacrifice human groundedness, it is nonetheless possible to find in these devices an extension of both ground and the human that not only fixes and objectifies, but also supplements and transfigures. With them, exorbitancy is yet another condition of possibility for the world’s determination. A note in Derrida’s reading of Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry suggests how this expansionist transformation might be understood. Had Husserl prophesied the ecstatic insight and extra-planetary cosmography that occurred when instruments were launched into orbit then it is likely that he would have seen this as another moment of misrecognition. Against the Copernican modernity that displaces the earth by locating it in a synthetic relationship with other celestial bodies – in which the earth’s character is confirmed by its dynamic relation to these other bodies – Husserl locates the earth as the ground against which experience is determined. ‘For us all, the Earth is the ground and not a body in the full sense’,35 Husserl writes in a fragment which detains Derrida, causing him to suspend his reading of The Origin of Geometry. Such a claim could easily be situated in the context of Husserl’s resistance to Platonism, and as a denial of the idea that beginnings start from above and supratemporally before falling to earth: for Husserl, Derrida writes, ‘Ideal geometric objects cannot have their place in some topos ouranios’.36 There is also something astronautic about the sense of the world that Husserl attaches to experience and to the attempt to grasp the singularity of the world. Husserl might not have anticipated satellite photography or astronauts looking down on the world from an orbiting station, but he does imagine interplanetary travel and the effects that such a terrestrial shift would have on the grounding of experience and perception. Travelling to another planet would, he writes, expose the earth as an abstraction which extends to include all occupied space: such a voyage would provide a sense of ‘two Earths as ground-bodies’ and would signify to those making the journey ‘two pieces of a single Earth with one humanity’.37 The earth therefore becomes generalized to encompass all sites of human inhabitation: it is not the physical actuality or spatial singularity of the earth as a planetary body that is determinate, but the horizon of experience that connection with the

174

Orbital Poetics

ground allows. Husserl’s description of the earth’s dislocated location suggests that the world’s completeness and uniformity extend beyond the planetary ground to the place from where it is observed. No longer extraterrestrial or unearthly, orbital space must be construed as worldly, and it forces us to recognize the constant conceptual unfolding of the world as the horizon of experience. Husserl looks to interplanetary travel to describe how the departure from planetary groundedness extends the world as a divided unity. For J. Hillis Miller, such a state of terrestrial anxiety is experienced when, on the ground, vision is supplemented by images from orbit. Although, Hillis Miller recognizes, these devices have been instrumental in establishing a sense of planetary immediacy and proximity, he also describes the dissonant sense of space and location that is effected by the satellite’s earthbound gaze. ‘With a few clicks of the mouse on Google Earth’, he writes, it is possible to zoom in from a satellite in outer space to see, from 1,475 feet up, my own house on Deer Isle … It makes me more than a little dizzy to look at the image and to think of it, since I seem to be in two places at the same time, in my study and 1,475 feet in the air above it, looking down on its roof from above.38

Satellites, then, effect a divided attachment to and detachment from location, rather than establishing the unity of place that is often associated with them. Elsewhere, Hillis Miller suggests that this cosmographic bifurcation has not replaced a sense of connection to the earth, but is another example of a broader and enduring condition of location-dislocation. He finds the conceptual resources for thinking this split condition in the concept of destinerrance that Derrida develops in ‘Le facteur de la vérité’, the final chapter of The Post Card. Whereas Heidegger believes that it is possible conceptually to map a foundational ground, the discreet implication of Derrida’s reading of Heidegger … is that Heidegger too is destined to err, to wander. This will happen however hard he tries to become correctly oriented, however much he believes he is aided by some Global Positioning Satellite device implanted in his Dasein, orienting him towards Being with a capital B.39

A destiny to err, then, fatefully directs the pursuit of destination. According to Derrida in ‘My Chances/Mes Chances’, this is the swerve – the ‘parenklisis or clinamen’40 – that has ‘the capacity for diversion within its very movement’.41 This destinerrance cannot be confined to Heidegger’s attempt to find a route to Dasein. Rather, erring is intrinsic to all efforts to locate and fix, to measure, map and make navigable the world, including by locative tools which presuppose an earth that can be experienced directly and mapped absolutely. Extending this

‘A Machine, Fallen from the Sky’

175

analogy, as Hillis Miller does, it also seems possible to associate Derrida with the idea that satellites do not render the world homeostatically, that they too are destined to errance. Satellites, Hillis Miller suggests, cannot be conceived simply as the instruments of a sovereign panopticism that secures the world that they view. They are instead devices that take the world from its own orbit. Derrida attaches such an exorbitance more directly to the concept of the satellite in ‘Racism’s Last Word’. In this essay, he discusses the itinerant ‘Artists contre/against Apartheid’ exhibition: Artists from all over the world are preparing to launch a new satellite, a vehicle whose dimensions can hardly be determined except as a satellite of humanity. Actually, it measures itself against apartheid only so as to remain in no measure comparable with that system, its power, its fantastic riches, its excessive armament, the worldwide network of its openly declared or shamefaced accomplices. This unarmed exhibition will have a force that is altogether other, just as its trajectory will be without example. … This new satellite of humanity … will move from place to place, it too, like a mobile and stable habitat, ‘mobile’ and ‘stabile’, a place of observation, information, and witness. A satellite is a guard, it keeps watch and gives warning: Do not forget apartheid.42

In this essay, Derrida once again associates the satellite not with a fixing of the world by measurement or a constraining quantification, nor with the heightening of a controlling gaze. The satellite, he proposes, possesses dimensions that elide determination: this vehicle moves around, but resists assimilation into a regime of systematic measurement. By refusing to attach ethnicity to place, this exhibition also refuses the logic of the system against which it is mobilized. Conceiving its movement as an irregular and defiant nomadism, Derrida here turns to the satellite as a conceptual figure that allows the world to be imagined beyond the authoritarian disciplining of populations. This satellite is ‘without example’ and ‘of humanity’. It is the guardian of an artistic errance that protects against the exclusionary determination of place as home.

V Something like a satellite also figures as part of Derrida’s planned contribution to Bernard Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette. In a letter to Peter Eisenman, Derrida offers a ‘proposition’ for the park that would seek to convey something of the tremulous,

176

Orbital Poetics

nourishing and primitive khōra that Plato names in Timaeus as the place in which things are made where the order of things is maintained. What Derrida proposes is something that resembles an imaging machine that has fallen from above: I propose then, the ‘representation’, ‘materialization’, ‘form’ following (more or less) in one or three examples … a metallic object, gilded (there is some gold in the passage of Timaeus on chora … ), planted oblique to the sun, neither vertical nor horizontal, a solid frame resembling, at the same time, a framework (loom), a sieve, or a grille (grid), and also a stringed musical instrument (piano, harp, lyre): strings, stringed instrument, vocal chords, etc. And more than grille, grid, etc., it will have a certain rapport with a selective and interpretive filter, telescope, or photographic revealer, a machine, fallen from the sky, after having photographed; photographic filter and aerial view, which allows the reading and the screening (sifting?) of the three sites, the three layers … And more than a stringed instrument, it will make a sign (signify?) to the concert and the multiple chorale, the chora of Choral Works.43

Khōra as Plato conceives it in the Timaeus, and as Derrida describes it in both ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ and ‘Khōra’, is the force or energy that secretly disperses and spaces without itself being positioned within space or conforming to the logic of spatiality. Without itself moving, it moves as an errant ‘third kind’ (triton genos) that is neither being nor non-being. It occupies a place between the sensible and the transcendent, the intelligible and the unknown. Khōra is to be found where the worldly and the celestial meet. Erupting onto thought and language, this enigmatic and untranslatable triton genos neither appears nor remains concealed but is a fissure that creatively opens the world. ‘The khōra’, Derrida writes, ‘is a triton genos in view of the two types of being (immutable and intelligible/ corruptible, in the process of becoming and sensible)’.44 Something more than the name khōra and standing outside of the regulation of place, this maker of distinctions always arrives without appearing. It is always there and yet cannot be: ‘There is khōra, but the khōra does not exist’,45 Derrida writes. The reference to Levinas is unmistakable here. ‘Il y a khōra’ reproduces the ‘Il y a’ that for Levinas signals an indefinable and unrepresentable outside where we can hear the whisper of something that is about to be spoken: ‘This impersonal, anonymous, yet inextinguishable “consummation” of being, which murmurs in the depths of nothingness itself we shall designate by the term there is. The there is … is “being in general”’.46 Khōra for Derrida seeks to convey this anonymous there is that says before speaking. It is this idea of a primordial and obscure coming to the world that he ‘recalls’47 with the obscure object envisaged for Villette. Since they not only remain dormant but appear to be unactualizable,48 his plans in this manner

‘A Machine, Fallen from the Sky’

177

come to resemble khōra: by not taking form or becoming rooted in the earth, the gilded object he imagines appeals to the sense of a mysterious and unrealizable formlessness that shapes Plato’s non-concept. What happens, however, when the secrecy of khōra is no longer withheld? Timaeus conceives this third kind as a receptacle, imprint-bearer, mother and nurse and it takes shape in Derrida’s imagined plans for Villette as a loom, instrument or filter. In these moments, khōra as a productive, sifting, separating force or energy has not only descended to the ground. It has become immobilized and placed obliquely out in the open, something that no longer moves in the depths of nothingness, but can be seen, touched and heard. Anticipating these problems, Plato turns to figurative representation, taking a detour from saying what khōra is even as he transports this insistently unimaginable non-entity in the direction of a thought that cannot think it. Appearing in the context of Timaeus’s rejection of language as a tool that has the capacity for adequate signification, khōra can be accessed, Plato proposes, only through metaphor. While pointing to the familiar tension that shapes Plato’s reasoning here (Plato the artist places his trust in figurative language even as he finds artistry and poetry to be wholly untrustworthy), Derrida nevertheless finds something of khōra attaching to Plato’s ‘khōra’. This concept is now over-burdened by an excess of readings and responses – for Derrida the ‘scene of reading’49 that it has subsequently generated. However, is not this concept’s capacity to generate plural responses that allows us to glimpse what it seeks to convey. It is instead in the collective failure to assign a reference to Plato’s metaphor that, according to Derrida, we are given the sense of something that neither appears nor remains concealed. Put otherwise, although ‘khōra’ is placed by Plato in the domain of image and rhetoric, this term itself works both to produce and to refuse the intelligible or the sensible. Derrida’s plans for Villette, when viewed in this hermeneutic context, too convey something of khōra, not because they faithfully resemble the unimaginable non-space or immateriality that Plato imagines, but because they remain unactualized and, as such, offer only a deferred speculation on what this object might look like. When Derrida begins to imagine what this object might look like, one of images that he suggests is that of a photographic revealer. Among the various ‘re-launchings’50 of Plato’s non-concept, khōra is the idea that it is something like a sight machine that has fallen from the sky. It is as though khōra is a satellite, although Derrida does not elaborate on how this analogy might be understood. Like khōra, the satellite maps, images and circumscribes the world, and in this role it sifts, separates and organizes in order to produce the perception of space,

178

Orbital Poetics

the image of the world and a sense of relation between things in the world. It also moves outside of the world that it circumscribes, between the earth as the domain of the sensible and the transcendence of a celestial realm that lies beyond. This hidden instrument moves outside of the earth, yet it constantly maps, images and circumscribes the world. Indeed, because the work of the satellite never ends, it persistently fails to enclose the world as a finitude. This photographic revealer or sight machine moves behind the scenes and remains sheltered not only because of its invisible manoeuvres and shady surveillance, but because its shaping of the world is an impossible determination. The separations, distinctions, striations, locations and spacings that it effects restlessly deny the world as a determinate space. It perpetually opens the world, and in this sense it acts figuratively as the strange force that Plato names as khōra. The Villette plans suggest, then, that the satellite should be situated between the actual and the obscure. Even though Derrida’s proposed object is yet to materialize at Villette (and probably never can), his description of, and diagrammatic sketch for, it have already translated khōra into metaphor, rendered it recognizable and brought it into contact with the ground and with things in and of the world, including – especially, given its exemplary appearance in Derrida’s letter – the satellite. This aerial or orbiting eye does not simply work to observe and reveal the world. As this book has argued, and as Derrida seems to suggest, it loses focus, tears up, catastrophically imposes itself on the world and puts us out of touch with the ground. The satellite postpones representation in the moment that it continually produces photographic evidence of the world; it is an instance of the ‘event-machine’51 that, according to Derrida in ‘Typewriter Ribbon’, interrupts technical thinking. Although it might well fall from the sky and touch the ground, the satellite that moves in Derrida’s work can never become inertly rooted in the soil of Villette (or, indeed, anywhere) as something familiar and unsurprising. ‘Is not what befalls us or descends upon us’, he asks in ‘My Chances/Mes Chances’, ‘as it comes from above, like destiny or thunder, taking our faces and hands by surprise – is this not exactly what thwarts our expectation and disappoints our anticipation?’.52

VI In Spurs, Derrida writes that this unexpected and sublime descent is style. Style is what comes from above and takes us by surprise because it exposes truth as the production of truth. One of the many quasi-synonyms for khōra that populate

‘A Machine, Fallen from the Sky’

179

Derrida’s writing, style as ‘style-spur’ intrudes, cuts and marks, breaching the membrane that tenuously separates the known from the unknown or being and non-being, even as it shields and withdraws itself. Style is the attendant that guards itself: Style also uses its spur (éperon) as a means of protection against the terrifying, blinding, mortal threat (of that) which presents itself, which obstinately thrusts itself into view. And style thereby protects the presence, the content, the thing itself, meaning, truth – on the condition that it should not already (déja) be that gaping chasm which has been deflowered in the unveiling of difference.53

Style is, then, a self-withholding perforation, a self-subtracting shaping from a distance. It is, Spurs suggests, khōra. Spurs is a study of the ‘abduction’54 of woman and the feminine from philosophy, and it records how this abduction has occurred through the attempt, at least since Plato, to eliminate style from thinking. In ‘Khōra’, Derrida considers a similar capture and exclusion. The introductory conversation that opens Timaeus is devoted to the utopian projection of a city that would be maintained by those who would be separated from citizens. Women in this society would be granted full legal and social rights, although this would also mean that they could not be mothers: the relationship between property and reproduction would be removed, with children being cared for by the community rather than being ‘owned’ by their parents. At this point in Timaeus, Derrida writes, the maternal body becomes associated with khōra because the maternal body would be the place from which the social sphere is produced and reproduced, although it would then withdraw and become concealed by the separation of mother from child.55 This body would be the source of an essential making but it would remain anonymous: it produces but is abducted. Furthermore, in the society envisaged by Plato, children of good birth would be educated, while those of low birth would be ‘secretly dispersed’ (Plato’s term is ‘khōra’) ‘through the rest of the community’.56 The maternal body and children are, according to Timaeus, where two manifestations of khōra are to be found. Another is the guardian, for Plato phulakē. Guardians would protect the city ‘against the assault of any that would injure her, whether from within or without’.57 They would, like the maternal body or the management of children, be another triton genos from which the character of the city – ‘the genos as race, people, group, community, affinity of birth, nation, etc.’58 – would be made and sustained. Guardians would not be citizens, and property would be denied to them since leading ‘a common life

180

Orbital Poetics

together’59 would best allow them to pursue their shared social responsibility. ‘To have nothing that is one’s own, not even the gold that is comparable to it’, Derrida asks, ‘isn’t this also the situation of the site, the condition of khōra?’.60 Separated from, and yet integral to the production, protection and functioning of the city, the various attendants and guardians in Timaeus are associated with being and non-being. They are anonymous being in general, and the guardian (phulakē) cannot be separated from khōra as the force that both produces the world and moves beyond the regulated space of the world. When in ‘Envois’ Derrida links phulakē to satellites, when he associates phulakē with khōra and when he imagines khōra as a sight machine that has fallen from the sky, he therefore finds in the satellite something other than an instrument of tyrannical rule.

Notes Martin Heidegger, ‘Hebel – Friend of the House’, in Contemporary German Philosophy, trans. Bruce V. Foltz and Michael Heim, vol. 3 (1983), 94. 2 Heidegger, ‘Hebel – Friend of the House’, 94. 3 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Guardians’, in Mindfulness, 4–5. 4 Oliver, Earth and World, 130. 5 Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, 120. 6 Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, 115. ‘Counting one and two’ in Timaeus, Cornford points out, ‘is connected with counting day and night’. Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, 91, n. 1. He also identifies an apparent inconsistency in Plato’s linking of planetary rotation to the production of day and night. Earlier in Timaeus, Plato ties the passage of day and night to the universal movement of time, ‘the revolution of the Same, which carries round with it … all the fixed stars’. What follows from such a position, Cornford proposes, is that ‘the earth must stand still relatively to the diurnal revolution of the stars. If it had an actual daily rotation in either sense, then day and night would not be produced’. Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, 120–1. 7 DeLillo, ‘Human Moments in World War III’. 8 David Mitchell, Ghostwritten (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1999), 428. 9 Also see Parks’s claim that ‘in cultural theory the satellite has been missing in action, lying at the threshold of the everyday and critical attention, but moving persistently through orbit, structuring the global imaginary, the socioeconomic order and the tissue of experiences across the planet … but managing to avert the critical gaze’. Parks, Cultures in Orbit, 7. 10 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), 80. 1

‘A Machine, Fallen from the Sky’

181

11 Jacques Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge: Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone’, in Acts of Religion, trans. Samuel Weber (London: Routledge, 2002), 61. 12 Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 33. 13 Jacques Derrida, ‘The Ends of Man’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 121. 14 Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 21. 15 See, for example, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, Retreating the Political, trans. various (London: Routledge, 1997). Also see Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘The Political and/or Politics’, trans. Christopher Sauder, Oxford Literary Review 36, no. 1 (2014): 5–17. 16 Heidegger, ‘Traditional Language and Technological Language’, 134. 17 Heidegger, ‘Traditional Language and Technological Language’, 138. 18 Philip J. Klass, Secret Sentinels in Space (New York: Random House, 1971), xii. 19 Matthew Brzezinski, Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Rivalries that Ignited the Space Age (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), 210. 20 Lyndon Johnson, cited in Brzezinski, Red Moon Rising, 253–4. 21 Jean-François Lyotard, The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 6. 22 Patricia Pisters, ‘Art as Circuit Breaker: Surveillance Screens and Powers of Affect’, in Carnal Aesthetics: Transgressive Imagery and Feminist Politics, ed. Bettina Papenburg and Marta Zarzycka (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013), 198. 23 Parks, Cultures in Orbit, 7. 24 Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 215. 25 Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye, 257. 26 Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 215. 27 Jacques Derrida, ‘Envois’, in The Post-Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 192. 28 Ned Lukacher, Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, cited in Laurent Milesi, ‘St!le in Deconstruction’, in Style in Theory: Between Literature and Philosophy, eds. Ivan Callus, James Corby, and Gloria Lauri-Lucente (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 231. 29 Jacques Derrida, ‘The Double Session’, in Dissemination, 202. 30 Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles/Éperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 105. 31 Derrida, ‘Envois’, 82.

182

Orbital Poetics

32 Derrida, ‘Envois’, 82. 33 Derrida, ‘Envois’, 82. 34 Lisa Parks points out that Hubble images, for example, have ‘been used to represent extremely distant matter as if it were part of us’. Parks, Cultures in Orbit, 146. 35 Edmund Husserl, ‘Fundamental Investigations on the Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature’, cited in Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 84. 36 Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry, 48. 37 Husserl, ‘Fundamental Investigations’, cited in Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry, 84, n. 87. 38 J. Hillis Miller, ‘Derrida’s Politics of Autoimmunity’, Discourse 30, no. 1–2 (2008): 219. 39 J. Hillis Miller, For Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 46. 40 Jacques Derrida, ‘My Chances/Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean Stereophonies’, in Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis, and Literature, trans. Irene Harvey and Avital Ronell, ed. Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 4. 41 Derrida, ‘My Chances/Mes Chances’, 16. 42 Jacques Derrida, ‘Racism’s Last Word’, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 293. 43 Jacques Derrida, ‘Letter to Peter Eisenman’, in Chora L Works: Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman, ed. Jeffrey Kipnis and Thomas Leeser (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1987), 185. 44 Derrida, ‘Khōra’, in On the Name, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 91. 45 Derrida, ‘Khōra’, 97. 46 Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1988), 57. When Levinas points to connections between his non-concept of ‘Il y a’ and Blanchot’s non-cosmology, he refers to the same disorientation that, as Chapter 5 notes, Stiegler discusses in The Fault of Epimetheus. Blanchot, Levinas writes, ‘describes an event which is neither being and nothingness … but a piece of being which would be detached from its fixity of being, from its reference to a star, from all cosmological existence, a dis-aster’. Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 50. 47 Derrida, ‘Letter to Peter Eisenman’, 185. 48 The letters reproduced in Chora L Works document conflict between Tschumi, Derrida, Eisenman and others involved in this project, suggesting a more pedestrian or more worldly explanation for why these plans remain unrealized.

‘A Machine, Fallen from the Sky’

183

See especially pp. 82–5 and pp. 186–9. Such an explanation does, of course, ignore the question of whether these plans could ultimately have been translated into an object, or whether Khōra could be formed into a comprehensible shape. 49 Derrida, ‘Khōra’, 98. 50 Derrida, ‘Khōra’, 101. 51 Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, in Without Alibi, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 73. 52 Derrida, ‘My Chances/Mes Chances’, 5. 53 Derrida, Spurs, 39. 54 Derrida, Spurs, 41. 55 Goethe appears to make a similar association between khōra and reproduction in an early attempt to describe nature: ‘She [nature] squirts her creatures out of nothingness, and does not tell them where they came from and where they are going. Their task is to run; hers is to know the orbit’. J.W. Goethe, Die Natur, trans. and cited in David Farrell Krell, Contagion: Sexuality: Disease, and Death in German Idealism and Romanticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 3. 56 Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, 11. 57 Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, 10. 58 Derrida, ‘Khōra’, 106. 59 Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, 10. 60 Derrida, ‘Khōra’, 105.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Translated by Patricia Daley. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. Aït-Touati, Frédérique. Fictions of the Cosmos: Science and Literature in the Seventeenth Century. Translated by Susan Emmanuel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Ajana, Btihaj. ‘Digital Health and the Biopolitics of the Quantified Self ’. Digital Health 3 (2017): 1–18. Aldrin, Buzz and John Barnes. The Return: A Novel of the Human Adventure. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2000. Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy. Translated by Thomas Bergin. New York: Appleton Century Crafts, 1955. Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy: Paradiso. Translated by Robin Kirkpatrick. London: Penguin, 2012. Anderson, Kevin B. Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Angelou, Maya. ‘A Brave and Startling Truth’. In Celebrations: Rituals of Peace and Prayer. London: Virago, 2010. Kindle edition. Apt, Jay, Michael Helfert, and Justin Wilkson. Orbit: Nasa Astronauts Photograph the Earth. Washington, DC: National Geographical Society, 1996. Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London: Verso, 2013. Apter, Emily. ‘Shareholder Existence: On the Turn to Numbers in Recent French Theory’. Textual Practice 28, no. 7 (2014): 1323–36. Aridjis, Chloe et al. Where You Are: A Book of Maps that Will Leave You Completely Lost. London: Visual Editions, 2013. Armstrong, Guyda. ‘Review of Giovanni Boccaccio, Life of Dante, J.G. Nichols trans.’ Heliotropia 2, no. 2 (2004): 13–31. Auerbach, Erich. ‘Philology and Weltliteratur’. Translated by Maire and Edward Said. The Centennial Review 13, no. 1 (1969): 1–17. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. Auerbach, Erich. Dante: Poet of the Secular World. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New York: New York Review Books, 2007. Augustine, Saint. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. Translated by Oliver Feltham. London: Continuum, 2006.

Bibliography

185

Barthes, Roland. ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives’. In Image, Music, Text, translated and edited by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana, 1977. Baudrillard, Jean. ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’. Translated by John Johnston. In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster. New York: New Press, 2002. Beckett, Samuel. ‘Dante … Bruno. Vico … Joyce’. In Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, edited by Samuel Beckett et al. New York: New Directions, 1962. Beckett, Samuel. Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. London: John Calder, 1983. Benda, Christoph. Senghor on the Rocks. Accessed 8 April 2016. http://collection. eliterature.org/2/works/benda_senghor/html/part1.html. Benjamin, Walter. ‘The Moon’. In Berlin Childhood around 1900. Translated by Howard Eiland. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006. Bergin, Thomas G. ‘For a Space Prober’. Advances in Geophysics 15 (1971): 136. Blanchot, Maurice. The Infinite Conversation. Translated by Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Bloomer, Edward. ‘The Third Brightest Object in the Sky’, The Guardian, 15 November 2015. Accessed 19 February 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/ nov/15/international-space-station-astronaut-starwatching. Boccaccio, Giovanni. A Translation of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Life of Dante. Translated by G.R. Carpenter. New York: The Grolier Club of the City of New York, 1900. Boitani, Piero. Winged Words: Flight in Poetry and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Bolter, J. David. Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print. 2nd edn. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001. Bond, Peter. The Continuing Story of the International Space Station. Chichester: Springer/Praxis, 2002. Borlik, Todd A. Ecocriticism and Early Modern English Literature: Green Pastures. London: Routledge, 2011. Boxall, Peter. ‘Still Stirrings: Beckett’s Prose from Texts for Nothing to Stirring Still’. In The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, edited by Dirk Van Hulle. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2015. Boyer, M. Christine. ‘Aviation and the Aerial View: Le Corbusier’s Spatial Transformations in the 1930s and 1940s’. diacritics 33, no. 3/4 (2003): 93–116. Bradley, A.C. Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth. London: Macmillan, 1905. Brits, Baylee. Literary Infinities: Number and Narrative in Modern Fiction. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. Brzezinski, Matthew. Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Rivalries that Ignited the Space Age. London: Bloomsbury, 2007.

186

Bibliography

Bush, Vannevar. ‘As We May Think’. The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945. Accessed 8 April 2016. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-maythink/303881/. Caesar, Michael, ed. Dante: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1989. Calder, William M. III. ‘The Spherical Earth in Plato’s Phaedo’. Phronesis 3, no. 2 (1958): 121–5. Cassin, Barbara, ed. Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon. Translated by Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. Cavel, Richard, ed. McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Chaplin, Joyce E. Round about the Earth: Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012. Clarke, Arthur C. The View from Serendip: Speculations on Space, Science, and the Sea, Together with Fragments of an Equatorial Autobiography. London: Random House, 1977. Clarke, Arthur C. The Fountains of Paradise. London: Gollancz, 2000. Colebrook, Claire. Death of the Posthuman: Essays on Extinction, vol. 1. Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing/Open Humanities Press, 2014. Connor, Steven. Living by Numbers: In Praise of Quantity. London: Reaktion, 2016. Connor, Steven. ‘The Horror of Number: Can Humans Learn to Count?’. Accessed 30 March 2018. http://stevenconnor.com/horror.html. Cooppan, Vilashini. ‘World Literature between History and Theory’. In The Routledge Companion to World Literature, edited by Theo D’haen, David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir. London: Routledge, 2012. Cornford, Francis MacDonald. Plato’s Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1937. Cosgrove, Denis. Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Crane, Hart. ‘Cape Hatteras’. In Hart Crane’s The Bridge: An Annotated Edition, edited by Lawrence Kramer. New York: Fordham University Press, 2011. Crawford, Robert MacArthur. ‘The U.S. Air Force Song’. In A Civilian’s Guide to the U.S. Military: A Comprehensive Reference to the Customs, Language, & Structure of the Armed Forces, edited by Barbara Schading. Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest Books, 2007. Cuarón, Alfonso, dir. Gravity. Film. Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Pictures, 2013. Danielewski, Mark Z. The Familiar Volume 1: One Rainy Day in May. New York: Pantheon, 2015. Danowski, Déborah and Eduardo Viveiros De Castro. The Ends of the World. Translated by Rodrigo Nunes. Cambridge: Polity, 2017. Dean, Margaret Lazarus. Leaving Orbit: Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2015.

Bibliography

187

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. London: Athlone, 1988. Derrida, Jacques. ‘Ellipsis’. In Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978. Derrida, Jacques. Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles/Éperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche. Translated by Barbara Harlow. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. Derrida, Jacques. ‘My Chances/Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean Stereophonies’. Translated by Irene Harvey and Avital Ronell. In Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis, and Literature, edited by Irene Harvey, Avital Ronell, Joseph H. Smith, and William Kerrigan. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. Derrida, Jacques. ‘The Ends of Man’. In Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Derrida, Jacques. ‘Racism’s Last Word’. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 290–9. Derrida, Jacques. ‘Letter to Peter Eisenman’. In Chora L Works: Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman, edited by Jeffrey Kipnis and Thomas Leeser. New York: The Monacelli Press, 1987. Derrida, Jacques. The Post-Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Derrida, Jacques. Edmund Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry: An Introduction. Translated by John P. Leavey, Jr. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. Derrida, Jacques. ‘Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and Other Small Seismisms’. In The States of Theory, edited by David Carroll. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Derrida, Jacques. Aporias. Translated by Thomas Dutoit. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. London: Routledge, 1994. Derrida, Jacques. ‘Khōra’. In On the Name. Translated by Thomas Dutoit. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. Derrida, Jacques. The Gift of Death. Translated by David Wills. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Derrida, Jacques. ‘Faith and Knowledge: Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone’. In Acts of Religion. Translated by Samuel Weber. London: Routledge, 2002. Derrida, Jacques. ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’. In Without Alibi. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Derrida, Jacques. The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Dicken, Peter and James S. Ormrod. Cosmic Society: Towards a Sociology of the Universe. London: Routledge, 2007.

188

Bibliography

Dicken, Peter and James S. Omrod. ‘Globalization of Space: From the Global to the Galactic’. In The Routledge International Handbook of Globalization Studies, edited by Bryan S. Turner. London: Routledge, 2010. Dickinson, Emily. ‘No Matter Where the Saints Abide’. In The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by R.W. Franklin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. Donne, John. ‘Good Friday 1613. Riding Westward’. In John Donne: Selected Poetry, edited by John Carey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Douglas, J. Yellowlees. The End of Books – Or Books without End? Reading Interactive Narratives. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Drucker, Johanna. SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Elden, Stuart. Speaking against Number: Heidegger, Language and the Politics of Calculation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988. Eliot, George. Daniel Deronda. London: Penguin, 1995. Engelbart, Doublas C. ‘Letter to Vannevar Bush and Program on Human Effectiveness’. In From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s Machine, edited by James M. Nyce and Paul Kahn. San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1991. ‘Europe: A Literary History’ project. Accessed 27 March 2018. http://www.english. upenn.edu/~dwallace/europe/about.html. Farman, Jason. The Mobile Story: Narrative Practices and Locative Technologies. New York: Routledge, 2014. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Translated by anonymous. London: Tavistock/Routledge, 1970. Gaston, Sean. The Concept of the World from Kant to Derrida. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013. Gerritsen, Tess. Gravity. London: Harper, 2004. ‘Going to Mars with Maven: Contest winners’. Accessed 3 August 2016. http://lasp. colorado.edu/maven/goingtomars/send-your-name/contest-winners/. Goldstein, Laurence. The Flying Machine and Modern Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Grosz, Elizabeth. Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction. London: Routledge, 1990. Hadfield, Chris. You Are Here: Around the World in 92 Minutes. London: Macmillan, 2014. Hallward, Peter. ‘Introduction: Consequences of Abstraction’. In Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, edited by Peter Hallward. London: Bloomsbury, 2004. Harland, David M. and John E. Catchpole. Creating the International Space Station. Chichester: Springer/Praxis, 2002. Hayles, N. Katherine. Writing Machines. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002. Hayles, N. Katherine. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2008.

Bibliography

189

Heidegger, Martin. ‘… Poetically Man Dwells …’. In Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. London: Harper & Row, 1975. Heidegger, Martin. ‘“Only a God Can Save Us”: The Der Spiegel Interview’. Translated by William J. Richardson. In Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, edited by Thomas Sheehan. Chicago: Precedent, 1981. Heidegger, Martin. ‘Hebel – Friend of the House’. Translated by Bruce V. Foltz and Michael Heim. Contemporary German Philosophy 3 (1983): 89–101. Heidegger, Martin, ‘Traditional Language and Technological Language’. Translated by Wanda Torres Gregory. Journal of Philosophical Research 23 (1998): 129–45. Heidegger, Martin. Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning). Translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1999. Heidegger, Martin. Mindfulness. Translated by Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary. London: Continuum, 2006. Henchman, Anna. The Starry Sky Within: Astronomy and the Reach of the Mind in Victorian Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Hight, Jeremy, Jeff Knowlton and Naomi Spellman. 34 North 118 West. Accessed 8 April 2016. http://jeffknowlton.info/index.php/projects/1-34-north-118-west. Hillis Miller, J. ‘Derrida’s Politics of Autoimmunity’. Discourse 30, no. 1–2 (2008): 208–25. Hillis Miller, J. For Derrida. New York: Fordham University Press, 2009. Houston, James M. Building a Monument to Dante: Boccaccio as Dantista. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. Howard, David. ‘Cartographies and Visualization’. In A Concise Companion to Postcolonial Literature, edited by Shirley Chew and David Richards. Oxford: Blackwell, 2010. Husserl, Edmund. Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology First Book. Translated by F. Kersten. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983. Ihde, Don. Heidegger’s Technologies: Postphenomenological Perspectives. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. Irigaray, Luce. Way of Love. Translated by Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluháček. London: Continuum, 2002. Joyce, James. Ulysses. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Joyce, Michael. Was: Annales Nomadique: A Novel of Internet. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007. Kay, W.D. Defining Nasa: The Historical Debate over the Agency’s Mission. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2005. Kiefer, Christian. The Infinite Tides. London: Bloomsbury Circus, 2012. Klass, Philip J. Secret Sentinels in Space. New York: Random House, 1971. Krell, David Farrell. Contagion: Sexuality: Disease, and Death in German Idealism and Romanticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Küpper, Joachim, ed. Approaches to World Literature. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013.

190

Bibliography

Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe and Jean-Luc Nancy. Retreating the Political. Translated by various. London: Routledge, 1997. Large, Duncan. ‘Nietzsche and the Figure of Copernicus: Grande Fantaisie on Polish Airs’. New Readings 2 (1996): 65–87. Latour, Bruno. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Polity, 2017. Lawall, Sarah. ‘Preface’. In Reading World Literature: Theory, History, Practice, edited by Sarah Lawall. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. Le Couteur, Cath and Nick Ryan. Adrift. Accessed 10 April 2018. http://www. projectadrift.co.uk/. Levinas, Emmanuel. Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo. Translated by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1985. Levinas, Emmanuel. Existence and Existents. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1988. Levinas, Emmanuel. ‘Heidegger, Gagarin, and Us’. In Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. Translated by Seán Hand. London: Athlone, 1990. Levy, David H. The Sky in Early Modern English Literature: A Study of Allusions to Celestial Events in Elizabethan and Jacobean Writing 1572–1620. New York: Springer, 2011. Licklider, J.C.R. and Welden E. Clark. ‘On-Line Man-Computer Communications’. AFIPS Proceedings 21 (1962): 113–28. Licklider, J.C.R. ‘Memorandum for Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network’. Accessed 8 April 2016. http://www.kurzweilai.net/ memorandum-for-members-and-affiliates-of-the-intergalactic-computernetwork. Logsdon, John M. Together in Orbit: The Origins of International Participation in the Space Station. Washington, DC: NASA, 1998. Logsdon, John M. et al. Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in the History of the U.A. Civil Space Programme, Vol. 3: Using Space. Washington, DC: NASA, 2009. Lovelock, J.E. ‘A Physical Basis for Life Detection Experiments’. Nature 4997 (1965): 568–70. Lupton, Deborah. The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self-Tracking. Cambridge: Polity, 2016. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. Marino, Mark C. ‘Critical Code Studies’. Electronic Book Review, 04 December 2006. Accessed 8 April 2016. http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/ codology. Markley, Robert. ‘Summer’s Lease: Shakespeare and the Little Ice Age’. In Early Modern Ecostudies: From the Florentine Codex to Shakespeare, edited by Thomas Hallock, Ivo Kamps and Karen L. Raber. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Bibliography

191

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. Translated by Samuel Moore. London: Penguin, 1967. Marx, Karl. Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’. Translated by Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin, 1976. Marx, Karl. ‘The English Middle Class’. In Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 13 Marx & Engels 1854–1855. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010. Mentz, Steve. ‘Tongues in the Storm: Shakespeare, Ecological Crisis, and the Resources of Genre’. In Ecocritical Shakespeare, edited by Lynne Bruckner and Dan Brayton. London: Routledge, 2016. Milesi, Laurent. ‘St!le in Deconstruction’. In Style in Theory: Between Literature and Philosophy, edited by Ivan Callus, James Corby and Gloria Lauri-Lucente. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Millard, Doug. Satellite: Innovation in Orbit. London: Reaktion, 2017. Miller, Shawn William. An Environmental History of Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Mitchell, David. Ghostwritten. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1999. Moretti, Franco. ‘Conjectures on World Literature’. New Left Review 1 (2000): 54–68. Murakami, Haruki. Sputnik Sweetheart. Translated by Philip Gabriel. London: Vintage, 2002. Murphy, Peter John. Beckett’s Dedalus: Dialogical Engagements with Joyce in Beckett’s Fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Sense of the World. Translated by Jeffrey S. Librett. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Creation of the World or Globalization. Translated by François Raffoul and David Pettigrew. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity. Translated by Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Nancy, Jean-Luc. ‘The Political and/or Politics’. Translated by Christopher Sauder. Oxford Literary Review 36, no. 1 (2014): 5–17. Nancy, Jean-Luc. After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Nelson, Theodore. ‘Dream Machines’. In Computer Lib: You Can and Must Understand Computers Now/Dream Machines: New Freedoms through Computer Screens – A Minority Report. Chicago: Self-published, 1974. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. ‘On the Abolition of the English Department’. In The Postcolonial Studies Reader, edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. London: Routledge, 1995. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Douglas Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

192

Bibliography

Oliver, Kelly. Earth and World: Philosophy after the Apollo Missions. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Oswald, Alice. Falling Awake. London: Jonathan Cape, 2016. Otlet, Paul. Traité de Documentation. Le livre sur le livre: Théorie et Pratique. Brussels: Editions Mundaneum, 1934. Parks, Lisa. Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Peake, Tim. Hello, Is This Planet Earth? My View from the International Space Station. London: Century, 2016. Peoples, Columba. ‘Envisioning “Global Security?” The Earth Viewed from Outer Space as a Motif in Security Discourses’. In The Politics of Globality since 1945, edited by Rens Van Munster and Casper Sylvest. London: Routledge, 2016. Pisters, Patricia. ‘Art as Circuit Breaker: Surveillance Screens and Powers of Affect’. In Carnal Aesthetics: Transgressive Imagery and Feminist Politics, edited by Bettina Papenburg and Marta Zarzycka. London: I.B. Tauris, 2013. Plascencia, Salvador. The People of Paper. London: Bloomsbury, 2006. Plato. Phaedo. Translated by David Gallop. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. ‘Poem by American Matriarch Flown on Orion Presented to NASA Administrator’ (7 April 2015). Accessed 18 August 2016. http://www.nasa.gov/content/poem-byamerican-matriarch-flown-on-orion-presented-to-nasa-administrator. Porter, James. Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. Prawer, S.S. Marx and World Literature. London: Verso, 2014. Raley, Rita. ‘On Locative Narrative’. Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 41, nos. 1–2 (2008): 123–47. Robin, Gordon de Q. ‘Curtain up on Polar Research’. New Scientist 95, no. 1323 (1982): 756–61. Said, Edward W. The World, the Text, and the Critic. London: Vintage, 1983. Said, Edward W. Beginnings: Intention & Method. London: Granta, 1997. Salisbury, Laura. Samuel Beckett: Laughing Matters, Comic Timing. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. Schinkel, Willem and Liesbeth Noordegraaf-Eelens. ‘Peter Sloterdijk’s Sphereological Acrobatics: An Exercise in Introduction’. In In Medias Res: Peter Sloterdijk’s Sphereological Poetic Being, edited by Willem Schinkel and Liesbeth NoordegraafEelens. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011. Schork, R.J. Latin and Roman Culture in Joyce. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997. Scott, David Meerman and Richard Jurek. Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. Scott, Ridley, dir. Blade Runner. Film. Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Pictures, 1982. Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Edited by R.A. Foakes. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2005.

Bibliography

193

Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Edited by Sukanta Chaudhuri. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2017. Sidney, Philip. ‘Defense of Poesy’. In Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, edited by Gavin Alexander. London: Penguin, 2004. Singh, Vandana. ‘Delhi’. In The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories. New Delhi: Zubaan/Penguin, 2008. Sloterdijk, Peter, Terror from the Air. Translated by Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009. Sloterdijk, Peter. In the World Interior of Capital: For a Philosophical Theory of Globalization. Translated by Wieland Hoban. Cambridge: Polity, 2014. Sloterdijk, Peter. Spheres Volume 2. Globes: Macrospherology. Translated by Wieland Hoban. South Pasedena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2014. Sloterdijk, Peter. Spheres Volume 3. Foams: Plural Spherology. Translated by Wieland Hoban. South Pasedena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2016. Smythe, Dallas W. ‘Communications Satellites’. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: A Magazine of Science and Public Affairs 17, no. 2 (1961): 65–70. Souza E Silva, Adriana de and Jordan Frith. Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces: Locational Privacy, Control, and Urban Sociability. New York: Routledge, 2012. Soyinka, Wole. ‘This Past Must Address Its Present’. Nobel Lecture, 8 December 1986. Accessed 25 August 2017. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/ laureates/1986/soyinka-lecture.html. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. ‘Star Flight: Yuri Gagarin. Documents of the First Manned Flight into Space’. Accessed 19 February 2018. http://www.firstorbit.org/media/pdfs/Gagarin_Vostok-1Transcript.pdf. Stengers, Isabelle. In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. Translated by Andrew Goffey. Ann Arbor MI: Open Humanities Press/Meson Press, 2015. Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Translated by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation. Translated by Stephen Barker. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. Tabbi, Joseph. ‘Electronic Literature as World Literature; or The Universality of Writing under Constraint’. Poetics Today 21, no. 1 (2010): 17–50. Valéry, Paul. ‘Agathe’. In Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Volume 2: Poems in the Rough. Translated by Hilary Corke. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969. Vaughan, Henry. ‘First to Fly’. In Into that Silent Sea: Trailblazers of the Space Era, 1961–1965, edited by Francis French and Colin Burgess. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. Verdicchio, Massimo. The Poetics of Dante’s Paradiso. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. Virilio, Paul. Strategy of Deception. Translated by Chris Turner. London: Verso, 2000.

194

Bibliography

Waetjen, Thembisa. ‘Sputnik from Below: Space Age Science and Public Culture in Cold War South Africa’. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 18, no. 5 (2016): 687–708. Walcott, Derek. ‘North and South’. In The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948–2013, edited by Glyn Maxwell. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. Wallace, David, ed., Europe: A Literary History, 1348–1418. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Watt, Callum. ‘The Uses of Maurice Blanchot in Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time’. Paragraph 39, no. 3 (2016): 305–18. Whitman, Walt. Song of Myself: With a Complete Commentary. Edited by Folsum and Christopher Merrill. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016. Wolfe, Tom. The Right Stuff. London: Vintage, 2005. Wright, Alex. Cataloguing the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Yates, Christopher. The Poetic Imagination in Heidegger and Schelling. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989. Zygielbaum Joseph L., ed. The First Man in Space: Soviet Radio and Newspaper Reports on the Flight of the Spaceship, Vostok. Translated by Joseph L. Zygielbaum. Pasadena, CA: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 1961.

Index ‘A Brave and Startling Truth’ (Angelou) 50–4 Africa 6, 23 Agamben, Giorgio 125, 149 and separation 69–70 ‘Air Force Song’ 49 Adjana, Btihaj 65 Adorno, Theodor 145 Aldrin, Buzz 49 Aldrin, Buzz and John Barnes 122–4, 129, 130, 132 Alighieri, Dante 51, 52, 59 and cosmology 17, 45–8, 52, 54–5, 60, 70, 79 and counting 61 and Erich Auerbach 44–7, 54–5, 60–2, 70 and language 41–2, 56 n.7, 61–2 and observation 46–8, 60 and power 48–9 and Samuel Beckett 61 and separation 17, 60, 79 and translation 41–2, 61–2 and world literature 43–6 Anders, William 13 Angelou, Maya 50–4 Antarctica 6 Anthropocene, the 114, 127–8 Apollo 12–13 Apollodorus 59 Apollo missions 2–9, 12–13, 24, 31, 32 n.13, 48–51, 94 and cartography 6 and cosmology 12–13 and imperialism 6 and Jean-Luc Nancy 147–9 and the moon 2, 5, 7, 13, 18, 32 n.13, 48–50, 57 n.32 and observation 2–9, 12, 32 n.13, 127 and On Kawara 147–9 Apt, Jay, Michael Helfert and Justin Wilkinson 12

Apter, Emily 46, 60, 68, 72–3 Aquinas, Thomas 145 Ariane 151 Aridjis, Chloe 100 Aristotle 46, 145 Armstrong, Neil 49, 57 n.32 Astrophilately 23–4 Auden, W.H. 145 Auerbach, Erich 52, 69 and cosmology 45–7, 54–5, 60–2, 70, 80 n.4 and Dante Alighieri 44–7, 54–5, 60–2, 70 and language 42 and Weltliteratur 44–5, 57 n.24, 64, 70 Augustine, Saint 46, 159 aviation 16, 51 Badiou, Alain 73, 76–9 Baran, Paul 90–1 Barthes, Roland 71 Baudrillard, Jean 21 Beckett, Samuel and counting 62–4, 67, 80 n.5, 80 n.13 and Dante Alighieri 61 beginnings 4, 14, 17, 30, 47, 124. See also time as the dawn 1–3, 10 and electronic literature 87–9 and knowledge 65–9 Benda, Christoph 97–9, 103 Benjamin, Walter 25 Benoist, Jean-Marie 145 Bergin, Thomas 47–9, 51, 57 n.29 Bergson, Henri 129 Berlioz, Hector 59 biowar 123–4 Blanchot, Maurice 118–19, 139 n.44, 182 n.46 blindness 16, 27, 63. See also crying; observation and the eye 133

196

Index

and Jacques Derrida 156–9, 179 ‘Blue Marble’ 2, 6, 31 n.4, 48, 71, 109, 117, 138 n.32 Boccaccio, Giovanni 42, 44, 59 Bolden, Charles, 50–1 Boltanski, Luc 73 Bolter, J. David 95 book-keeping 61–3, 67. See also counting; measure-taking; metrics; numerology Borlik, Todd 10 Borman, Frank 13, 32 n.13 Boxall, Peter 63 Bradley, A.C. 108 Bridle, James 100–1 bringing-forth 19, 147–9, 164 Brits, Baylee 64 Bunin, Ivan 15 Bush, Vannevar and Arthur C. Clarke 94–5, 98, 102, 105 n.31, 120 and electronic literature 87–8 and hypertext 88–90, 95 and the memex 87–8, 91, 98, 102 Calvino, Italo 44, 59 Carroll, Lewis 15 cartography 13, 169 and the Apollo missions 6 and circumnavigation 14–15 and ‘Earthrise’ 6 and electronic literature 96, 98–103 and the Global Positioning System 26 and modernity 13 and world literature 54, 64 catastrophe and Bernard Stiegler 119–20, 139 n.44 and Bruno Latour 108, 110–11, 114 and Claire Colebrook 125–9 and climate change 111–15 and counting 131 and culture 114 in ‘Delhi’ 131–2, 134 and disaster 120–2, 139 n.44 in Gravity (Cuarón) 120–2, 128–30, 132, 134 in Gravity (Gerritsen) 123–4, 128–30, 132 and Isabelle Stengers 111–14 and Jean-Luc Nancy 120, 133–4, 151

in King Lear 107–10 and Martin Heidegger 17–18 and nature 107–10 in Sputnik Sweetheart 134–37 in The Return 122–4, 128–9, 132 in The Infinite Tides 130–2 Chaplin, Joyce E. 14–15 Char, René 18 Chernomyrdin, Viktor 1–2 China 23, 26, 83 n.87, 122–3, 135 Christianity 13, 21, 42, 48, 73, 117, 158, 170 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 13, 170 Clarke, Arthur C. 91–4, 120–1 and Vannevar Bush 94–5, 98, 102, 105 n.31, 120 climate change 31 n.4, 111–15, 117, 124. See also catastrophe; disaster; ecology Cocteau, Jean 15 Cold War 3, 26, 144 Colebrook, Claire 125–30 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 15 colonialism 23, 26–7, 97–9, 15. See also decolonization; globalization; imperialism; the North; the West community 179 global 22, 24, 95, 132 planetary 8, 22 universal 69–70, 89 and world literature 43 Comparative Literature 23, 44 Connor, Steven 62 Conrad, Joseph 15 Cooppan, Vilashini 65 Copernicus, Nicolaus 31 n.4, 55, 58 n.44, 59, 116, 172, 173 Cosgrove, Denis 2, 5–6, 12–13, 15, 170 cosmology 13, 22, 66, 73, 116–17, 146, 172, 182 n.46 and the Apollo missions 12–13 and Bruno Latour 115–17 and Dante Alighieri 17, 45–8, 52, 54–5, 60, 70, 79 and Erich Auerbach 45–7, 54–5, 60–2, 70, 80 n.4 and Immanuel Kant 152–4 and Jean-Luc Nancy 147–9, 152–5, 161 n.35 and literature 29, 62–3, 71–2, 100, 109, 131

Index and Peter Sloterdijk 74–9 and Plato 10–12, 180 n.6 and sovereignty 59 cosmopolitanism 22, 43, 83 n.87, 89, 170. See also globalization; internationalism cosmos 4 and Jean-Luc Nancy 133, 152–3 and literature 15, 16, 26, 28, 55, 99, 120 and untranslatability 60–1 count-as-one 73–4, 77. See also counting; measure-taking; metrics counting 59–79, 122, 164, 180 n.6. See also book-keeping; count-asone; measure-taking; metrics; numerology and Bruno Latour 73 and catastrophe 131 and Dante Alighieri 61 and Jacques Derrida 70–2 and modernity 73–4 and Peter Sloterdijk 76 and Samuel Beckett 62–4, 67, 80 n.5, 80 n.13 and writing 61–3, 67–72 Crane, Hart 16, 27–8 Crichton, Michael 121 crying 154, 178. See also blindness; observation in Blade Runner 144–5 and Chris Hadfield 143–4 and the eye 143, 158–60 in Gravity (Cuarón) 143–4 and Jacques Derrida 145–6, 158–60 and Jan Provost 158–9 and Jean-Luc Nancy 145–6 and John Donne 145 and John Glenn 144–5 and literature 145, 159 and Rainer Marie Rilke 158–9 and Saint Augustine 159–60 in The Right Stuff 144 Cuarón, Alfonso 120–2, 124, 127–32, 134, 143–4 Damrosch, David 43–4, 46, 54 Danowski, Déborah and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro 114, 115, 117 Dastur, Françoise 156

197

data visualizations 64 dawn 1–3, 10, 14, 124 Dean, Margaret Lazarus 30 decolonization 6, 8. See also colonialism; globalization; imperialism; the West Defoe, Daniel 15 Deleuze, Gilles 169 Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari 101–2 ‘Delhi’ (Singh) 131–2, 134 Democratic Republic of Congo 24 Derrida, Jacques 10 and blindness 156–9, 179 and counting 70–2 and crying 145, 158–60 Dissemination 71–2 Edmund Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry 173–4 ‘Ellipsis’ 70–1 ‘Envois’ 163, 170 and guarding 163, 171 and Immanuel Kant 157 and Jean-Luc Nancy 145, 155 ‘Khōra’ 175–80 ‘Letter to Peter Eisenman’ 175–6, 182 n.48 and Martin Heidegger 163 and Maurice Merleau-Ponty 155–6 Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins 156–60 and observation 155–60 Of Grammatology 146 On Touching–Jean-Luc Nancy 155–6 and Plato 177–80 and power 165–70, 172, 175 ‘Racism’s Last Word’ 175 and Saint Augustine 159–60 and satellites 165–80 and separation 146, 157, 177–80 and sovereignty 169–72, 175 and spacing 146–7 Speech and Phenomena 146 Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles 178–9 and style 167–8, 170–1 and surveillance 165–8, 171 and technicity 166–8, 170, 172–3, 178 The Beast and the Sovereign vol. 1 169–72 and touch 155–6 Devlin, Dean 121–2

198

Index

Dicken, Peter and James Ormrod 23 Dickinson, Emily 16, 27 digital divide 23 disaster. See also climate change; ecology and Bernard Stiegler 120, 139 n.44 and catastrophe 120–2, 139 n.44 Divine Comedy, The (Dante) 41–8, 52–4, 60–2, 70 Djibouti 24 Donne, John 15, 27, 145 Douglas, J. Yellowlees 88 Drucker, Johanna 88 Dyer, Geoff 100 ‘Earthrise’ 2, 5–6, 9, 31 n.4, 32 n.13, 47, 49 ecology 51, 68, 103, 117, 132, 165. See also catastrophe; climate change; disaster and environmental catastrophe 109–13, 117 as planetary wholeness 2, 6, 22, 132, 167 Eisenman, Peter 175, 182 n.48 Elden, Stuart 72 electronic literature and beginnings 87–9 and cartography 96, 98–103 and globalization 89–92, 95–103 and satellites 92, 95–103 and Ted Nelson 88–90, 93 and Vannevar Bush 87–8 and writing 88, 90, 92, 95–103 Eliot, George 28–9 Engelbart, Douglas C. 88, 90, 95 Espinosa, Daniel 121 Europe 26, 45, 54, 57 n.24, 65, 74, 135, 151 extinction 114–17, 123–4, 126, 128–9 eye, the 16, 28, 29, 72, 122, 166. See also blindness; crying; observation; the eye and blindness 133 and crying 143, 158–60 and earth observation 3, 7–10, 12, 14, 33 n.30, 46, 114, 127, 151, 154, 158, 168, 178 and perception 126–30, 156, 158–60 Foale, Michael 34 n.48 ‘For a Space Prober’ (Bergin) 47–9 Foucault, Michel 65–70, 73 Frege, Gottlob 77

Gagarin, Yuri 2, 3, 7–9, 25, 30, 127 Gaia 110–17, 165 Galilei, Galileo 116 Genesis (Book of) 13, 145 geocentrism 27, 46, 55, 59, 73, 116 Gerritsen, Tess 123–4, 128–32 Giddens, Anthony 22 Giotto 59 Glenn, John 30, 144 Global Positioning System (GPS) 26, 65, 96, 100–2 globalization 12, 54, 109–10, 128, 150, 165, 168. See also colonialism; decolonization; cosmopolitanism; imperialism; internationalism; the North; the West and ‘Blue Marble’ 2–3, 6–7, 31 n.4 and climate change 111, 115 and ‘Earthrise’ 2, 5–6, 31 n.4 and electronic literature 89–92, 95–103 and hypertext 95 and the International Space Station 7–9 and literature 43, 45 and Peter Sloterdijk 75 and power 22–7, 67, 75, 118, 134, 170 and satellites 2–8, 22–8, 91–9, 118–19, 121–4, 130–7, 165, 168–70 and technicity 24, 150 terrestrial 74–9 God 1, 22, 46, 52, 66, 69, 73, 76, 77, 116, 117, 120, 158, 159, 166 Goddard, Robert 30 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 43, 45, 55, 56 n.13, 57 n.24, 59–60, 67–8, 183 n.55 Google Earth 9, 174 Google Maps 97, 98 Gore, Al 1–2 Gravity (Cuarón) 124 and Arthur C. Clarke 120 and Bruno Latour 121 and catastrophe 120–2, 127–32, 134 and crying 143–4 and the International Space Station 120–1, 129–30 and the Kessler Syndrome 120 and observation 130 and redemption 128 Gravity (Gerritsen) and catastrophe 123–4, 128–30, 132

Index and the International Space Station 123–4, 130 Gros, Frédéric 73 guarding 19, 23, 49, 112, 135, 163–5, 168–72, 175, 179–80 and Jacques Derrida 163, 171 and Martin Heidegger 163–4 and observation 163–5 and Plato 171 Hadfield, Chris 8, 13–14, 143–4, 157 haiku 50 Hallward, Peter 73 Harmony (ISS module) 3 Hayles, n.Katherine 88, 103 heaven 1, 10–11, 41–5, 48, 50, 52, 66, 70, 72, 76, 124, 126, 144, 145, 153, 158, 164, 166 Hebel, Peter 163 Heidegger, Martin 25, 61, 75 and catastrophe 17–18 and disaster 21 and guarding 163–4 ‘Hebel–Friend of the House’ 163 and Jacques Derrida 163 and language 19–20 and measure-taking 72 and modernity 17, 19–20 ‘Only a God Can Save Us’ 17–19 ‘… Poetically Man Dwells…’ 71–2 and poetry 19–20, 71–2, 163 and satellites 17–18, 20–2, 24, 78, 117–18, 163, 165 and speech 19 and technicity 17–22, 164, 167, 174 and the moon 163–4 and observation 17–18, 20 ‘The Guardians’ 163–4 ‘Traditional Language and Technological Language’ 19–20 and writing 18–19, 24 Hernández, José 8 Herodotus 118 Hesiod 110 Hight, Jeremy, Jeff Knowlton and Naomi Spellman 97–8, 103 Hillis Miller, J. 174 Hirschbiegel, Oliver and James McTeigue 121

199

Hölderlin, Friedrich 71–2 Howard, David 26 humanism 45–8, 55, 56 n.13, 125, 133 Husserl, Edmund 4–5, 146, 156, 173–4 hypertext 88–9, 93, 95 imperialism 6, 13, 15, 26–7, 56 n.7. See also colonialism; decolonization; globalization; the North; the West India 56 n.13, 122, 131–4 Infinite Tides, The (Kiefer) and catastrophe 130–2 and the International Space Station 131 internationalism 3, 7–8, 24, 43, 56 n.13, 123–4, 169–72. See also cosmopolitanism; globalization; sovereignty International Space Station, the (ISS) 12, 14, 24, 34 n.48 and globalization 7–9 in Gravity (Cuarón) 120–1, 129–30 in Gravity (Gerritsen) 123–4, 130 and internationalism 1, 3 and Peter Sloterdijk 75, 78–9 and photography 8–9, 33 n.30 in The Infinite Tides 131 in The Return 122–3 Internet, the 9, 95, 169 Irigaray, Luce 22 Jabès, Edmond 70 JAXA 8 Johnson, Lyndon 168 Joyce, James 28–9, 61–2 Joyce, Michael 99, 103 Kant, Immanuel 125–7, 145, 152–7 and cosmology 152–4 and Jacques Derrida 157 and Jean-Luc Nancy 152–5 and observation 152–7 Kawara, On 146–9 Kessler Syndrome 120 khōra 176–80 Kiefer, Christian 130–2 King Lear (Shakespeare) 107–10 Klass, Philip J. 93, 168 kosmotheoros, the 152–7, 160 Kubrick, Stanley 93

200 Lacan, Jacques 35 n.71, 77 language 27, 35 n.71, 101, 108, 151, 166, 171 and Dante Alighieri 41–2, 56 n.7, 61–2 and Erich Auerbach 42 and khōra 176–7 and literature 42, 61–2, 147 and Martin Heidegger 19–20 and spacing 146 and translation 41–3, 43, 61–2, 66–7 Latour, Bruno and catastrophe 108, 110–11, 114 and cosmology 115–17 and counting 73 and Gaia 110–11, 114, 165 and Gravity (Cuarón), 121 and James Lovelock 110–11, 115–17 and King Lear 108 and the moon 116–17 Lawall, Sarah 65 Leroi-Gourhan, André 119 Levinas, Emmanuel 25, 176, 182 n.46 Licklider, J.C.R 90, 95 Licklider, J.C.R and Welden E. Clark 93 locative literature 96–9, 103 London, Jack 15 Lovell, James 13 Lovelock, James 110–12, 115–17, 138 n.32 Luiselli, Valeria 100 Lukacher, Ned 170 lunar landing 49, 147–8 Lunar Orbiter 1 2, 18, 31, 163 McLuhan, Marshall 9, 90 MacLeod, Ken 120 Magellan, Ferdinand 13–15 Marino, Mark C. 91 Markley, Robert 108, 110 Mars 50, 52, 115–16 Mars Atmosphere and Evolution (MAVEN) probe 50 Marx, Karl 42–3, 56 n.13, 63, 68 materialism 60, 61, 111, 113, 116, 136, 152–3 maternality 110, 179–80 measure-taking 72, 79. See also bookkeeping; count-as-one; counting; metrics Meillassoux, Quentin 73

Index memex, the 87–91, 95, 102 Mercury 52, 59–60 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 155–6 metrics 64–5, 72. See also book-keeping; count-as-one; counting; measuretaking Millard, Doug 30, 129 Milton, John 15, 44 Mir space station 34 n.48, 75 Mitchell, David 165 Modernism 28–9, 62 modernity 51, 78, 125–6, 128, 173 and cartography 13 and counting 73–4 and Jean-Luc Nancy 21 and Martin Heidegger 17, 19–20 and satellites 23–4, 26, 83 n.87, 94, 102 and technicity 17, 19–20, 118–19 monospherical thought 74–5, 78–9. See also the orb; spheres moon, the 25, 30, 52 and the Apollo missions 2, 5, 7, 13, 18, 32 n.13, 48–50, 57 n.32 and Bruno Latour 116–17 and Jean-Luc Nancy 147–8 and Martin Heidegger 163–4 and Walter Benjamin 25 Moretti, Franco 67–8 Mundaneum, the 90 Murakami, Haruki 134–7 Murphy, Peter John 62 Nance, John 121 Nancy, Jean-Luc After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes 120, 133 and the Apollo missions 147–9 and catastrophe 120, 133–4, 151 and cosmology 147–9, 152–5, 161 n.35 and cosmos 133, 152–3 and crying 145–6 Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity 150–1 and Immanuel Kant 152–5 and Jacques Derrida 145, 155 and modernity 21 and the moon 147–8 and observation 133–4, 151–5 and satellites 21

Index and separation 148–51 and spacing 146–7 and technicity 133, 147–8, 150 The Creation of the World or Globalization 21–2 The Sense of the World 133–4, 151–5 ‘The Technique of the Present: On On Kawara’ 146–9 and touch 156 NASA 2, 8, 12–13, 32 n.22, 34 n.48, 49–50, 57 n.32, 115, 117, 122–3 Nazism 17–18 Nelson, Ted 88–90, 93, 95 Newman Jane O. 45, 64 Newton, Isaac 14 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 23, 145 Nietzsche, Friedrich 58 n.44, 145 Noguchi, Soichi 8 North, the 22–4, 27. See also colonialism; globalization; imperialism; the West nuclear war 115, 122, 165 numerology 61, 71. See also book-keeping; counting Oberth Hermann 30 observation 22, 53, 63, 72, 92, 116, 120, 133–4. See also blindness; crying; photography; surveillance and the Apollo missions 2–9, 12–13, 32 n.13, 127 and climate change 112 and Dante Alighieri 46–8, 60 and the eye 3, 7–10, 12, 14, 33 n.30, 46, 114, 127, 151, 154, 158, 168, 178 in Gravity (Cuarón) 130 and guarding 163–5 and Immanuel Kant 152–7 and Jacques Derrida 155–60, 165–78 and Jean-Luc Nancy 133–4, 151–5 and literature 15–16, 26–8, 98–100, 103 and Martin Heidegger 17–18, 20 and perception 126–30 and photography 12, 33 n.30, 53, 176–8 and Plato 10–12 and sovereignty 8, 111, 132, 156, 175 Oliver, Kelly 24, 34 n.62, 164 orb, the 10, 74–9. See also monospherical thought; spheres

201

Orion 50–1 Ortelius, Abraham 13 Oswald, Alice 1, 10 Otlet, Paul 90 Pakistan 122–3 Palau 24 Parc de la Villette 175–8 Parks, Lisa 4, 26, 169 Parmenides 77 Paul, Saint 44, 69 Peake, Tim 8–9, 33 n.30, 34 n.48 Pelton, Jospeh n.92 perception 126–30, 156, 158–60 Peter, Saint 42 Petrarch, Francesco 59 Philology 44–5 photography 5, 8–10, 12, 17–18, 33 n.30, 53, 100, 126–7, 173, 176–8. See also the eye; observation phulakē 164, 171–2, 179–80 Pisters, Patricia 169 Plascencia, Salvador 99, 103 Plato 15, 73 and cosmology 10–12, 180 n.6 and guarding 171 and Jacques Derrida 177–80 and observation 10–12 Phaedo 10–12, 33 n.37 and spheres 10–12, 33 n.37, 109, 164 Timaeus 10, 109, 164, 176–80, 180 n.6 power 7, 42, 65, 107, 109–13, 118–20, 123. See also surveillance and Dante Alighieri 48–9 and globalization 22–7, 67, 75, 118, 134, 170 and Jacques Derrida 165–70, 172, 175 and Maya Angelou 52–3 and satellites 21–8 and technicity 18, 164 and writing 42 pre-Socratic thought 10, 77 print 88, 95, 99, 103 privatization of space 21, 123–4, 169 Project Vanguard 168 Provost, Jan 158–60 Ptolemy, Claudius 46, 52 quantified self 65

202

Index

Raley, Rita 96 Rassvet (ISS module) 3 Return, The: A Novel of the Human Adventure (Aldrin and Barnes) 130 and catastrophe 122–4, 128–9, 132 and the International Space Station 122–3 Rhys, Jean 145 Rilke, Rainer Marie 158–9 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 119, 145 Russia 1–2, 23, 31 n.1, 92, 120 Said, Edward 45, 57 n.24, 87, 102 Salisbury, Laura 62 satelles 23, 171 Saussure, Ferdinand de 146 Schinkel, Willem and Liesbeth Noordegraaf-Eelens 76 Scott, David Meerman and Richard Jurek 30 Scott, Ridley 144 Sellars, Piers 34 n.48 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus 13, 170 Senegal 97–9 Senghor, Leopold 97–9 Senghor on the Rocks (Benda) 97–9, 103 separation 107, 120, 130, 154. See also spacing and Dante Alighieri 17, 60, 79 and Giorgio Agamben 69–70 and Jacques Derrida 146, 157, 177–80 and Jean-Luc Nancy 148–51 and Michel Foucault 65–9 set theory 77 Shakespeare, William 145 King Lear 107–10 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 15, 109 Shannon, Claude 90 Sharman, Helen 34 n.48 Sidney, Philip 63 Simpson, John 100 Singh, Vandana 131–2, 134 Sloterdijk, Peter 46, 51, 83 n.87 and counting 76 and globalization 75 monospherical thought 74–5, 78–9 and the orb 10, 74, 76 terrestrial globalization 74–9 Smith, Benedict 50 Smythe, Dallas 94

Sollers, Philippe 71 South Africa 26, 100, 175 Souza e Silva, Adriana de and Jordan Frith 96 sovereignty 21, 55, 107, 109, 120, 125, 128, 150, 167 and cosmology 59 and internationalism 24 and Jacques Derrida 169–72, 175 and nationality 2, 6, 123 and observation 8, 111, 132, 156, 175 Soyinka, Wole 26 Soyuz 24 Space Shuttle 24, 34 n.48, 121–4, 129 spacing 76, 146–51, 157, 161 n.35, 178. See also separation speech 19–20, 171 speed 9, 13, 15, 21, 34 n.52, 43, 74, 92, 131, 151, 166. See also time spheres 3–5, 8–16, 22, 42, 59–60, 66, 120, 138 n.32, 148, 157, 170. See also monospherical thought; orb and Gaia 111–14 and literature 27–30, 122 and Peter Sloterdijk 74–9 and Plato 10–12, 33 n.37, 109, 164 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 23 Sputnik 17, 21, 26, 31, 31 n.6, 48, 94, 136–7, 168 Sputnik Sweetheart (Murakami) 134–7 Stengers, Isabelle 111–14, 165 Stephenson, Neal 121 Stiegler, Bernard 182 n.46 and catastrophe 119–20, 139 n.44 and disaster 120, 139 n.44 and technicity 118–20 style 167–72, 178–9 surveillance 24, 94, 99, 166, 169, 171–2, 178. See also observation; power Tabbi, Joseph 90 technicity 131, 144 and Bernard Stiegler 118–20 and globalization 24, 150 and Jacques Derrida 166–8, 170, 172–3, 178 and Jean-Luc Nancy 133, 147–8, 150 and literature 29–31, 63, 68, 103, 110, 147

Index and Martin Heidegger 17–22, 24, 78, 164, 167, 174 and modernity 17, 19–20, 118–19 Telstar (satellite) 4, 20, 31, 93 Tennyson, Alfred 15–16, 145 Terra (Earth Observing Satellite) 3 34 North 118 West (Hight, Knowlton and Spellman) 97–8, 103 Tiangong-1 (Heavenly Palace) space station 83 n.87 time 1–4, 10, 46, 47, 118, 120, 128, 131, 144, 146–50, 164, 166, 180 n.6. See also beginnings; speed touch 53, 55, 77, 150, 154–6, 166, 177 Transit Research and Attitude Control (TRAAC) satellite 47 translation 33 n.37, 41–3, 54, 60–1, 67, 69 Tschumi, Bernard 175, 182 n.48 Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin 30, 92 Twain, Mark 15 Twitter 8 uncanny, the 8, 25, 27, 29, 62 United Nations 24, 50 Unity (ISS module) 3 untranslatability 60–1, 68, 79 n.1, 176 USA 1–2, 6, 23, 24, 27, 31 n.1, 47–9, 51, 90, 93–4, 123–4, 144, 165, 168 USSR 94, 168 Valéry, Paul 29 Vaughan, Henry 3

203

Verne, Jules 15, 30, 34 n.52 Villa-Lobos, Heitor 59 Virilio, Paul 21 Vostok 2, 12 Waetjen, Thembisa 26 Walcott, Derek 26, 44 Wallis and Futuna Islands 23–4 Warhol, Andy 59 Weltliteratur 43–5, 54, 57 n.24, 60, 68 West, the 6, 22, 23, 119, 134, 169, 170. See also colonialism; decolonization; globalization; imperialism; the North Where You Are: A Book of Maps that will Leave You Completely Lost 100–1 Whitman, Walt 16, 27–8 world literature 23, 43–5, 53–5, 60–1, 64–70 World Systems Theory 68 Wright, Alex 90 writing 16, 51, 92, 134–7 and counting 61–3, 67–72 and electronic literature 88, 90, 92, 95–103 and Martin Heidegger 18–19, 24 and power 42 and satellites 27–8, 30 Yates, Christopher 72 Zarya (ISS module) 1–3, 124 Žižek, Slavoj 95 Zola, Emile 59