vital reenchantments Before you start to read this book, take this moment to think about making a donation to punctum books, an independent non-profit press, @ https://punctumbooks.com/support/ If you’re reading the e-book, you can click on the image below to go directly to our donations site. Any amount, no matter the size, is appreciated and will help us to keep our ship of fools afloat. Contri- butions from dedicated readers will also help us to keep our commons open and to cultivate new work that can’t find a welcoming port elsewhere. Our ad- venture is not possible without your support. Vive la Open Access. Fig. 1. Hieronymus Bosch, Ship of Fools (1490–1500) vital reenchantments: biophilia, gaia, cosmos, and the affectively ecological. Copyright © 2019 by Lauren Greyson. This work carries a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International license, which means that you are free to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and you may also remix, transform and build upon the material, as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors (but not in a way that suggests the authors or punctum books endorses you and your work), you do not use this work for commercial gain in any form whatsoever, and that for any remixing and transformation, you distribute your rebuild under the same license. http://creativecommons.org/li- censes/by-nc-sa/4.0/ First published in 2019 by punctum books, Earth, Milky Way. https://punctumbooks.com ISBN-13: 978-1-950192-07-6 (print) ISBN-13: 978-1-950192-08-3 (ePDF) lccn: 2018968577 Library of Congress Cataloging Data is available from the Library of Congress Editorial team: Casey Coffee and Eileen A. Joy Book design: Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei Cover image: Valerie Hammond, Traces 8, pigment, color pencil, graphite, wax, glass beads and thread on Japanese paper, 16 × 17" (2010). Courtesy of the artist and Littlejohn Contemporary. Lauren Greyson Vital Reenchantments Biophilia, Gaia, Cosmos, and the Affectively Ecological Contents Popular Science as Hot Philosophy — 13 — Wonder, or Reenchantment on High — 49 — Biophilia Affiliation and the Infinite Unseen — 97 — Gaia The Affects of the Earth — 137 — Cosmos ‘The Subtle Machinery of Awe’ — 193 — Conclusion Enchanted Popular Science and Its Afterlives — 231 — Bibliography — 257 — Acknowledgments I owe so much of the vitality of this work to others. punctum books took a chance on this book and embraced it for what is. I am enormously grateful for their support. The Graduate Cent- er for the Study of Culture at Justus Liebig University not only originally made this project possible, but also introduced me to brilliant colleagues who wisely suggested I not fight the urge to write about Carl Sagan. I am particularly thankful to Sebastian Brand and Elizabeth Kovach, both great conjugators of ideas, for their comments and conversation over the years. To my first and second advisors, Ingo Berensmeyer and Hanjo Berressem, I am also deeply grateful — they have been exceptional readers and the most productive of critics. Finally, to Philipp, my reenchanteur — your infinite charms are behind the best bits in these pages. A thank you does not even begin to do your contribution justice. 1 Popular Science as Hot Philosophy Not all charms fly at the touch of cold philosophy.1 This work examines so-called “cold philosophy,” or science, that does pre- cisely the opposite — rather than mercilessly emptying out and unweaving, it operates as a philosophy that animates. Taking up a selection of popular works by scientists who have engaged in attempts to rail against the idea of disenchantment (Entzau- berung) first introduced by Max Weber, it investigates the con- cepts and strategies of scientific reenchantment. It demonstrates how the “poet-in-scientists”2 operating during the late 1970s and ’80s direct our attention to the marvelous unfolding of life in the world and the cosmos. Both in terms of the subjects they take up and the ethics they espouse, these figures attempt to turn science to life in an age in which the counter-culture in particu- lar had made the institution of science synonymous with tech- nologies of destruction and alienation. What is so unique about them is that they reenchant without pandering to what Dawkins will later term “cosmic sentimentality”3 — Carl Sagan may have 1 John Keats, “Lamia,” Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/ files/2490/2490-h/2490-h.htm, ll. 229–38. 2 Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 85. 3 Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder (New York: Mariner Books, 1998), ix. It is in this book — 13 — VITAL REENCHANTMENTS said “We are made of starstuff,”4 but he would never insist, as Joni Mitchell did in 1969, that “we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.”5 Instead, they insist on a third way that does not rely on the idea of an ecological Eden — a vigorously vital material- ism in which the affective trumps the sentimental. Although not without its precedents,6 this vital materialism has found unique expression in the set of works I will discuss. Its reverberation in ecological circles (and well beyond), moreover, merit the works’ reevaluation. Far from existing merely as books that popularize science, these works reanimate a world that was, in any case, never really dead. More concretely, this book looks at what I call “affective wonder,” understood as the experience of and attunement to novel affects, within a selection of works by E.O. Wilson, James Lovelock, and Carl Sagan. Although the works it focuses upon, namely Biophilia (1984), Gaia (1979),7 and Cosmos (1980), were all published within five years of one another during what one might reasonably still call the dawn of the environmental move- ment, the concepts they flesh out have continued to circulate since their publication and live on in ecological and popular thought today; they elaborate what I will call affective ecologies. I will also insist that their historical emergence was no accident: They respond to an ever-deepening sense of environmental cri- sis, certainly, but along with it they respond to perhaps more than marginally related narratives of the large-scale disenchant- ment brought on by modernity or science. More often than not, they respond to a mixture of the two. that Dawkins accuses Carl Sagan of “cosmic sentimentality,” but Chapter 5 takes up this debate in more detail. 4 Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York: Random House, 1980), 190. 5 Joni Mitchell, “Woodstock,” Ladies of the Canyon, cd, MCA, 1970. 6 Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life (Princeton: Princeton Uni- versity Press, 2001) explores many of these, looking at authors as diverse as Paracelsus, Kant, Thoreau, and Latour in light of an “enchanted material- ism.” 7 James Lovelock, Gaia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). — 14 — POPULAR SCIENCE AS HOT PHILOSOPHY Their mode of reenchanting may thus be understood as vital in three senses: first, in their celebration of the bountiful and precarious life on Earth8; secondly, in the manner in which they reverberate with and prefigure the scientifically informed “vital materialism” appearing in the twenty-first century; and thirdly, in their orientation towards the most basic ecological concerns — the protection and maintenance of life and living systems. As Jane Bennett writes, “To be enchanted is, in the mo- ment of its activation, to assent wholeheartedly to life — not to this or that particular condition or aspect of it but to the expe- rience of living itself.”9 In reaching out to science in order to reenchant, these authors also insist on its life-affirming qualities and the potential it has to serve as an ally in ecological struggles. This orientation toward and affirmation of life is neither new nor anomalous, although this work does make the claim that this set of popular science writers embrace and direct us to life in unique and unprecedented ways. There is a rich his- tory of scientifically-informed vitalism and cultural production surrounding it. Indeed, the literary scholar Robert Mitchell has gone so far as to locate three vitalist waves, the first coincid- ing with the Romantic period at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century: “a transnational European affair, as British, French, and German physicians, surgeons, phi- losophers, and literary authors struggled to understand the rela- tionship of a “principle of life” that seemed to animate and con- 8 This, as will become more clear in the following chapters, is life under- stood not merely as organisms we immediately recognize as creaturely. Indeed, there is no precise definition of life to be found in these pages; the closest we might come is in Lovelock’s assertion, appearing in Chapter 4 of Gaia, that it is “something edible, lovable, or lethal.” As Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan astutely observe, “Life, although material, is inextricable from the behavior of the living. Defying definition — a word that means ‘to fix or mark the limits of’ — living cells move and expand incessantly. They overgrow their boundaries; one becomes two become many” (What Is Life? Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press [1995], 4). Life, even in the works here that orient themselves towards the natural sciences, is understood more in relation to what it does than what it is. 9 Bennett, Enchantment, 159–60. — 15 — VITAL REENCHANTMENTS nect living beings to the concrete matter of which these bodies were composed.”10 The second, according to Mitchell,