The WholeThe Earth California and the of Disappearance the Outside

The Whole Earth

California and the Disappearance of the Outside

Alex Slade Nextera SEGS VI-IX/Harper Lake Wildlife Viewing Area, Lockhart, CA Calenergy Geothermal Generating Plants/Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge, Calipatria, CA Cogentrix SEGS II/Yarrow Ravine Rattlesnake Habitat Area, Daggett, CA 2013 | Photographs | each 122 × 153 cm | Courtesy the artist

2 Eleanor Antin Going Home from Roman Allegories 2004 | Chromogenic print | 124 × 260 cm Courtesy Anonymous Collection Image Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York and Anonymous Collection

3 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword Navigating in and Bernd M. Scherer with the System 6 Sabeth Buchmann 60 The Whole Earth Diedrich Diederichsen Visual Essay Anselm Franke Frontier: 8 At the Pacific Wall 72 Earthrise and the Disappearance of the Outside Plan the Planet Anselm Franke John Palmesino and 12 Ann-Sofi Rönnskog / Territorial Agency Pop Music and the 82 Counterculture Diedrich Diederichsen From Here to California 20 Laurence A. Rickels 91 Visual Essay Universalism Visual Essay 36 Whole Systems 100 The Politics of the Whole Fred Turner A Thousand Ecologies 43 Erich Hörl 121 Whole Earths, 1968–1980 Norman M. Klein 54

4 TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Limit of The Power of Information Limitlessness Mercedes Bunz Eva Meyer 172 132 Visual Essay Visual Essay Self Incorporated / Boundless Interior Networks and the Long Boom 137 177

“After we knew that the Visual Essay Earth was a sphere” The Earth is Not Whole Flora Lysen 187 150 Musical Stations Medium Earth of the Counterculture Kodwo Eshun 189 159 Installation Views Visual Essay Biographies Apocalypse, Babylon, Simulation Acknowledgments 163 Colophon 192 On the Californian Utopia / Ideology Maurizio Lazzarato 166

5 Foreword —

In the mid-1960s, several years into America’s space came the point of reference for Brand’s project. In the program, a certain Stewart Brand observed that no summer of 1968, he published his first Whole Earth image had yet emerged showing our planet in its en- Catalog, which served as a kind of material platform tirety. Brand began printing badges bearing the ques- for the philosophy of a new age. Rather than expound- tion “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole ing this philosophy in theoretical language, Brand Earth yet?” Then, in 1968, such a picture appeared. assembled a collection of things that represented the The Earth could be viewed as a whole for the first time, new planetary thinking. This world of things ranged it looked fragile, vulnerable, and, above all, beautiful. from everyday objects that were useful for life in the From today’s perspective, we also see that in revealing communes, to advanced technologies, to the books of the Earth in this state, the image gave rise to a con- Buckminster Fuller. The alliance of the Whole Earth sciousness of the age of the Anthropocene. First pro- Catalog project with communal life and thinking result- claimed at the start of the new millennium by the climate ed in strategies that proved essential for the mutual scientist Paul Crutzen, the Anthropocene thesis as- integration of technologies and lifestyles. However, an serts that since the Industrial Revolution, and especially examination of this part of the “archive of the Anthro­ since the “great acceleration” of the mid-twentieth pocene” also sheds light on a danger inherent in holis­- century, humans have altered the environment so tic approaches: their exclusionary character, which extensively as to create a new form of nature. Ex- their integrative terminology veils. The rhetoric of the pressed geologically, humankind has produced its own harmonistic connection between the technological sediment layer, which has spread over the globe. We movement and the holistic philosophy of the communes humans are inscribing ourselves into geological time. masked over the social and political conflicts of the Our activity encompasses the entire Earth, in both its time: racial and economic struggles at home and the temporal and spatial dimensions. Vietnam War abroad. It is perhaps not surprising, then, The Anthropocene thesis draws from two traditions that within months of their founding, most communes that have often regarded one another from a critical fell victim to internal power struggles and clashes of distance. On the one hand, it centers on a develop­- interest for which they had no language. ment that arises out of the interplay between the natu- I wish to express my thanks to the curators Anselm ral sciences, technology, and economic forces. These Franke and Diedrich Diederichsen, who have developed provide the modes of thought and the energies that this project for the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and propel the fundamental changes of the Anthropocene. to the Hauptstadtkulturfonds, which has so generously On the other, the notion of a human-made nature leads supported it. to a new holistic conception of the world in which the nature–culture distinction is erased. This articulation Bernd M. Scherer of a harmonious, unified vision of the world is firmly Director, Haus der Kulturen der Welt rooted in Romanticism. These two traditions celebrated a first great symbiosis in California during the late 1960s and early ’70s, Translated from the German by Michael Dills when a generation of young Americans broke with the urban-based societal model and official United States politics and moved into rural communes. In groups organized on egalitarian principles and inspired by Asian religions, they sought to restore a lost unity of man, nature, and the cosmos. These communes be-

6 Jack Goldstein Untitled 1988 | Acrylic on canvas | 215.3 × 243.8 × 16.5 cm Vanmoerkerke Collection, Belgium | Image © We Document Art

7 The Whole Earth. California and the Disappearance of the Outside — Diedrich Diederichsen Anselm Franke

Space travel produced an image that replaced the The exhibition is also composed of artworks that either mushroom cloud as the icon of our worldview. That deal with the discursive complex of the counterculture image appeared in late 1968 on the cover of the first and the ideological culture that emerged from it or else Whole Earth Catalog; it was the photograph of the Blue were born of that culture themselves in some signifi- Planet. This Catalog was something like the very first cant way. These artistic positions, nearly all of which search engine, that is, a collection of objects, tools, are reproduced in this publication, have their counter- and ideas. It is regarded as the central document and part here in a varied set of essays that pursue historical archive of the Californian counterculture. By studying lines of development, recount pre- and post-histories, the Catalog, one can also observe how the culture offer critical assessments, and take a comparative look of revolt gradually distanced itself from its political at the artistic and intellectual repertoire of the Califor- objectives, while the other central conceptual models nian, countercultural, cybernetic, and ecological ap- of the Catalog—such as cybernetics, ecology, man­ proaches and related phenomena presented here. agement, and psychology—helped to develop the Along the way, we repeatedly encounter many figures standards of the neoliberal era, which took hold in who are, as it were, the “stars” of the exhibition; but we the environmental movement, computer culture, and also meet a number of unusual and unexpected charac- post-Fordist corporate management, and also in pop ters. One of these is the lover of California desert land- culture and lifestyle. scapes Jean Baudrillard, who appears in Sabeth The exhibition The Whole Earth draws on the environ- Buchmann’s “Navigating in and with the System” as the ment and archive of the Catalog and on the counter­ leader of a “French Group” critical of universalism at culture that produced it. And it situates the upheavals the International Design Conference in Aspen in 1970, of the late 1960s within the long history of modernity’s an episode found in the work by Martin Beck discussed colonial and technological expansion, which, after glo- by Buchmann, Panel 2, which quotes a sentence from balization, now led to the “Anthropocene,” the geo­ Baudrillard’s manifesto in its subtitle: “Nothing better logical era marked by human influence, whose concept than a touch of ecology and catastrophe to unite the provides the framework for the series of projects to social classes … .” By contrast, Erich Hörl, in his essay which this exhibition belongs. We organize the themes subtitled “The Process of Cyberneticization and Gen- of this development into seven narrative threads, each eral Ecology,” shows how a notion of ecology which of which yields, in the exhibition, a coherent collection he traces back to Heidegger’s observation of the end of images, texts, musical expressions, and documents of philosophy “by the technological fulfillment of meta­ of all kinds. In this catalog, these seven narratives physics as cybernetics” has become extremely univer- are represented by visual essays geared toward the sal, so that it can only be addressed by emu­lating Félix narratives on the walls of the exhibition. Guattari, among others, and recognizing the existence

8 of many little instances of the concept, the “thousand specific sociotope disconnected from the needs of ecologies.” For his part, Anselm Franke seeks to come other regions but of other classes as well. For him, the to terms with the all-encompassing nature of the pre- pivotal year was not 1968 but 1973, which he regards sent-day “ecological paradigm” as it manifests itself as the turning point when, from the “opening” of China in the photograph of the Blue Planet, and to locate it to the home computer, present-day capitalism began, within a “grand narrative” of modernity that has implic- born in no small measure from the spirit of a cybernetic itly continued since the California of the 1960s and California. 1970s and cybernetics; in doing so, he establishes the Taking Stan VanDerBeek’s ambiguous animated film framework for this exhibition. Science Friction as her example, Flora Lysen studies One figure who is surely a surprise guest is Hannah the influence of Buckminster Fuller and others on Arendt, who is mentioned a number of times; in 1968, essentially countercultural artists who wished to break the same year the Whole Earth Catalog was published, out of the “closed world” but felt they needed the mili- she took the “conquest of space” as the point of depar- tary to do so. Sigmund Freud’s head is opened once ture for precisely the turn that this exhibition seeks again. Diedrich Diederichsen explores similar contra- to describe: the Earth’s new governability as nature dictions in the history of countercultural pop music and begins with the view of it from without, as Laurence its many programmatic statements. Mercedes Bunz A. Rickels, who takes Arendt as his starting point, discovers the continuation of Fullerism and the cyber- discusses in connection with literary and real science netic paradigm of information in the world-observing, fiction about and from California. Here, the history satellite-based approaches of the visual arts of the of the loss of the outside is recounted as a loss of youth 1990s, for example, in the work of Peter Fend and and psychological development in a world of androids. Ingo Günther. Observation from without is followed by Maurizio Lazzarato’s “On the Californian Utopia / empathy and colonization of the interior, which is not Ideology” explains how the Californian ideology of an a metaphor in Kodwo Eshun’s “Medium Earth: Seismic immanent control by economic and communicative Sensitivity as Planetary Prediction,” since he provides megamachines that operate without external interven- actual examples of auditory and tactile observations of tion defines the current global condition of capitalism. the planet. At the end of the Blue Planet’s image stands John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog theorize its sound. It too is blue. the condition of universal control, observation, and influence as a challenge to formulate a new conception Berlin, April 2013 of architecture and planning (“Plan the Planet”). A less surprising guest is Sigmund Freud, whom we have already encountered in Laurence A. Rickels’ Translated from the German by James Gussen essay, including in the person of Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew, and the inventor of public relations. In Eva Meyer’s “The Limit of Limitlessness,” Freud is one of two proponents of an idea of limitlessness as a com­ponent of the sense of self; the other is Heidegger, who used the term “gigantic” to describe the “world (become) picture” with its broad array of mechanisms for control and description. Here, they both encounter Gotthard Günther, the logician who used “number as potentiality” to free himself from the gigantic, and the European cultural pessimism associated with it. In “The Politics of the Whole: Circa 1968 and Now,” Fred Turner, an eminent historian of the counter­ culture, draws attention to the commune movement, which the Whole Earth Catalog sought to address and whose everyday practice and cultural identity it sup- ported. Turner traces a portrait of the New Commu- nalism, which must be clearly distinguished from the New Left; it was inspired by cybernetics, ecology, and Buckminster Fuller but remained largely confined to an affluent white middle class. Similarly, forNorman M. Klein, the California counterculture was always a highly

9 Jordan Belson Re-Entry 1964 | 6 min, color, sound | 16 mm | Film stills © Center for Visual Music

10 Raymond Pettibon No title (For of course) 1997 | Pen and ink on paper | 49.5 × 34.3 cm © Raymond Pettibon Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin

11 Earthrise and the Disappearance of the Outside — Anselm Franke

The Whole Earth: an examination of the contemporary With this distance, we intend to illuminate the difference “planetary paradigm.” The Whole Earth is conceived as between the contemporary and historical character a cultural-historical exhibition, which explores the of potent epochal dreams. We have attempted not only now implicit background conditions and history of this to bring the narrative to life through the images, but paradigm. The project treats the exhibition as a nar­ also in the images, whereby, ideally, they become multi- rative form that integrates images, texts, music, and stable perceptions, which in turn enable us to identify other materials. Art occupies a special place within this, historical tipping points. The multistable image is a not least because it repeatedly crosses, explodes, and means employed numerous times and in a variety of displaces this narrative form. However, the history ways throughout The Whole Earth. of ideas and the epoch’s imaginings are at the forefront. The Whole Earth is concerned, firstly, with the trans- The focus is on the relationship of the present to the formation of the universalistic ideals and concepts expectational and conceptional horizons of the immedi- of global order of the immediate past. Secondly, the ate past. We use the medium of the exhibition, as well image of the Blue Planet, the last universalistic icon, as this book, as an archive space enabling us to enter is placed center stage, together with the history of its the image sphere of a historical period. Through the impact on the “great transformation” of the Western gesture of historicization we intend to establish a criti- system of knowledge and order after 1945—cyber- cal distance to cultural-historical tendencies to which neticization and the rise of computer technology— we actually have very little distance, because—at least whose largest impact was the general rise of an anti- in terms of their consequences—they have become Cartesian paradigm of boundary-breaking, com­ a permanent component of our life-worlds and have munication, and immanence which can still be felt to been absorbed into the new designs of our “environ- this day. Thirdly, it is concerned with the concrete ments” and the now systemically posited framework localization of this history in the California of the 1960s conditions. and ’70s. Here it is the Whole Earth Catalog, first

12 published in 1968 by Stewart Brand, that forms the terculture’s critique are in need of a new interpretation central reference and which played an essential role in within the frame of this bigger narrative. mediating between technological determinism on the Today it appears, to name just one example, perhaps one side and hippie revolt, i. e. back-to-nature roman­ closer to the truth to say that the call for the imagina- ticism, on the other. Furthermore, thanks to its special tion to assume power was not capable of heralding structure as a “catalog” and a counterculture archive, the start of such a regime, but, precisely the opposite, it embodies essential aspects of the American environ- marked the end of a specific phase of colonialism. At mental movement and the rising computer culture no time did the imagination exercise so much power as of the Californian Bay Area, that mixture, which later in the age of representation and its multidimensional gave rise to the so-called Californian ideology and “great exterior”—which in a different form, carried the digital network capitalism—whereby the latter would name of the primitive, archaic, irrational, animalistic, in turn decisively shape the postmodern globalization and undiscovered. Within the context of the discussion euphoria of the New Economy. Fourthly, we aim to show of the “Anthropocene” as a term for a period in Earth’s how the contemporary wave of calls for “planetary” history shaped by human influence, an age in which solutions, in particular to the ecological crisis as brought mankind becomes a geological factor and the borders about by climate change, is identical with the rhetoric between “nature” and “man” need to be rethought in of planetary crisis that found its way into mainstream the context of an ecological paradigm, The Whole Earth discourse in the early 1970s thanks, among other aims to situate the invocations of the “big picture” within things, to the Whole Earth Catalog. a specific historical frame, without which it will become Thus we identify a comprehensive break circa 1968, increasingly difficult to even address the new relations which, contrary to prevailing rhetoric and declared of power and exploitation as such. intention, did not result in the end of colonial capitalist The picture of the Blue Planet established the largest modernity but created the conditions of its endured possible frame and claims universal validity. At an continuity. In the past, the schema of this break was abstract, formalistic level, it is the circle of the whole inadequately described through an exclusive emphasis Earth that displaces the line of the horizon. The circle, on the co-option or assimilation of the dissidence of the like the zero in mathematics, is a pure function and counterculture. It is our aim to show that this is only thus corresponds to the smallest unit in the relation: part of the story. This description needs to be extended the site that since the 1970s has equated the “self,” as and integrated into the critique of modernity at large, a relational function, with the planetary relationship. which, perhaps prematurely, has long been abandoned This transition, and the use of this function, constitutes as one of the grand narratives. The new approach to the continually recurring motif lending this project its an aspect of this grand narrative proposed here defines rhythm. And the exhibition explores precisely that the expansive phase of colonial modernity as the con- historical period in which this equation simultaneously struction of a multiple outside or exterior that is con- becomes “universally” operative and identifiable. The structed and characterized by a series of exports, image of the Blue Planet needs to be historically posi- which means effective transferals, attributions, and tioned and contemplated in order to proceed from simultaneous appropriations of extraterritorials. With- the apparently self-evident description of a condition, in this context, 1968 is not defined by the famous May also built on aesthetic affects (the planetary unity, as revolt only, but by the spectacular pictures of the a consequence of which we are all sitting in the same planet Earth transmitted by the Apollo 8 mission and boat, the fragility and uniqueness of the Earth as an the Californian counterculture, both simultaneously ecosystem and as the fundamental basis of all life), located at this turning point. At this point, a course of in order to advance to the finer nuances of the “state- development reached a tipping point, a development, ment” or “message” of the image, and not least to which, roughly since the end of the Second World wrestle this “text” from its ideological invocation. Every War had already been characterized by the gradual universalist discourse claims to transcend the parti­ re-import and redeployment of that which during the cular, that is, specific local conditions. However, every course of the expansion of modernity was originally universalist discourse is localizable. And it is particular, excluded and defined as the other: the irrational, for- as it is based on a specific capacity of empowerment, eign, affective, playful, exoticized. Such exclusion was a situated speech position. The image of the Blue Planet the pre­condition for the expansion and the exploitation as universalist interpellation is a special case whose of the colonized, although it was always a paradoxical specific localization and historicity is quickly forgotten mechanism. In the picture of the Earth from space, this and negated. “The whole Earth”: that is a frame, which scheme reverses: the expansion into the exterior of does not allow for any exterior and thus claims to stand space now produces the ultimate, immanent planetary outside of history. It promotes a certain anti-historical interior. Perhaps the demands articulated in the coun- position and thus distinguishes itself from its forerunner;

13 Earthrise and the Disappearance of the Outside

the atomic mushroom cloud, with its reference to through exclusions and continues to produce them—and the historical upheaval associated with the nuclear that no less than every previous imperial universalism. explosion of Hiroshima, and, as a symbol for the However, this universal program has employed a collapse of Western civilization, is also connected with new paradigm, now characterized by largely indirect- Auschwitz. The icon of the mushroom cloud radically systemic, media-modulating technologies of culture questioned the universalism of Western modernity, and power. And geographically, this history was largely and with it, its legitimation discourse as linked to the mediated via California, the site at which Western concept of progress. colonial expansion reached its natural terrestrial limit, The Blue Planet exhibits a completely different tenden- and thus changed its direction, from outward expansion cy for bringing about the end of history. It appears to an inner intensification. to transcend all frames, borders, and preconfigured Thus, we come to the exhibition’s other essential frame notions of order, dissolving them in an oceanic vertigo: of reference: the Whole Earth Catalog, published the astronaut Russell Schweickart gave the title “No by the biologist, entrepreneur, artist, and publicist Frames, No Boundaries”1 to his memories of seeing the Stewart Brand. From its first appearance in 1968, the Earth from space. Here, all antagonisms, borders, and Whole Earth Catalog quickly became a popular pub­ conflicts “down below” fade into the background, and licistic platform of the Californian counterculture. Any with them history with its contradictions and struggles. undertaking, which sets out to explore the cultural and And this is not least the promise of redemption, as technological development of capitalist modernity at concrete history promises to dissolve into a universal the transition to the information society, must examine history. However, the negation of all frames is also the the Californian counterculture. And within the param- largest possible frame. Thus, the “Blue Marble” be- eters of the Europeanized, Western culture of moder- comes the ultimate multistable image: the universaliza- nity, which long claimed the identity with history as its tion of the framework-conditions, within a frame that own, the counterculture’s radical critique of the ruling no longer recognizes any frames. The result: a bound- system is something akin to a last great invocation of less containment. the external, whereby, as we will see, all previous forms The Whole Earth is an attempt to reunite this image of this exterior are invoked and appealed to one last with its situated history, against its claim to transcend time, with the paradoxical effect that precisely this all that is particular and historical. For us, weakening exterior disappears, ultimately resulting in a permanent the universalist claims of the icon of the Blue Planet change in the conditions for negation and critique by reconnecting it to the particular ideological condi- through a shift in the entire structure of power tech- tions of its production, means insisting that there is an nologies. exterior to the claim to validity invoked by the image. But what does the image of the Blue Planet have to This is precisely what is at stake: not questioning the do with California and the counterculture? It was not disappearance of the outside from an ecological only the Whole Earth Catalog and the space industry, perspective, but remaining skeptical in respect of the primarily located in California. Above all, it was the associated ideological containment, the use of the affective, unflinching turn to the transgression of icon of the Blue Planet as a unification machine that boundaries, the negation of all authoritarian ideas of appears to transcend all difference and ideology, that the social order and its framework conditions, together ought to be capable of generating boundless consen- with the simultaneous search for the “spontaneous sus. To the extent that the historical and structural harmony” of social organization and our relationship conditions of this containment become explicit, so to the “home planet,” which turned the picture on an exterior, at least in ideological form, becomes an the cover of the Whole Earth Catalog into the icon option again. of the white counterculture. The boundless containment, which in the form of the Within the environs of the Whole Earth Catalog at the systemic universalization of digital-network capitalism end of the 1960s and throughout the 1970s, a unique intended to put an end to history, has a history of its alliance developed between psychedelia and computer own, has main protagonists, has constituted itself culture, between hippies, proponents of cybernetics,

1 Russell Schweickart, “No Frames, No Boundaries,” In Context: A Quarterly of Humane Sustainable Culture 3, Bainbridge Island (Summer 1983): 16–18. See the Context Institute website: http://www.context.org/iclib/ic03/ schweick [last accessed April 13, 2013].

14 Anselm Franke

back-to-nature romantics, and technology worship- objects by the colonial regimes, began to claim unre- pers who shared a common rejection of hierarchical stricted rights associated with the subject status. How- power structures and authoritarian institutions and ever, the outcome of this history, which claimed the went in search for utopian outlaw areas. However, this universal values from the imperial centers and deployed narrative not only manifests the striving for a radical them against colonial subjugation, was subsequently break but also the continuity of a frontier spirit, which overshadowed by the new “universal standards,” which, in California, has come up against its physical-territorial via California, would come to determine the epoch of limits and is in search of new territories: for example, capitalist globalization, both economically and techno- in technology, the virtual and immaterial, and in psycho­ logically. In its wake, and to the extent that it subjecti­- logy. The aforementioned alliances played a decisive fied the entire world by means of a cybernetic neo- role in shaping the concrete form assumed by the animism, it simultaneously began to dissolve the “sub- environmental movement on the one side and digital ject” as the site of universalist demands. The Whole network culture on the other. In many respects Califor- Earth Catalog was an important force in this double nia in general, and the rapidly growing catchment area tendency. of the Whole Earth Catalog in particular, was the site To a certain extent, the Whole Earth Catalog also set where the global avant-garde developments proceed- the course for syntheses, such as that between techno- ing at the decisive tipping point, where the paradigm determinists and back-to-nature romantics, which of the re-import described above, began to form. In elsewhere in the Western world were less able to over­ other words, the site where an apparently irresistible come their antagonisms. That which was printed in epoch of immanentization and intensification began and the Catalog’s pages—information on and discussions which we are still witnessing today. In order to uncover of tools of all kinds, from geodesic domes and garden- the reasons for this we need to question the potential and outdoor equipment to early computers, and not of the “transformation,” which has become a para­digm least, countless short reviews of books on themes such at all levels, tracing the nexus of negation and affirma- as cybernetics, psychology, esoteric, and environmen- tion and its economy. The Californian answer, pursuing tal protection—appeared literally under the motto the great romanticization of the “exterior” as a space of the “whole Earth” and aimed at a grand new synthe- of unlimited freedom and spontaneous harmony through sis of everything, yet particularly technology and the counterculture, placed its trust in the self-fulfilling nature. The decisive point is that this synthesis was power of the positive in the context of an apparently paradoxically always present, not merely in the machin- boundless plurality. It ultimately dispensed with any ery that allowed for the production of the image of demand for political transformation, instead erecting the Blue Planet, but also in the message of the icon: an economy of self-transformation in which either the if the entire planet was understood as an interconnect- re-import was a resource or was banished to the ed immanent system, this must be an always-already domain of the negative as a circumscribed excision, given condition. The synthesis did not first need to be which no longer contained any semblance of the roman- laboriously manufactured by politics and the declared tic promise of freedom. Instead, the negative was enemy of the Whole Earth Catalog, “ideology.” Instead, placed under social quarantine. it comes by realization and a change in consciousness. It is also necessary to ask what parallels existed outside Consequently, nearly every issue of the Whole Earth of these movements, in particular in non-Western Catalog was adorned with a variation of the image countries, former colonies, and “other modernities,” of the Blue Planet, whose publication Stewart Brand which point to further essential dimensions of the demanded as early as 1966 with a campaign inspired epochal transformation in the second half of the twenti- by LSD and Buckminster Fuller (he distributed numer- eth century. However, here it is not, as in the case of the ous badges bearing the slogan “Why haven’t we seen counterculture, the reified-ossified world imprisoned a photograph of the whole Earth yet?”). by “objectified consciousness” which rises to speak Thus the Catalog, like virtually no other publication, again through cybernetic information circuits and drug was not just a mirror of the history of the reception experience, but subjects who, degraded to the status of of the image of the Blue Planet, but a direct agent of its

15 Earthrise and the Disappearance of the Outside

dissemination. One can go so far as to say that every- because it simply no longer recognizes any outside, any thing the image of the Blue Planet has to say to us has otherness—in its own opinion it is simultaneously with- been articulated on the pages of the Whole Earth out alternative and “open” to any form of otherness. The Catalog and its successor. Thus the Whole Earth Cata- negation of the frame is the biggest frame. log is tantamount to the mouthpiece of the icon of the A foray into the archive of the environmental movement, Blue Planet, the cosmic messenger journeying to us the counterculture, and later the computer culture, from outer space, bringing with it news of the “Earth- as can be found in the Whole Earth Catalog, frequently rise” (the term for the overwhelming pictures of the gives rise to a “Anthropocene” déjà-vu: the discourses Earth “rising” from behind the moon taken on the 1968 and problems which are explored with great urgency Apollo 8 mission), heralding a coming “planetary” today in the concept of the Anthropocene are, in large epoch. The “Earthrise” epoch is the consciousness- part, identical with the discourses and problems altering, long arrival of the cosmic icon on Earth, the addressed by the Whole Earth Catalog. So what lies process of the universalization of that multistable image between us and the California at the turning point of the created in the exterior of space at the moment when late 1960s? What has happened since then? Not much, the expansive gaze, previously directed outwards, it would appear, apart from the fact that the rhetoric returns on itself to spread the paradoxical message used today to invoke both the utopian exterior and the that there is no longer any outside. planetary unity has become, in the context of a digital The first news that the Whole Earth Catalog reports, neo-positivism, more sober and managerial, with fewer and whose content it formulates as a prefatory motto, utopian aspirations. That is because the outside has states: “We are as gods and we might as well get disappeared and can no longer be invocated; in the pro- good at it.” If there is a divinity behind the icon from cess, a number of the epic visions of the counterculture the cosmos then it is humankind, who must become the have been transformed in the deliriums of the New Age. planet’s manager, shaper, and “comprehensive designer” Along with the outside and its promises, the taste for (Buckminster Fuller).2 On the other side, everything negation has disappeared in the shadow of the media that is not included in the Catalog (all social struggles staging of the present as now. This has resulted in characterized by a strong negativity), is also excluded the multiple appearances on the stage of history of from the image of the Blue Planet: from above, as countercultural boundary-crossings as pure gestures test­ified by the statements of the astronauts, one can- of transgression, primarily in commercial but also in not see them anyway. artistic form. But at the same time an incredible amount As a result of the Anthropocene discourse, mankind, has happened: the entire background of every such nature, and technology enter a permanent multistable- statement, such political articulations and subjectifica- image relationship, as everything which the prevailing tion has shifted. Without an outside the functionality discourse of modernity used to consider stable back- of power changes: it no longer primarily delimits, in- ground (the planet) has become unstable, and the previ- stead it operates from the center of the media nexus. ous “figure,” the transcendental humanist subject The only utopia that has been handed on unscathed (of history) begins to dissolve into post-humanist struc- from the twentieth to the twenty-first century is that tures and techno-sociological milieus. Figure and of ecology. It is the idea of a future modern civilization background, the variable elements of every multistable that has made its “peace with nature” (Richard Nixon, image, become transferable to the instable, media 1970).3 Apart from rogue warlords and the Sarah relationship at the nexus of active and passive, of mak- Palins of this world, no one seriously opposes the ing and being made. The Anthropocene is a techno- demands of ecology any more. Who would be in favor ecological discourse for the reconceptualization of the of the blind destruction of their own basis of life? anthropos as a planetary relationship, whose universal- Nothing is, nothing could be, and nothing should be ist dimension can be clearly recognized in the per­ more suited to the production of a universal, yes, global manent invocation of the largest possible frames (the consensus, than saving the life-maintaining system entire world), which refuses to be identified as such of the Earth.

2 Buckminster Fuller presented the 3 In his speech on the state of the nation sage to the Congress on the State of the concept of the “comprehensive designer” on January 22, 1970, Nixon stated, “The Union,” January 22, 1970, in Public Papers as a synthesis of inventor, artist, engineer, great question of the seventies is, shall we of the President of the United States economist, and “evolutionary strategist” surrender to our surroundings, or shall (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Print- in his book Ideas and Integrities: A Sponta- we make our peace with nature and begin ing Office, 1971): 8–16. neous Autobiographical Disclosure to make reparations for the damage we (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963). have done to our air, to our land, and to our water?” Richard M. Nixon, “Annual Mes-

16 Anselm Franke

However, on closer inspection, the cause of ecological where. The ecosphere does not know “rubbish,” there utopia, irrespective of how essential its claims, appears is no “beyond” where one can throw the trash. The extremely complicated. The road from understanding outside vanishes a further time. Here it is that outside to implementation is clearly a stony one as it is crossed beyond immediate perception, one’s own horizon, by a confusion of contradictory or openly antagonistic and the isolation techniques in the laboratories where interests, and that, irrespective of whether it is the things were extracted from their relational milieus. United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen or the Perhaps it was not yet completely clear to Barry subjective consciousness of an individual consumer Commoner that this would also lead to the disappear- in search of ecologically responsible principles. The ance of “nature,” at least to the extent that this “nature” result of this fragile consensus, namely, that it is only had been considered external to humankind (meaning: ever possible to realize temporary rapprochements of civilization’s humanism, Western modernity, and agreements, can only be countered by the ideology and instrumental reason), as a passive, material back- of ecology with a greater dose of urgency. There is ground to be formed. This was the Cartesian res an ecological imperative of the present, however, but extensa, which could only function as both conceptual apart from specific rituals of self-assurance, including and practical exterior as long as the fiction of the auto­ an increasingly powerful bio-aesthetic, it remains nomous subject and the symmetrical passivity of matter unclear what its political message is, apart from that of could be upheld on the one side, and nature could be urgency. The universal demands of an ecological utopia assigned the status of an inexhaustible resource and always lead to politics, and that means politics as a quasi-infinite factor on the other. The end of this fic- mediator between partial perspectives and conflicts of tion’s operational capacity manifested itself, not least, interest, whereby, as frequently emphasized, increas- in the Anthropocene concept. For this hypothesis ing numbers of stakeholders and non-human factors stated that humankind’s interventions into the planet need to be considered. In this situation politics attempts had reached geological proportions. The circle closes, to turn to science, which, in an earlier stage of moder- and it is a closure of planetary proportions, manifested nity, elevated isolation and reduction to a success prin- not least in the con­cept of climate change, which can ciple in order to uncover the stable, and therefore only be thought about globally. technologically stabilizable, applicable, mobilizable law­- The Californian answer to the ecological challenges, fulness from the objects of nature. However, science as it formed in exemplary fashion in the Whole Earth has also been gripped by this crisis. As a legitimating Catalog, has not declined in influence since the time of discourse, it is becoming increasingly embroiled in the the counterculture. This answer has its origin in cyber- political conflicts of interest, and thus is no longer capa- netics and consists in the attempt to bring about a ble of claiming exterritorial status. The exterior disap- systemic alignment of society and nature—a nature, pears here too; now science is embedded in politics it should be noted, that is modeled as a system using and vice versa. computers, and which perhaps has more to do with In 1971, the biologist Barry Commoner published the their possibilities than with biology. book The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technol- This answer has proven to be far more effective socially ogy.4 In this book he attacked a series of his colleagues’ than ecologically: it has reorganized capitalism under assumptions which attributed the ecological crisis to the sign of the network, the system, and the construct- “explosive” population growth, countering this with the ed environment. Cybernetics was initially a break- argument that it is primarily capitalist technologies through at the level of the integration of man and ma- and relations of exploitation that have caused the crisis. chine and the predictability and calculability of complex, He also posited a series of ecological principles. The non-linear, dynamic processes. However, this break- first two deal with the disappearance of the outside. through produced nothing less than a new principle of Firstly, everything is connected to everything else, all reality. Cybernetics became a universal discipline to life inhabits one and the same ecosphere; what affects the extent that it made plausible a world composed of one thus affects all. Secondly, everything goes some- systems and communication flows. Here, too, the circle

4 Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology (New York: Knopf, 1971).

17 Earthrise and the Disappearance of the Outside

begins to replace the line: in the feedback concept deed, has not disappeared but has in fact adapted and linear causalities are replaced by circular ones. Feed- reconciled itself with that very alternative (the non- back: the reified, mute, objectified world reacts, begins hierarchical network). In this situation, concrete par- to speak again, even if only in the language of com­- ticularistic demands increasingly fail to add up to a puter systems. By understanding machines, people, counter-universalist claim. Hence such critique today and nature in equal measure as information-controlled notoriously lacks the power to make a substantial systems, information, as the new principle of reality, difference to what it critiques. It contributes against held the promise of leveling all boundaries, once held to its will to the general sentiment that there is no outside be absolute and now recognized as being purely “disci- to the system, no real viable alternatives. Instead of plinary.” “System” becomes virtually a magic word, continuing to work on mechanisms and institutions that with the aid of which it is possible to end the trauma of are capable of investing hierarchical power with demo- alienation from the world and the “outside” of Cartesian cratic responsibility, the generally propagated tenden- subjectivity, together with the trauma of ideological cy towards the non-hierarchical tends increasingly planning and enforced subjection to authoritarian to work against the goals of those who reject authority power. The age of hierarchically organized authority and power. For, as the historical experience, not least and ideologies was geared towards its end. These are of the utopian hippie communes demonstrates, these being replaced by decentralized, indirect forms of phenomena do not disappear, instead they become power and control, and a management now supported absorbed into modulated milieus within which power- by dynamic computer-modeled scenarios. relations are no longer nameable as such, thus be­ But first, it is the psychedelic drugs and the import of coming quasi “without history.” In opposing this state Asian spiritualities into California that certify cybernet- of affairs, we would be advised to recall, along with ics as a neo-animist principle. The great reconnection, Edward Said, that the critique must be a critique of the reconciliation, and lifting of alienation begins, and with grand narratives, narratives that have remained active it the naturalization and humanization of capitalism. in the background, for it is only through them that the Objective reality becomes dissolved in information structures can be addressed. The task is to wrestle flows and relations, and the relationship of the self to these narratives from the background “planet Earth.” the world is also understood simply as the dynamic part or function of this information pattern. Accordingly, everything becomes one in the great network of life Translated from the German by Colin Shepherd and immanent consciousness. The question remains: in what relation? The Whole Earth Catalog plays a central role in the new conception of both “nature” and “technology” to the extent that both are understood, in the context of the universal signs of cybernetic systems, as components and extensions of life on planet Earth. The Silicon Valley ideologues of the globalized, boundaryless network society of the 1990s, many of them associated with the Whole Earth Catalog, saw themselves in this sense as part of a techno-biological system, as part of a super- organism and its evolution. However, in the moment in which such a universalization and unification occurs under the sign of biologicized systems, politics simply disappears. Is it possible to rescue politics and history the other side of this tipping point? Perhaps of funda- mental relevance for such an undertaking is the cri­- tique of the tendency—still active in the long shadow of cybernetics—that sees its sacred goal in the relational dissolution of all demarcations, and thus always ends up emphasizing that everything has always been rela- tional, and as a result, frequently loses sight of the object of its criticism—the mechanisms of exclusion and the historical continuity of suppression. This form of critique ends up calling for alternatives against an old form of power (hierarchical authority), which in-

18 Jack Goldstein Untitled 1986 | Acrylic on canvas | 183 × 211 × 10 cm Vanmoerkerke Collection, Belgium | Photo: Stefan Maria Rother

19 Pop Music and the Counterculture: The Whole World and Now — Diedrich Diederichsen

Planets and Music a few verses by Stefan George. New music and the ideology of the planetary clearly got along well. After In the 1960s, Stewart Brand asked NASA to release all, in Plato’s dialogs, the idea of harmony already images of the Blue Planet. The image finally appeared derives from the construction of the solar system, and on the cover of the Whole Earth Catalog. Already in twentieth-century musicians from Sun Ra to Karlheinz 1969, CBS released a compilation double LP called The Stockhausen sought to work with this cosmic reso- Blues with a color picture of the blue planet on its blues- nance chamber. Herbert Marcuse however, who rock sub-label Blue(!) Horizon.1 African-American blues attempted to reconcile counterculture with Critical music, which at that time was still treated and market­ed Theory, wondered if Schönberg’s negation was not separately in the United States, now appeared under too abstract and the other planets too remote. In a lec­- the banner of a new global model. Here, white, mainly ture given in June 1968, Marcuse saw this program British blues-rock bands like Steamhammer and Fleet- ful­filled for the first time in the pop music and “black” wood Mac appeared interspersed with black veterans music of the present: “These values, these instincts like Ma Rainey, Sunnyland Slim, Son House, and Bessie want to come to voice, to song and rhythm. […] [T]hey Smith, who died in 1937 because in the segregated have become the cry of the young all over the globe. South—Clarksdale, Mississippi—no ambulance was […] [T]hey really want ‘music from other planets,’ very available that could transport black people after a car real and close planets.”2 Practically speaking, pop accident. Now the signified “sad” and the signified music was the first to become a musical practice that “blue” of the English “blue” were suddenly fused both defied fixed cultural and political boundaries, or at least in image and in music. whose ideology asserted as much. This was very im- The planetary idea as a new universalism was also portant for the role it went on to play in the complex of present at the beginning of the twentieth-century’s new the counterculture. Pop music addressed almost all music. In his second string quartet, Arnold Schönberg of the latter’s key positions, often before being formu- let “air from other planets” blow through the music with lated in any other context.

1 Various artists, The Blues, 1969, 2 Herbert Marcuse, “Commencement CBS/Blue Horizon. Speech to the New England Conservatory of Music” [1968], in Art and Liberation: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, vol. IV, ed. Douglas Kellner (Oxon: Routledge, 2007), 139.

20 Telstar: Russian and British Threats The first European-British track to hit number one in the US, however, was not a song by the Beatles or the Pop music emerged as a new multisensory media Rolling Stones, The Who, or the Small Faces, but an nexus, linking TV and portable record players, radios, instrumental dedicated to space travel. Joe Meek, the and advertising posters at around the same time as first producer-auteur of pop music history and a trail- space flight. These are the events of the late 1950s: blazer in his day, released an instrumental single in Sputnik, Elvis, the Soviet space dog, Little Richard, honor of Telstar, the first commercial satellite—it was and pop-related events in other areas: Cassius Clay, jointly initiated by NASA and the phone company the Independent Group, Richard Hamilton, and Andy AT&T—two months after its launch on July 10, 1962. Warhol. The launch of the first satellites coincided with Its official authors were the Tornados,3 one of a number the trial balloons of a new cultural format that tried of semi-fictional bands that Meek used as vehicles for to strengthen the connections among individual mass his, completely newfangled at the time, sound-effect- media by ceasing to leave them to the vagaries of con- based studio music. The first field assigned by Meek to tent and imperatives and making them the business this new actor (and auteur), the producer—and it was of the recipients themselves. The latter now formed a decision with far-reaching consequences—was outer gangs and tribes that could be recognized by their space, the satellite perspective, the view of the whole: hairstyles and clothing. These groups were associated an idea as megalomaniacal as it was successful. Mass with music that, on the one hand, was consumed pas- culture and its horizons had expanded with the establish- sionately, almost religiously, and at home—in the new ment of a global Western youth market. The revaluation suburban architectural novelty called the “child’s of the existing Fordist lifestyle toward a hedonistic room”—and, on the other hand, was confidently carried easing seemed quite promising to a variety of different out into the public space, played at music clubs, on interests, whether regarded as an emancipatory pro- jukeboxes, and on transistor radios. The fans—as they ject or an economic one. On the one hand, the outer were now beginning to be called—were the vehicles space perspective, the cosmos as new frontier, was of this linkage. A new social choreography began that a cover story for the new frontier of the sexual-hedo­ became quite loud and was more and more difficult to nistic and civil rights revolutions; on the other hand it survey. Indeed, to document the festivals at Woodstock was a powerful metaphor that was here to stay. and Monterey a decade later, aerial photographs shot from a helicopter and a wide screen split into three separate panels were necessary. Hey Mr. Spaceman A pivotal milestone of the pop music complex was the British Invasion. Why was it so important? British, A few years later, more and more aliens began to join European sensibilities reached a mass market in the the foreigners arriving from Great Britain. If there United States. They had a defamiliarizing and unifying was anything in the States that corresponded to the effect, because unlike American pop music they were British Beat, it was the ethnically and traditionally not already locally or ethnically defined; nor, however, unspecific and, yet, clearly defined modern sound were they bland and unspecific; instead, they had a of the kind of electric folk-rock played by the Byrds, new and different kind of specificity. The latent dandy- which would soon become the basis for the West ism and social-climbing edginess of the Mods, the Coast Sound and hippie music, especially in California. anti-authoritarian sarcasm, the influence of the legend- On their third LP, which came out in 19664 (the year ary art schools on the young musicians who studied psychedelic and consciousness-expanding motifs there—all of this produced a mixture that was not broke through in mass culture), the Byrds were immediately legible in the United States. It was attrac- already running through everything linked to the last- tive there, particularly since it expressed itself in musi- ing discovery that our world is merely a planet, a lump cal idioms that the British borrowed from the States, of clay, which can be seen from without in an infinite especially black America. universe.

3 The Tornados, Telstar, August 1962, 4 The Byrds, 5D, 1966, Columbia/CBS. Decca. The album contains the songs “Mr. Space- man,” “Eight Miles High,” and “5D,” among others.

21 Pop Music and the Counterculture

Primarily, that meant there could be other beings like us, inhabitants of other planets (“Mr. Spaceman”). Second, it meant an expansion of our range of possible experiences: we could break our ties to Earth and home and fly, looking down from above (“Eight Miles High”). Third, we had to rethink the a prioris of our worldview and think in at least five dimensions (“5D”). Here, the planetary thinking induced by (manned) space flight and the sight of the Earth as a whole, finite, but essentially “addressable” planet, combined with the new accession to power of pop music in the definition of feelings and their relationship to the public sphere. The public fact that young people took their music with them everywhere and consumed it in a way that was visible to others. Further, that they dressed and wore their hair in a particular way and expressed themselves using a particular kind of body language, was strangely connected with the intimate and intensive nature of the music, which seemed to personally address one in a direct and physical way. Structurally however, this relationship resembled the reversible figure of plan- etary consciousness: the visibility of the Earth as a planet, the visibility of the planet as a whole, celestial body, also made visible one’s own gaze. After all, in look- ing at something that was one’s own Earth, one was also looking at one’s self. The structural connection between the trip to outer space and the journey inward to the self, as orchestrated by the final scenes of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, was already present in the music of the Byrds, who in 1966, on their next album, set out for the “Mind Gardens.”5 Here David Crosby celebrated an adventure-filled journey to inner space in just as much detail—the only real difference was that supplying the sonic décor was the sounds of Indian sitars and tambouras, whereas ac- cording to Byrds leader Roger McGuinn, the rest of their music was inspired by the sound of jet engines.

The Whole World Is Watching Various Artists The Blues However, if the seeing and the seen were interchange- 1969 | Blue Horizon | © Sony Music Entertainment able since the Earth had become a visible planetary object, then everyone in the world was watching too. The slogan “The Whole World Is Watching” accom­ panied the demonstrations during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, to which the police responded with brutal attacks. The semi- documentary Medium Cool is not the only instance

5 The Byrds, Younger Than Yesterday, 1967, Columbia/CBS. The album contains the song “Mind Gardens,” among others.

22 Diedrich Diederichsen

of recounting the phrase; the band The Chicago Transit already see before us the end of this world, of which Authority incorporated the battle cry into their song we have made such a mess. “The End”: the song is a “Someday.”6 However, it was not only the injustice in reversible figure, which is what made it attractive to Chicago, but as Jimi Hendrix made clear in his famous Francis Ford Coppola as the Apocalypse Now sound­ dedication of the live versions of his song “Machine track! This end is also the frontier, it is the West, it Gun”—“This is for all the soldiers fighting in Chicago, is the Californian desert. Yet, in the Doors’ next epically ah, and all the soldiers fighting in Vietnam”—the injus- long song, “When the Music’s Over” from their second tice in Vietnam did not escape world attention either. album, Strange Days (1967), which goes on dreaming At this time, the Grateful Dead not only developed into of the end, Morrison becomes more explicit. “What the house band of the hippie culture in San Francisco have they done to the earth,” he cries, while drummer and the surrounding area; it also—without political John Densmore simulates sounds of actual torture: statement—became the musical accompanist of the “Ravaged and plundered and raped her and bit her / entire phenomenon of politicization. They played free Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn / And tied of charge for the occupiers of Columbia University in her with fences and dragged her down.” Civilization New York, the Black Panthers in Oakland, but also for or capitalism, agriculture and instrumental reason— the Bay Area chapter of the Hell’s Angels; the counter­ indeed the mere physical presence of humanity on culture was heterogeneous. To the new relationship the planet—have tortured and raped the Earth, our of seeing and being seen, to the visibility of the whole, “fair sister,” as Morrison calls it in the role of male pro- of the Earth, they dedicated the line, “Wake up to find tector. The Earth is not ours; it is like us a relative, out that you are the eyes of the world.” The “You”— and a friend. Not long after, however, in what perhaps alludes to the masses of young people who had run is Morrison’s most famous lyric, he demands, “We away from home and were overcrowding and stream- want the world and we want it … now!” ing through the West Coast’s big cities, whose curious The world, then, was to belong to us; handed over and drug-shrouded eyes either looked very far away like the contents of a supermarket cash register that or very deep inside. we held up at gunpoint. The world—abstract and infi- However, in addition to the “You” and the “We,” there nite—was close to us and almost within our reach, was also a “They.” If there was a planetary totality and whereas the Earth—concrete and finite—was slipping still no peace, then there had to be a second totality, away, slowly taken from us. The world, however, like a complex that was overrunning the planet and threat- that control of the discourse, which the hippies and ening it with atom bombs. That long-familiar entity was freaks seemed to conquer in 1967, was an instrument hence a totality as well; called “the system,” no longer one could seize. The shock or promise that the world a cybernetic category, but an opaque and impenetrable and the Earth could be identical began to emerge in the undemocratic manifestation of power, for example, shamanistic ritual in which Morrison let the demand as in the military-industrial complex. Above all, however, for the world enter his associative poetic process. After it became clear that this side, too, became more lamenting the Earth and pleading its case in a litany drastic, more dynamic, by dint of the fact that it was that deliberately recalls the ritual laments of the Ameri- whole and concerned and threatened the whole Earth. can indigenous peoples, in which they denounced the crimes of the white colonists, he detects a “gentle sound.” The sound reaches him when he presses his ear What Have They Done to the Earth? to the “ground,” which is now not merely the ground underfoot, but also that of “common ground” and even The first to suspect that with the new freedom the end that of “grounds,” as in one’s reason, or “grounds” for might also be at hand was Jim Morrison, who left choosing a course of action. Then he discerns another open whether he meant that existentially or politically. command: Conquer the world! In order to save the Now that we have to choose our own authority, we are Earth? threatened with the consequence of our acts. Which At this time, Jim Morrison was giving some thought to might simply be the end of the world. Or—politically strategic questions that naturally concerned the whole and ecologically: now that we are opening our eyes Earth, of the world within us, and split them. “They and awakening from our self-imposed immaturity, we got the guns but we got the numbers,” he sings in “Five

6 The Chicago Transit Authority, The Chicago Transit Authority, 1968, Columbia/CBS.

23 Pop Music and the Counterculture

to One.” Another number is mentioned by The Seeds, of LSD to spike the refreshments at the tea party, another band that clustered around a charismatic but the security people recognized Hoffman, and the masculinist figure, Sky Saxon, and an organ. They two guests got no further than the threshold. derived hope from a sum rather than a ratio: “900 Million People Daily, All Making Love.” Jefferson Airplane: The House Band of a Generation

Feed Your Head: Inner Space “Would you like to know a secret? Just between you and me, / I don’t know where I’m going next, I don’t know Timothy Leary is not particularly highly regarded on who I’m gonna be, / Yeah, and that’s the other side of the West Coast, in California. According to Owsley this life.”9 At this time, the Airplane often opened their Stanley—the great LSD chemist, Grateful Dead road- concerts with an insistent, multi-voiced rendition of ie, and Acid Tester—his self-aggrandizing propaganda this manifesto, which they had taken from a compara- was one of the reasons the drug, which was originally tively peaceful coming-of-age ballad by the folkie Fred legal, got bad press.7 There was, however, a surprise Neill. This is how André Breton felt as he wandered waiting on the inward journey equal to the outward view. through Paris in 1919, free of all ties, and wavering Indeed, the view of the planet gave rise to a boundless between loneliness and delusions of grandeur. However, new interior space in which outer and inner cosmos although he felt the same way that every other faded commingled—all that was above—all made famous by Romantic had felt for the previous 100 years, Breton a song that Grace Slick, the lead singer of the Great knew there was no more future for those old feelings. Society, brought with her when she joined her second In the same way, when Jefferson Airplane had made this band, Jefferson Airplane in 1967. pledge of allegiance to a very different life, a fundamen- “White Rabbit” ends with a clear command that brooks tally different life, shouted in a confusion of voices by no excuses: “Feed your head!” Kindly feed your head three singers, they realized that an entirely new situa- with all the mushrooms and pills you can get your hands tion was at hand for which the romantic words of this on! “White Rabbit” is a march based on Spanish- and Beatnik were barely adequate. For it was not only a North-African-flavored melodies that uses the LSD few bohemians who were on the road to that legendary experience, based on its similarities with the mush- other side now—it was millions: roughly half a genera- rooms and stuffed animals from Alice in Wonderland, tion, in fact. This was not just a phenomenon of every- to issue an apodictic call, to expand one’s mind. Every- day life that was primarily visible on the streets of one at that time was writing songs about the psyche- San Francisco. These millions manifested themselves delic experience (“I Had Too Much to Dream Last more and more frequently in an utterly new and Night”), but thus far, no one had thought of making them unprecedented way in the public space of the cities, at normative. No wonder Grace Slick thought she could free concerts, demonstrations, hanging out in parks, “dose” Richard Nixon8 when she managed to wangle at be-ins, and festivals. an invitation to the White House on the basis of having At moments like these, the Airplane struggled, with gone to the same school as his daughter. She brought audibly breathless exuberance, to find words for this as her date the psychedelic student leader and revo­ new phenomenon. For the fact that something unprec- lutionary Abbie Hoffman, along with large quantities edented was happening here: centuries-old experi-

7 See http://forum.lowcarber.org/ but we weren’t interested in a lot of people. 9 “The Other Side of This Life”; it can be showpost.php?p=6064486&postcount Richard Milhouse Nixon was our mark. […] heard on various albums, including Jeffer- =1637 [last accessed February 27, 2013]; The plan was for me to reach my overly long son Airplane, Bless Its Pointed Little Head, also Robert Forte, Timothy Leary: Outside pinky fingernail, grown especially for easy live album, 1969, RCA Victor. Looking In (Rochester: Park Street Press, cocaine snorting, into my pocket, fill it with 1999). six-hundred mics of pure powdered LSD, and with a large entertainer’s gesture, drop 8 Together with Abbie Hoffman, Grace the acid into Tricky Dick’s teacup. […] Of Slick planned to “dose” Richard Nixon, course, from what we learned later about that is, send him on an undesired LSD trip. Nixon, he walked around the White House Because the young Grace Slick had at- talking to pictures anyway, so nobody tended the same school as Nixon’s daughter might have noticed much of a change.” See Patricia, she received an invitation to tea at Andrea Cagan and Grace Slick, Somebody the White House and listed as her date one to Love: A Rock-and-Roll Memoir (New “Leonard Haufmann.” At the last minute, York: Warner Books, 1999), 192–93. the State Department prevented the action: “In our pockets was more than enough pow- dered acid to get a lot of people very high,

24 Diedrich Diederichsen

ences of alienation, isolation, new beginning, and escape, nuclear apocalypse. On the sleeve, superimposed on a which had only ever been lived and described by indi- mushroom cloud, are the double-exposed, phase- viduals and had always been either accompanied shifted psychedelic portraits of the band members. by great sacrifices or made possible by positions of privilege, were suddenly something that visibly elec- trified great numbers of people. The expressive range As Three? of a solitary lyrical subject embodied by a lead singer was no longer adequate to describe it. Choirs were Grace Slick offered still another concrete utopia, and also out of the question, because of their subservience it was considerably more explosive. David Crosby had and uniformity. Many-voiced, improvisatory instru- written a song in which he invited two young women mental music helped, but it was only the voices of a to a three-way relationship in purring and somewhat political folkie (Paul Kantner), an aggressive female dubious tones, but also quite elegantly, with the kind beauty (Grace Slick), and a white soul boy (Marty Balin) of piping, “Indian” delivery that he could manage when all singing over each other that first constituted a his nasal septum was still intact. Nevertheless, as one musically and performatively adequate representation listens to the virile whispering of this baroque, musta- of this new paradoxical condition. This exalted subject chioed figure, one cannot help but be reminded of the in search of a sense of belonging to a larger collective, grown-up hippie pimp played by Harvey Keitel in Taxi a “We-feeling.” Driver. A three-way relationship—the cultural revo­ lution? You’ve gotta be kidding! It was a very different matter when Grace Slick, with her piercing voice, The Crown of Creation: 1968 took over from Crosby and recorded a cover version of “Triad” for Crown of Creation. She gives her two In the following year, 1968, the wait is over. The “We- male lovers a little cultural-revolutionary speech against feeling” is ready, and it has a name: “You are the Crown the nuclear family, and lovingly, but without endless of Creation,” declares the title song of the fourth LP, patience, demolishes their cautious or embarrassed Crown of Creation. “You are the Crown of Creation, petit bourgeois narrow-mindedness, concluding: “I and you’ve got no place to go.” The lack of a goal or don’t really see—why can’t we go on as three?” This destination is suddenly a problem and not just an oppor- time, then, the focus is no longer on a name, on a way tunity. The others, the opposing side, are also becom- of freezing or fixing the unknown, but on the concrete ing increasingly determinate: “I’ve seen their ways suggestion of a new kind of contract—no longer on the too often for my liking,”10 and, “In loyalty to their kind, many new acts but on an arrangement, not only on a they cannot tolerate our minds.” The confrontation is “We-feeling” but on a new, organized cell of possible taking shape. To describe the great openness find “We-feelings.” The three-way relationship, like the build­ a great euphemism. We (here, still “You”) are those to ing blocks of the geodesic dome, was a new formula whom the Earth belongs. For the moment, the others for the internal architecture of the “We”—something are simply still those whose faces we have seen too whose importance cannot be overestimated when often. Who could doubt it? Yet, if anything, the final battle we realize how lacking we are today in images of alter- for the new whole only becomes bitterer. Its stakes natives to the nuclear family. are the image of the final struggle for the totality: the

10 This and the other quotations are from “Crown of Creation,” on Jefferson Airplane, Crown of Creation, 1968, RCA Victor.

25 Pop Music and the Counterculture

In historical reality, many bands turned into communes; as a noble means of survival, a means of survival, how- conversely, many communes took their cue from the ever, that is motivated not by material poverty but by combination of collectivity and division of labor that the intolerability of the others. Not only can we no made up the easygoing social arrangement of the band, longer live with them or follow their rules; we have to even when musicians did not formulate their social actively fight them: “All your private property is / Tar- aes­thetic. At the same time, however, there was a grow- get for your enemy / And your enemy is / We.” An ing sense of unease with the sexism of the new fami- excellent bit of deductive reasoning: oppose private lies,11 in which the tone was set either by the majority of property because its rejection is the sign by which you the guys or directly by male individuals, like banjo player recognize your enemies; since we want to be your Mel Lyman or singer and songwriter Charles Manson, enemies, we take away from you what is most precious who became patriarchal gurus. Meanwhile, the first to you. Not what is physically most precious to you but gay and lesbian or all-female communes were formed. as a principle. The period of the totality was past; now a Some of the most highly elaborated and most puzzling new (also of course, very old) friend–foe distinction was of the new patriarchs were musicians and band- tested. In 1969/70, the same thing was happening— leaders, like Father Yod (1922–1975), also known as and intensifying—all over the world. It was not just the YaHoWa13, and his Source Family. The most influential German Red Army Faction that wrote in their strategic among such figures was Mel Lyman, whom Branden pamphlet, “[that] a clear line must be drawn between Joseph calls an “acid fascist.”12 Lyman started out as ourselves and the enemy.” Even serious movements like a musician in Jim Kweskin’s Jug Band, a folk group that the Black Panthers saw themselves as engaged in a was popular in hippie culture, of which some of its mem- global conflict, no longer just with local adversaries in bers ended up in his commune. Then Lyman was the the police and state apparatus, but with the owners publisher of Avatar, an influential journal of East Coast of the means of production. counterculture, and finally, he became the absolute At the same time, it was a relatively rare move in the ruler over a devoted company of musicians, artists, Californian counterculture to declare directly that and other specialized cultural workers, who all gave private property was the enemy. The band’s friendship him their earnings. Robin Williamson of the Incredible with the Yippies and Abbie Hoffman may have played String Band was one of his admirers, and the two co- a role, however. In the long term, the Californian ideol- stars of Zabriskie Point ended up in his camp as well. ogy would be distinguished precisely by the fact that, Daria Halprin managed to escape and married Dennis from Stewart Brand to Perry Barlow, many of its Hopper, while Marc Frechette participated in a bank representatives not only wished to reconcile anarchist robbery together with other members of the commune and libertarian impulses with capitalism, but sought and landed up in prison, where he died a short time to use those impulses to exacerbate the latter’s asocial later under dubious circumstances. components even further. The split between a branch of the counterculture that remained committed to the commune movement and to free and nontraditional The Abolition of Private Property lifestyles but was also pro-capitalist and anti-statist, and a revolutionary, anti-capitalist branch became per- For their next record, Volunteers, released in fall 1969, manent in 1970, even if it continued to go unperceived immediately after Woodstock—the Airplane, as the because of the stylistic consensus surrounding long political wing of the hippie movement, resolved to strip hair and gestures of freedom and independence. “We the whole undertaking to its essentials. In doing so, are forces of chaos and anarchy / Everything they say they proceeded more rigorously and more radically we are we are / And we are very / Proud of ourselves.” than any of their (musical) contemporaries. “We are Say the Airplane. Yes, we are proud that you acknowl- all outlaws in the eyes of America / In order to survive, edge us as your enemies; the more often you tell us that, we steal, cheat, lie.” In the first line of “We Can Be the better. But the proposition was also attractive to Together,” the lawlessness is only attributed to them counterculturalists who meant the chaos of the market by others; in the second, it is conceded and described and the anarchy of commodity society.13

11 See Vivian Estellachild, “Two Hip 12 See Branden Joseph, “‘My Mind Split 13 This and the other quotations are Communes: A Personal Experience,” in The Open,’ Andy Warhol Exploding Plastic from “We Can Be Together,” on Jefferson Modern Utopian, ed. Richard Fairfield et Inevitable,” Grey Room 8 (Summer 2002): Airplane, Volunteers, 1969, RCA Victor. al. (Port Townsend: Process Media, 2010), 8 0 –107. 158–62.

26 Diedrich Diederichsen

As an anthem and political manifesto, “We Can Be well as its loopy utopias and goals, could only become Together” has a companion piece on the record, as powerful and successful as it did because it largely the album’s title song, “Volunteers.” This too is some- paralleled the political and economic transition from thing fairly unique in the context of politicized pop material to immaterial labor, sometimes as its van- music of the ’60s: the recognition that we are all volun- guard. This upheaval was not just a product of capitalist teers—not in the moral sense—but in the sense that perfidiousness and its systemic logic; it was also an what turned us into revolutionaries was not an easily achievement of the revolts carried out in the name of identifiable objective situation like drastic poverty, greater easing around 1968. As a result, today, in all hunger, or persecution, but something that initially professions and classes there is a kind of individual looked like a sudden decision. True, there was an esca- competition that no longer includes the “rest areas” lation of racist resistance to the civil rights movement of individuality in one’s so-called free time. Instead, in and the everyday racism in US cities; similarly, with keeping with the demands for wholeness put forward the late shadows of McCarthyism in figures like Gover- by socialist as well as esoteric ’60s activists, the com- nor Reagan and President Nixon. Most important, plete and constantly self-actualizing human being of course, was resistance to the draft, which forced has turned into an economic subject and object, which one to risk one’s life in a war that one would have reject- is thoroughly “economicized,” even with respect to ed, even if one’s own neck had not been at stake. All his or her psychology. these issues lent a sense of urgency as well as a clear This historical dynamic could not have been apparent shape to the political. However, as an explanation to the actors at the time however, as they could only for the energetic eruption of those years, it is insuffi- attribute their success, their revolutionary progress cient: that eruption did not remain political. On the and conquest of ever-new domains of what had thus far contrary—and this is something most of its interpret- been stable and static, to themselves. The name for this ers overlook—its primary hallmark was the fact that attribution is “volunteer.” Thus, the song “Volunteers” (except perhaps in two or three German lecture halls) calls for a spontaneous uprising. The word “revolution” politics and culture, position and lifestyle could never is used as a noun here, but it also becomes a verb: be separated. Of course, “voluntarism” is not an ad- “Gotta revolution, gotta revolution,” as the song says equate explanation for this state of affairs, but nor are repeatedly, suggesting that we already have the revo­ widespread legends from the opposite, apolitical pole lution, but it also means that—so to speak—we actively of the movement which maintain that it was rooted “have to revolution.” For, as volunteers, we do not, in in spiritual needs seeking an outlet in a materialistic any event, have to wait for opportunities; we do not world. It makes more sense it seems to me, to seek the need a favorable kairos; we can choose our moment. historical reasons for it outside the horizon of the At the same time, however, the revolutionary situation movement’s contemporaries. has long been at hand. And third, for all the pathos The transformation of a conformist disciplinary society of this revolution, it is always infused with the LSD-­ into the society we know today, where creativity and inspired good humor of a healthy distance from one’s independent-mindedness are utilized as resources own boasts: Marty Balin borrowed the slogan “We and the communitarian models of the hippies are em- are volunteers of America” from a garbage-collection ployed by ad agencies as compulsory techniques of company that, needless to say, was even then already employee motivation, where competition and camara- private and carting away the hippies’ trash in Haight- derie have converged to the point where they are Ashbury. indistinguishable, was on one level nothing but an utterly normal—capitalist—cycle: here, new markets and new pro­duction models and products were being Apocalypse developed. It goes without saying that capitalism didn’t conspire in the dark of night to employ the “cultural Where there is revolution, the apocalypse is not far revolution” exclusively for its own purposes. The unde- away. Already in 1968, undermining (or accelerating) niably anti-disciplinary dynamic of its legitimate as the whole hippie Nietzscheanism, the sleeve for Crown

27 Pop Music and the Counterculture

of Creation shows the band grouped on a mushroom It begins with one hippie whispering to another: “If you cloud that spreads out across the whole area. Indeed, smile at me, I will understand, / ’Cause that is some- this record contains the band’s first monumental thing everybody everywhere does in the same lan- “wide-screen” disaster opera. A couple walks through guage.” Why is communication suddenly a problem? the disgusting shit of the present—“You and me […] “I can see by your coat, my friend, / You’re from the and […] the bullshit around us”14—and takes a merci- other side,” says another voice, in what seems to be a less stance toward a depopulated Earth: “The idiots reference to the fragmentation into antagonistic sub- have left.” The coasts crash into the ocean, crushing cultural tribes which are recognizable by their clothing. all human handiwork, which the song’s protagonists Then it asks, “There’s just one thing I got to know, / regard as an extremely welcome development. Finally, Can you tell me please, who won?” It becomes clear that there is peace and quiet on the planet again; the war in “Wooden Ships,” too, friendly individuals sharing the is over; then, they suddenly realize that they themselves last available food—“You must try some of my purple are dying. “From here to heaven is a scar,” is a final berries / I been eating them for six or seven weeks reminder to humanity. “The House at Pooneil Corners” now / Haven’t got sick once”15—are moving through a is even more ambivalent than suggested by this para- post-apocalyptic world. Yet, unlike in “House at Pooneil phrasing: the expressionist mirth of Van Hoddis’ “End Corners,” they aren’t contemplating the end of all life of the World” combines with heavy, rumbling kitsch with a sense of satisfaction, but taking it as an oppor­ about tears that cannot end the war, and another tunity to construct a new world of long-hairs and primi- sweet, wise LSD animal, Pooh Bear, turns up as Poo- tive socialists. Ultimately, the song is another in the neil. In a manner reminiscent of program music, the series of revolutionary scenarios that includes “We storms of the Day of Judgment snarl and spit through Can Be Together” and “Volunteers.” the high-voltage sonic landscape. Jean-Luc Godard Finally, there is a third destroyed world that is also pre- wanted to shoot an American sequel to One Plus One sent on Volunteers, and which is this time the subject that would feature Jefferson Airplane and be called One of ecological destruction. In “Eskimo Blue Day,”16 the A.M. (One American Movie). He arranged for the band band once again looks down on anthropocentrists to play this song on the roof of a skyscraper in the with an LSD-inspired sense of satisfaction. Now, how- middle of a harsh New York winter. The Godard film ever, not from the perspective of a gratified spectator was never finished, but D. A. Pennebaker and Richard of the world’s annihilation but from the vantage point Leacock documented the scene for their version of of nature: “The human dream / Doesn’t mean shit to a the project (One P.M. or One Parallel Movie, completed tree”—“Consider how small you are,” Grace Slick hurls, in 1972), with Godard filming the Airplane from the once again with sledgehammer force at her listeners, window of another building and half-naked couples including the dreamy Woodstock audience. By depict- recognizing their favorite band from the windows of the ing both the movement of the water and the gliding hotel opposite. In the end, the police arrive and escort of eels and snakes as a sexual, utopian image of a trium- Marty Balin away from the scene. phant nature, there is the suggestion that we can per- haps become a part of it too. All three songs revel in exalted scenarios, infinite Wooden Ships, Barbarism expanses, planetary escalations, and cosmic catastro- phes, always with a few cool types, who know what is Crown of Creation clearly stages the end of the world what, standing over on the other side. On the one hand, as a nuclear apocalypse. The band’s old friend David these were escape plans for a period without or after Crosby collaborates again on the sequel, Volunteers. the revolution, a superior striking-out into vast, over-

14 “You and me, we keep walking around / 15 “If you smile at me, you know I will 16 “Consider how small you are / Com- And we see all the bullshit around us,” understand, / Cause that is something pared to your scream / The human dream / from “The House at Pooneil Corners,” on everybody everywhere does / In the same Doesn’t mean shit to a tree.” From “Eskimo Jefferson Airplane, Crown of Creation, language. / I can see by your coat my friend Blue Day,” on Jefferson Airplane, Volun- 1968. that you’re from the other side. / There’s teers, 1969, but also on Woodstock II, 1971, just one thing I got to know, / Can you tell Atlantic. me please, who won? / You must try some of my purple berries, / I been eating them for six or seven weeks now, / Haven’t got sick once. / Probably keep us both alive.” From “Wooden Ships,” on Jefferson Airplane, Volunteers, 1969.

28 Diedrich Diederichsen

whelming landscapes that were a destination for many ences, and China.22 In the following year, they even went who found that things were not moving fast enough, so far as to accuse Western civilization of thinking or who at least were able to contemplate them in the only of salt, carbon, and water when it thought of tears, so-called “Spaghetti Westerns.” At the same time, while the East thought of love.23 It never got better however, these scenarios also reflected the general after that. Most of the band’s members are still alive; feeling that the only possible alternative to revolution Grace will turn seventy-five next year, and paints. She was annihilation: Socialisme ou Barbarie, as the French recently explained that, unlike her band mates, she group was known and to which more or less every does not have to make compromises because she put self-respecting independent Left, from Castoriadis her money in a safe place early on, when they were still and Lefebvre to Lyotard, belonged. That was not just a all taking drugs. Politically, she says, she stands to corollary of the manifest power of the “We” experience, the left of the Sandinistas. Recently, she christened an which implied the existence of a similarly unequivocal airplane “Jefferson Airplane” for Virgin Airlines. “They”; it was also the reality of a disciplinary society whose status quo seemed to brook no possible com- promise—except in advertising and product design. Exorcising the Evil Spirits from the Pentagon: The Garden is Open

Nostalgia and Esotericism Non-Western thought and the esotericism and holistic thinking that later helped to dress up contemporary The Airplane stayed together for a few more years, forms of false consciousness were not an invention of while their members formed new bands and drifted the late 1960s; they already belonged to the intellectual apart, even as they continued to come together again stock-in-trade of the Beatnik generation whose suc- from time to time. As early as 1970, a first splinter cessors were the Bay Area hippies as well as minds as group led by Paul Kantner inveighed against what it at diverse as the Musical Minimalist innovators La Monte that time called the “Empire”17 on an LP whose theory Young and Terry Riley. But already the politicized Negri/Hardt recently supplied. He also continued to generation of Beat-poets around Allen Ginsberg, and write revolutionary anthems, which he now set a little the sometime Stewart Brand-collaborator Gary further in the future, but not too far. In 1975, he wrote Snyder, all the way to Tuli Kupferberg and Ed Sanders, in 1971, the people in the rural communes would rise who in 1965 would found The Fugs, an anarchist trio up and drive out the governments.18 Grace Slick, who of poets and rock musicians, had an open ear for continued to write the most powerful and aggressive non-Western ideas. In many countercultural left wing numbers,19 now and then became soft. There was a groupings—be it, the Fluxus movement or the anar­- point when she preached to young women not to wear cho-hippies of the West Coast and California—non- makeup, because “you’re only pretty as you feel.”20 European religious thought was also mixed with left wing Here, the rejection of the mask, another gruesomely ideas. In a humorous twist to this complex, The Fugs, successful attempt to reduce hippie liberation ideas to especially Ed Sanders and his friend Allen Ginsberg, an ideologeme, raised its ugly head. In 1973, they all decided, in the name of all deities and a few made-up came together again to invoke the great lineage of the religions, to levitate the Pentagon in a ritual ceremony revolutionaries, including the Americans of the 1770s, and even declared their intentions to the authorities. the Mexicans of the 1910s, and Lenin, but also Jesus Ed Sanders had planned the ceremony in close consul- and Eldridge Cleaver.21 Yet, even the most successful tation with the filmmaker and folk music archivist Harry songs dealt only with esotericism, near-death experi- Smith, the head magician of the New York Beatnik

17 Paul Kantner, Blows Against The 19 “You know my old man’s gun has never 22 For example, “Your Mind Has Left Empire, 1970, RCA. been fired, / But there’s a first time, and Your Body” and “Sketches of China,” this could be, / This could be the first time.” on Kantner/Slick/Freiberg, Baron Von 18 “In nineteen hundred and seventy-five, From “Law Man,” on Jefferson Airplane, Tollbooth & the Chrome Nun, 1973, / All the people rose from the country- Bark, 1970. Grunt/RCA. side, / Locked together hand in hand / All through this unsteady land, / To move 20 “You’re only pretty as you feel, / Just 23 “Ride the Tiger,” on Jefferson against you, government man!” From as pretty as you feel inside / […] / Don’t Starship, Dragon Fly, 1974, Grunt/RCA. “War Movie,” on Jefferson Airplane, Bark, wear no plastic face.” From “Pretty As You 1970, Grunt/RCA. Feel,” on Bark, 1970.

21 “Flowers of The Night,” on Kantner/ Slick/Freiberg, Baron Von Tollbooth & The Chrome Nun, 1973, Grunt/RCA.

29 Pop Music and the Counterculture

scene. The authorities found the desired height of they have created as soon as they settle there. But several hundred meters excessive but agreed to for Hammill, too, it is clear in the end that this flight can a compromise: they would allow the Pentagon to float have no other endpoint but California, since it is impos- three meters off the ground. There is an acoustic sible to go any further than that point when one has document of the ceremony on The Fugs LP Tenderness reached the frontier. Junction; Chris Marker and Shirley Clarke independent­ from each other captured it on film,24 and Kenneth Anger was also spotted with a camera. You Gotta Make Way for the Homo Superior The combination of a humorous, drug-inspired appli­ cation of exotic material, gleaned from books, with At this point, the countercultural complex fell apart. earnestly held political positions was a standard com- David Bowie has repeatedly described one of the ponent of the little urban and literary Beatnik culture resulting complexes, for example in “All You Pretty that survived into the psychedelic and partially politi- Things,” when he deplores or applauds the fact that cized mass culture of the 1960s. As soon as it became “you gotta make way for the Homo Superior.” The mass culture and began to consider the whole on hippies had always described themselves as “stardust” various levels—including the economic and the ecologi- or “golden,” as in Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock,” or as cal—instead of just the concerns of the opposition, “child[ren] of God” (in that same song), as “new chil- responses emerged from the system. The system, dren” (Tim Buckley), and the advent of a new race was which was now no longer merely a counterpart, insisted never so remote a prospect that, in the end, that name on being either defeated or embraced—or held back could not briefly be used by the late Australian version behind a stable border. For example, by those who of The Stooges (New Race). The notion that this retreated to the countryside or planned a new exodus. would lead to the emergence of a biologically new Homo Superior was very much in keeping with a world of (self-)images dominated by aliens, astronauts, and We Are Refugees / I Talk to the Wind other extraterrestrial fictional characters. Neverthe- less, they still covered the range from queer and fleeing In addition to conformism, takeover attempts, and aliens to racist ones—all they had in common was that declarations of war, beginning in the early 1970s they had unilaterally given notice to the universalism there was also a reformulation of the old individualism. of the counterculture in the face of the Blue Planet and Greg Lake of King Crimson sang the song “I Talk to left it behind. The others reinserted themselves into the the Wind,” in which he celebrated the figure of the traditional class- and ethnicity-based categories, whose romantic loner, which was further developed by Tim seemingly natural boundaries remained unsettled, Buckley in California. Both of them drew on musical and but without promising anything in return. At most, there philosophical models that pre- and proto-political folk was still career—Homo Superior—or esotericism. had used to assert its contrast with Fordist mass culture (thereby readying itself for politicization). How- ever, they now used those models to reject the new We’re Only in It for the Money mass culture of the hippies and that of the hedonists with their relaxed alternative lifestyles. In King Crim- Although he was obviously one of its components, Frank son’s version, the dubious and glorified “late man” is Zappa ridiculed the counterculture from the beginning. opposed to the “straight man,” whose features bear a The now proverbial title of Zappa’s third LP with the striking resemblance to those of the politicized person Mothers of Invention, We’re Only in It for the Money, also as well as to those of the familiar, narrow-minded petty came out in the decisive year 1967, which surely, bourgeois. Peter Hammill and his band Van der Graaf catered to a populist reductionism. On the record itself, Generator cast this relationship more dialectically. a sarcastically realistic pandemonium fills in beside In the song “Refugees,” the new human beings pro- the planetary images: the need for love of the kids who duced by the counterculture are permanent refugees run away to “Frisco” is a product of the dead, disem- who must constantly leave behind the livable conditions bodied lovelessness of their parents, above whose social

24 See Ed Sanders, Fug You (New York: DaCapo, 2011), 266, 277–82; also The Fugs, Tenderness Junction, 1968 (various labels).

30 Diedrich Diederichsen

level they have little hope of rising. Here, there is an- Francisco band the Dead Kennedys and their lead other critique of ideology in the search for the “ugliest singer, Jello Biafra, who in 1978, released the single part of your body,” the answer—“your mind”—was “California Über Alles,” which was chiefly aimed at already setting the agenda before any of the counter- the state’s hippie governor and green advocate, Jerry culture’s great disappointments had become fore­ Brown. Biafra depicts a totalitarian state of “Zen fas- seeable. At the same time, Zappa created another cists,” who radiate forced cheerfulness and check to mythology, another counterculture. Comrades-in- make sure their subjects are displaying the mandatory arms like Captain Beefheart, dancers Vito and Carlo smiling face and where the “uncool” are placed in Franzoni, Kim Fowley, and other sarcastic wits camps. When shortly thereafter Ronald Reagan, an- from Los Angeles helped him to formulate this anti- other former Californian governor, became the presi- San-Francisco program: the culture of the freak-out dent of the United States, Biafra sang, to the melody and the ugly LA-flower children that came out of it, of his aspersion against Jerry Brown, the lyric “we’ve who different from their San Francisco counterpart got a bigger problem now.” never became advertising material, and deliberately acted like monstrous figments of the scenarios of cultural pessimism. Translated from the German by James Gussen

California Über Alles

Nevertheless, the reckoning with California didn’t come to an end until the emergence of a completely new counterculture, one that later turned out to also con- sist, in part, of former hippies: the American version of punk, called hardcore, and present in various locations, but already, in the 1970s most emphatically in Cali­ fornia, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Hardcore had naturally adopted many aspects of the counterculture: the independent production of its own music, com- munes, and anarchisms—but hardcore completely dispensed with universalism. Its adherents operated in local cells, developed sometimes bizarre and some- times rational strategic scenarios, and refused to join any larger political context. They hated hippies, and this one resentment was one on which they could all agree, even if to some of them it meant they hated their politics while to others it meant the apolitical withdrawal from those politics. Hardcore existed primarily in nihilistic and radical left-wing versions but also as right-wing virility cults or even as Buddhists, followers of Krishna, and Rastafarians. One of the most clear-eyed and comprehensive reck- onings with counterculture as a precursor of the Cali- fornian ideology—the latter understood as the trans- formation of liberating ideas into the liberation of markets and the liberalization of the capitalist econo- my—and the creator of a servile and escapist ideology of wellness, fitness, and New Age, comes from San

31 HEXEN 2.0 / Tarot / IX The Hermit – Theodore Kaczynski / Unabomber Suzanne Treister HEXEN 2.0 / Tarot / X Wheel of Fortune – Cybernetics Archival giclée prints on Hahnemuhle Bamboo paper | each 29.7 × 21 cm HEXEN 2.0 / Tarot / XI Strength – Networked Revolution © the artist | Courtesy Annely Juda Fine Art, London HEXEN 2.0 / Tarot / XII The Hanged Man – Stewart Brand

32 HEXEN 2.0 / Tarot / IX The Hermit – Theodore Kaczynski / Unabomber HEXEN 2.0 / Tarot / XIII Death – John von Neumann HEXEN 2.0 / Tarot / X Wheel of Fortune – Cybernetics HEXEN 2.0 / Tarot / XIV Temperance – ARPANET HEXEN 2.0 / Tarot / XI Strength – Networked Revolution HEXEN 2.0 / Tarot / XVIII The Moon – Transhumanism HEXEN 2.0 / Tarot / XII The Hanged Man – Stewart Brand HEXEN 2.0 / Tarot / XXI The World – WWIWWIIWWW

33 Philipp Lachenmann SHU-Still 2003/2008 | LightJet print | 125.5 × 167.5 cm | Edition 6 + 1 AP Courtesy Galerie Andreas Binder, Munich | Image © Galerie Andreas Binder and Philipp Lachenmann

34 “Production in the Desert” in Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog: Truth Consequences January 1971 | Courtesy Stewart Brand

35 Visual Essay

1 3 Universalism

What was arguably the most im- pressive demonstration of American power at the height of the Cold War gave rise to a momentous image: the photograph of the Blue Planet. This picture of the Earth became a global icon, one that, for the last time in the late twentieth century, would come to symbolize a Utopia. At the level of universalistic imagery, at least, the Cold War was decided. The Blue Planet seemed to provide, from the 2 world of media-circulated images, symbolic confirmation of Wernher von Braun’s dictum that hegemony on Earth would be determined by the control of space. But the photograph of the Blue Planet didn’t remain the mere tro- phy of a world power; it also set in motion a global environmental movement and called for a new age —one marked by a global unity directed against the current rulers 1 Auschwitz Main Camp Complex – Oswiecim, Poland, and their exploitation of the planet. 04 / 04 / 1944 | 1944 | Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration, College Park The physical, visible Earth warned 4 against its own endangerment 2 Harold Melvin Agnew | Aircraft en route to Nagasaki; shots through environmental destruction of “Bock’s Car” | 1945 | Film still | Courtesy The Museum of Ante-Memorials, curated by Eric Baudelaire | © Hoover Institution and war. The image showed a planet Archives, Stanford University, Stanford, California capable of overcoming old demar- 3 View of Earth from a camera on V2 #13, 8 – 8 × 10 Black cations in favor of a new connected- & White Photographs taken from a V2 by camera installed ness, and that held the promise of by Mr. Clyde Holliday | 1946 | © 2012 JHU / APL. All rights leaving behind national and ideologi- reserved. cal conflicts. 4 Wayne Miller | Wayne Miller’s wife and children in front of a The image of the Blue Planet re­ picture of the H-bomb at “The Family of Man” exhibition | 1955 | © Wayne Miller / Magnum Photos / Agentur Focus verses the relationship between in- terior and exterior space. As the expansive view into outer space and driven by the ideology of pro- turns 180 degrees, it focuses back gress. Despite being a product of in on the planet from which it was the space age, which continued, originally cast. The planet now ap- undaunted, under the banner of sci- pears as the horizon of our view, and ence and progress, the Blue Planet is paradoxically both that which we photograph appeared to break behold and the place from which we with this ideology and its historical behold it. It appears to us as a com- frame of reference. plete entity upon which we can gaze from outside, then shows us as a part of a system in which all things are interconnected. It calls forth a 1 “In Central Europe, the sky is new planetary consciousness, an mostly overcast; there is a clear view 5 6 awareness of the “big picture.” The for only some 30 days in a year. On Earth as a whole has moved into 4 April 1944, the sky was cloudless. the field of a new and permanent vis- Previous rainfall had bound the dust ibility and is now part of a global, in the air. American aircraft had taken media-defined present. off in Foggia, Italy, and were headed The power of the Blue Planet as an for targets in Silesia: factories for icon was enough to displace another synthetic petrol and rubber, called image that had defined the global Buna. While approaching the facili- situation after 1945: the mushroom ties of the IG Farben factory, which cloud. This photograph of a nuclear were still being built, an airman trig- explosion had carried forward a gered his camera, taking a picture memory of the emergence of a new of the Auschwitz concentration camp. world order from the Second The first picture of Auschwitz, taken 7 World War. The omnipresent Cold from an altitude of 7,000 meters. War threat of nuclear holocaust was The pictures taken in Silesia in April heightened by the memory of the ’44 were brought to Medmenham catastrophic connection between in England for evaluation. The evalu- modern technology, mass psychol- ators discovered a power plant, a ogy, and the terror of fascism. carbide factory, a factory, still under The atom bomb confronted us with construction, for producing Buna, the destructive power of modern and one for benzine hydrogenation. soci­eties and their technology. If no They had not been instructed to look image was capable of representing for the camp, so they didn’t find it.” the evil of the Shoah, the mushroom Harun Farocki, voice-over text from the film Images of the cloud filled that void and stood as World and the Inscription of War, West Germany 1989. 8 an icon of absolute dread, one that was soon integrated into everyday life as an image of the absolute limit 2 This image, taken from an American ob- of civilization. At the same time, the servation plane, shows the B-29 bomber atom bomb served as a symbol of Bock’s Car making three circles over Western civilization’s on­going claim Kokura on August 9, 1945, in search of a to power—legitimized by modern hole in the unexpected cloud cover that science’s uni­versal claim to truth was making it impossible to visually identify

36 UNIVERSALISM

9 ; ?

<

:

=

@

>

? 5 9 Distant Early Warning Line | 1953 | Courtesy The Porticus U. G. Sato | Where next | 1985 | Courtesy Center for “The 36-Hour War” | in Life Magazine, November 19, 1945 Centre, Beatrice Technologies, Inc., Subsidiary of Beatrice the Study of Political Graphics, Los Angeles | © U. G. Sato : Companies, Inc. 6 Charles & Ray Eames | Glimpses of the U.S.A. | 1959 | @ Herman Kahn | Thinking About the Unthinkable | Cover | Installation View | © Eames Office (eamesoffice.com) First Geodesic radome, 30 ft. in diameter. Withstood 182 miles New York: Avon Books, 1962 per hour winds, and refused to ice in a 2-year top-of-Mt. Washington test. | 1950s Mt. Washington, New Hampshire | Courtesy 7 Herman Kahn | On Thermonuclear War | Cover | Princeton: ;< American child’s drawings of Sputnik, by a female, aged 13 | The Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller Princeton University Press, 1960 1957 | Courtesy Rhoda Bubendey Métraux Papers, 8 “The Earth is the cradle of reason, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Edward Steichen | The Family of Man | Cover | New York: => The Museum of Modern Art, 1955 but one cannot live in a cradle Balinese child’s drawings of Sputnik, by a female / a male, forever.” both aged 13 | 1957–58 | Courtesy Margaret Mead Papers, 9 “In the panorama above, looking Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky, pioneer of eastward from 3,000 miles above cosmonautic theory. the Pacific, LIFE’s artist has shown “But it is a curve each of them feels, the U.S. as it might appear a very few unmistakably. It is the parabola. They “Since Sputnik, the earth has been years from now, with a great shower must have guessed, once or twice photographs were taken from a distance wrapped in a dome-like blanket or of enemy rockets falling on 13 key —guessed and refused to believe— of 105 kilometers from Earth. The V2 is bubble. Nature ended.” U.S. centers. Within a few seconds that everything, always, collectively, generally regarded as the first manmade Marshall McLuhan, Culture Is Our Business atomic bombs have exploded over had been moving toward that purified object to enter space and was the first (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), 196. New York, Chicago, San Francisco, shape latent in the sky, that shape rocket with a built-in camera. After 1945, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boulder of no surprise, no second chances, former SS member Wernher von Braun Dam, New Orleans, Denver, no return. Yet they do move forever was declared the father of the American Washington, Salt Lake City, Seattle, under it, reserved for its own black- space program. Von Braun convinced the “Interplanetary travel is now the only Kansas City and Knoxville.” and-white bad news certainly as US military command that the question of form of ‘conquest and empire’ com- Unknown author, “The 36-Hour War” in Life Magazine if it were the rainbow, and they its global power would be decided in space. patible with civilization.” (November 19, 1945): 28 f. children …” In addition to countless scientific articles, Arthur C. Clarke, Voices From the Sky: Previews of the Coming Space Age (London: Gollancz, 1961), 3. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow he wrote science fiction and collaborated (New York: Viking, 1973), 249. with Disney and other major media corpo- presented in a neutral tone. The exhibition rations in popularizing space travel among was centered on themes shared by all of the American public. humanity, such as birth, ritual, work, and — “Space, like freedom, is a limitless, death. Critics felt that its universalistic “Nature does not know extinction; all never-ending frontier on which language ignored historical questions, and it knows is transformation.” 4 “The Family of Man” exhibition opened our citizens can prove that they are that it obscured and depoliticized the Wernher von Braun, “Why I Believe in Immortality,” quoted at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in indeed Americans.” political-­economic hierarchies and differ- in Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (New York: Viking, 1955 and was subsequently shown world- Ronald Reagan in an address at the National Space Club ences in global society. The large-format 1973). wide as part of America’s international dip- on March 29, 1985, quoted in John M. Logsdon, image of the US nuclear test Ivy Mike “Outer Space and International Space Policy: The Rapidly lomatic efforts during the Cold War. By Changing Issues” in International Space Policy: Legal, (1952), the sole color photograph in the the target. Bock’s Car eventually diverted 1962, over nine million people had seen the Economic, and Strategic Options for the Twentieth Century exhibition, was shown in New York but and Beyond, D. S. Papp, J. R. McIntyre, eds. (New York: to the designated secondary target: exhibition, from Japan to Moscow, from Quorum Books, 1987), 31. not in Japan. Nagasaki. Berlin to Guatemala City. The program- — — matic title expressed the new “universal values” cham­pioned by the West. The exhi- and human rights while at the same time : In 1959, in a unique reciprocal propa- 3 The first known photographs of Earth bition took a stand against racism and pos- acknowledging cultural diversity. The ganda action campaign, the Soviet Union taken from outer space came from V2 tulated a fundamental unity of humanity ideology of race and the develop­mental and the United States exchanged exhibi- rockets tested in New Mexico after being that transcended cultural, geogra­phical, stages of civilization, traditionally used to tions. The “American National Exhibition” brought, along with their inventors, from and social differences. It proclaimed the describe and legitimize differences, was that traveled to Moscow was held in a defeated Nazi Germany to the USA. The humanistic universalism of democracy replaced here by scientific concepts geodesic dome designed by Buckminster

37 Visual Essay

A C

B

A Chesley Bonestell | The Wastes of Mercury | circa 1953–54 | Reproduced courtesy of Bonestell LLC “One afternoon, probably in March B Jud Yalkut | “Why Haven’t We Seen a Photograph of in 1966, dropping a little bit of LSD, the Whole Earth yet ?” | in Tulane Drama Review, Vol. 11, No.1, I went up onto the roof and sat shiver- Fall 1966 | Courtesy Jud Yalkut ing in a blanket sort of looking and C Ted Streshinsky | Stewart Brand plays a version of Earth Ball thinking… And so I’m watching the Fuller. Inside it, a multichannel film instal­ at the New Games, an event he organized | The object of this buildings, looking out at San Francis- game is to see how long a person can balance atop the ball | “‘The boundless frontier has been lation by the architects Charles & Ray Marin County, October 1973 | © Ted Streshinsky / CORBIS co, thinking of Buckminster Fuller’s opened. Man’s horizon now reaches Eames first showed modern America from notion that people think of earth’s re- D Stewart Brand (Ed.) | Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools | to infinity,’ proclaimed the Washington a bird’s-eye perspective, then invited the sources as unlimited because they Fall 1968 | Courtesy of Department of Special Collections Evening Star. ‘It boggles the mind,’ viewer inside the American household. and University Archives, Stanford University and Stewart Brand think of the earth as flat. I’m looking at said the Los Angeles Times. ‘Man, One event in particular etched itself into San Francisco from 300 feet and 200 after thousands of years of life on this historical memory: the famous “Kitchen micrograms up and thinking that I can planet, has broken the chains that Debate” between President Nixon and see from here that the earth is curved. I bind him to Earth.’” Premier Khrushchev on the relative “I was a big fan of NASA and of the had the idea that the higher you go the Robert Poole, Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth achievements of the two systems of gov- ten years of space exploration more you can see earth as round. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 6. ernment and the advantages of their that had gone up to that point, and There were no public photographs of respective ways of life, held in an exhibition there we were in 1966, having seen the whole earth at that time, despite model of a modern American kitchen. a lot of the Moon and a lot of hunks the fact that we were in the space pro- The immersive multiscreen installation of the Earth, but never the complete missiles. The Bell Telephone Company, gram for about ten years. I started and the dome architecture were to be- mandala… it was a bit odd that for Western Electric, and MIT all contributed scheming within the trip. How can come standard pieces in the experimental ten years, with all the photographic to the project, which included computer I make this photograph happen? repertoire of artistic avant-gardes and apparatus in the world, we hadn’t technologies that had been developed Because I have now persuaded myself countercultures. turned the cameras that 180 degrees under the leadership of systems theorist that it will change everything if we have — to look back.” Jay Forrester and would become the this photograph looking at the earth Stewart Brand, Smithsonian National Air and basis for network technologies as well as from space.” ;<=> These children’s drawings were Space Museum, Airspace Blog, http://blog.nasm.si. communication and game theory. The Stewart Brand, quoted in Fred Turner, From Counterculture­ edu/2009/12/ [last accessed May 1, 2013]. commissioned by anthropologist Margaret to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, The Whole Earth DEW comprised over fifty stations, each of Mead in several countries, including Bali Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism which housed a radar within a Buckminster and the USA, immediately after the launch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 69. Fuller-designed geodesic structure of the first satellite into space. In response to protect it from the extreme weather “The famous Apollo 8 picture of to the “Sputnik Shock,” Margaret Mead, conditions. Earthrise over the Moon that estab- known to the American public through her the beginning of the “Space Age,” while the — lished our planetary facthood and contro­versial work on sexuality, initiated R-7 carrier rocket gave the Soviets the beauty and rareness (dry moon, an “emergency Sputnik survey” meant to capability to strike US territory with inter- A Planetary Landscapes barren space) and began to bend record raw data on people’s reactions to continental nuclear missiles. human consciousness.” the Soviet triumph. The satellite Sputnik 1 — Publishers in the 1950s looked to creative, The legend of the “Earthrise” picture as published in was launched on October 4, 1957, from the inside front cover of the Last Whole Earth Catalog, yet supposedly scientifically plausible, illus- the Soviet Union’s rocket testing facility in ?@ “Distant Early Warning” Line Project: June 1971. trations to satisfy the imaginations of sci- the desert near Tyuratam in the Kazakh In 1957, the USA installed a radar system ence fiction readers. And there were in- Republic. The launch of Sputnik 1 marked spanning the Arctic to detect Soviet creasing numbers of illustrators who, on a

38 UNIVERSALISM

D

39 Visual Essay

E I J

F K

J Chris Marker | The Sixth Side of the Pentagon | 1967 | Film still | © Les Films du Jeudi

K John Coney | Sun Ra: Space is the Place | 1974 / 2003 | G Film still | Courtesy David Katznelson and Jim Newman

K “Space is the Place exists in a mul- tiverse of genres—a militant blax- ploitation free-jazz absurdist sci-fi cosmodrama. It seems to have begun as a double homage, Jim Newman’s desire to document Ra’s visionary music merging with John Coney’s love of fifties low budget science fiction movies like First Space Ship on Ve- nus. Ra’s lifetime vision of expanding the cosmic consciousness of African Americans was superimposed on the street life of the early seventies H Oakland ’hood. ‘It was a time of dis­ location,’ recalls Coney, placing the film in the context of the Black Pan- ther movement and the radical para- noia of the Vietnam years. Afro-­ Futurist ritual drama blended— explosively—with the iconography of Shaft. […] The energy music of Ra’s ‘tone scientists’ drives his ship. In the control room he boots up his Moog over rumbling baritone saxes and percussion. The band members I Ed Sanders | Structure for the The idea for the Whole Earth Catalog was are a swirl of robes and hieratic Exorcism of the Pentagon | 1967 | Courtesy described by Brand as a community meet- Ed Sanders and Jed Birmingham helmets—Nubian or Neptunian?— ing-place in print that would provide ac- as they churn up the polyrhythms. cess to a variety of “useful” tools, and that The ship heads earthwards, eyes would owe nothing to the producers and flashing, transmitting its message E Haskell Wexler | Medium Cool | 1969 | Film still | everything to the users. Each listed item across California: ‘Calling Planet © Paramount Pictures. All rights reserved. could be ordered directly at the source or Earth!’” F Grateful Dead | Eyes of the World | live at Winterland Arena | via the Whole Earth Catalog, which be- Paul A. Green, “Space is the Place,” 2005, 1974 | Film still from The Grateful Dead Movie | © 1974, 1977 Paul Ehrlich (author of The Population came, through the feedback of readers, & 2004 Grateful Dead Productions. | used with permission from http://www.culturecourt.com/Br.Paul/media/ Rhino Entertainment Company. All rights reserved. Bomb, 1968) after serving in the army. He a self-organizing system. The Whole Earth SpaceisthePlace.htm [last accessed May 1, 2013] went on to become a member of the artist Catalog started as a publication designed GH Raymond Pettibon | The Whole World is Watching – Weatherman ’69 | 1989 | 122 min, color, sound | Film still | group USCO in the 1960s, which was particularly for the hippie commune move- Courtesy the artist, Regen Projects, Los Angeles and pioneering happenings and psychedelic ment, but its unique blend of systems the­ conceive of themselves as part of a larger, Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin multimedia performances across America. ory, psychedelia, mysticism, technology, epochal trans­formation. He then became a promi­nent member of ecology, and Do-It-Yourself ethos turned it — professional basis and in dialog with (popu- Ken Kesey’s legendary Merry Pranksters into a widely popular phenomenon, bridg- lar) science, devoted themselves to the re- and founded the “Trips Festival” in San ing all sorts of ideological divides. The cat- E Ever since the Earth as a whole has be- alistic representation of interstellar and Francisco, which played a key role in popu- alog holds an important role historically in come a visible planetary object, seeing and intergalactic situations. The best-known of larizing psychedelia and hippie culture. In reconciling environmentalism with utopian being seen can be reversed, meaning that these was the painter and draftsman 1966, Brand began campaigning for NASA approaches to tech­nology, and is often everybody on Earth also is an observer Chesley Bonestell, who sparked the imagi- to release a photograph of the whole seen as an analog precursor to the Inter- of everything. When the police moved bru- nation of the young Stewart Brand, among Earth. The photograph appeared two net. Brand declared in 1968 that his vision tally against demonstrators at the 1968 others. Innumerable science fiction films years later on the cover of the first Whole was to create a database through which Democratic National Convention in Chi- and (popular) scientific renderings were Earth Catalog founded and edited by “anyone on Earth can pick up a telephone cago, the events were accompanied by the inspired by Bonestell. His specialty was the Brand. and find out the complete information on slogan “The Whole World Is Watching.” portrayal of familiar celestial bodies, such — anything.” This is taken up in the semi-documentary as planets from our solar system, from Every issue of the catalog between 1968 film Medium Cool (1969), as well as by the extraordinary perspectives (as seen from D When the first Whole Earth Catalog and 2000 carried an image of Earth seen band The Chicago Transit Author­ity, who one of their moons). appeared in 1968, the “Earthrise” pictures from space. The image of Earth not only integrated recordings of the demonstra- — from the Apollo 8 mission had not yet been gave the catalog its title, it was the pro- tion rallying cry into their song “Someday” taken. The image on the cover was a color grammatic, if sometimes vague, framework (1969). And it wasn’t only the injustice in C Stewart Brand, seen in this picture reproduction of the 1967 ATS-III weather that allowed systems thinkers, environ- Chicago that the eyes of the world were meditating on a miniature globe in Marin satellite TV picture of Earth, taken in mentalists, space enthusiasts, New Age fixed on but also the injustice in Vietnam, County, 1973, had studied ecology with November 1967. mystics, and computer engineers alike to as Jimi Hendrix made clear in his famous

40 UNIVERSALISM

L O

P These are the Magic Eyes of Victory! Victory for Peace. Money made the Pentagon, melt it! Money made the Penta- M N gon. In the name of the generative powers of Priapus, in the name of Ourouriouth Iao Sabaoth Ereschigal, we call upon the malevolent Demons of the Pentagon to rid themselves of the Cancerous, Tumorous War-Death. Every Pentagon general lying alone at night with a tortured psyche— Out, Demons, Out! Out, Demons, Out! Out, Demons, Out! Out, Demons, Out! Out, Demons, Out! Out, Deeeeeemooooon! Out Deeeeemoooon! Out, Demons, Out! Out, Demons, Out! Out, Demons, Out! Out, Demons, Out! Out, Demons, Out! O Beyond War | No Frames. No Boundaries | 1984 | Film still | Courtesy Beyond War Out, Demons, Out! Out, Demons, Out! In the name of the Most Sacred of Names, P Jefferson Airplane | Crown of Creation | 1968 | Cover | (P) 1968 Sony Music Entertainment Out, Demons, Out! Out, Demons, Out! Out, Demons, Out! Fugs’ LP Tenderness Junction (1968) and — captured on film by Chris Marker (pictured here) and Shirley Clarke. P “Crown of Creation” Ed Sanders invoked the gods with the L Robert Nye | NASA Langley Office of Public Affairs team report the success of Lunar Orbiter I at a press conference | following words: You are the Crown of Creation October 6, 1966 | Courtesy NASA In the name of the Amulets of Touching, You are the Crown of Creation M The Mother Earth News | Vol. 1, No. 1, January 1970 | Seeing, Groping, Hearing, and Loving, and you’ve got no place to go. Reprinted with permission by MOTHER EARTH NEWS, we call upon the powers of the Cosmos to www.MotherEarthNews.com. All rights reserved. N United States Post Office Department | 6-Cent Apollo 8 Commemorative Postage Stamp | May 5, 1969 protect our ceremonies. In the name of Soon you’ll attain the stability you strive for Zeus, in the name of Anubis, God of the in the only way that it’s granted Dead, in the name of all those killed for in a place among the fossils of our time. “The semi-official Soviet congratu­ GH In 1988, Raymond Pettibon made four causes they do not comprehend—in the lation declared that the voyage feature films on video, each lasting just un- name of the dead soldiers who were killed In loyalty to their kind of Apollo 8 ‘goes beyond the limits der two hours, in which he had protago- in Vietnam because of a Bad Karma, they cannot tolerate our minds. of a national achievement and marks nists of the Los Angeles post-punk under- in the name of Seaborne Aphrodite, In loyalty to our kind a stage in the development of the ground culture, including Mike Watt, in the name of Magna Mater Deum Idea, we cannot tolerate their obstruction. universal culture of Earthmen.’” Dez Cadena, and Mike Kelley, recreate in the name of Dionysus, Zagreus, Jesus, Robert Poole, Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 6. central counterculture happenings. The Iao Sabaoth, Yahweh the Unnameable, Life is Change Whole World is Watching: Weatherman the Quintessential Finality, the Zoroastrian How it differs from the rocks ’69 is a fictional portrayal of the day-to-day Fire, in the name of Hermes, in the name I’ve seen their ways too often for my liking existence of the armed group Weather- of the Beak of Thoth, in the name of the New worlds to gain dedication of “Machine Gun” at live per­ man. The whole world viewing the injustice Scarab, in the name of the Tyrone Power […] formances: “This is for all the soldiers becomes both the whole world that the Pound Cake Society In the Sky, in the name fighting in Chicago, uh, and all the soldiers clandestine group assumes is watching of Ra, Osiris, Horus, Nephthys, Isis, Jefferson Airplane fighting in Vietnam.” them, and the scope of guilty conscience Harpocrates, in the name of the mouth “Crown of Creation” — of the revolutionary vis-à-vis his revolu- Ouroboros, we call upon the Spirits to 1968 tionary cause. Raise the Pentagon from its Destiny and Lyrics by Paul Kantner F During this period, the Grateful Dead — Preserve it—In the naaaaaaaame— © EMI Music Publishing advanced to become not only the house in all the names! — band of the San Francisco Bay hippie cul- IJ The Fugs, a New York band made up Out, Demons, Out! Out, Demons, Out! ture, but also—without overt political of beatnik poets and counterculture ac­ Demon, Out! Out, Demons, Out! “We’d spent all our time on Earth statements—the musical accom­paniment tivists including singer and lyricist Ed Out, Demons, Out! Out, Demons, Out! training about how to study the Moon, to the overall politicization taking place at Sanders, here together with their friend Out, Demons, Out! Out, Demons, Out! how to go to the Moon; it was very lunar the time. They gave free concerts for the Allen Ginsberg, resolved in the name of Out, Demons, Out! Out, Demons, Out! orientated. And yet when I looked up Columbia University occupiers in New all deities and a number of invented reli- Out, Demons, Out! Out, Demons, Out! and saw the Earth coming up on this York, the Black Panthers in Oakland, and gions, to levitate the Pentagon in a ritual Out, Demons, Out! Out, Demons, Out! very stark, beat-up lunar horizon, an the Bay Area chapter of the Hell’s Angels; ceremony. They even notified the authori- Out, Demons, Out! Out! Out! Out! Out! Earth that was the only color that we the counterculture is heterogeneous. ties of their undertaking. Ed Sanders Out! Out, Demons, Out! could see, a very fragile looking Earth, In dedication to the new re­lationship to planned the ceremony in close collabora- For the first time in the history of the a very delicate looking Earth, I was seeing and being seen, to the visibility tion with Harry Smith, filmmaker, folk Pentagon, there will be a grope-in within immediately almost overcome by the of the whole, to the Earth, they sing the line music archivist, and master sorcerer of a hundred feet of this place. Seminal thought that here we came all this way “Wake up to find out that you are the eyes the New York beatnik scene. Deeming the Culmination in the spirit of Peace and to the Moon, and yet the most signifi- of the world.” You—the young runaways intended 300 feet excessive, the authori- Brotherhood. A real Grope for Peace. cant thing we’re seeing is our own home who roamed West Coast cities, their drug- ties instead agreed to allow the Pentagon All of you who want to protect this rite of planet, the Earth.” clouded yet in­quisitive eyes gazing far into to be levitated to a height of ten feet. The love may form a circle of protection around Bill Anders, Apollo 8 astronaut quoted in Robert Poole, the distance, or deep inside. ceremony was acoustically documented on the lovers. Circle of Protection! Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 2. — 41 Visual Essay

Q

Q Blue Marble, 1972 | Courtesy NASA / Goddard Space Flight Center | scientific Visualization Studio O “You look down there and you that means anything to you. All of his- That contrast, the mix of those two can't imagine how many borders and tory and music and poetry and art and things, really comes through. “Raging nationalistic interests, boundaries you crossed again and war and death and birth and love, And you think about what you're expe- famines, wars, pestilences don’t again and again. And you don't even tears, joy, games, all of it is on that lit- riencing and why. Do you deserve this ? show from that distance. […] see 'em. At that wake-up scene—the tle spot out there that you can cover This fantastic experience ? Have you We are one hunk of ground, water, air, MID-EAST—you know there are hun- with your thumb. earned this in some way ? Are you sep- clouds, floating around in space. From dreds of people killing each other over And you realize that that perspective arated out to be touched by God to out there it really is ‘one world.’” some imaginary line that you can't see. … that you've changed, that there's have some special experience here Frank Borman, “A Science Fiction World—Awesome, From where you see it, the thing is a something new there. That relation- that other men cannot have ? You know Forlorn Beauty” in Life Magazine (January 1969): 29. whole, and it's so beautiful. And you ship is no longer what it was. And then the answer to that is No. There's noth- wish you could take one from each side you look back on the time when you ing that you've done that deserves in hand and say, ‘Look at it from this were outside on that EVA and those that, that earned that. It's not a spe- perspective. Look at that. What's im- few moments that you had the time cial thing for you. You know very well “The first photos of the earth changed portant ?’ because the camera malfunctioned, at that moment, and it comes through the frame. We began to talk more And so a little later on, your friend, that you had the time to think about to you so powerfully, that you're the about ‘humans’ and less about again those same neighbors, another what was happening. And you recall sensing element for man.” Germans or Americans. We began to astronaut, the person next to you goes staring out there at the spectacle that Russell Schweickart, 1974 spoke these words before a start talking about the planet as a out to the Moon. And now he looks went before your eyes. Because now meeting on “Planetary Culture” at the spiritual community whole. […] We did not have the idea of of Lindisfarne, Long Island. back and he sees the Earth not as you're no longer inside something http://settlement.arc.nasa.gov/CoEvolutionBook/ a global solution before.” something big, where he can see the with a window looking out at a picture, SPACE.HTML [last accessed May 1, 2013] Stewart Brand, interview in The European, “Look at the World Through the Eyes of a Fool,” 2011, beautiful details, but he sees the Earth but now you're out there and what http://www.theeuropean-magazine.com/268-brand- as a small thing out there. And now you've got around your head is a gold- stewart/269-life-the-universe-and-everything [last accessed May 1, 2013]. that contrast between that bright blue fish bowl and there are no limits here. and white Christmas tree ornament There are no frames, there are no “To see the Earth as it truly is, small and that black sky, that infinite uni- boundaries. You're really out there, and blue and beautiful in that eternal verse, really comes through. The size over it, floating, going 25,000 mph, silence where it floats, is to see our- “One hundred thousand miles out from of it, the significance of it—it becomes ripping through space, a vacuum, and selves as riders on the Earth together, Earth there is no room for a space both things, it becomes so small and there's not a sound. There's a silence brothers on that bright loveliness in race, no place for Russian-­American so fragile, and such a precious little the depth of which you've never experi- the eternal cold—brothers who know competition. This is something for all spot in that universe, that you can enced before, and that silence con- now they are truly brothers.” mankind.” block it out with your thumb, and you trasts so markedly with the scenery, Archibald MacLeish, “Riders on Earth Together, Thomas O. Paine, Administrator of NASA, Apollo 8 realize that on that small spot, that with what you're seeing, and the speed Brothers in Eternal Cold” in New York Times post-recovery press conference, December 27, 1968, little blue and white thing is everything with which you know you're going. (December 25, 1968). JSC 078/11.

42 The Politics of the Whole Circa 1968—and Now — Fred Turner

“We are as gods and we might as well get good at braced the Catalog’s social vision to a degree its found- it.” With those immodest words, multimedia artist and ers could have only dreamed. For that reason, we need budding entrepreneur, Stewart Brand, introduced to revisit the Catalog and with it, the politics of holistic one of the defining publications of American counter- consciousness circa 1968. In the pages of the Catalog, culture, the Whole Earth Catalog. Chockablock with we can glimpse a series of techniques by which we pictures of everything from books on how to build organize public discourse today, online and off—tech- a geodesic dome to descriptions of a top-of-the-line niques such as aggregation, curation, and peer pro­ Hewlett Packard calculator, the Catalog presented duction. We can also explore a world whose citizens a banquet of goods so rich and various that it was have largely turned away from the traditional political indeed fit for an emerging generation of god-like con- mechanisms of law making and institution building sumers. With its front-cover image of the Earth seen toward the building of communities based on shared from outer space, the Catalog reminded readers that tastes and social networks. American technology had enabled the individual citizen In the late 1960s, this turn away from politics and to see the globe itself from a point of view once avail­- toward peer-to-peer networking was meant to help able only to divinities. And inside the book, Brand re- expand human vision, to grant participants a glimpse minded readers that each of them was now the center of the whole systems of which they were a part, and of their own universe: “[ A ] realm of intimate, personal so instill a sense of the divinity within each of them. Yet, power is developing—power of the individual to con- they also had the effect of helping to bring the racism duct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape and sexism of mainstream America into the communes his own environment, and share his adventure with of the counterculture. Moreover, they did little to help whoever is interested,” wrote Brand. “Tools that aid the communes become stable, long-lasting communi- this process are sought and promoted by the WHOLE ties—on the contrary, most communes in this period EARTH CATALOG.”1 collapsed very rapidly. For decades now, the Whole Today the Catalog may look a bit archaic, even quaint, Earth Catalog has been a beacon to information tech- but its faith in the divine powers of the tool-enabled nologists seeking to build online communities and individual pervades our lives. If anything, the laptop- to ecologists seeking to promote awareness of global wielding citizens of industrialized nations have em- interconnections in the natural world. To the extent

1 Stewart Brand, “Purpose,” in Whole Earth Catalog, ed. Stewart Brand (Menlo Park, CA.: Portola Institute, Fall, 1968), n.p.

43 The Politics of the Whole

that its politics and techniques grew out of communal- bankrupt. In their view, rule-making and bureaucratic ism of the 1960s however, the Catalog should also procedure had helped empower psychologically frag- be a warning. mented bureaucrats, men who could not see that the wars they waged and the atomic weapons they built threatened the planet as a whole. New Communalism and the Politics of Consciousness To challenge these bureaucrats and so perhaps to save the planet, the New Communalists turned toward what To see why, we need to return to the moment just before counterculture chronicler Theodore Roszak called at the Catalog came into being. In the spring of 1968, the time a “politics of consciousness.”3 As Roszak put Stewart Brand and his then-wife Lois found themselves it, he and others believed that “building the good society living south of San Francisco and marveling as the is not primarily a social, but a psychic task.”4 If main- long-haired denizens of its Haight-Ashbury neighbor- stream America sought to transform the globe with hood streamed out of the city toward the high plains of massive military technologies, the New Communalists Colorado and New Mexico. The hippie scene had been would seek to transform themselves, with smaller, more bubbling in the Haight for several years—long enough personal technologies, from the tools they used to that tour buses full of out-of-towners had begun to build their gardens to the LSD they took to liberate their roam the neighborhood. Race riots gripped Newark psyches. On the communes, they hoped they could and Detroit, but in San Francisco, the summer of 1967 become the kind of psychologically whole people who, became the “Summer of Love.” Tens of thousands of in turn, could see the whole of the global system, young people flocked to the city, sleeping in parks, and natural and manmade alike. With their minds attuned nearly overwhelming the city’s social services. to one another and to the invisible laws of the universe, To many who had been living in the Haight for years, the they believed they could turn away from the hierarchies chaos of that summer suggested it was time to move of the corporation and the cold, glass towers of the on. One after another, the Brands’ friends began head- megalopolis and embrace collective decision-making ing out to rural areas to form or join alternative com- within the warmth of their own hand-built homes. From munities with names like Morning Star, Drop City, Libre, there, spirits aglow, they could build a kind of polity and New Buffalo. Some formed urban communes as that could by its example save the globe as a whole from well. Together, they represented the largest wave military or industrial annihilation. of commune building in American history.2 They also This was the sense that Brand aimed his catalog at the carried with them a unique political vision. In popular “Whole Earth.” At one level, the Catalog was simply an memory, the American counterculture was a single index of goods. In its first, 1968 edition it featured a movement, one in which young people marched against little more than 130 items arrayed over sixty-one pages the Vietnam War in the morning and drove out to the and in seven sections: commune in the afternoon. While this did sometimes happen, the counterculture actually included two very × Understanding Whole Systems different groups. For the students and activists of × Shelter and Land Use the New Left, accomplishing social change in America × Industry and Craft meant engaging in politics. Marches, manifestos, × Communications and meetings were their tools. For the hippies of what × Community I will call the New Communalism movement, the mech­ × Nomadics anisms of politics had already proven themselves × Learning

2 In the 200 years before 1965, histori- Communes and the New Anarchism (New 3 Theodore Roszak, The Making of a ans believe that Americans established be- York: Seabury Press, 1974); Rosabeth Counter Culture: Reflections on the Techno- tween 500 and 700 communes. Between Moss Kanter, Commitment and Community: cratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition 1965 and 1972, Judson Jerome, one of the Communes and Utopias in Sociological (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969), 51. most reliable contemporary sources, sug- Perspective (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard gested that perhaps as many as three quar- University Press, 1972); Rosabeth Moss 4 Ibid. 49. ters of a million Americans lived in a total of Kanter, Communes: Creating and Manag- more than 10,000 communes. See Hugh ing the Collective Life (New York: Harper Gardner, The Children of Prosperity: Thir- & Row, 1973); Foster Stockwell, Encyclo- teen Modern American Communes (New pedia of American Communes, 1663–1963 York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978); William (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 1998). Hedgepeth, The Alternative: Communal Life in New America (New York: Macmillan, 1970); Judson Jerome, Families of Eden:

44 Fred Turner

The Catalog did not actually sell the goods in its pages. but also of an emerging network of communes. By Rather, it served as what Brand called an “evaluation noticing who had recommended a product, a reader and access device.”5 In each issue, Brand himself and could also learn a bit about the countercultural possi- the Catalog’s readers recommended goods that fit bilities in the recommender’s part of the country. In the seven categories and told readers where to acquire other words, the Catalog’s readers provided each them. Between twice-annual issues of the Catalog, other not only with access to tools, but with themselves, Brand also released a Supplement filled with news of as tools, for turning themselves into networked indi- communal gatherings, interdisciplinary conferences, viduals, aware of the social, technological, and natural and yet more useful tools. systems within which they lived. Both the tools on offer and the strategy of retailing The appeal of this system was extraordinary: by access to information rather than goods reflected the 1971, the Catalog had ballooned to 438 pages, sold New Communalist readership’s politics of conscious- more than a million copies, and won a prestigious ness. When Brand started the Catalog, many of National Book Award. However, the seeming openness his imagined readers were heading out to set up rural of the Catalog’s cybernetic embrace of the whole, communities—towns in which they hoped to farm, masked a series of exclusions within its pages and a to build their own houses, to make their own clothes. deeply conservative strand within the politics of con- You might think that they would need the most mate­- sciousness. Although published during the same years rial of tools—hoes and axes, saws and tractors. The that the Black Panthers6 could be seen rallying in Catalog did indeed list such things, but by far the great- Oakland, California just an hour north of the Catalog’s est numbers of items in its pages were books. The offices, virtually no people of color appeared in its most prominent of these were books on cybernetics pages.7 The Catalog listed Native American moccasins, and the whole-systems thinking of Buckminster Fuller. and Brand himself sported a buckskin-fringe jacket For the New Communalists, social change began not and top-hat-with-feather in public events at the time. with discussions of land rights or the mechanics of But apart from Brand’s wife Lois, whose mother was government, but with the collective tuning of citizens’ a member of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and senses toward the cybernetic understanding that the Chippewa Indians,8 Native Americans themselves whole, individual person, the whole of human society, almost never appeared. Likewise, the few women who and the whole of nature nested inside one another appeared in its pages tended to be depicted in the most like Russian dolls. Tractors and hoes simply helped conventional of roles: sitting in on meetings watching a person farm; books on “Whole Systems” granted men speak, or as part of a male-female couple living readers glimpses of their place on the planet and so, on a commune, or giving birth. Moreover, although the in theory at least, a rationale for making new political Vietnam War was raging at the time, the Catalog paid choices. it almost no heed. On the contrary, in one of the very At the same time, by asking readers to recommend few references to the war at all, the Catalog recom- goods, Brand turned the Catalog itself into a model of mended a guide to military surplus gear. Clearly, even peer-to-peer collaboration. Readers could not simply though Brand himself had served in the Army several acquire what they saw; they could shape it, and they years earlier, the editors of the Catalog did not imagine could build individual reputations while they did so. They that their primary readership included the working- could also see the shape of the movement of which they class men who were unable to escape the draft and who were a part. In the late 1960s, before the Internet was were fighting in Southeast Asia. For the New Commu- publicly available, the Whole Earth Catalog served as nalists, Vietnam was very far away indeed. a map of tools for the transformation of consciousness,

5 Stewart Brand, “Function,” in Whole 6 Editor’s note: Huey Newton and Bobby 7 For a more comprehensive discussion Earth Catalog, op. cit. Seale founded the Black Panther Party of race in the Whole Earth Catalog, see (originally the Black Panther Party for Self- Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Defense) on October 15, 1966 in Oakland, Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole California. It achieved national and interna- Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital tional notoriety through its involvement in the Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Black Power movement and American poli- Press, 2006). tics of the 1960s and 1970s. First circulation of the organization’s official newspaper The 8 Editor’s note: The Grand Traverse Band Black Panther was in 1967. See en.wikipedia. of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians is a feder- org/wiki/Black_Panther_Party [accessed ally recognized Native American tribe in February 24, 2013]. Michigan. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Grand_Traverse_Band_of_Ottawa_and_Chip- pewa_Indians [accessed February 24, 2013].

45 The Politics of the Whole

In this respect, the Catalog mirrored the communities suffused it. The New Communalists rarely built their it served. The vast majority of New Communalists were communities on plains empty of inhabitants. Rather, young, white, and well educated. More than a few com- they often built their almost exclusively white settle- munes survived on the proceeds of trust funds. But ments near comparatively impoverished communities the Catalog also reflected the politics of consciousness. of color. In Taos, New Mexico, for instance, a number That politics aimed to free its adherents from the psy- of communes sprung up amid longstanding Chicano chological and social rigidity of bureaucracy. Peter and Native American communities, setting off a culture- Rabbit, the cofounder of the Drop City commune, put it this way: “There is no political structure in Drop City. Things work out; the cosmic forces mesh with people in a strange complex intuitive interaction […] When things are done the slow intuitive way the tribe makes sense.”9 In the context of Cold War America, this shift from a politics of explicit negotiation over rights, responsibili- ties, and rules to one of intuition and “cosmic forces” represented a powerful attempt to reintegrate every- day life. At communes like Drop City, your home could be your workplace, your colleagues could be your friends and family, and you could live your life in full awareness of and respect for the natural systems of which it was a part—at least in theory. At the same Richard Kallweit time however, the turn to consciousness as a basis for Drop City social organization had the effect of stripping many circa 1966 | © Richard Kallweit | Courtesy Tom McCourt communes of the tools they needed to negotiate the equitable distribution of money, labor, time, and other resources. Without such tools, communes fell back on the charis- clash of epic proportions. As one long-time Mexican ma of individual leaders. They also turned to the unspo- American Taos resident told several white commune ken structures of culture, of racial distinction and visitors at the time, “You see the scenery. We see traditional gender roles, as sources of order. Rules a battleground.”11 To the citizens of Taos, communal became unspoken; racial others became invisible; preoccupation with achieving a global consciousness women donned the long dresses of prairie wives and via drug use, dome-building, and extramarital sex hauled water from wells for their men. Brand’s former smacked of an alien invasion, not liberation. wife Lois recalls that when they visited communes Where did the New Communalists’ blindness to the with their Catalog, Stewart and the men would gather politics of race and gender, of class and geography to make important decisions, while she and the other come from? In part, certainly from personal lived women tended to the children and “put the Clorox in the experiences as largely middle- and upper-class white water to keep everyone from getting sick.”10 Gender Americans, but also from the politics of consciousness relations on rural communes closely resembled those and the cybernetic ideology of holism within it. By in the 1950s Maryland suburb where she had grown imagining each other as elements in a whole system, up, she explained. the New Communalists focused not on engaging and Some communards also echoed the racial insensitivity accommodating differences, but on erasing them. more commonly associated with mainstream, white They sought a social order predicated on the principle America. Explicit racism was not welcome anywhere that, as one community’s slogan put it, “We Are All in the New Communalist world, but implicit racism One.”12 In the process, they turned away from the need

9 Peter Rabbit, quoted in Gardner, The 10 Lois Brand, Quoted in Turner, From Children of Prosperity, op. cit., 36. Counterculture to Cyberculture, op. cit., 76.

46 Fred Turner

making small changes in one’s belief system, or dress, or patterns of consumption changed the planet as a whole. It was, in short, all too easy to believe that one’s intimate personal surroundings were in fact the whole Earth. This narcissism plagues us today. In part, this is so because the Whole Earth Catalog has had an outsized influence on our understandings of information tech­ nology, ecology, and the power of peer-to-peer net- working. In the decades after Brand created the Cata-

Richard Kallweit log, he and members of his staff went on to help found Drop City one of the first and most influential virtual communities, circa 1966 | © Richard Kallweit | Courtesy Tom McCourt the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (or WELL); an influen- tial corporate consultancy, the Global Business Net- work; and even the self-proclaimed voice of the digital revolution, Wired magazine. Brand and members of to build unity among individuals and groups with very his extensive network remain influential voices in de- different life experiences. What is more, as they turned bates on ecology, technology, and community around toward tool use, and so, also, consumption, as the the globe. mechanisms by which they would pursue their mystical However, it would hardly be fair to lay responsibility unity, the New Communalists leaned ever more on for the politics of consciousness or the attitudes toward the privileges of their class. If achieving oneness meant technology that underlie it at the door of the Whole buying and using the right tools, well, they could afford Earth Catalog alone. On the contrary, the tactics them. that Brand deployed in the Catalog—peer production, aggregation, and curation—became models for digi- tized processes that have dramatically enlarged and The Politics of Consciousness Today diversified the membership of the global public sphere. At the same time however, the Catalog and the com­ In the pages of the Whole Earth Catalog, and in the New munities it served should remind us of the hidden costs Communalist movement generally, the effort to see of putting our hopes for social change in the technolo- the world as a single system began as an attempt to find gy-empowered, expressive individual and the ideology alternatives to Cold War social conservatism, Ameri- of holism. We inhabit a time in which media technologies can militarism, and the predations of heavy industry. have made it remarkably easy to imagine that we Ironically, by making consciousness the basis of com- can see and access a whole globe’s worth of things, munity, the New Communalists found themselves and ideas, and people from our armchairs. Marketers replicating the racism, the sexism, and even the class encourage us to see our digital devices as tools for divisions of mainstream America. To the extent that personal transformation. With our cell phones in hand, they embraced consumer goods as tools for personal we can wander the globe, seeking out companions transformation, they re-embedded themselves in for our individual adventures. Never mind the minerals precisely the consumer society they claimed to be mined to produce our phones, nor the social and eco- fleeing. Slowly but surely, the New Communalists came logical cost of that mining. Never mind the carbon we to a new and narcissistic understanding: the world was spew into the atmosphere as we board our jetliners, indeed a whole system, as was each individual within or for that matter, as the citizens of Third World nations it. To the extent that the life of the individual mirrored dismantle our worn out computers and melt the casings the life of the planet, it was all too easy to believe that from their wires. Equipped with the notion that we

11 Quoted in Hedgepeth, The Alternative: 12 “We Are All One” was the mantra of Communal Life, op. cit., 72 The Us Company (or USCO), a perfor- mance art troupe with which Brand spent considerable time. See Turner, From Coun- terculture to Cyberculture, op. cit., 48–51.

47 The Politics of the Whole

are the centers of our individual universes and that our portable information technologies make that fact visible, we are free to ignore the radically unequal distribution of material resources and the actual, mate- rial, non-mystical condition of the planet. In the late 1960s, the New Communalists transformed their lives into performances, hopeful expressions of the possibility of living in the awareness that every gesture matters, that the politics of the everyday are the politics of the globe and vice versa. The communi- ties they built tended to collapse within a year or two of their founding and often sooner. In our time, many have begun to imagine that by taking to the Internet, by making contact with another and expressing a holis- tic understanding of their own place in the world, we can change our lives and the planet too. Yet, even as we gather and converse, the engines of industry and milita- rization grind on. We are hardly gods as far as they are concerned. What control their motions are not indi- viduals or even networks, but institutions. Contrary to what marketers tell us today and to the dreams of the New Communalists as well, our lives are not the cent- ers of the global system. The personal may be political, but it is hardly the whole of politics.

48 Suzanne Treister HEXEN 2.0/Historical Diagrams/From MKULTRA via the Counterculture to Technogaianism 2009–2011 | Rotring ink on paper | 122 × 152 cm Courtesy the artist and Annely Juda Fine Art, London

49 Bruce Conner CROSSROADS 1976 | 36 min, b&w, sound | 35 mm transferred to digital video | Film stills Courtesy Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles and the Conner Family Trust

50 Öyvind Fahlström Sketch for a World Map Part I (Americas Pacific) 1972 | Offset lithograph | 86.4 × 101.6 cm | Edition: approx. 7300 Printer: Triggs Color Printing Corp, New York | Courtesy Eva Schmidt, Siegen Image Courtesy Aurel Scheibler, Berlin | © The Öyvind Fahlström Foundation and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2013 Photo: Wiley Hoard

51 Öyvind Fahlström Section of World Map – A Puzzle 1973 | Silkscreen on vinyl, magnets and enamel on metal plate | 50.8 × 81.3 × 0.6 cm | Edition: 100 Printer: Styria Studio, New York | Editor: Multiples, Inc., New York | Courtesy Eva Schmidt, Siegen Image Courtesy Aurel Scheibler, Berlin | © The Öyvind Fahlström Foundation and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2013 Photo: Simon Vogel

52 Robert Rauschenberg Earth Day 1970 | Offset lithograph poster | 85.7 × 64.1 cm Collection, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2013

53 Whole Earths, 1968–1980 — Norman M. Klein

I did not find the Whole Earth Catalog particularly use­- ful when I first opened it in 1968, nor the various editions later on. In 1968, I was living in Chicago. The format and content of the magazine seemed to me from another part of the country, not part of the urban grime, the modified slum, and immigrant worlds that I knew best (from south Brooklyn to the Midwest). I was studying the history of nineteenth-century illustra- tion and print design at the time, towards a Masters’ thesis on French Culture and the Revolution of 1830; then in the years that followed, I was studying sources “Pneumatic Chambers at the Établissement of the 1860s, towards a dissertation about imperialist Aérothérapeutique, Paris” armchair tourism and the caricatures of Gustave Circa 1899 Doré. The layout of the Whole Earth Catalog seemed ironi- cally familiar to me, like a cluttered homage to nine- teenth-century newspaper advertising (or even a transitions, food co-ops, and the free speech move- Montgomery Ward catalog from 1885). It matched ment, the green agenda, along with the gadgets the commune movements of 1968, the homemade and gizmos of a liberated future. Today, that future and the ironically rural, the granny dresses and newly feels almost like a precursor of steampunk. churned buttermilk; the contradictions (about evasion Of course, I realized in 1968 how high-tech it was, and engagement at the same time), the whole-grain although I barely owned a transistor radio myself. The

54 neo-Victorian designs suggested very late modernism; they were conveniences about to liberate us. However, I knew about those already. I had seen industrial films about the Ford Motor Company that were oddly similar. It was something like a convenience kitchen transport- ed to outer space. By contrast, the San Francisco underground comics (comix) movement felt closer to the sentiment of the large immigrant cities where I was living. The Whole Earth Catalog struck me as a cross between Buckminster Fuller and albums by The Band, in a song like “Across the Great Divide.” It was a sampler filled with Xeroxes. In 1968, with progressive action as its guide, science hailed a frontier that might liberate us all during the Nixon era; almost as if the bizarre twists of that year snatched from us a future. Frankly, I never cared whether we went to the moon; it was just a military expedition to me, another invasion of nowhere. Art Young Let me look back in another way: there were certainly “New York City, is it Worth it?” adepts who needed the Whole Earth Catalog on the in Life Magazine, 1910 stand beside their bed. Its affect (despite the radical message) on me, however, was to bring to mind the sub- urbs somehow. Today, it seems strange that I am so immersed in digital media objects—in that noosphere next novel, The Imaginary Twentieth Century. Even in that is so much like a suburban moon mission. I am a that project (a printed book cross-embedded with an digitati and a happy dinosaur, I guess, particularly in my online archival interface of 2,200 images), the rhythm of cities in 1900 is evident; and above all, so are the eccentricities of print culture before the movies truly invaded the design of printed objects. I flip through my yellowed copies of the Whole Earth Catalog. I understand more clearly now what those circa-1910 panels stood for. Prior to 1914—or even before 1920—the legibility of the printed page did not share the mood of a sharp-focused tracking shot as it did after the 1920s. From about 1890 to 1915, the pages were like the metropolis of that period: vertiginous. The narrative arc constructed for the eye to follow was often diagonal, with panels and layers as thick as bricks and mortar. The pages were rooms in a house with brick-built bearing walls, not a steel frame. The path, from cluster to cluster, was labyrinthine, through a filigree of inky prototype line drawings— nothing like the cinematic photo-layouts after 1920, which are hollow around the center. The pages from around 1910 or so lacked the negative space that we see in illustrated magazines of 1968; they crowd out the central aperture. Now in 2013, I see the point of that similarity. We have Harrison Cady left 1968, which late-modernist cinematic logic domi- “Untitled” in Life Magazine, 1910 nated; and have entered the data field of 2013. Like Baroque emblem books, our data surfaces fold the text and image into each other. The eye, much as it did in

55 Whole Earths, 1968–1980

1900, moves through layers. Layouts like a brick-built the Co-Evolution Quarterly, which seemed to me (circa house again, in a way (seen on desktop or iphone); 1972) closer to a biopolitical statement, about the but also a translocal gaseous house; it is a contested mortal crisis of bios—meaning the skin of the Earth and space, neither/nor, an architecture about an identity the flesh of our bodies. The later publications contained crisis, to be literally trapped in parallel worlds. That more paranoia brought on by the Nixon era. They is our evo­lution as of 2013, the digital version of the were more about morbidity than Gaia, which seemed whole Earth. In the seventies, such phantasmagorical to be the Whole Earth consciousness, its utopian-tech mishmash might have sounded liberating (mind- message. expanding); I remember thinking in that way, even after The point of this volume is to understand more clearly I stopped taking drugs. Today, we are much less cer­- how the 1960s’ “Whole Earth” culture and Silicon tain about the freedom of data. The fantasies of open Valley joined up during the 1970s—in California, and, source, mostly put forward during the 1980s and more, beyond. We agree that there were many varia- ’90s, have crashed literally upon us; thrown us physi- tions of sixties’ “radicalism,” especially by region. I cally into financial crashes. A drone running on games am from the immigrant working class. I grew up sur- soft­ware crashes into real villagers 6,000 miles rounded by Holocaust victims. Stewart Brand was away. Open source is not open it is also closed, a gated shipped through Exeter into Stanford and then into the community. That means secrecy and evasion, as pipeline of Protestant culture and the American mili- we have discovered, as in tax havens and derivative tary. Then he broke away, of course. There is a general trading. irony shared even by my version and his. The photos from space of the whole Earth tell a dif­ We all were buried waist-deep somehow (or misplaced) ferent story, about data corrupted by the millisecond, by the perversities of the American story after 1975. bouncing off satellites. Now I can try to make more Brand is a heroic version of the problem. He managed sense of these pages. They are more like time going to keep going with more direction than many other backwards. Something like 1900 has transmogrified of his peers. I suppose capitalism inverted the point of into 2013; but not as nostalgia—more accidental than this message. nostalgic, more about an instrument of power, of Whatever the argument, there is indeed an evacuated agency. The resemblance is almost a Darwinian repli- quality to many of these stories. The enthusiasms of cation, naturally selected, not copied. After 1968, we the 1960s were, to be honest, generally waylaid. The (if I can speak of my generation) accidentally reinvented mood of the United States (with allowances for differ- the wheel. We helped bring into place—or accidentally ence) went broadly from activism in 1968 (even in the witnessed—the birth of globalism. It is not a pleasant media) to what I call a state of being “in violet” today. thought, I must say, but the facts are indisputable, By that, I mean, a plastic surgery of the present, with- whatever our ethics were. out much access mentally to the past, and no great In that sense, the Whole Earth Catalog contains, in its enthusiasm for the future. As of 2013, the “Whole filigree of images, a clue to evolutionary accidents after Earth” has slid into anomie, like a caffé latte update of 1968. The accidents relate to the birth of globalism Durkheim. Too many Americans, even progressives and the digital. The pages contain a genealogy, about after the Occupy Movement, appear vaguely medicated an emerging historical ruin. That makes sense, despite in their political enthusiasms, in their commitments. all the futurology about new tech. I hope this is just a stage, of course. I refuse to accept We move to a related question: if the layout of the Whole this as a permanent condition, but one must speak Earth Catalog suggests, as Steve Jobs and others have honestly, as far as the evidence shows. Our sense of the pointed out, a precursor to the computer monitor—if present in 2013, of its illegibility, suggests something the link was evident in the eyes of teenage “geeks” depleted. We were victims of this trick played on us like Jobs in 1975—what was it that they were noticing? (or by us) over a period of about forty years—but most The pages of the Whole Earth Catalog uniquely of all, from 1968 to 1980. I call it a history of the capture something of the years from 1968 to 1980. present. Thus, its connection with Silicon Valley, as this volume The history of our present began approximately in 1973, indicates: there lies the evolution, not just in the cata­- as prolog to a future that labeled globalism. There log, but also in California—1968 to 1980, a prolog seems to be little argument about the date. I have asked to globalism. Now to review what that prolog con­- hundreds of people who remember 1973; and they all tained. immediately fall into a similar nocturne. Among the First, please allow me to make a brief clarification about most remembered events are: the end of the Bretton the word evolution: the Whole Earth ethos is quite Woods postwar economy, the collapse of Nixon’s presi- different from Stewart Brand’s other publications, like dency, the evolution of ARPANET toward what became

56 Norman M. Klein

the Internet, the birth of OPEC, global fundamentalism, × The first stage in a long-term depression in and China’s new policy. American university hiring. This leads to an aristo- For Mexico, it was the political shock of June 1971, a cratic isolation that stymies discourse within government repression much more permanent than many professions of the Humanities. the events of 1968. In South America, the assassination × Trilateral Commission (United States’ corpora- of President Allende initiated an era of military dicta- tions begin to sense loss of their dominant position torships. In the US and Britain, the failures after 1968 in the world economy). ushered in neoliberal politics. × Economic takeoff in Japan, evident in the success Arguably, in the United States, we never actually recov- of the Datsun 240Z (1972), affordable (at $3,500) ered from the recession of 1971, from the depletion and “sweet to handle.” of our resources afterwards. Instead, we simulated × Nixon “opens” China. our future. “We” purchased imaginary futures; we × Bloodless coup in Afghanistan begins a new cycle hedged, but never restructured. Our booms proved of foreign interventions and ethnic wars. to be arti­ficial. Finally, this endless present crashed × Iraq nationalizes its oil industry. in 2008. × Terrorist attack at the Munich Olympic Games. The events of September 2008 ended a forty-year nocturne, a dreamy intermission. We spent several The density of these events all point toward a general decades “in violet.” To repeat: as mass psychology, to contradiction. I will use myself as a brief example. Like be “in violet” means a culture paralyzed by foreboding. so many American progressives, I was obsessed with No version of the past or future is allowed in, only the threats of an imperial presidency, and the potential a plastic surgery of the present. That became our for more military adventurism. These fears, based answer to master planning, myself included. in fact, were a trifle myopic I regret to say. By concen­ Consider how many events coincide in 1973 or close trating on the all-powerful nation state, I ignored to that year. Here is a partial list: the cues that suggested the depletion of nation-states, of their vertical authority. Vaguely, backhandedly, I × Downward economic slide of the American middle accepted containerization, the opening up of China, the class begins, particularly among white men. digitalization of banking, the rise of NASDAQ, of tax × Tragicomedy of Watergate meets the bombing of havens, and hedge funds. The year 1973 marks the high Cambodia. For the United States presidency, the point in the average income of Americans. The widen­- ongoing constitutional and military crises never ing of the social classes seemed imperceptible in the seem to go away. 1970s; mostly, the crisis emphasized runaway infla­- × Emergence of OPEC after the Yom Kippur War. tion, often understood primarily as a crisis generated × Assassination of the Chilean President Salvador by insane Mideast policies (true enough, but not Allende. enough). × United States satellite program begins. What I neglected to see was the emergence of an urban × Containerization of the shipping industry industrial feudalism, a new regionalism, the end of essentially begins. master planning, the rise of fundamentalist movements × Rapid acceleration in the number of tax havens in Asia, and in the United States. Afflicted by a fantasy, in small British colonies. I was convinced that the Whole Earth phenomenon × Stewart Brand notices the advances toward what would not threaten my freedoms, that it was relatively will become the home computer (i. e. the Alto innocent. When I saw the home computer, and all the mini-computer at Xerox Parc; Intel 8008). related paraphernalia, I remember asking myself if this × Early multiple-user data systems, particularly would shift the direction of the world economy. in the newspaper industry. I did not struggle to harness data as a public utility. In × Early arcade game industry: Pong (Atari 1972). my anonymity and confusion, I joined the millions × The Internet (ARPANET, Ethernet, SatNet). who allowed the computer to become a warlord eco­ × Worldwide digitization of the investment industry nomy, which today is being deployed as a weapon and (Dow Jones). depleting my sovereignty. Did I not realize that indus- × Right-wing thinktanks in the United States (i. e. tries incubated by NASA and by the American mili­- Heritage Foundation, Pacific Legal Foundation). tary would evolve, almost genetically, into what we find × Exceptional growth of evangelical media. today? × Ronald Reagan’s second term as governor It is indeed nearly impossible to see the present, much of California. less the future, which, so often, is merely a caricature of the present. Americans were falling in love with the

57 Whole Earths, 1968–1980

privatization of media. They failed to notice the corro- source utopia; data would sing for us, and be purely sive power of the first amendment robotized and off- anarchic. This fancy, still commonly assumed today, shored. I did not notice the end of the Enlightenment— blinds us. In 1975, we could not see what was so blunt of its political assumptions—at least in my own country. about computers. If we had simply noticed, the timing I never imagined that the Roe v. Wade—abortion was early enough. Open source would lead to unregu- rights—would be challenged again. lated warlord capitalism. Now the layering of a horizontal world promised by poststructural philosophers has come into being, filled with niches and voids, a blurred sovereignty, and a depleted working class. I look at the next generation: my students and my son. They will have to return to 1900, to a pre-cinematic era, to become structuralists again, to invent a new kind of master planning, and a new poetics. The whole Earth, as suggested by Califor- nia communalism in the 1960s, will finally be more evident—a world that is wholesomely local, like farm- er’s markets, as a radicalized ecological culture.

Adolf Oberländer “Nervös” in Fliegende Blätter, No. 2240, January, 1888

The Whole Earth Catalog was, presumably, a fore- shadowing of the digital age. I see it more as a presage of the tactile, handmade culture today. We are not so much, more analog or digital as struggling more to be intuitive in our media. The Whole Earth movement was a response to the high point of American wealth and imperium. It is now an archive of the early stages of our entropy. That is not a sign of its limitations, merely its modernity. The Whole Earth ethos promised an open-

58 Raymond Pettibon The Whole World is Watching - Weatherman ’69 1989 | DVD Cover | Artwork © Raymond Pettibon | Cover Design: Paul Mittleman Published by: Regen Projects, Los Angeles

59 Navigating in and with the System. Art, Technology, and Nature: 1970/Today — Sabeth Buchmann

Against the Natural Order ral and technical sciences on the one hand, and the humanities and literature on the other.2 Whilst the aim The art historical reception of contemporary instal­ of his inflammatory speech was to highlight the striking lation art is mostly driven by methodologies of cultural, flaws within the educational sector, his demands were visual and media studies, the social sciences, and aes- coupled with nothing less than an appeal for a solution thetic theory; discourses on the natural sciences have to global problems. only played a subsidiary role. True as that is, the natural I place against this backdrop and at the center of my sciences have significantly shaped the agendas of the contribution to The Whole Earth, Martin Beck’s 2008 post avant-garde movements such as Minimalism and exhibition Panel 2—“Nothing better than a touch of Conceptual art, both of which have been instrumental ecology and catastrophe to unite the social classes …,” in forging the transformation of traditional art forms initially on view at Gasworks in London, because it into installation formats. This speaks to a phenomenon reflects an upheaval in thinking: it provides a snapshot that originated in the fundamental changes to the idea of the relationship between culture, nature, and tech- of what constitutes an artwork in the course of the nology, with reference to the infamous International 1960s. That is, in the blurring of scientific and aesthetic Design Conference in Aspen (IDCA) in 1970, which categories as part of a shift towards “structure, func- attested to the fundamental conflicts arising between tion, and environment”: a phenomenon which Reinhold the art, architecture, and design avant-gardes on the Martin has analyzed1 as a consequence of the emer- one hand and the emerging social movements on the gence of cybernetics, communication media, and sys- other. Focused on the prevalent ecological discourse tem theories in the mid-twentieth century, which coin- of the time, these conflicts also cast the spotlight onto cided with the attempt to bridge the gap between the more fundamental identity-based and democratic so-called “two cultures.” Thus the cultural avant-garde policy agendas, that is, the struggle for socially inclu- was acceding to the demand made by C.P. Snow in sive, participatory, and non-hierarchical communica- 1959 to overcome dualistic concepts between the natu- tion structures.

1 Reinhold Martin, The Organizational 2 See C.P. Snow, “The Two Cultures,” Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corpo- the Rede Lecture delivered at the Senate rate Space (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, House, Cambridge, England on May 7, 2005) and idem, “The Organizational 1959. Published as The Two Cultures Complex: Cybernetics, Space, Discourse,” and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: in Assemblage 37 (December 1998): Cambridge University Press, 1959). 102–27; here, 105ff. Thanks to Tom Holert for alerting me to this source.

60 The methodology employed by Panel 2 to relate this by Eli Noyes and Claudia Weill. This corresponded with nexus to display and form criteria in the communication a second monitor raised above eye-level, showing the formats of contemporary installation work is pointing 1981 video demonstration of the Interactive Movie Map: towards the interaction of artistic and political dynam- A Surrogate Travel System, also known as the Aspen ics within the framework of the development described Movie Map. The Movie Map is an image-based naviga- by Martin. This is also reflected in Beck’s title choice: tion system meant to prepare users for spatial orien­ whereas Panel 2 associates display-related questions tation in unfamiliar places. Conceived in the late 1970s of presentation with the popular formats of discourse as a hypermedia form of “cognitive mapping,” within and events, the subtitle quotes a pamphlet written by the framework of research conducted by the Architec- Jean Baudrillard and presented by a group of French ture Machine Group at the Massachusetts Institute of architects, designers, and sociologists, known as the Technology, it is an interactive Touch-Screen system French Group, during the course of the Aspen confer- that became the precursor for current technologies ence.3 Included in a brochure that is displayed together underpinning GPS or Google Street View. The town of with other information in the exhibition’s “archive area,” Aspen served as a test site.4 The cybernetic shift away the text simultaneously challenges the ideological from static and real to dynamic and virtual spatial imag- naivité of the ecology discourse and the idealism of the ing systems corresponded with the exhibition design counterculture. From the perspective of the authors, of Panel 2. The exhibition comprised a constellation of ecology had assumed the reactionary function of claim- distinct work and media formats including: a photo- ing universal solidarity, over and above the prevailing graph (Panel 1—Social Abstraction); a fabric painting class conflict, whereas the primary task must be to (Panel [red, yellow, black]); a sculpture (Sculpture); combat real pollution—namely that of society at large. a film (The Environmental Witch-Hunt); a set of five This highlights the conflicting reasons and interests screen prints (Aspen) featuring the stylized and serially motivating the actors of the Aspen conference to ques- modified motif of the aspen leaf; and a supergraphic tion the separation of the “two cultures,” which would wall painting (Untitled Square). This ensemble con- appear to be of constitutive importance for Western veyed, inevitably, the impression of a temporal motion, modernism. of a progression or degression, which is particularly The way in which Panel 2 reflects a historical conflict as noticeable in how the conference emblem, the aspen symptomatic for the political tensions in the fields of leaf, is employed to interweave constructivist and art, architecture, and design at the time also highlights figurative visual languages. Used as visual leitmotif, the the extent to which the interconnectedness of the aspen leaf situates the “panel” in the exhibition’s title natural sciences and the technology sectors was an in a specific place, as the site of the conference owes its inherent constituent in the harmonization of aesthetic name to the aspen trees growing around the epony- and scientific categories, as diagnosed by Martin. mous town. Close scrutiny of the exhibition’s layout revealed that the progression rule found in the vein distribution of the Constructivist Biologism aspen leaf is applied to the proportions of the objects (for example, to the progressively expanding dimen- The fact that Beck’s case study is suited for bringing sions of Panel [red, yellow, black]) and the temporal larger structural characteristics to the foreground is structure of the video film The Environmental Witch- discernible from its spatial and visual interlinking of Hunt. The dual encoding of Panel [red, yellow, black] the heterogeneous topologies. Divided into archive and as a fabric painting recalling Blinky Palermo and a exhibition area, two historically interlinked narratives billboard-like display are reminiscent of Constructivist forged a common thread running through the instal­ currents of the 1960s, which also found their expres- lation. Thus, a monitor positioned on a plinth in the sion in the corporate aesthetics of the time. This phase entrance area showed the long-lost documentary on overlaps with the history of the Aspen conference, the turbulent events of the conference, IDCA 1970 originally founded in 1951, and is personified in an

3 The pamphlet was originally presented 4 For further information on the as “Statement by the French Group,” in background and development of the Aspen the anthology of conference contributions Movie Map, see Felicity D. Scott’s essay edited by architectural historian Reyner “Aspen Proving Grounds,” in The Aspen Banham, The Aspen Papers (New York: Complex, ed. Martin Beck (Berlin: Praeger, 1974), the text is published as Sternberg Press, 2012), 158–84. “The Environmental Witch-Hunt.”

61 NaviGating in and with the System

exemplary way by Herbert Bayer—the Austrian-born cube derives from the subtraction and addition of painter, graphic designer, exhibition architect, and numbers taken from the progression of the golden typographer. A teacher at the Bauhaus in the 1920s, he section. settled in Aspen in the 1950s. In the early 1960s, Bayer Beck relates this calculation model to virtual imaging designed the architecture for the local conference techniques, independent of “real” proportions. Prepar- center for which he also developed a decorative pro- ing the layout of the exhibition for Gasworks’ space, gram of wall paintings and sculptures in primary colors Beck worked with a vector-based computer program reminiscent of the Bauhaus era. Aspiring towards a whose layer and scaling logic makes it possible to synthesis of art and design, Bayer’s increasingly floral develop different aspects of the exhibition in one and style was in-synch with the post-war tendency to strive the same document. A similarly relational approach was for a harmonization (expressed in commodity aesthet- used for the five screen prints, featuring the aspen ics) of nature and technology. leaf motif in different arrangements: Aspen (“Man-Made Environment”; “Problems, Problems”; “Beetle Coun- try”; “The Orders of Freedom”; “Polarization”—Ivan Growing Within and Through the Movement Chermayeff for Reyner Banham for IDCA). The individu- al arrangements are based on illustrations drawn by Panel 2 responded to the corporate dimension of the the graphic designer Ivan Chermayeff to mark off five post avant-garde endeavors to reconcile the “two sections in the book The Aspen Papers,6 published cultures” on both a methodological and a content level: by the architectural historian Reyner Banham in 1974. with recourse to the veins of the aspen leaf, the consti- Here, too, the aspen leaf manifests itself as the inter- tutive geometric shapes of Minimal art—square, cube, face between the artistic and design avant-gardes. In grid—no longer appear as unmediated expression this context, it is worth pointing out that the advertising of a radical anti-naturalistic principle of form.5 Instead, agency co-founded by Chermayeff in 1957, Chermayeff the leaf venation emerged as a rule of progression & Geismar, wielded a decisive influence on the advertis- of the golden section, which the work of preeminent ing landscape in the 1960s. In addition to the IDCA, artists of the time—such as Palermo and Robert the agency’s customers included corporations such as Smithson—frequently referenced. Accordingly, the Mobil, Chase Manhattan Bank, and Pepsi. In the 1940s, entropy concept of the Land Art artist drew on Darcy Ivan’s father, Serge Chermayeff, taught at the New Wentworth Thompson’s 1915 book On Growth and Bauhaus in Chicago, which was funded by the founder Form—pivotal for the design avant-garde—which of the Aspen conference, the entrepreneur Walter established a link between biological growth processes Paepcke. Beck’s screen prints take account of the very and mathematical proportions. networks that manifest themselves on an aesthetic, Thus, arising from Panel 2 was a scientific principle in methodological, and ideological level. Thus, his mix of the form of an overarching reference to an avant-garde colors modifies the original in order to correspond with scene in which artistic processes overlap with those the concept of the growth progression: whereas the of the design and advertising industries. This is evident, first graphic features a very dark green, the other four in an exemplary way, in Sculpture, comprised of five prints show lighter variations of 62 percent and 38 reflecting chrome steel cubes, each open on two op- percent ink density. Here, too, the principle of subtrac- posing sides. The dimensions of the cubes adhere tion and addition was applied: 38 percent plus 62 to Thompson’s progression rules: starting with a side percent color is equal to 100 percent color. Thus, the length of 618 millimeters, the following cubes progres- initial near black yielded a mathematically logical sively reduce in size. The ratios here follow not the palette of natural green variations. The titles of Beck’s golden section itself, however, but a “folded” progres- screen prints combine Banham’s chapter headings sion: 618–597–563–507–412 millimeters. Begin- with Chermayeff’s aspen leaf arrangements: signifi- ning with the largest cube, the size of the subsequent cantly, the chapter containing the pamphlet of the

5 Cf. Rosalind E. Krauss: “Grids,” in The 6 Reyner Banham (ed.), The Aspen Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Papers, cf. note 3. In The Aspen Papers, Modern Myths (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Banham structures the history of the Aspen Press, 1988), 9–22; here 9 f. Conference into five sections, using Chermayeff’s illustrations and program- matically metaphorical chapter headings, each of which corresponds with a key as- pect of the respective debates at the IDCA.

62 Sabeth Buchmann

French Group is titled “Polarization” and the accompa- upon natural phenomena as the foundation for dynamic nying graphic shows large and small leaves mixed topologies—and the grid, as it emerges from the golden in such a fashion as to imply the dissolution of order. section, now is paired with the figure of the rhizome Chermayeff’s illustrations reflect an organization of the that defines today’s network metaphors.7 leaf motif representative of avant-garde topologies: This becomes manifest in the seemingly disorientated conforming to the principles of representation prevail- manner in which the actors, who gather to prepare ing in the 1950s, in the first chapter (“Man-Made Envi- their parts for a planned panel, wander through the ronment”) the leaves appear in a grid, arranged ac- forest. Evidently, having advanced into an interactive cording to size. In the subsequent chapters or graphics, navigation system, the forest serves as a rehearsal the grid is broken up, and the leaf arrangements are stage for young people dressed in contemporary altered in a way that suggests systemic-contingent garb, who are practicing to read the passage from classification criteria rather than logical or rational Baudrillard’s pamphlet on which Beck predicated his ones. From this perspective, organic-biomorphic exhibition. Thus, “Nothing better than a touch of eco­ and abstract-geometric forms no longer appear anti­ logy and catastrophe to unite the social classes” ap- thetical but as a conflict-free synthesis—a condition pears as a commentary on the impact of those identity- which C.P. Snow would doubtless have approved but based political agendas that emerged from the social also one that derided the political protests against movements in the late 1960s and early ’70s. One is the Aspen conference. instantly reminded of the environmental groups and hippie activists documented in IDCA 1970, who per- ceived environmental pollution as the expression of an Interactive Forests ailing civilization. That such an attitude was susceptible to cultural pessimism and romantic dropout fantasies The conflicts obscured by the cybernetic dream even- becomes evident in Beck’s film direction. For it por- tually resurface in Beck’s video film The Environmental trays the aspen forest not only as a transparent rhizome, Witch-Hunt—a ten-minute loop without beginning or but also as a virtual social space devoid of an exterior. end, which is set in an aspen forest near the eponymous Similar to the Aspen Movie Map’s camera, his camera town. This location holds a certain resonance for the navigates the forest, rhythmically switching from mov- link between scientific and artistic methodologies that ing to still images, from overviews to close-ups, re- unfolds in Panel 2; it also resonates between the pe- cording and scanning tree trunks, branches, leaves, riod’s ecological discourse and the subsequent devel- light, and protagonists. The correspondence between opment of an interactive navigation system, in that the the quaking aspen leaves and the mechanical move- tree in question, the so-called quaking aspen, is very ments of the forest ramblers comes into view as literal specific as it grows best at altitudes above 2,000 embodiment of the progression rule, which, in turn, meters—a habitat defined by comparatively short corresponds with the film’s editorial structure. The growth periods. segment lengths are 100 seconds, 62 seconds, 38 The quaking aspen owes its name to the characteristic seconds, etc. Thus, the proportions deduced from the rustling of its leaves that are joined to the twigs in such aspen leaf generate the virtual time structure, which, in a way that they move with the gentlest breeze—a phe- turn, highlights the superimposition of digital imaging nomenon that ensures the greatest possible pene­ systems onto analog ones, and by extension, the super- tration of light, right to the core of the tree, thus opti- imposition of rhizome-based navigation systems mizing photo-synthesis. In order to thrive, the quaking onto the classic grid. aspen has to create optical transparency. Aspen In Beck’s film The Environmental Witch-Hunt, this forests are cohesive organisms; the trees are not layering manifests itself in the concurrent recognition “individuals” but connected to all other aspen trees in of the forest, both as a real physical place and a virtual the forest via their roots. This fact, once more, calls social space. Clad in red, yellow, blue, white, and black

7 See for example Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Rhizom (Berlin: Merve, 1977).

63 NaviGating in and with the System

clothes, and thus representative of the modern color and exhibition design. By enabling us to navigate be- palette, the protagonists contrast with the green hues tween real and virtual topologies, Panel 2 sensitizes us that chromatically dominate the forest, and that also for the conflicts that find expression in such details are present in the exhibition’s screen prints. Caught as the orientation guide that was the Aspen Movie Map in the shafts of sunlight, the gleaming aspen leaves alter becoming a key precursor to today’s military and the basic color contrast, causing it to appear almost consumer technologies. artificial. Consequently, the harmonization of nature and technology, as mooted by Chermayeff, appears severely compromised here. The above text is a revised and abbreviated version of the essay “Between Structure and Praxis: The Heteronomy of ‘Panel 2,’” in The Aspen Complex, ed. Conclusion Martin Beck (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 30–57. I would like to thank Martin Beck for our extensive Due to the intensified application of its constitutive rule, discussions and for his provision of documentary Beck’s exhibition undermines the “progressively” material. conceived networking of culture, nature, and technol- ogy, which first took root in the art, architecture, Translated from the German by John Rayner and design avant-gardes of the 1960s. By the same token, the activists’ demands at the time for a social understanding of ecology that transcends the class divide can now be viewed in the light of the topological realignments which saw the traditional structures of organization supplanted by rhizomatically networked formats of communication, imaging, and spatiality. At this point, we also recognize the parallels intimated by Panel 2, between the Aspen Movie Map and the boom in participative displays in contemporary installations that are associated with identity-based policy agendas. In Beck’s translation of the events of the time, a young Afro-American man and a young white woman domi- nate the speaking parts: groups, neither of which had a voice in the modernist design discourse, nor in the ideological critique delivered by the French Group. An elderly white haired éminence grise, reminiscent of Bayer, is merely a listener, who must carry his own chair through the woods. The confrontation between identities and roles reaches its ironic apogee in the activist Michael Doyle: for together with David Straus, he was, a few years later, to publish How to Make Meetings Work—a classic in interactive communication and organization design, which became part of post- Fordist management theory. The manner in which Panel 2 opened up the under- standing of classic artwork formats that, in terms of their scientific and technological as well as their social and media-historical implications, are informed by the aesthetics of Minimalism and Conceptual art lends itself, without doubt, to a revision of participatory communication formats. With its interweaving of the object and information aesthetics, documentary-inter- ventionist and narrative-fictional forms of represen­ tation, exhibition and graphic design, still and moving images etc., Beck’s project illuminates the impact wielded by cybernetic theory relating to structures, functions, and environments on contemporary work

64 Martin Beck Martin Beck Panel 2 —“Nothing better than a touch of ecology Aspen (“Man-Made Environment”—Ivan Chermayeff and catastrophe to unite the social classes …” for Reyner Banham for IDCA) Gasworks, London, 2008 | Exhibition views | Photos: Matthew Booth 2008 | Silkscreen | Courtesy Martin Beck and 47 Canal, New York

65 Martin Beck Panel 1— Social Abstraction 2007–08 | Photograph | Courtesy Martin Beck and 47 Canal, New York

The Environmental Witch-Hunt 2008 | 3 video stills | Courtesy Martin Beck and 47 Canal, New York

66 David Lamelas The Desert People 1974 | 48 min, color, sound | 16 mm transferred to video | Film stills Courtesy David Lamelas, Sprüth Magers, Berlin/London, Jan Mot , Brussels, and LUX, London Images Courtesy David Lamelas and LUX, London

67 Jack Smith Scotch Tape 1959–1962 | 3 min | 16 mm film transferred to DVD | Film still Distributed by Arsenal Distribution, Arsenal - Institut für Film und Videokunst, Berlin

68 Ashley Bickerton Commercial Piece #1 1989 | Anodized aluminum, wood, leather, acrylic paint, rubber | 177.8 × 259.1 × 50.8 cm Courtesy Lehmann-Art Ltd. and Rashel-Art Ltd.

Anthroposphere #1 1989 | Anodized aluminum, wood, rubber, leather, glass, studio garbage | 190.5 × 295.1 × 52.1 cm © the artist | Courtesy Murderme | Photo: Jochen Arentzen

69 Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson East Coast, West Coast 1969 | 22 min, b&w, sound | Video | Film still © The Estate of Robert Smithson and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2013 Courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York/Shanghai and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York

70 Lawrence Jordan Tryptich in Four Parts 1958 | 12 min, color, sound | 16 mm film transferred to HD video | Film stills Courtesy Lawrence Jordan and LUX, London

71 Visual Essay

1 2 Frontier: At the Pacific Wall

In California, westward colonial expansion ran into its geographical boundary, the “Pacific Wall” (Lyotard). But even though the European settlers have completed their geographical conquest of the American continent, colonial America’s central myth, that of the frontier, continues. Conquest and progress haven’t stopped at California’s beaches. The search for new territories, a new exterior, continues. In the second half of the twentieth century, the history of the mutations of the frontier included the Californian avant-garde, which, in recent decades, has produced technologies, cultural techniques, and image economies that have con- quered the entire capitalist world. 1 G. Frederick Keller | “The Curse of California” | in The Wasp, Yet just as the camera of the Apollo Berkeley, Vol. 9, No. 316, August 19, 1882 | Call Number F850. W18 v.09, No. 316 | Courtesy The Bancroft Library, University mission enabled a 180-degree turn of California, Berkeley in the old European astronomic view, by looking back at our planet 3 4 from outer space, so too was the is the outer edge of the wave—the direction of expansion of the new meeting point between savagery and frontier reversed when it reached civilization. […] The frontier is the line the wall of the Pacific. Even as of most rapid and effective American­ “expanding,” “breaking out,” and ization. The wilderness masters “transcending boundaries” became the colonist. […] As has been indi­ counterculture catchwords, the cated, the frontier is productive “outside” disappeared—whether of individualism. […] The tendency is this be virgin nature, the idea of anti-social. It produces antipathy freedom beyond “the system,” or to control, and particularly to any the great unknown of our inner direct control. But never again selves. will such gifts of free land offer them­ selves. For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken 1 During the final decades of the nine- and unrestraint is triumphant. There teenth century, a transcontinental railroad is no tabula rasa. The stubborn was built, connecting, for the first time, American environment is there with the East and West Coasts of the United its imperious summons to accept States. What became known as the Over- its conditions; the inherited ways of land Route opened the West to the rest of doing things are also there; and yet, the country and, in the words of Frederick in spite of environment, and in spite 2 Troop F on Fallen Monarch, Yosemite | 1899 | Courtesy Jackson Turner, effectively “closed the of custom, each frontier did indeed Yosemite Museum, National Park Service frontier”: the vast continent no longer furnish a new field of opportunity, “The Master Narrative of the US pro­ 34 Robert Porter, Henry Gannett, William Hunt | seemed limitless. Native Americans were a gate of escape from the bondage “Progress of the Nation,” in Report on Population of the United claims that there were no ‘Indians’ in removed from their tribal lands. Chinese of the past; and freshness, and confi­ States at the Eleventh Census: 1890, Part 1. Bureau of the Census, the country, simply wilderness. Then xviii–xxxi. | Washington: Bureau of the Census, 1895 | Courtesy citizens also faced daily prejudice, and dence, and scorn of older society, Census Bureau Suitland / Senate House Library, London that ‘Indians’ were savages in need The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 closed impatience of its restraints and its of the US. Then, that the ‘Indians’ all the United States to further Chinese ideas, and indifference to its lessons, died, unfortunately. Then that ‘Indi­ labor immi­gration. The new railroad made have accompanied the frontier. What ans’ today are (a) basically happy “In American folklore, the nation was travel faster and safer, and westward the Mediterranean Sea was to the with the situation, and (b) not the real built out of a wilderness by free- expansion brought more and more people. Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, ‘Indians.’ Then, most importantly that booting individuals—the trappers, As the unregulated practice of open range offering new experiences, calling out this is the complete story. Nothing cowboys, preachers, and settlers grazing was established in the western new institutions and activities, that, contrary can be heard. […] The set­ of the frontier. The American revolu­ territories, the emerging conservation and more, the ever retreating frontier tlers claim the discourse on ‘Indians’ tion itself was fought to protect the movement advocated for laws and restric- has been to the United States direct­ as their own special expertise […].” freedoms and property of individuals tions to protect the natural wonders and ly, and to the nations of Europe more Jimmie Durham, “Cowboys and …” in A Certain Lack of against oppressive laws and unjust beauty of the land. remotely. And now, four centuries Coherence: Writings on Art and Cultural Politics taxes imposed by a foreign monarch. (London: Kala Press, 1993), 175. — from the discovery of America, at the For both the New Left and the New end of a hundred years of life under Right, the early years of the American the Constitution, the frontier has republic provide a potent model gone, and with its going has closed “Up to our own day American history for their rival versions of individual “For I stand here tonight facing west the first period of American history.” has been in a large degree the history freedom.” on what was once the last frontier. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the of the colonization of the Great West. Frontier in American History” in Report of the American Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, “The Californian From the lands that stretch three […] Each frontier has made similar Historical Association (1893): 199–227. Ideology” in Science as Culture, Vol. 26, Part 1 (1996): thousand miles behind us, the pio­ 58–59. contributions to American character neers gave up their safety, their com­ […] Each was won by a series of fort and sometimes their lives to build Frederick Jackson Turner wrote his mani- Indian wars. […] American social our new West. They were not the festo in 1893 during the peak phase of development has been continually be­ captives of their own doubts, nor electrification and industrialization in the 2 The closing of the frontier was accom- ginning over again on the frontier. the prisoners of their own price tags. United States. Three years earlier, the US panied by the beginning of the conservation This perennial rebirth, this fluidity They were determined to make the Census Bureau had declared the era of movement, which sought to preserve en- of American life, this expansion west­ new world strong and free—an the frontier to be officially at an end. The claves of nature and wilderness. The move- ward with its new opportunities, example to the world, to overcome influential myth of the frontier, which ment laid the foundation for the later envi- its continuous touch with the simpli­ its hazards and its hardships, to Turner promoted, romanticized the real ronmental movement. city of primitive society, furnish the conquer the enemies that threatened circumstances of the conquest of the — forces dominating American charac­ from within and without. West, not least the genocide committed ter. […] In this advance, the frontier against Native Americans. —

72 Frontier: At the Pacific Wall

5 8 9

6 :

8 KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FLA. | Dr. Wernher von Braun yond—or through heightened—sensory explains the Saturn system to President John F. Kennedy at Complex perception, and that psychedelic drugs 37 who was on tour at the Cape Canaveral Missile Test Annex (CCMTA) | 1963 | Courtesy NASA can open the gates to this knowledge. In their song “Break on Through (to the Other Side)” (1967), The Doors declare Have we the nerve and the will ? Can 7 this breaking-through to be a courageous we carry through in an age where act of will. we will witness not only new break­ — throughs in weapons of destruction, but also a race for mastery of the A Closed World sky and the rain, the ocean and the tides, the far side of space, and Computers played a central role as both the inside of men’s minds ? tools and symbols in the Cold War. In 5 Ralph Crane | “The Call of California” | 1962 | Washington, government planners used in Life Magazine, October 10, 1962 | Courtesy Getty Images That is the question of the New computers to model the possible effects of 67 Keep America Beautiful | People Start Pollution, People Frontier.” Can Stop It | 1971 | Film still | Courtesy Keep America Beautiful, nuclear holocaust; in North Dakota, Alas-

Inc. (kab.org) John F. Kennedy, Democratic National Convention ka, and elsewhere, air force generals used Nomination Acceptance Address, “The New Frontier,” computers to track potential attacks on delivered July 15, 1960, Memorial Coliseum, Los Angeles. the United States. In both cases, the planet Some would say that those struggles was transformed into a closed informa- are all over, that all the horizons have “The End” tional system for purposes of military com- been explored, that all the battles ; mand and control. Cognitive psychologists have been won, that there is no longer This is the end in turn began to imagine that the brain was an American frontier. But I trust Beautiful friend a form of digital hardware and its actions that no one in this assemblage would […] a form of software, that thinking was a type agree with that sentiment; for the Can you picture what will be of computing and memory simply a matter problems are not all solved and the So limitless and free of data retrieval. Together, such analogies battles are not all won; and we stand Desperately in need … of some … supported what Paul N. Edwards has today on the edge of a New Frontier— stranger’s hand called a “closed-world” discourse. the frontier of the 1960s, the frontier In a … desperate land Within this discourse, the mind of the indi- of unknown opportunities and perils, […] vidual man and the command centers of the frontier of unfilled hopes and Ride the highway west, baby America’s nuclear defense establishment unfilled threats. Ride the snake, ride the snake both seemed to be mechanized tools of 9 Aldous Huxley | The Doors of Perception | Cover | To the lake, the ancient lake, baby management and control. Both seemed London: Chatto & Windus, 1954 Beyond that frontier are uncharted The snake is long, seven miles devoted to maintaining firm boun­daries— : Celia Rosebury, James Peake | “The American University” | areas of science and space, unsolved Ride the snake … he’s old, and his skin national in the case of the military, mas­ in Insurgent, Berkeley, Vol. 2, No. 1, January–February, 1966 | problems of peace and war, uncon­ Courtesy UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young is cold culine in the case of individual military lead- Research Library quered problems of ignorance and The west is the best ers. The world in which they lived and prejudice, unanswered questions of ; Helen Nestor | Dusty Miller and other students with STRIKE The west is the best worked seemed to be dominated by large, poverty and surplus. and FSM cards | 1964 | Courtesy Oakland Museum of California, Get here, and we’ll do the rest bureaucratic organi­zations. As the inter- Oakland The blue bus is callin’ us personal corollary to the “closed-world” For the harsh facts of the matter The blue bus is callin’ us visions of military and government plan- are that we stand at this frontier at Driver, where you takin’ us ners, containment referred to a way of a turning-point of history. We must “There’s a time when the operation being in which men and women sought prove all over again to a watching of the machine becomes so odious, “The End” to constrain their emotions, maintain their world, as we said on a most conspicu­ makes you so sick at heart, that you 1967 marriages, and build safe, secure, and ous stage, whether this nation, con­ can’t take part, you can’t even Lyrics by The Doors independent homes. Like the air force ceived as it is with its freedom of tacitly take part. And you’ve got to © Universal Music Publishing Group / Kobalt Music Publishing Ltd choice, its breadth of opportunity, its put your bodies upon the gears and — range of alternatives, can compete upon the wheels, upon the levers, “The revolution must be cultural. For with the single-minded advance of the upon all the apparatus, and you’ve 9 The Doors of Perception: the band culture controls the economic and Communist system. got to make it stop. And you’ve got to The Doors took their name from British political machine, not vice versa. The indicate to the people who run it, to author Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of machinery turns out what it pleases Can a nation organized and governed the people who own it, that unless Perception (1954), which deals with his and forces people to buy, but if the such as ours endure ? you’re free, the machine will be pre­ experimen­tation with mescaline, a sub- culture changes, the machine has no vented from working at all.” stance with effects similar to those of choice but to comply.” That is the real question. Mario Savio speaking at the Free Speech Movement LSD and other synthetic psychedelic Charles Reich, The Greening of America protest at the University of California at Berkeley, drugs. The book’s central notion is that (New York: Random House, 1970), 255. December 2, 1964. there is knowledge to be reached be-

73 Visual Essay

soldiers who scanned America’s borders < for incoming Soviet bombers, many Ameri- cans took to monitoring the boundaries of their own lives. —

:; Anti-Machine (IBM Card at University of California at Berkeley Protest): Hal Draper, a librarian at Berkeley in 1964, explained that for a student, “the mass university of today is an overpowering, over-towering, impersonal, alien machine in which he is nothing but a cog going through pre-programmed motions—the IBM syndrome.” As Mario Savio later told an interviewer, he and many others felt that “At Cal you’re little more than an IBM card.” —

The Specter of Mass Society and the Birth of the Counterculture

In the 1950s, the United States lived in the shadow of the nuclear threat and the expanding military-industrial complex, a system whose idiosyncratic logic and increasing power even President Eisen- hower warned of at the end of his term in office. Additionally, industrialization and the mass media in combination drove back the libertarian ethos of the frontier, leading to an authoritarian society that was built on the pressure to conform, and which systematically suppressed differ- <= Ron Cobb | Mah Fellow Americans, 155 Editorial Cartoons > ence. Social criticism was domi­nated by from the Underground Press Syndicate | amsterdam: Real Free = talk of the “organization man” (William H. Press, 1971 | Courtesy Ron Cobb Whyte), cast as an insignificant cog in a soulless bureaucratic machine. Rationality San Francisco Oracle, its radical political and the belief in progress through science stance was always in the foreground, were viewed as part of a machine-like eclipsing, for example, the psychedelic civilizing order which, dependent on rhetoric. The Los Angeles Free Press was systematic repression and manipulation, an important mouthpiece of the opposition severely constrained the individual and to the Vietnam War. their experience. Behind this debate lurked — the specter of the organized, unleashed masses of Nazism. A growing voice of protest equated American society with the “What makes the youthful disaffili­ > Adam Curtis | The Century of the Self | 2002 | Film still | National Socialist sys­tem, pointing to the ation of our time a cultural phenom­ Courtesy Adam Curtis & BBC organization of mass-media spectacles, enon, rather than merely a political the military threat of destruction, and the movement, is the fact that it strikes diametrically opposed to that of National suppression of dissidence. In reaction to beyond ideology to the level of con­ rebellion. In response, America is ready Socialism—and beyond the con­straints the Vietnam War, this critique hardened sciousness, seeking to transform our to destroy us […]” of technological discipline. into the conviction that the system couldn’t deepest sense of the self, the other, — — be repaired, but must be rejected outright. the environment.” — Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful The complete rejection of all the existing The Merry Pranksters Opposition (New York: Anchor Books / Doubleday & Co, institutions and rules of the allegedly totali- 1969), 59. tarian system became the basis of the In the fall of 1964 the Merry Pranksters, a “Concentration camps, mass movements known as the “counterculture.” group of artists and drop-outs Ken Kesey exterminations, world wars, and The counterculture is not synonymous had assembled around himself, painted atom bombs are no ‘relapse into C On May 15, 1969, Governor Ronald with the activists of the “New Left,” who up an old school bus and drove east on the barbarism,’ but the unrepressed Reagan ordered armed police to carry founded the Free Speech Movement, first leg of the legendary tour chronicled implementation of the achievements out a dawn raid against hippie protesters allied themselves with Black Power and in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid of modern science, technology, who had occupied People’s Park near the civil rights campaigners, and demon­ Test. Whole Earth Catalog founder and domination.” Berkeley campus of the University of strated against the Vietnam War. The Stewart Brand was then a member of the Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 4. California. During the subsequent battle, term was coined by Theodore Roszak in Merry Pranksters, but he did not join one man was shot dead and 128 other his 1969 book The Making of a Counter this tour. In the words of Tom Wolfe, Brand people needed hospital treatment. On Culture. Roszak was a critical observer represented “the restrained, reflective <= The American cartoonist, writer, film that day, the “straight” world and the coun- who supported the rebellious youth in their wing of the Merry Pranksters.” maker, and director Ron Cobb was one terculture appeared to be implacably struggle against the ruling “technocracy,” The Merry Pranksters saw the Beats as of the most incisive caricaturists of the un- opposed. On one side of the barricades, which he maintained had become a system a model of how to step outside mainstream derground of the 1960s and 1970s. He Governor Reagan and his followers of total manipulation. “Politics, education, American culture, build an alternative designed the cover of Jefferson Airplane’s advocated unfettered private enterprise leisure, entertainment, culture as a whole, community, and pursue psychic whole­- 1967 album After Bathing at Baxter’s as and supported the invasion of Vietnam. the unconscious drives, and even […] ness even within the bowels of a militarized well as the “ecology flag,” a modification On the other side, the hippies championed protest against the technocracy itself: all state. Like the Beats, the Pranksters of the American flag that included the ecol- a social revo­lution at home and opposed of these become the subjects of purely sought to experience a condition of harmo- ogy symbol, an amalgam of the letters E imperial expansion abroad. In the year tech­nical scrutiny and […] manipulation.” nious flow, and they turned to drugs to do for ecology and O for organism (see p. 113). of the raid on People’s Park, it seemed Roszak saw assembly line discipline it; they saw the whole world as their stage However, Cobb was best known for his that the historical choice between these —soulless and intel­lectually deadening— and their own lives as roles that could contributions to the underground maga- two opposing visions of America’s future as having spread into all spheres of life. be played for pleasure. But the Pranksters zine Los Angeles Free Press, which he could only be settled through violent Liberation from this system meant libera- also appropriated technologies developed started working for in 1965. The Los conflict. As Jerry Rubin, one of the hippie tion from the all-pervasive logic of the in industrial and sometimes military Angeles Free Press was one of the counter­ leaders, said at the time: “Our search machine and its “mad rationality.” He contexts (including LSD) and put them culture’s first and highest circulation for adventure and heroism takes us outside called for people’s repressed, irrational, to work as tools for the transformation underground magazines. In contrast to the America, to a life of self-creation and and sensual side to be freed, in a manner of self and community. The model of a

74 Frontier: At the Pacific Wall

? @ C E

A B

? Ken Kesey | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest | Cover | New York: Signet Books, 1963 (1962)

@ Charles Reich | The Greening of America | Cover | D New York: Random House, 1970

A Herbert Marcuse | One-Dimensional Man | Cover | Boston: Bacon Press, 1964

B Theodore Roszak | The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition | Cover | New York: Anchor Books / Doubleday & Co, 1969

“The first drug trips were, for most of us, shell-shattering ordeals that left us blinking kneedeep in the cracked crusts of our pie-in-sky personalities. Suddenly people were stripped before one another and be­ hold! As we looked, and were looked on, we all made a great discovery: E Berkeley Bonaparte, Rick Griffin | Pow-Wow: A Gathering we were beautiful. Naked and help­ of the Tribes for a Human Be-In | 1967 | Courtesy Hoover less and sensitive as a snake after Institution Archives, Stanford University, Stanford, California “For Kesey and company, body and skinning, but far more human than landscape, community and state, and that shining knightmare (!) that had Freedom had to be won through liberation sometimes even biological and elec­ stood creaking in previous parade from convention. “There is a policeman in tronic systems were mirrors of one rest. We were alive and life was us. our heads.” The political revolution, said another. Metaphorically, when they We joined hands and danced barefoot Abbie Hoffman, was only culti­vating “or- drove their school bus into the heart amongst the rubble. We had been C Frank Bardacke | Who Owns the Park | Berkeley 1969 | ganizers,” while the cultural revolution was of the United States, its sheet-metal cleansed, liberated! We would never Courtesy Frank Bardacke producing “outlaws.” Many icons of the skin coated with Day-Glo paint, its don the old armors again.” D The International Times | No. 28, April 5–18, 1968 | counterculture developed a contempt for Courtesy IT: www.international-times.org.uk insides and often outsides wired with Ken Kesey, “Ken Kesey Was a Successful Dope Fiend,” politics in general. Traditional politics was speakers and microphones, its inhab­ in The Last Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog aimed merely at institutional change, ed. Stewart Brand (March 1971): 4. itants hairy, costumed, nicknamed, This novel set the tone of what was to they felt, whereas the counterculture was and alert, Kesey and the Pranksters become a major strand of the countercul- changing the whole culture and conscious- dropped a tab of LSD into the belly of movable, traveling commune was often imi- tural discourse: anti-psychiatry. Other ness from the ground up. According America. They wanted to turn the tated by others in the counterculture— major voices of the anti-psychiatric to Theodore Roszak, the counterculture country on, to do for the nation what such as the lesbian-feminist group The Van critique included Michel Foucault and R. D. sought the “psychic liberation of the LSD had done for them as individuals Dykes—and represented an alternative Laing, who spoke of schizophrenia as a oppressed.” It aimed to change not insti­ and as a community. They wanted to the commune movement for which “trip” towards a deeper sense of self. The tutions, but consciousness. Through the to show Cold War America an alter­ Stewart Brand originally published the common denominator of this critique was counterculture, in Roszak’s view, the native and apparently a much more Whole Earth Catalog. that it did not regard insanity as an indi- revolution became “primarily therapeutic adventurous, harmonious, and fun — vidual disease but as a symptom produced in character and not merely institutional.” way to live. The bus was both the vehi­ by institutional repression and the exclu- — cle by which to make this new life­- In his famous chronicle of novelist Ken sion of deviant behaviour by a normative style visible and a prototype of that Kesey’s group the Merry Pranksters, enti- society, which demanded submission and “Tribalization” lifestyle itself. Are you “on the bus”? tled The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom adaptation to its conventions. In embracing asked the Pranksters. Or not? Wolfe reports that on October 15, 1965, and romanticizing mental disease, the The members of the band Jefferson Air- Both on and off the bus, the Prank­ Ken Kesey was invited to speak at a rally counterculture painted the contours of plane were close friends with the political sters played with the boundaries be­ against the Vietnam War in Berkeley. a non-repressive “outside” beyond the and social activist Abbie Hoffman. They tween self, community, and technol­ Organizers expected a fiery speech and institutions of discipline and enclosure. It agreed with his idea that children should be ogy. As they drove across America, a joining of the New Left and the growing was a vision of liberation strictly defined taken away from their parents so that a they kept a movie camera rolling. If counterculture. But rather than orate, in relation to the existing system that it new generation of outlaws could be trained. all the world was a stage, they were Kesey simply stood up and announced negated. The band formulates its politics most living here and now, in the real, mate­ to the audience, “You know, you’re not gon- — radically in “We Can Be Together” (1969), rial space of everyday life, and at the na stop this war with this rally, by marching which is decidedly anti-capitalist and same time inside a movie, in media … That’s what they do.” He then pulled Politics and Self-liberation opposed to private property. space.” out his harmonica and played “Home on Transgressive Trips: Psychedelia & — Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: the Range.” Psychiatry Stewart Brand, The Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of — Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, The counterculture lived not least from the 2006), 63. ? Ken Kesey’s fame was built by his novel renewed currency it gave to mythological One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 1962. values and the rhetoric of the frontier.

75 Visual Essay

F I K

J L

I San Francisco Oracle | Vol. 1, No. 8, May–June 1967 | Courtesy The Estate of Allen Cohen and Regent Press, publishers of the San Francisco Oracle Facsimile Edition “It is the American young, with their J San Francisco Oracle | Vol. 1, No. 8, May–June 1967 | underdeveloped radical background, Courtesy The Estate of Allen Cohen and Regent Press, publishers who seem to have grasped most of the San Francisco Oracle Facsimile Edition clearly the fact that, while such K San Francisco Oracle | Vol. 1, No. 6, February 1967 | immediate emergencies as the Viet­ Courtesy The Estate of Allen Cohen und Regent Press, publishers of the San Francisco Oracle Facsimile Edition nam war, racial injustice, and hard- L G H San Francisco Oracle | Vol. 1, No. 8, May–June 1967 | core poverty demand a deal of Courtesy The Estate of Allen Cohen and Regent Press, publishers old-style politicking, the paramount of the San Francisco Oracle Facsimile Edition struggle of our day is against a far M Stewart Brand (Ed.) | The Updated Last Whole Earth Catalog: more formidable, because far less Access to Tools | May 1974 | Courtesy Stewart Brand obvious, opponent, to which I will give the name ‘the technocracy’—a social form more highly developed in “If technology finally had begun to America than in any other society. draw Americans toward a ‘cosmic The American young have been some­ consciousness’, well, the Indians F San Francisco Oracle | Vol. 1, No. 8, May–June 1967 | what quicker to sense that in the had been there all along.” Courtesy The Estate of Allen Cohen and Regent Press, publishers struggle against this enemy, the con­ of the San Francisco Oracle Facsimile Edition Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: ventional tactics of political resist­ Stewart Brand, The Whole Earth Network, and the Rise G Adam Curtis | All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago 2011 | Film still | Courtesy Adam Curtis & BBC ance have only a marginal place, largely limited to meeting immediate Press, 2006), 59. life-and-death crises. Beyond such frontline issues, however, there lies “We Can Be Together” the greater task of altering the total cultural context within which our “Not only does the visual, specialist […] daily politics takes place.” and fragmented Westerner have now We are all outlaws in the eyes of America Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: to live in closest daily association with In order to survive we steal cheat lie Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful all the ancient oral cultures of the forge fuck Opposition (New York: Anchor Books / Doubleday & Co H Steve Baer | Dome Cookbook | Corrales, New Mexico: 1969), 14–15. earth, but his own electric technology hide and deal Lama Foundation, 1967 | Courtesy Steve Baer now begins to translate the visual We are obscene lawless hideous or eye man back into the tribal and dangerous dirty oral pattern with its seamless web violent and young Everything they say we are we are E To many counterculturalists, American of kinship and interdependence.” But we should be together And we are very Indians became the symbolic figures of au- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions Come on all you people standing around Proud of ourselves thenticity and alternative community. The of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 50. Our life’s too fine to let it die and […] American Indian served as a model for the We can be together “retribalization” of society announced by All your private property is Jefferson Airplane McLuhan as a “global village” and fostered Target for your enemy “We Can Be Together” by the emergence of media communication And your enemy is 1969 networks. We Lyrics by Paul Kantner — We are forces of chaos and anarchy © EMI Music Publishing / Universal Music Publishing Group — 76 Frontier: At the Pacific Wall

M

77 Visual Essay

78 Frontier: At the Pacific Wall

N

79 Visual Essay

Communes: Building a New Civilization O

G Between 1967 and 1970, tens of thou- sands of young people set out to establish communes, many in the mountains and the woods. It was for them that Brand first published the Whole Earth Catalog. For these back-to-the-landers, and for many others who never actually established new communities, traditional political mechanisms for creating social change had come up bankrupt. Instead, they were seeking a life outside of “the system,” where they attempted to build their own civilization from scratch, in pursuit of freedom and harmony and beyond the hier­archies and constraints of traditional power. —

P “Revolution Blues”

Well, we live in a trailer at the edge of town You never see us ’cause we don’t come around. We got twenty five rifles just to keep the population down. Well, it’s so good to be here, […] asleep on your lawn. Remember your guard dog? Well, I’m afraid that he’s gone. It was such a drag to hear him whining all night long. Yes, that was me with the doves, setting them free P near the factory Where you built your computer, love. I hope you get the connection, ’cause I can’t take the rejection […]

I got the revolution blues, I see bloody fountains, And ten million dune buggies comin’ down the mountains. Well, I hear that Laurel Canyon is full of famous stars, But I hate them worse than lepers and I’ll kill them in their cars.

Neil Young “Revolution Blues” 1974 Lyrics Neil Young © Warner Bros. Records —

The case of Charles Manson and his mur- derous commune represents a negative climax in the communal movement and its public image. Neil Young lends Manson his voice, portraying in the first person Manson’s hate of the winners of the coun- terculture in the cultural and computer industries. At the same time, Young offers material on the demise of the commune model and exodus to the land: from experi- mental ways of life to the trailer camps of the destitute in today’s America. —

N Stewart Brand (Ed.) | The Updated Last Whole Earth O Ron Cobb | Mah Fellow Americans, 155 Editorial Cartoons Catalog | May 1974 | Courtesy Stewart Brand from the Underground Press Syndicate | amsterdam: Real Free Press, 1971 | Courtesy Ron Cobb

P Neil Young | On the Beach | 1974 | Cover | Reprise Records | © Warner Bros. Records

80 Erik Bulatov Sunrise or Sunset 1989 | Oil on canvas | 200 × 200 cm Sammlung Ludwig - Ludwig Forum für internationale Kunst Aachen © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2013 Photo: Anne Gold, Aachen

81 Plan the Planet — John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog/ Territorial Agency including a photographic essay by Armin Linke

0001 0002

The alliteration hides a divergence, a discordance of The Apollo 8 NASA image of the full Earth from outer the two terms: to plan is to fix in place, to determine, to space enters the international at a moment when mark and delineate the process for attaining, for hold- its invocation has matured from a set of practices ing onto something; its connections are to the Latin for that have already reshaped and reclaimed the planet as planting a tree, establishing a location on the ground one. It is an image that reaffirms, secures, and fixes the and in space, while the etymon of planet is the wander- planet, albeit acting as a call for direct action, inter­ er, the rootless, the Ancient Greek αστήρ αστήρ πλανήτηςλανήτης vention, and urgent reorganization. It is an image, which (astēr planētēs) or the mobile star. The alliteration is, makes the planet immobile and mobilizes planning. In thus, a device that realigns two trajectories, one that the shifting field of forces of the international, the image renders mobile what, usually, is thought of as fixed, and captures the process of individuation of the planet. It is one that brings stasis to a transient Earth. The long an image shaped by the scientific technologies of vision, rise of the international is a complex set of procedures, by the surveying and measurement impetus, and the protocols, and processes that operate in the field of accounting processes of Western empiricism. Yet, it is forces marked by this realignment: a field shaped by an image beginning from the fully constituted, individual a pivoting of our planet into an object of planning. Earth. It is an image, which setting the individuated

82 Earth before the processes of individuation, hides the surement, control, and calculus. Sweeping imperialist clashes and the multiple points of view, disguises the notions of control and dominance of the planet quickly disparities of territories and the material processes become a vast infrastructure, organized and composed that characterize the making of the planet into one. The along the lines of command and supply chains, around individuation process of the Earth is one that brings telecommunication networks and extraction industries. together, in stealth, the environment, composed of the Members of newly independent decolonized nations technologies of measurement, the surveys, the pro­ rapidly fill empty seats of the new international assem- tocols of calculation and planning, the software and bly. They enter into a wide set of organizational proto- machines that make up the individuated Earth and the cols and procedures: relaying weather stations across fields of forces that shape the planet itself: milieu the planet to ensuring demographic control and cen- and individual become one. sus; from statistical accounts of macroeconomics to provisions for military cooperation and mutual defense; from synchronization of time-zones to the tucking 0003 together of monetary markets; from air and maritime traffic-control to underwater cabling. Architecture is the agent of the relation between polities and their spaces of operation. When in 1780 Jeremy Bentham introduced the neologism inter­ 0005 national, the aim was to exceed the law of nations, and to make evident and unmediated by custom the rela- The location of the drafting of the Atlantic Charter tions between nations through a new jurisprudence, agreement should not pass without comment either: one aimed at containing supreme authority and reor- the relevance of the neutral high seas to the edifice ganizing sovereignty. The utilitarian move towards a of the international is obvious. The making of the inter­ new space of operation structured a new architecture, national coincides with the making of the seas into one acting on large shapes and scope. To manage, a blank: of transforming the power of waves, currents, contain, cover, oversee, govern, and police the interna- gales, and winds into a set of navigational markers and tional: agency is by this move located solely within the territorial boundaries. The mass of the oceans tamed figures spanning the surface of the planet, only within to become a surface, a graph. The oceans a back- human institutions and laws. The planet is background, ground; water a land without depth. captured by the navigational grid, referenced by lati- tude and longitude. It is a planet governed through the Cartesian extension of adjacent territories, where 0006 delimitation, demarcation, and measurement are considered limits to contain sovereignty. The planet The new infrastructures of the international reverber- is considered as the back ground: the ground, out ate with the resounding growl of modern techniques of which, the land of nations emerges. of management and engineering set in motion to govern flows and circulations. Moving away from the empirical survey of outer nature to cast their gaze onto human 0004 nature and subjectivity, these techniques begin to be used to measure responsiveness, to test command- In the chilling Atlantic waters off the coast of Nova chain systems, to evaluate and calibrate productivity, to Scotia, on August 14, 1941, Prime Minister Winston enquire into psychology, and to organize the dissemina- Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, aboard tion of information and articulation of humans, as well military vessels, drafted the first document that was as their environments. Survey and surveillance tech- set to be become the foundation of the United Nations. nologies accelerate the very flows they set out to mea­ The Atlantic Charter delineates the regimes of planning sure: separation and distinction of paths emerge as and laying-out of the infrastructures for a post-Second characters that cross and make up international space. World War epoch. It outlines machinery for independ- What seems to emerge is a complex of systematic ence and liberality of access to mineral and natural fragmentation and separation: a system of new bound­ resources through interlocking regimes of governance aries and borders, which is aligning itself with the and policymaking. Drawn-out at the height of the Sec- emergence of expert and sectoral rationalities. What ond World War, the United Nations is a complex system seems to emerge is a world, which, at the same for peacekeeping and governance of the international, time, becomes part of a computational regime and and at its basis lies a widespread architecture of mea­ incommensurable.

83 Armin Linke NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 99.9% air-based substance Pasadena (California) USA 1999 | Photograph © Armin Linke

Armin Linke ONU, Security Council New York USA 2001 | Photograph © Armin Linke

Armin Linke Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Felix Candela, Bacardí y Compañía, Bacardí World Mexico City Mexico 1999 | Photograph © Armin Linke

84 Armin Linke Three Gorges Dam project, model Yichang (Hupeh) China 1998 | Photograph © Armin Linke

Armin Linke ESA-ESRIN European Space Research Institute, Frascati (Rome) Italy 2010 | Photograph © Armin Linke

Armin Linke CNR, National Research Council, Fermi conference hall, on the wall the Globe made by Fra’ Mauro in 1460 2007 | Photograph © Armin Linke

85 Plan the Planet

When Richard Buckminster Fuller starts designing 0008 his integrated architectures, The World Game series, and investigations into the Operating Manual for Space­ Rather than an undifferentiated and seamless space ship Earth, focus is on the level of intervention: at what of uncontested operations, these elements sustain a level of magnification can architecture intervene in the critical break-up, a construction of entanglements and complex system of the planet, at what level can we reflexive divestments “from all sides.” Whatever spaces start operating the planet as a spaceship? The Earth we attend to, differential evolutive forms confront us: becomes an object to maneuver in its complex trajec­ expansion phenomena, interlaced with the retraction tories, both internal and external. Moreover, the planet of human activities from ample portions of urban space, becomes a model to which calculation and computation complex environments next to those with oversimplified need to adjust. Planning and measuring needs to ap- functioning. Areas undergoing accelerated transfor- proximate the planet. Planning must move towards the mations overlap with articulations that are more stable fixed planet. in their spatial assets. How do we avoid considering Earth modeling rapidly inverts the empirical tradition these elements as the system’s remainders? As the of science: rather than structuring scientific research unwanted? How should we think about new processes as a theory–computation–experiment sequence, and processions where knowledge-production inter- where experimentation is the ultimate benchmark with twines with the formation of inhabited territories? Can nature, the model produces a new hierarchy of inter- architecture rethink its agency? nalization and abstraction. From experimentation and measurement, we now move to theory, and from there, go on to modeling and computation. The abstract 0009 computational model becomes the object of study, and through it, the object of planning. The extension, expansion, and intensification of the international operate both above and beneath the state. Sovereignty is limited and contained simultaneously. 0007 Holders of sovereignty, absoluteness of sovereignty, and the internal and external dimensions of sovereignty A closer look at the transformation processes that are held fast, circumscribed, and operated by the mark the contemporary inhabited territories that these international. From the outset, the world post-Second practices of measurement and control have con­ World War is marked not only by the rise of the United structed, show them at odds with the mainstay of the Nations, the European Union, and Human Rights, it is equivalence between the organizational framework enmeshed with scientific measurement, with the co- of modernity and the morphological structures of its evolution of calculation. The key words of both science material landscapes. Facing the architecture of the and inter- and non-governmental politics are surveying, international is the expanded acropolis of global cir­ measuring, controlling, modulating, and containing. culations and dirty cosmopolitanization processes, Exercise of the pivoting movement of planning, and that gearing the procession of highlights in human interven- of the planet itself, is through infrastructures. At the tion to the hard grids of data, protocols, and proce- same time, the call to action implied by the measure- dures of sectoral and expert knowledge. The transpar- ment technology of the international is elucidating and ent equivalence of these arrangements clots with laying out a space completely available to action, yet the reciprocal contamination of the uncertain, the unex- engulfed in irrevocable stasis. pected, the unsolicited, and the unstructured: a not- At the outset of the Cold War, empires were made into fit-for-purpose suffuses contemporary space, with underdeveloped countries, newly independent, and non-enumerable, non-determinable differences and decolonized. Their infrastructures relied on the foun- diverging lines emerging from all sides. The mirror dations of both a drive towards autonomy and inde- image that architecture sets up to consider expanded pendence and on the circulatory patterns of the extrac- fields is broken up and refracted by the many slippages tive industries belonging to their colonial pasts. Their and countermovements, by material, cultural, and architecture is based on divisions and separations: formal hindrances. Seen as the interplay between of maritime routes and airspaces, of Exclusive Eco- closed spaces and wide-open circulatory movements, nomic Zones, hospitals and military compounds, of contemporary space is where agency, conductivity, university campuses and industrial complexes, of urban and traversal need to be constructed repeatedly. and rural areas, of mobility networks, and of housing

86 John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog / Territorial Agency

and resorts. The world-without-borders of the inter­ and vice versa. It is a gray space of reinscription and national operates through the fragmented logistics transcription of codes and protocols. It is a space that of open and closed spaces. multiplies and fragments rationalities and modes of calculus, and where, in spite of the drive towards fixing the planetary behavior into a model, no one single 0010 institution can command complete knowledge of the situation. No single entity is able to assemble all of Infrastructure and decolonization: the curse of re­ the available information, and cohere and coordinate sources and the capturing devices of measurement action to operate on it. tech­nologies are the outlines of an expanded archi­ The divisions, the fractures, and the margins that tecture drawn-up by the international. It is an architec- characterize both the modeling and the actions appear ture, which operates seamlessly, without divides and everywhere: it is a space of constant negotiations and without contest. The Ecumenopolis of Constantinos endless dismissals. Events are never the causes of one Doxiadis, the World Game systems of Buckminster another; they enter the gray zones of semi-causality. Fuller, the Soviet experiments for living rationally on They enter the gray zone of the tedious transcription the planet, the non-aligned movement of international and reinscription of laws and codes (both juridical and pro­curement of engineering projects, the bureaucratic mathematical). They enter a space where distribution politics of Le Corbusier’s five points for modern archi- and composition of agencies and territories can no tecture, and the megalopolis of Jean Gottmann—they longer be located and localized. all indicate a transient system laid out to announce a possibility—a system devised to enable and facilitate. Yet the operations, the protocols through which they 0012 operate, are structures for reorganizing ambitions: from imagination and hope to standardization and Arraying the planet through remote sensing, through regulation, from storytelling, to calculus and manage- measurement of the atmosphere and the deep seas, ment. The architecture they incorporate, ultimately, through continuous enquiry into the very possibility of is one that hides a pause and a break between the making observation global, the international is a space humanities and engineering. where multiplicities of actors are reorganized and their The retooling of the planet, through the new archi­ territories undone, eroded, shifted, and recomposed. tectures that operate at the largest possible level of If the interception of lines of sight and the surface of the magnification, indicates a reconceptualization of the planet forms the horizon, which both binds us to a place agency of planning and design: rather than demarcate, and constitutes the orientation for our actions; the fix, and stabilize, the emphasis is on acceleration, extrapolation of points of vision into the vast machines change, mobilization, and integration. of climate-change modeling, remote sensing, surveil- lance, and surveying technologies is reshaping the figures of our landscapes. The international disposes 0 011 a multiplicity of territories, recomposes their agencies, and makes them available through the kaleidoscope It is no longer possible to imagine that the material set of technological vision, for controversies, and radical of forces, the milieu for the individuation of the Earth, negotiations, where no overarching rationality is prac- for the planning of the planet, is merely nature-given. ticable. The dyad of the city, which operates between These instruments and tools augment nature. Nature’s the duality of polity and space, stones and people, is work is increased, redirected, and re-governed. At recomposed into the geological stratum of the Anthro- the same time as architecture, engineering and the pocene. Nomos becomes logos, becomes polis. Polis sciences enter this new phase of engagement in the becomes territory, becomes nomos. A gray area marked field of forces governing the realignment between by concomitant forces of divergent trajectories, a mobile planning and the fixed planet, a new space is planet that can be inhabited almost in its entirety, yet in the process of formation. It is the space of nowcast- appears inert to the realignments we try to impose ing, of modeling and measuring the combined actions on it. of the international, of the integrated environmental impact analysis, of the logistics of implementation, where the planet needs to be conformed to the model

87 Plan the Planet

0013

Architecture is a constructive enterprise, a diverse, interdependent, and contingent system that does not operate through preexisting structures of thought and values. It is not only that the condition of uncertainty within which the architectural project operates links to the reduced availability of information and knowledge, but that it is also constrained within the structure of the “mechanism” that produces the international space itself. This structure is opaque to the attempts to bring into evidence its persistent traits, retracting in front of our efforts to comprehend. Seen in this light, the role of architecture and the organization of complex pro- cesses (cultural, social, technical, economic, scientific, and urban) seem to be more about inserting in the mineral space of the city and in the topology of infra- structural networks a set of propensities towards change, in order to calibrate, intensify, or stabilize the non-deterministic transformative processes, rather than that of an overall prefiguration of a stable spatial configuration. It is architecture of discontinuous and asynchronous change. Agency—the capacity to act in the world—is shaped by endeavors to operate with and within increasingly rich matter and processes, by the recognition of openness of the planet’s future.

88 Suzanne Treister HEXEN 2.0/Historical Diagrams/From ARPANET to DARWARS via the Internet 2009–2011 | Rotring ink on paper | 122 × 152 cm Courtesy the artist and Annely Juda Fine Art, London

89 Angela Bulloch Night Sky: E. T. from Pluto.9 2008/2012 | LED installation, neoprene, aluminum profile | 198 × 198 × 12 cm | Unique Courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin Installation view Esther Schipper, Berlin, 2013 | Photo © Andrea Rossetti

90 From Here to California — Laurence A. Rickels

In “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man” The Whole Earth Catalog was the consequence of, or (1963), Hannah Arendt aligned the exploration of Outer afterthought to, a photograph of Earth taken from a Space with “our new ability to handle nature from a satellite, which then became the publication’s first iconic point in the universe outside the earth.”1 Following cover. Before proceeding with the product placement publication of his science journal essay in 1945, which of ecological consumerism as a new mode of adaptation contributed to the launching of the first satellite, Arthur to the alternate prospect of the end of the world, in C. Clarke introduced the precondition upon which his 1966, Stewart Brand mounted a public campaign to get science fiction depended, which he had first muted in NASA to confirm by its release the rumor of this sci- his 1951 short story “The Sentinel.” This precondition ence-factual point of view (POV). Arendt offers the was that the ability to view the earth from space has following observation to complete the picture: “If we to be in place before contact between earthlings and look down from this point upon what is going on on sentient species from other planets can commence. earth and upon the various activities of men, […] then Science fiction (SF), as the positing of hypotheses in these activities will indeed appear to ourselves as ‘overt advance of their possible realization, had already ended behavior’ […] Under these circumstances, speech and with the takeoff of the V2 rocket, which drew a Before everyday language would indeed be no longer a mean- and After line through SF reckoning. Henceforward ingful utterance that transcends behavior even if it the future address of SF would bear relation, by denial only expresses it, and it would much better be replaced and integration, to the Nazi era of realization of first by the extreme and in itself meaningless formalism of contact. mathematical signs.”2

1 Hannah Arendt, “The Conquest of 2 Ibid., 273–74. Space and the Stature of Man,” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 273.

91 From Here to California

What Arendt looks down on both explicitly and by not deliver change and its alternate histories promote absence or implication are the two tendencies in the instead acceptance of the irretrievability of loss. organization and comprehension of mass media soci- Dick’s first published novel, The Man Who Japed (1956), ety, the behavioral and the psychoanalytic, which in offers a prehistory of USEA set apart as Dick’s sole SF reign as two orders of simulation. In Aldous Huxley’s representation of a PR model of mass psychology. Brave New World, these orders, which can also be Throughout his science fiction proper, which com- characterized as the Public Relations (PR) trajectory of menced the following year with the publication of Time adaptation to information or opinion and the advertising Out of Joint, Dick focused on advertising as object or aspect of identification, keep company in one belief trigger of identification and projection. But in The Man system. The future divinity of behavioral and biological Who Japed, society is held together by a culture indus- adaptation is addressed as “Our Ford,” although he try of mediatized packets issued by Research Agencies prefers to be called “Our Freud” when psychological to promote a “Morec,” a message or moral. The pro- issues are raised.3 Otherwise, the trend assigned by tagonist, Purcell, runs one of the agencies trying to Huxley to Fordism in 1932, hosts tendencies which have “anticipate future trends.”6 “Remember the packet we been kept distinct from Freud’s name. did on Goethe? The business about lens-grinding? […] Philip K. Dick’s 1964 novel, The Simulacra,4 follows out The optics angle made a good Morec—Goethe saw the Freudian understanding of mass mediatized psy- his real job. Prisms before poetry.”7 chology, but literally as made in Germany and continued Morec Society mediatizes adolescence as a line of in California. In the future a German-Californian state, informant robots called “Juveniles” which penetrate USEA, projects its mass psychology around the mas- every space and convey the audio and video surveil­- cot status of a ruling couple, consisting of the German lance to the guardians of the status quo. Yet, the novel Chancellor, who is in reality an android, and the First tarries with the actual adolescents who hang out Lady, in fact, a role played by an actress. It is a corpo­ near the launching pads to watch the rocket traffic with ration/incorporation, which is organized around at colony planets, and imagine the prospect of escape. least one real identity or missing person with countless Something like “individualism” is Purcell’s guilty as- cosignatories who are figments of the imagination sumption in identification with the teens. Otherwise, the engaged in keeping a couple of identifications in safe so-called unique individual is the concern of the therapy deposit. Un-translated German words in Dick’s text business alone, which treats the outsiders at occupa- attest to this process of encryption. The Geheimnis tional-therapy resorts on other planets. That the thera- (secret) of a couple of faux persons is “carried” by the py client counts as the treating therapist’s “obsession” ruling class of so-called Geheimnisträger (bearers encircles each client as “noose,” the “derisive term of secrets) in order to uphold a state of preservation. contracted from neuro-psychiatric.”8 The loop extends In Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) through the other outside world to the term “psycho.” and Ubik (1969),5 adolescence, as the target audience Because the wife of this society’s founding father had of mass psychology is admitted as a problem with a a predilection for analytic psychotherapy, it allowed the future, while in The Simulacra all problems add up to “Psych Front left over from the war” to institute itself the impasse of modern traumatic histories. However, as part of the new order.9 although the USEA state of incorporation fails, in the The First World War was the ultimate setting for the course of the novel, all those trying but inevitably failing departure of one model of mass-media society from to effect a political correction of history through time- the other. While Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, traveling intervention, have been in reality-training won the war for his theory of PR,10 which found suc- for the ability to mourn. While time travel in Dick’s cessful application in the propaganda of the Entente, novel, invented at the time of the merger of California Freud himself won the postwar period for psycho­ and Germany, remains a magnet for fantasies of cure- analysis over the symptomatizing bodies of war-neu­ all reversals of history, the technology itself does rotic soldiers. Freud’s inside view of the shell-shocked

3 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World 5 Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream 6 Philip K. Dick, The Man Who Japed 9 Ibid., 54. (New York: Bantam Books, 1960), 28. of Electric Sheep? (New York: Ballantine (New York: Vintage Books, 2002), 5. Books, 1996) and Philip K. Dick, Ubik 10 Edward, L. Bernays, Propaganda 4 Philip K. Dick, The Simulacra (New York: Mariner Books, 2012). 7 Ibid., 8. (Brooklyn: Ig Publishing, 2004). (New York: Vintage Books, 2002). 8 Ibid., 21.

92 Laurence A. Rickels

soldier as incapacitated by a conflict in his ego be­tween needs to know all about it; then he releases the expla­ the “peace-ego” and its “parasitic Doppelgänger,” the nation, the surprising bit of prehistory about the found- war ego,11 issued the owner’s manual to the psyche’s ing fathers’ predilection for cannibalism, into the openly protection and projection. When the defeated German awaiting sensoria. PR creates a more general need command conceded that the Central Powers had suc- for fulfillment before pitching a specific product as the cumbed to the propaganda savvy of the enemy and filler. Bernays recalls the example of pianos for sale. had lost thus on psychological grounds alone, the direc- Rather than extoll the attractiveness of pianos, for ex- tion was given for the new German investment in mili- ample, which would be mere advertising, the PR strat- tary psychology and the development of what the egy was to publicize, via miscellaneous reports, inter- Germans would rename psychological warfare. That views, and editorials, the hottest new accessory of psychoanalysis was by the end of the First World War the home, the music room or corner. Once the need the treatment of choice for war neurosis gave Freud’s for such a space or displacement was instilled, it then concise grasp of where self-esteem goes under condi- fol­lowed that pianos would be recognizable to meet tions of traumatic duress the ultimate stamp of approv- the need to complete the installation.13 The gist of the al. It was the “open sesame,” which introduced Freud’s anecdote is that simulation is another word for the science into all institutions of psychological under- PR organization of blanks that advertising and consum- standing, treatment, and application. It also offers one erism proceed to fill. quick explanation as to why the Nazi state would not Because the public is readymade while its adaptation to forego its counsel, even though the founder’s name was opinion is ongoing, the PR campaign must be in a posi- a Geheimnis carried by insiders of the new German tion to project or forecast consumerism via sampling psychotherapy. of opinions and the taking of polls and surveys. In Daniel The fast track of insight into the traumatic basis of Galouye’s Simulacron 3 (1964), the business of polls mass psychology and its application as psychological and surveys has impinged on everyday life. An electron- warfare could not but convey the sense that the state ic simulation of consumer society offers an alternative: of the art of PR-based propaganda was outdated. It is the pollsters can only ask about the changes that can be also possible to view the PR model’s projection of directly introduced into the simulacron and the reac- behavioral adaptation to information (and opinion) as tions of the simulated figures observed in double real exceeding the contest between the two trends in mass time. The world to which we are introduced through psychology. While it is possible to derive one more the protagonist Hall, who is one of the programmers of paranoid proverb out of Thomas Pynchon’s reduction “Simulacron 3,” turns out, however, to be yet another of psychoanalysis to occult hobbyism in Gravity’s Rain- simulation. Yet, this simulated world reacted to stimuli bow,12 we might also recognize in the foregrounding by preparing to launch the very simulacron project that of Pavlovian behaviorism in Pynchon’s fabulation of the subsumes its own reality. Already during the trial runs V2 rocket “another history” or “allegory” of mass and installation of “Simulacron 3,” the denizens of both media, which illuminates a joint delegation, for example worlds begin to wonder if they are real, if their world the belief system Ford/Freud. To make the line of is reality. Hall searches for the point or unit of contact separation legible as adhesive strip we return to SF, between the two worlds, to settle the philosophical the genre in which Pynchon initially tested his decision or psychotic questioning of reality, which counts thus as to write. the only hypothesis among “all the metaphysical con- In The Man Who Japed, Purcell has charge of Tele­ cepts […] open to final verification.”14 That the infinite media, the government’s own PR control tower of regress of PR simulation could pull up short before one opinion. He sets in motion a campaign that is at once original world symptomatizes a denial of depression an adolescent prank and the PR rehearsal of Dick’s basic to the worlds of Simulacron 3. At one point, Hall later interest in alternate history. First, he sets the hot is dismayed over the grief of Jinx, his deceased em­ topic of “active assimilation” circulating, until everyone ployer’s daughter, which he characterizes as a: “striking

11 Sigmund Freud, “Introduction to 12 Thomas Pynchon. Gravity’s Rainbow 13 Dick, The Man Who Japed, op. cit., Psychoanalysis and the War Neuroses,” (New York: Viking Press, 1973). 77–78. in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. 14 Daniel Galouye, Simulacron 3 and trans. James Strachey, vol. 17 (London: (New York: Bantam Books, 1964), 91. Hogarth Press, 1955), 209.

93 From Here to California

throwback to the mid-twentieth century. […] before enlightenment had […] swept away the vicious cruelty of the funeral convention. In those days, proof of death had to be established on a practical plane. Those who attended wakes and funeral services saw and believed. And they went away convinced that the loved one was actually beyond this life and that there would be no complications arising from a supposedly dead person showing up again. That the close ones also went away nursing traumatic wounds made little difference.”15 In the future, according to Simulacron 3, the news of the passing of a loved one means that removal of the body has already taken place. The SF forecast is a 1936 diagnosis in Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller”:16 the removal of the dying and the dead from all living quarters circumscribes the encap- sulation and internalization of an inoculation we began taking in with the novel. The protagonist’s death scene at the end of the novel as reclamation of the whole life as meaningful, rendering that life at every moment the life of one who died thus and then, was what the readership swallowed. The inoculation service was accelerated with the advent of information, which, shot through with explanation, guaranteed the demise of history, story- telling, counsel, even experience itself. At the same time, Benjamin singles out the psychic impact of the First World War, traumatic enough to forego a history, as alone responsible for the autoimmune crisis other- wise informed by the novel’s happy conclusion in death.17 In Simulacron 3, what proves jolting is to witness the sudden disappearance of your neighbor, swiftly followed by the erasure of his trace in the environment. This new shock, which is specific to the electronically simu- Rainer Werner Fassbinder lated nature of its setting, and which Fassbinder’s 1973 WELT AM DRAHT TV adaptation, World on a Wire, carries forward as 1973 | © Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation its theme, introduces the onset of mourning according to the logic of a PR campaign: “Watching a man disap- pear isn’t something you simply shrug off and forget.”18 Design of the simulation lab was to penetrate “the core PR campaigns must get around the consumer’s abil­ity of our basic drives, fears, aspirations,” and “dissect to shrug off advertisements of new products. The the very soul itself.”19 Beyond the shaping of opinion out display of electronic erasure simulates a change that of information, the lab can follow or even direct what remembrance supplies and supports. The evidence develops out of the instinctual core. “By prodding those of utter disappearance, like a blip from the screen, analog units, we can observe not only the beginning, promotes the inside view of reality as infinite regress but also every step in the development of undesirable, of simulacra. Now each inner world is a place for antisocial tendencies.”20 The psychopathic violence that absence. develops out of antisocial tendencies is the boundary

15 Ibid., 41. 17 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 62.

16 Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Re- 18 Daniel Galouye, Simulacron 3, 20 Ibid., 62. flections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” in op. cit., 9. Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969).

94 Laurence A. Rickels

concept of all the worlds in Simulacron 3 that depend twinning West Germany and Israel as the two quintes- upon the philosophical “peephole” between the real sentially postwar states, was adolescent. The new world and its simulated copy. To observe the reactions notion of the teen, whose main task of finding a job to in the simulacron the operators can either rotoscope occupy or cathect begins to keep the promise of child- themselves directly into the faux setting or borrow a hood, is one of the overriding continuity shots between simulated person’s POV (“empathy coupling”). For the culture of Bildung and psychoanalysis. The psycho- regular functioning, however, the system requires that pathic violence that had its outlet in Nazi Germany was one artificial denizen, a so-called Contact Unit, knows separated out from the energy or industry of applica- that he is a figment in a simulated environment serving tion and misapplication—associated with adolescence real operators in the real world. Hall diagnoses the since Werther’s sorrows—and reapplied to the pros- symptom: “Somehow I couldn’t shake off the conviction pect of repair. In turn, assessment of the deprivation that permitting a Contact Unit to know he is nothing that applicants for reparation had endured could be in more than an electronically simulated entity was the terms of the promise not kept, a potential productivity height of ruthlessness.”21 It is the detail that Hall’s curtailment. The centrality of the teen industry to this operator lodges his “perverted gratification into,”22 economy of recovery was not personalized. There were when, by the technique of faulty coupling, he makes Hall exceptions, however, like the movies starring Romy feel the pain of being his electronic dupe and even hear Schneider as Sissi, but they tended to underscore on the echo of his derisive laughter. “I knew now that the average a general absence, which in other syndications Operator was a sadist. Perhaps, in that Higher Exist- of mass culture almost proved generic. In the SF series ence, everybody was.”23 That Hall prevails only by Raumpatrouille, which was first broadcast on West replacing the Operator, who then really disappears, German TV in 1966, the vitality of youth belongs to the underscores that psychopathic violence remains the middle-aged hero. Although whenever he is in crisis it flaw in the appointment that Simulacron 3 otherwise is not identified as midlife in contrast to an adolescence tries to keep with mourning. to be envied, identified with, or criticized, which is how The future society that proximity to psychosis built we encounter the paradigm of youthfulness in the mass struggles in postwar SF to contain and integrate both cultural productions of the former Allies. historical and actual psychopathy. We can follow this World on a Wire adapted a work that, since most suc- tendency in the simulated worlds of SF into a real one cessful in its German translation, was already adopted via Theodor Adorno’s 1959 “Was bedeutet Aufarbei- by the culture prepared to watch it or itself on TV. tung der Vergangenheit” (“What does Dealing with There is much to study in the German introjection and the Past Mean?”). This set the trend Alexander and projection of this PR-SF model of mass psychology. Margarete Mitscherlich misappropriated in 1967 One aspect deserves mention here: Fassbinder’s film as their outright dismissal of the West German policy shows as corollary to the near miss with mourning the of restitution to the victims of Nazi persecution as full frontal absence in its setting of adolescence. Sex retraumatization. There is a particularly over-deter- appeal in World on a Wire belongs to the buffed, pol- mined aside that belongs to this delegation of symp- ished midlifers, who in no way depend on teenagers, as toms. Adorno belittles the tendency of West Germans though, like the cat the canary, they had swallowed them. to shrug off the possibility of change simply because German SF, notably Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) they are too immature for democracy as analogous to and Woman in the Moon (1929), in which the outer space the juvenile delinquent who says he is only a teenager of psychosis underwent colonization for the survival and cannot help himself.24 of the species, went under following its season of reali- But where did all the Siegfrieds go? Following elevation zation in Nazi Germany. Postwar SF introjected to the position of cultural superego in Nazi Germany, Germany inside California (the secret identity of most the adolescent was largely missing from the postwar future worlds) as the problem of the containment and reopening of Germany, at least from the mass-media integration of the prospect of psychopathic violence mirrors. Yet, the very industry of the economic miracle, (as in Dick’s android testing). Identified as the time- which is inseparable from the policy of restitution based enactment of a psychopathy one grows out of,

21 Ibid., 146. 24 Theodor W. Adorno, “Was bedeutet Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit,” 22 Ibid., 128. in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 10.2: Kulturkritik und 23 Ibid., 110. Gesellschaft II (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003), 559–60.

95 From Here to California

adolescence modeled the android problem in Dick’s SF that termination will not solve but testing for empa- thy will, which approximates integration. By proxy, expiration-date adolescence in the postwar mass cultures of the former Allies became the medium for immunization against the troubling, doubling prospect of going psycho. In postwar Germany, adolescence was swallowed, whole. Splitting off the teen industry from the ruthless violence of the recent past and applying it to economic recovery and restitution, the midlife carriers of youth, meanwhile, smacked the lips of their recent repast.

96 The Center for Land Use Interpretation Bradley Landfill (top) Lopez Canyon Landfill (bottom) From Landfills of Los Angeles | 2013 | Photo: CLUI

97 Josef Strau “17h 03m/-55⁰” 1990 | Chromogenic print | 29.9 × 19.7 cm Courtesy Private Collection, Berlin Image Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne

98 Piero Manzoni Socle du monde July 4, 1961 | Iron and bronze | 82 × 100 × 100 cm HEART, Herning Museum of Contemporary Art, Herning Courtesy Fondazione Piero Manzoni, Milano | © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2013

99 Visual Essay

1 4

4 2 3 Sophie Bassouls | French structural anthropologist and philosopher Claude Levi-Strauss | 1988 | © Sophie Bassouls / Whole Systems “The error of traditional anthro­ Sygma / Corbis pology, like that of traditional linguis- 5 Stewart Brand (Ed.) | Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools | After 1945, a fundamental transfor­ tics, was to consider the terms, and Fall 1969 | Courtesy Stewart Brand mation in the knowledge systems not the relations between the terms.” 6 Stewart Brand (Ed.) | Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools | Fall 1968 | Courtesy Stewart Brand and technology of Western societies Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Structural Analysis in Linguistics took place. Information theory, and Anthropology” in Structural Anthropology, Vol. 1, (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 46. cybernetics, and the development of computers stood at the center of “In treating the sensible properties this change. Information became the of the animal and plant kingdoms as if dominant reality principle, posing they were the elements of a message, a challenge to all prior distinctions, 1 Quote by Harold Morowitz | taken from Energy Flow and in discovering ‘signatures’­—and demarcations, and hierarchies. in Biology | New York, 1968 | in Whole Earth Catalog: “[The story is not true from a scien- so signs—in them, men have made Access to Tools, Spring 1969 | Courtesy Stewart Brand In the postwar period, there was a tific point of view but] we could only mistakes of identification: the mean- 2 Daniel Bell | The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political widespread hope in the United Ideas in the Fifties | Cover | New York: Free Press, 1960 understand this property of the myth ingful element was not always the one States that scientific progress and at a time when cybernetics and com- they supposed. But, without perfect- 3 Daniel Bell | The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture new technologies would make the in Social Forecasting | Cover | New York: Basic Books, 1973 puters have come to exist in the scien- ed instruments which would have per- old, irrational system of rival nation- tific world and have provided us with mitted them to place it where it most states obsolete, ushering in an era an understanding of binary opera- often is namely, at the microscopic of global planning in which the world tions which had already been put level—they already discerned ‘as “We have had to wait until the middle could be placed under technological, to use in a very different way with con- through a glass darkly’ principles of of this century for the crossing of rational control. Efficient manage­ crete objects or beings by mythical interpretation whose heuristic value long separated paths: that which ment was the watchword, not hierar­ thought. So there is really not a kind and accordance with reality have arrives at the physical world by the chical power and ideology. Increas­ of divorce between mythology and been revealed to us only through very detour of communication, and that ingly, social and natural systems science. It is only the present state of recent inventions: telecommunica- which as we have recently come to came to be equated with technologi­ scientific thought that gives us the tions, computers and electron micro- know, arrives at the world of commu- cal ones. However, technological ability to understand what is in this scopes.” nication by the detour of the physical. systems were regarded by many to myth, to which we remained com- Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind The entire process of human knowl- be an existential threat to social pletely blind before the idea of binary (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966), 268. edge thus assumes the character of a and ecological systems—as hostile operations become familiar to us.” closed system.” to man and destructive of nature. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (New York: Schocken Books, 1979), 8. This understanding fell out of cur­ (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966), 269. rency in the 1970s under the influ­ ence of the Californian ideology “Man is dead. Credit his death to an and its embrace of holistic solutions. invention. The invention was the Interdisciplinary systems thinking grasping of a conceptual whole, a set became a universal discipline. The “We’re moving out of a universe made “This time is now restored to us, of relationships which had not been iconic image of the Blue Planet, up mostly of physical objects and thanks to the discovery of a universe previously recognized. The invention which presented a vision of a whole, emerging into one formed of a flux of of information where the laws of sav- was manmade. It was the recognition integrated system, had pointed the energy, electromagnetic waves age thought reign once more: ‘heaven’ that reality was communicable. The way for this universalization. Only and invisible changes and communi- too, ‘walking on earth’ among a pop­ process was the transmission of systems theory seemed to offer an cations. All the world’s television ulation of transmitters and receivers neural pattern. Such patterns are answer to the challenge of how and radio broadcasts are constantly whose messages, while in transmis- electrical, not mental. The system to grasp the coherent whole as the moving through our unaware heads, sion, constitute objects of the physi- of communication and control func- product of its interrelated parts. along with a lot of things we’ve not yet cal world and can be grasped both tioned without individual human Drawing eclectically from systems tuned into. This book is about this from without and from within.” awareness or consent. The message theory, the Whole Earth Catalog new universe and about learning how Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind in the system was not words, ideas, played an important role in breaking to live in and participate in its (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966), 267. images, etc. The message was nonlin- down the oppositions between changing patterns.” ear: operant neural pattern. It be- culture, technology, and nature in Tom Bender about Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema came clear that ‘new concepts of the public’s perception. (New York: Dutton, 1970) in The Updated Last Whole communication and control involved Earth Catalog (May 1974), 248. netic concepts were applicable wherever a new interpretation of man, of man’s things had to be understood in relation­ship knowledge of the universe, and of to one another and as a system. Informa­ society.’ Man is dead. ‘We’re talking.’” “anti-aircraft predictor,” which was never tion, feedback, and the differentiation John Brockman, By the Late John Brockman Cybernetics put to use, was based on feedback effects, between the analog and the digital formed (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 22. the calculation of which assumes a con­ a new conceptual foundation, on the The origin of cybernetics lies in questions tinuum between pilot and machine. Feed­ basis of which cybernetics was developed posed in the sphere of military research back became a central concept of systems into a universal theory of regulation, within the disciplines of biology, neurology, about the relationship between humans theory. It made the prin­ciples of the man­agement, and control. This theory sociology, linguistics, and computer and machines. In the Second World War, organization of systems under­standable. claimed validity for living things and science, as well as in psychoanalysis, Norbert Wiener, the founder of cyber­ Cybernetics, a science located between machines, eco­nomic as well as mental ecology, politics, and economics. netics, had worked on calculating the flight disciplines, was regarded in the 1970s processes, sociological as well as aesthet­ — paths of enemy German bombers. His as a new kind of universal language. Cyber­ ic phenomena. Cybernetics also spread

100 Whole Systems

5

101 Visual Essay

6

102 Whole Systems

7

103 Visual Essay

8

104 Whole Systems

9 : > A

; <

? B

=

78 Stewart Brand (Ed.) | Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools | Fall 1969 | Courtesy Stewart Brand @ 9 Norbert Wiener | The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society | Cover | Cambridge, MA.: The Riverside Press, 1950

: Ludwig von Bertalanffy | General System Theory: Foundations, Developments, Applications | Cover | New York: George Braziller, 1993 (1968)

; Jay W. Forrester | Der teuflische Regelkreis: Kann die Menschheit überleben? | Cover | Munich: DVA, 1971

< Stafford Beer | Designing Feedom | Cover | Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1998 (1974)

= Adam Curtis | All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace | 2011 | Film still | Courtesy Adam Curtis & BBC

“It seems strange that we were not A Industrial Design Group of the INTEC, Comité de Investiga­ taught about the historical, philo- ciones Tecnológicas de Chile, Santiago, Chile | Cybersyn sophical and economic significance of Operations Room | 1972 | Courtesy Gui Bonsiepe > the foregoing transition from an open Cybernetic Introspective Pattern-Classifier | ca. 1968 | B Model reproduction | Photo: Norio Takasugi Stafford Beer | “Feedback from the people, fig. 45” | to a closed world system. However, in Brain of the Firm, 2nd edition (London / New York: John Wiley the omission can be explained by real- ? James Lovelock | Electron Capture Detector | 1960 | “Hippies from Manhattan to Haight- & Sons, 1981) | Courtesy Vanilla Beer, Dr. Allenna Leonard Model reproduction | Photo: Norio Takasugi and Prof. Dr. oec. habil. Fredmund Malik (president of CII-Stiftung, izing that a closed system would ex- Ashbury read Norbert Wiener, St. Gallen) clude any variables supposedly oper- @ Paul DeMarinis | Pygmy Gamelan | 1973 | Photo: Buckminster Fuller, and Marshall ating external to the system. This Paul DeMarinis McLuhan. Through their writings, automatically would exclude any young Americans encountered a Beginning in the 1940s, he was centrally super-­natural phenomena such as cybernetic vision of the world, one in involved in the development of digital the theologies of the organized reli- which material reality could be imag- computer technology in military research “Is it any wonder the world’s gone gions. And because the churches were ined as an information system. To at MIT. In his work as a systems theorist, he insane, with information come to be strong and the great pirates wished a generation that had grown up in a established the field of system dynamics. the only medium of exchange?” to obscure both their monopoly of the world beset by massive armies and His comprehensive model of the world’s Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York: Viking, riches of the closed infinite system 1973), 258. by the threat of nuclear holocaust, socioeconomic processes was included in and their grand world ocean strategy the cybernetic notion of the globe as a the calculations published by the Club of for its control, significance of the single, interlinked pattern of infor- Rome in 1972 under the title The Limits concept of a closed world system was mation was deeply comforting: in the to Growth. Forrester published the model popularly unrealized. ideologies and their values-based dis­ invisible play of information, many as “WORLD 2” in his own book World Once a closed system is recognized course. In The Coming of Post-Industrial thought they could see the possibility Dynamics (1971). as exclusively valid, the list of varia- Society (1973), he foretells a society of global harmony.” — bles and the degrees of freedom are defined by industries of information, Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: closed and limited to six positive and service, and knowledge. Bell is additionally Stewart Brand, The Whole Earth Network, and the Rise > The Cybernetic Introspective Pattern of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago six negative alternatives of action regarded as having given decisive impetus Press, 2006), 4–5. Classifier was shown in the exhibition for each local transformation event to the emergence of posthistoire thinking. Cybernetic Serendipity at the Institute in universe.” — of Contemporary Arts, London, in 1968. R. Buckminster Fuller, Vision 65: Keynote Address: People looking into the CIPC were given October, 1965 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, spread of cybernetics in the social sci­ a brief flash of a pattern that planted an 1965), 5. The Macy Conferences ences and humanities. Parallel to this, the image on the retina, which could be seen Between 1946 and 1951, a total of ten concepts of cybernetics were already with eyes closed for one minute. It allowed 23 Daniel Bell (1919 – 2011) was an conferences titled “Cybernetics: Circular being applied in military research at MIT people to watch their own cerebral American sociologist who taught at Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) process actually in action. Harvard University. Two of his books were Biological and Social Systems” were held and other institutions, as well as in the — among the most influential sociol­ogical under the aegis of The Josiah Macy Jr. development of computers. works of the postwar period. In The End of Foundation in New York. The Macy Con­ — ? James Lovelock developed this highly Ideology (1960), Bell speaks of a future in ferences, which are considered a central sensitive detector for measuring air which technocratic adaptations in the event in the history of knowledge of ;= Jay Forrester (born in 1918) is a pollution in 1960. The Electron Capture management of society would supersede the postwar era, played a key role in the computer engi­neer and systems theorist. Detector confirmed the ubiquitous

105 Visual Essay

C

CD San Francisco Oracle | Vol. 1, No. 12, January 1968 | D E F Courtesy The Estate of Allen Cohen and Regent Press, publishers of the San Francisco Oracle Facsimile Edition distribution of pesticide residues and other halogen bearing chemicals. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring is based on measurements and analyses that only became possible through the use of Lovelock’s detector. Just a few years later, Lovelock authored the Gaia theory. —

@ Five to ten little electronic circuits of Paul DeMarinis’ Pygmy Gamelan respond to electrical fluctuations in the galaxy by improvising around five-note phrases. —

A Cybersyn: In 1970, Salvador Allende became the world’s second democrati­ cally elected socialist president. The new E Herman Kahn, Irvin Mann | WAR GAMING, P-11167 | Chilean government began nationalizing Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 1957 | Cover | Reprinted banks and large corporations under the with permission of RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA. auspices of the Corporacíon de Fomento by which to predict the reactions of the F R. Buckminster Fuller: The World Game | Presentations to de la Produccíon (COR­FO). On July 13, Soviets, game theory—developed in the Congress | 1969–1970 | Courtesy Buckminster Fuller Institute 1971, CORFO director Fernando Flores, 1920s by John von Neumann—became charged with the reorganization of the Pinochet coup brought the project to the new leading discipline in the modeling economics in particular, however, serving Chilean economy, wrote to the British a premature end in 1973. of reality, especially decision situations. as the foundation of many of the programs theorist Stafford Beer, who was the first — What determines “rational” behavior with which automated transactions are person to apply the principles of cyber­ in conflict situations? What determines carried out in today’s markets. netics to management. Flores asked Beer E The RAND Corporation (for “Research economic behavior? Game theory, a — to develop a cybernetic control system and Development,” based in Santa Monica, branch of mathematics, also conquered for the economy as a whole—one that, California) has close ties to the US gov­ psychology, sociology, political science, The War Game and The World Game in keeping with Allende’s principles, didn’t ernment and is viewed as the most influen­ and biology through the application of its impose the restrictions of a central tial think tank of the postwar era. In the models in the context of computer tech­ E–L Herman Kahn was a military strate­ committee on the autonomy of labor. The development of analyses and strategies nology. Game theory models dominate gist, system theorist and preeminent

106 Whole Systems

G H “Some critics today worry that our democratic, free societies are be- coming overmanaged. I would argue that the opposite is true. As paradoxi- cal as it may sound, the real threat to democracy comes, not from over- management, but from underman- agement. To undermanage reality is not to keep free. It is simply to let some force other than reason shape reality. That force may be unbridled emotion; it may be greed; it may be aggressiveness; it may be hatred; it may be ignorance; it may be inertia; it may be anything other than reason. But whatever it is, if it is not reason that rules man, then man falls short of his potential. Vital decision-making, particularly in policy matters, must remain at the top. This is partly, though not completely, what the top is for. But rational decision-making depends on having a full range of rational options from which to choose, and success­ful management organizes the enterprise so that process can best take place. It is a mechanism whereby free men can most efficiently exercise their reason, initiative, crea- tivity and personal responsibility. The adventurous and immensely I J satisfying task of an efficient organi- zation is to formulate and analyze these options.” Herman Kahn, in Robert S. McNamara, The Essence of Security (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), quoted in Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (New York: Anchor Books / Doubleday & Co, 1969), 11–12.

“The World Game is a scientific means for exploring expeditious ways of employing the World’s resources so efficiently and omni-considerately as to be able to provide a higher standard of living for all humanity— higher than has heretofore been ex- perienced by any humans—and on a continually sustainable basis for all generations to come, while enabling all of humanity to enjoy the whole planet Earth without any individual profiting at the expense of another and without interference with one an- other, while also rediverting the valu- able chemistries known as pollution to effective uses elsewhere, conserv- ing the wild resources and antiquities. The World Game discards the Mal- thusian Doctrine which is the present working assumption of the major states. Malthus held that humanity is multiplying much more rapidly than GHIJ Lucy Lippard | Six Years: The dematerialization futurist, who played a major role in deter­ futility of a nuclear war, Kahn seemed to it can supply resources to support of the art object from 1966 to 1972 | Berkeley: University of mining America’s nuclear strategy. Kahn revel in planning for its aftermath. He once itself, and compounds with Darwin’s California Press 1997 (1973) | © University of California Press became a model for Dr. Strangelove, in told a reporter, “We [scenario writers] survival of the fittest, to assume that Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove or: take God’s view. The President’s view. Big. only the side with the greatest arms How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Aerial. Global. Galactic. Ethereal. Spatial. can survive. […] The World Game “[T]here are contexts in which what is the Bomb. At the RAND Corporation and Overall. Megalomania is the standard employs design science to produce happening in the whole cannot be de- later, at his own Hudson Institute, Herman occupa­tional hazard.” At the same time, progressively higher performance duced from the characteristics of the Kahn, perhaps the most well-known however, particularly as the 1960s pro­ per units of invested time, energy, and seperate pieces, but conversely; what analyst at the time, began to present his gressed, Kahn embraced the American know-how per each and every com­ happens to a part of the whole is, in simulations in the form of scenarios— counterculture. “I like the hippies,” ponent function of the world’s re- clear-cut cases, determined game theory inspired narrative scripts he explained to a reporter in 1968. “I’ve sources. The World Game makes it by the laws of the inner structure of of possible futures. These included his been to Esalen. I’ve had LSD a couple of possible for intelligent amateurs to its whole. [...] this is gestalt theory, infamous scenarios for nuclear Armaged­ times. In some ways I’d like to join them.” discover within a few weeks of simu- no more no less.” don, scenarios for the Vietnam War, which Conversely, concept artists like David lated design revolution illustrated Max Wertheimer, “Gestalt Theory,” in Social Research, no. 11 (1944): 84. ultimately led to escalation and failure, and Askevold, who was influential in California, on the World Map that the foregoing his equally well-known visions for America were interested in game theory scenarios. premises are valid.” in the year 2000. On the one hand, Kahn’s The “shoot / don’t shoot” scenario can be R. Buckminster Fuller, “Fuller Statement on World Game,” work on nuclear war seemed to many to be seen as the Cali­fornia-Western response Summer 1969, in The World Game: Integrative Resource Utilization Planning Tool (Carbondale: Southern Illinois the epitome of American technocratic to the famous prisoner’s dilemma. University, 1971), 89. hubris. Rather than acknowledge the utter —

107 Visual Essay

K M

N

L

KL Guy Mercier | Buckminster Fuller and The World Game | “Next we are going to set up a com­ 1971 | Courtesy Buckminster Fuller Institute puter feeding game, called ‘How Do We M Radical Software: The Electromagnetic Spectrum | Vol. 1, Make the World Work?’ We will start No. 2, Autumn 1970 | Courtesy Ira Schneider / Raindance playing relatively soon. We will bring NO Paul Ryan | “Cybernetic Guerilla Warfare” | in Radical people from all over the world to play Software, Vol. 1, No. 3, Spring 1971: 1–2. | Courtesy Paul Ryan O it. There will be competitive teams from and Ira Schneider / Raindance all around earth to test their theories P Stewart Brand (Ed.) | Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog: on how to make the world work. If a The World Game | March 1970 | Courtesy Stewart Brand team resorts to political pressures to accelerate their advantages and is not MNO Radical Software, launched in able to wait for the going gestation 1970 by Phyllis Gershuny, Beryl Korot, rates to validate their theory they are Ira Schneider, and others, was a magazine apt to be in trouble. When you get into of the early video culture and artistic politics you are very liable to get into avant-garde. At that time, the term soft­ war. War is the ultimate tool of politics. ware referred to informational content. If war develops the side inducing it — loses the game.” R. Buckminster Fuller, Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects of Humanity (New York: Bantam Books, 1969), 158.

108 Whole Systems

P

109 Visual Essay

110 Whole Systems

Q

111 Visual Essay

R

112 Whole Systems

S

113 Visual Essay

T U \

\ Bernard Gotfryd | First Earth Day | 1970 | Courtesy Bernard Gotfryd | © Getty Images

And tied her with fences and dragged her down I hear a very gentle sound with your ear down to the ground We want the world and we want it … […] W [ V NOW! X Y […] Z The Doors “When the Music’s Over” 1967 Lyrics by The Doors —

VWY The best-selling book The Closing Circle (1971) by biologist Barry Commoner is, like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a classic of the environmental movement. Q Stewart Brand (Ed.) | Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog: V Rachel Carson | Silent Spring | Cover | London: Y Barry Commoner | The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, Difficult But Possible | September 1969 | Courtesy Stewart Brand Hamish Hamilton, 1962 and Technology | Cover | New York: Knopf, 1971 Yet his was a leftist, eco-socialist analy­- sis, arguing that capitalist technologies RS Stewart Brand (Ed.) | Supplement to the Whole Earth Cat- W Paul R. Ehrlich | The Population Bomb | Cover | Z Eugene Odum | Fundamentals of Ecology | Cover | alog: The Outlaw Area | January 1970 | Courtesy Stewart Brand San Francisco: W. H. Freeman & Co, 1970 Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders Company, 1954 (1953) were chiefly responsible for environmental degradation, as opposed to population T Don Farber / Peace Press | Alliance for Survival | X William Vogt | Road to Survival | Cover | New York: [ Gregory Bateson | Steps to an Ecology of Mind: 1979–1980 | Courtesy Center for the Study of Political William Sloane, 1948 A Revolutionary Approach to Man’s Understanding of pressures, a widely held opinion at the Graphics, Los Angeles | © Don Farber Himself | Cover | New York: Ballantine Books, 1985 (1972) time, supported by books such as Paul U Klaus Staeck | [Violets and Factories] | 1971 | Courtesy The term ecosystem appeared for the Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb. He argued Center for the Study of Political Graphics, Los Angeles | first time in 1935 in a paper by the British reconciling the environmental movement with Ehrlich and other environmen­talists © Klaus Staeck biologist Arthur Tansley. An ecosystem with technology. Chief among these that their proposed solutions were politi­ encompasses all of the factors that was the magazine CoEvolution Quarterly, cally unacceptable because of the coercion Spaceship Earth to Mother Earth are necessary to maintain life in a certain launched in 1974. These publications that they implied, and because the cost environment. The concept is used to systematically operated beyond the would fall disproportionately on the poor. T–[ The Ecosystem describe the interaction of the parts in dualism of nature and culture by treating The first two of the basic axioms of eco­- an assumed whole. 1953 saw the publica­ ecology and cybernetics equally as infor­ logy postulated by Commoner stated: In the 1970s, ecological standpoints were tion of Howard and Eugene Odum’s book mation systems. They also discussed “1. Everything Is Connected to Everything embraced by a broader public. Fear of Fundamentals of Ecology, which draws and promoted so-called “soft technolo­ Else. There is one ecosphere for all living an imminent ecological catastrophe began on concepts from systems theory and gies” that adapted to local conditions. organisms and what affects one, affects to gradually supplant the fear of nuclear contributed to the establishment of eco­ Stewart Brand pursued the goal of a com­ all. 2. Everything Must Go Somewhere. holocaust that had dominated the 1950s. logy as an independent discipline. Rachel prehensive integration of the techno­ There is no ‘waste’ in nature and there is The world’s population was rising at Carson’s book Silent Spring appeared sphere and biosphere as “whole systems.” no ‘away’ to which things can be thrown.” what was seen as an explosive rate. It was in 1962. Taking up the subject of pesti­ He called the spaces in which this integra­ — widely believed that, to avert ecological cides, it describes their consequences for tion took place, where people and tech­ catas­trophe and ensure survival, global the “ecological balance” that has devel­ nologies learned to adapt to the universal \ Earth Day population growth must be restricted, the oped over millions of years, as well as for laws of the Earth as a holistic system, plundering of natural resources halted, the food chain, right up to the human level. “outlaw areas.” The plans that he sup­ The first Earth Day was held March 21, and technological development curbed. Around 1970, the prevailing view was ported, during part of his career, for 1970 in San Francisco and other cities. “Eco­logy” and “ecosystem” became firmly that the biosphere and the technosphere colonies in outer space were prototypes It was initiated by John McConnell, who anchored in the vocabulary of a public stood in fundamen­tal conflict with one of such techno-ecological “outlaw areas.” later founded The Earth Society Founda­ discourse overshadowed by a general another. It was widely assumed, and — tion, which continued its campaign for sense of crisis. It was the end of the “out­ espoused in books like Silent Spring, that some years, devising idealistic schemes side.” Nature, inexhaustible and self- the ecosystems of the biosphere regu­- “When the Music’s Over” for global citizenship and world passports, governing, could no longer be taken for lated themselves and were in a natural and promoting the Earth Flag as “a non- granted as the background to man’s balance, which man and his technology […] government flag for all Earth people […] actions, but now had to be actively pre­ were now upsetting. Romantic and holistic What have they done to the earth? to encourage equilibrium in nature, in served. This sphere, too, was now thought concepts of nature seemed irrecon­cilably What have they done to our fair sister? social systems, and in the minds of men.” of in terms of feedback effects: the pesti­ opposed to the destructive power of Ravaged and plundered and ripped her The flag with the picture of Earth had been cide sprayed on the land doesn’t disap­ technology.­ and bit her designed by McConnell, after he had seen pear; it returns, just like the exhaust from Publications associated with the Whole Stuck her with knives in the side of the the “Earthrise” picture in Life magazine. the smokestacks. Earth Catalog played an essential role in dawn —

114 Whole Systems

] a b

a Ernest Callenbach | Ecotopia | Cover | New York City: Banyan Tree Books, 1975 “Selfsufficiency is an idea which has b Stewart Brand (Ed.) | The CoEvolution Quarterly | No. 20, Winter 1977/1978 | Courtesy Stewart Brand done more harm than good. On close conceptual examination it is flawed at the root. More importantly, it works badly in practice. “‘COEVOLUTION,’ our founding idea, is a term coined by biologists Paul Anyone who has actually tried to live Ehrlich and Peter Raven (one each in total selfsufficiency— there must zoologist and botanist) to account for be now thousands in the recent wave events that neither of their separate that we (culpa!) helped inspire— disciplines could explain. They no- knows the mindnumbing labor and ticed that plants they were studying loneliness and frustration and real carried large amounts of energy- marginless hazard that goes with the expensive alkaloids that made sense attempt. It is a kind of hysteria. […] only in terms of the voracious cater- pillars who were put off by the poison- […] selfsufficiency is not to be had on ous quality of the alkaloids. Some any terms, ever. It is a charming bugs however (such as the Monarch woodsy extension of the fatal Ameri- ] Bill Garner / Environmental Action | Environmental Action April 22 | 1970 | Courtesy Center for the Study of Political butterfly caterpillar) adapted to can mania for privacy. […] It is a Graphics, Los Angeles | © Bill Garner “It solved a problem. All you’d have to the poisons (such as in milkweed) and damned lie. There is no dissectable do is to leave out one ethnic flag and kept them in their bodies to foil their self. Ever since there were two organ- you’d have a crisis. This covers every- own predators (such as bluejays). isms life has been a matter of coevo- “EARTH DAY is the first holy day body.” That’s why nobody eats Monarch lution, life growing ever more richly which transcends all national bor- An official on the occasion of the first Earth Day, 1970 butterflies, and why they advertise on life. […] We can ask what kinds ders, yet preserves all geographical quoted in John McConnell, “The History of the Earth Flag” their poisonousness with bright or- of dependency we prefer, but that’s in The Flag Bulletin (March/April 1982): 61. integrities, spans mountains and ange and black wings and slow flight, our only choice.” oceans and time belts, and yet brings and why it is advantageous for other Stewart Brand, Soft Tech - A CoEvolution Book, eds. people all over the world into one non-poisonous butterflies (such J. Baldwin and Stewart Brand (New York: Penguin Books, 1978), 5. resonating accord, is devoted to the seceded from the United States to es­ as the Viceroy) to mimic their appear- preservation of the harmony in nature tablish a sustainable society. A central ance. So much for the idea that and yet draws upon the triumphs of challenge in Ecotopia is the question of how evolution­ merely responds to inert technology, the measurement of time, to bring countercultural anti-authoritari­ processes such as climate. Indeed, larizing “soft technology” and the future and instantaneous communication anism into line with the demand for eco­ a recent theory called the Gaia “reconciliation” of man, technology, and through space. logically sustainable practices. In Eco­- Hypothesis asserts that climate, nature. topia, problems aren’t solved politically, and even the chemical makeup of the “Where the insights of Buckminster Fuller EARTH DAY draws on astronomical but rather technologically. Ecotopia is atmosphere, is highly co-evolved initiated the Whole Earth Catalog, Gregory phenomena in a new way – which is the vision of a reconciliation between with all the Earth’s organisms, Bateson’s insights lurk behind most of also the most ancient way – using the high-tech and cultural Utopias. It is also including us. what is going on in this Epilog,” Brand vernal Equinox, the time when the a prophetic model of a consumption- Including us. That’s the kicker, be- wrote at the beginning of the Whole Earth Sun crosses the equator making night oriented democracy in which the ideal of cause the co-evolutionary idea of life Epilog in 1973. Gregory Bateson was an and day of equal length in all parts a “spontaneous” harmony is realized ever more intricately fitting, fighting, anthropologist and participant in the of the Earth. To this point in the an- through the market. Ecotopia is a charac­ cooperating with, and learning Macy Conferences, and was known in the nual calendar, EARTH DAY attaches teristically Californian mix, combining a from other life only picks up speed United States at the time especially for no local or divisive set of symbols, countercultural lifestyle, including certain and complexity when you mix in cul- his “double bind” theory about schizophre­ no statement of the truth or superior- egalitarian values and the collectivism tural species such as we. The moral nia; his cybernetic, information theory- ity of one way of life over another. of the New Left, with a technology- of the co-evolutionary perspective based understanding of alcoholism and But the selection of the March Equi- embracing conservationist ethic and is its imperative to always look one psychopathology; and his long marriage to nox makes planetary observance of a the libertarian values of the government- level larger and one level finer (at Marga­ret Mead. Stewart Brand had first shared event possible, and a flag wary American West. least) than where you are, and to met Bateson in 1960. Their second en­ which shows the Earth as seen from — see clear through your cycles. So as counter, in 1972, led to Bateson taking space appropriate. you study your soil, your yard, your over Buckminster Fuller’s previous role in […]” b CoEvolution Quarterly watershed, your bio-community and the Whole Earth publications. Fuller’s Margaret Mead, “Earth Day” in EPA Journal human community, your weather, “comprehensive design” philosophy had (March 1978). In 1973, Stewart Brand founded the your access to tools, and your night made the “spaceship earth” metaphor the magazine CoEvolution Quarterly, to which sky, be aware that they are studying basis of the Whole Earth Catalog. In a he would devote a great part of his atten­ you.” paradigm change regarding the percep­ a In his famous eco-science fiction novel tion until 1985. It was a “California-based Stewart Brand, The CoEvolution Quarterly Editorial, tion of the planet, CoEvolution Quarterly Ecotopia, Ernst Callenbach models a peculiar magazine” that continued to No. 15 (Fall 1977): 5. marked a move from an “engineer’s near-future Utopia in which Northern pursue the agenda of the Whole Earth metaphor” to a “biological metaphor” California, Oregon, and Washington have Catalog, with a special concern for popu­ (Stewart Brand). —

115 Visual Essay

c

116 Whole Systems

d

117 Visual Essay

e g h

cd Stewart Brand (Ed.) | Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog: The Outlaw Area | January 1970 | Courtesy Stewart Brand

ef Stewart Brand (Ed.) | Space Colonies – A CoEvolution Book | September 1977 | Courtesy Stewart Brand

gh Paul Krassner, Ken Kesey | The Realist: THE LAST SUPPLEMENT TO THE WHOLE EARTH CATALOG | No. 89, March–April 1971 | © The Realist Association and its contributing writers and artists

“As long as there is a safety valve of unexplored frontiers, then the cre- ative, the aggressive, the exploitative urges of human beings can be chan- neled into long term possibilities and benefits. But if those frontiers close down and people begin to turn in upon themselves, that jeopardizes the democratic fabric.” Jerry Brown, the governor of California, on the occasion of the first Space Day, 1977.

“Ecology and technology find a unity in Space” f Jerry Brown, the governor of California, on the occasion of the first Space Day, 1977.

“Now there is nowhere left for smart Americans to go but out into high or- bit. I love that phrase—high orbit… We were talking about high orbit long before the space program.” Timothy Leary, on the occasion of the first Space Day, 197 7.

for space colonies. For many readers from the counterculture and the environmental movement, this show of support for “big technology” went too far. In August 1977, the “hippie” gover­nor of California, Jerry Brown (who in 2011 assumed the office once again), along with the astronaut Russell Schweickart (“No Frames, No Boundaries”), O’Neill, Stewart Brand, and others, held a “Space Day” at which the idea of a perma­nent human presence ef Outer Space, Back into the System back into “the system,” the city, and the in space was discussed. It was, not least, mainstream without betraying their ideals. California’s long-established aerospace By the mid-1970s, most of the utopian According to his model, the system has no industry, the event’s sponsor, that Brown communes to which the Whole Earth “outside,” but can be changed from the had in mind when he broke with the domi­ Catalog was originally addressed had inside out in a process of mutual “optimiza­ nant crisis rhetoric of constraint: “It is a disbanded. In the pages of Co­Evolution tion”: co-evolution. world of limits but through respecting and Quarterly, Gregory Bateson’s ideas of In the second half of the 1970s, however, reverencing the limits, endless possibilities the entire natural and social world consti­ Stewart Brand’s support for a new form of emerge,” he said at Space Day (1977). “As tuting an information system, and of the collective led to a heated debate among the for space colonies, it’s not a question of immanence of the individual consciousness readership of Co­Evolution Quarterly and whether—only when and how.” as a part of this system, became a bridge beyond. Brand published the physicist — offering dropouts of the movement a way Gerard K. O’Neill’s techno-utopian plans

118 Ira Schneider & Raindance/Radical Software Selections from the 1970s concerning the Whole Earth, Ecology and Earth Day 1970s/2013 | 20:25 min, color, sound | Video | Film stills Courtesy Ira Schneider and ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe

119 Eleanor Antin Harold Beard from California Lives Merrit from California Lives 1969, replicated 1998 | Clothes tree, camouflage suite, 1969, replicated 1998 | Gasoline can, bush hat with “peace” decal, four decoy ducks, and text panel | Dimensions variable metal comb, and text panel | Dimensions variable Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York

120 A Thousand Ecologies: The Process of Cyberneticization and General Ecology — Erich Hörl

Ecological Encyclopaedism own use of the formula, and as such is an expression of the technological unconscious of our era: Heidegger’s “L’écologie, tâche de la pensée/ecology, the task of mid-1960s observation may since have turned out thinking”1 says Michel Deguy. Our task of thinking, to to have been very accurate—in so far as it recognized be precise: our task of thinking today and to come, our early on the enormous scope of the cybernetic chal­ next task of thinking. But the question then remains: lenge to the dogmatic image of thought, and in so doing what is this future task all about? What are its outlines? anticipated the replacement of traditional categories What are its stakes? From where has our becoming- and leading differences Leitdifferenzen( ) by concepts of ecological been written? And how is this emergence of command and control; nevertheless, his own account a general ecology as opposed to a restricted ecology, of what he called the “future task of thinking” remained which is taking place before our very eyes, to be char­ ultimately strangely vague and sometimes even domi­ acterized? Deguy’s exact phrase, “the task of thinking,” nated by a counter-technological poetics.2 This lack employed to highlight the urgency and scope of the eco­ of clarity in relation to the wider noo-political horizon logical question, had originally been used by Heidegger of the cybernetic age may in the first instance have been to sum up the end of philosophy and the reversal of due to Heidegger’s ultimately inadequate conceptual­ thinking that had been caused by the technological ful­- izations of the history and historicity of objects, which fillment of metaphysics as cybernetics. This choice were excessively dominated by an instrumental image of phrase is highly significant, as shining through it, at of technology. Heidegger did not fully explore a real least between the lines, Deguy allows us to perceive thinking of technological becoming, which would include a reference to the process of cyberneticization as the becoming of technology itself, arising from a funda­ the technological condition of the general ecology of mental transformation of the sense of technology as thought. This also to an extent goes against Heidegger’s such, beyond its traditional tool-equipment/instrumen­

1 Michel Deguy, Écologiques 2 Martin Heidegger, “The End of Phi­ an account of the fundamental ambivalence (Paris: Hermann, 2012), 31. losophy and the Task of Thinking,” (1964) in Heidegger’s reading of cybernetics, in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. in which cybernetics are seen not only to David F. Krell (San Francisco: Harper, represent and implement the end of the 1977), 373–92. See also Erich Hörl, “Das age of “Enframing” (Gestell) but also the kybernetische Bild des Denkens,” in Die entry into a new epoch in the history of Transformation des Humanen. Beiträge being, see Erich Hörl, “Die offene Maschine. zur Kulturgeschichte der Kybernetik, eds. Heidegger, Günther und Simondon Michael Hagner and Erich Hörl (Frankfurt über die technologische Bedingung,” am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008), 163–95; for Modern Language Notes, vol. 123 (2008): 19 4 –2 17.

121 A Thousand Ecologies

tal and mechanical derivations.3 Furthermore, even the problem of mediation as such to come fully into as, for his own part, he continuously problematized and focus, exposing it with a radicality never seen before. attacked the anthropological, that is, the humanistic, As such, it is both a problem and question of consti­ order, his own thinking was still too anthropocentric to tutive relationality; or, more precisely—to paraphrase be able to describe the future cybernetic and neo- Gilbert Simondon—the problem of an original relation­ cybernetic couplings of people, living beings, and tech­ ship between the individual and its milieu, with which nologies—in other words, of human and non-human it has always already been coupled and which would forces—and to draw from them the necessary concep­ not simply constitute a ready-made, prior “natural” tual-political consequences. Neither was it able to environ­ment to which it would have had to adapt, but describe the new fundamental experience and the new which must rather be conceived as the site of its fundamental position under the technological condi­- originary and inescapable artifacticity, with which it tion, each of which is not only de-subjectivized and is conjoined, and with which it makes its appearance de-objectivized, but also, as we shall soon see in great­ together; a co-evolution, or to use a term employed by er detail, presented as technically distributed, pro­ Jean-Luc Nancy, a comparution.6 One could initially cessualized, indeed environmentalized in a radically suggest that ecology marks out both the present and technological form, and which in their essential environ­ future positions in the history of sense through which mentality are hard to grasp using Heidegger’s con­ precisely this question of the primordiality of relation ceptual arsenal.4 imposes itself. Relation must be understood as some­ The description that is now possible, half a century thing that precedes the forming of the terms of the after Heidegger, of the task of thinking as ecological, relation (subject, object, individual, groups, indeed has its strong diagnostic and conceptual-political bases all forms of collective human and non-human agents): precisely in the evolution of technological objectivity predominantly, it must traverse all modes and levels that has been observed since: the sense of the ecologi­ of Being, from the micro to the macro, meaning that it cal as such—which determines both the task of thinking is a “modality of being.”7 The phrase “Being is rela­ and the horizon of the cybernetic age—clarifies and tion”8—which Didier Debaise rightly recognizes as a unfolds itself, first and foremost, on an object-historical key phrase of contemporary thought as well as an basis. Contrary to all of the ecological preconceptions expression of our current ontological state—encapsu­ that bind ecology and nature together, ecology is in­ lates the fundamental principle of general ecology. In creasingly proving to epitomize the un- or non-natural other words: in the insistence and virulence of the configuration that has been established over more question of relationality, the core of our eco-technicity than half a century by the extensive cyberneticization is revealed. and computerization of life.5 The radical technological In line with Simondon’s fundamental distinction between mediation that has been implemented since 1950 three forms or stages of the encyclopaedic spirit, the through the process of cyberneticization—and which ecological task of thinking can, as a whole, be viewed today operates within the sensory and intelligent as constituting what I propose to call the forthcoming environments that exist in micro-temporal realms, in fourth type of encyclopaedism. This is exactly what is pervasive media and ubiquitous computing—causes at stake with the general ecology of technology and

3 Heidegger does have incredible diag­ 4 For Heidegger’s anthropocentrism, 5 Timothy Morton, with his well-known 6 Tracy B. Strong translates comparu- nostic intuition for the coming cybernetic as well as for the inherent limitations of phrase “Ecology without nature,” opposes tion using the Scottish common law term age, which is what makes his thinking on this his anthropocentric conceptualization the fundamental “ecologo-centric” belief “compearance,” referring to the act of subject so valuable. He did not, however, of environmentality (Umweltlichkeit), see that amalgamates ecology and nature (the appearing in court. See Jean-Luc Nancy produce a systematic study of the “histori­ Jean-Hugues Barthélémy, “La question de latter understood in its modern sense, and Tracy B. Strong, “La Comparution/ cality” of equipment (Zeug), although he la non-anthropologie,” in Technique, as an antonym of technology and culture, The Compearance: From the Existence frequently alluded to its having as many monde, individuation. Heidegger, Simondon, as an equilibrium, and as a state to which of ‘Communism’ to the Community of eras or epochs as the “historicality” of Be­ Deleuze, ed. Jean-Marie Vaysse it is worth returning). Morton ignores or ‘Existence,’” Political Theory, vol. 20, no. 3 ing. See also Hubert Dreyfus “Heidegger’s (Hildesheim: Olms, 2006), 117–32; misses the object-historical basis of his (August 1992): 371–98. History of the Being of Equipment,” in Jacques Derrida, The Animal That There- own critique of ecologo-centrism, i.e. the Heidegger: A Critical Reader, eds. Hubert fore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. question of the historicity of the concept 7 Gilbert Simondon, “The Genesis of the Dreyfus and Harrison Hall (Oxford: Black­ David Wills (New York: Fordham University of nature itself and that of its potential— Individual,” in Incorporations, eds. Jonathan well, 1992), 173–85. Press, 2008), 141–60; Giorgio Agamben, and necessary—reconceptualization. Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York: The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin See Timothy Morton, “Ecologocentrism: Zone Books, 1992): 312. Attell (Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Unworking Animals,” SubStance, issue 117, Press, 2004); for the concept of neo- vol. 37.3 (2008): 73–96. 8 Didier Debaise, “What is relational cybernetics see also Bruce Clarke and thinking?” in Inflexions, no. 5 (2012): 1–11. Mark B. N. Hansen (eds.), “Neocybernetic Emergence,” in Emergence and Embodi­ ment: New Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory (Durham, NC.: Duke University Press, 2009), 1–25.

122 Erich Hörl

media. Simondon, who himself mapped out a complex finality.”13 By putting an end to the regime of “means ecology of participation based on the individual-milieu and ends,” universal cybernetics (Simondon himself— dyad and on the concept of the pre-individual, and who sharply criticized the first-order cybernetics of who can thus without doubt be viewed as one of the his day as well as its fascination with automatism and pioneers of a general ecology,9 differentiates between its fixation on adaptation—speaks of an “allagmatic,” the ethical encyclopaedism of the Renaissance, the a transversal, unifying theory of operations) exposes technical encyclopaedism of the Great Encyclopaedia mediation as such for the first time in history, forcing and the Enlightenment, and finally, the technological the question and the problem of mediation out into encyclopaedism of his own cybernetic era. Each type the open and making its organization the central issue of encyclopaedism is, principally, an expression of a of the era. This is, at least, cybernetics’ enlightening society’s fundamental desire “to attain an adult and free aim: according to Simondon, it “enlightens the open state, since the regime as well as the conventions of processes of social and individual life. In this sense thought patronize the individuals and keep them in an technology reduces alienation.”14 Mediation as such artificial state of infancy.”10 Thus it is quite clear that for now becomes the core problem of encyclopaedism Simondon it is the force of the scientific, ultimately of in our time. technical thinking and of invention, that liberates and Since these remarkable observations on alienation and universalizes, enabling what he terms transindividuation on the enlightening spirit of cybernetics were made, by breaking up the closed social systems that control not only have we advanced ever deeper into the organi­ the processes of psychic-collective individuation—at zation and operationalization of mediation, not only least for a moment, before (re-)dogmatization takes have we given way to the promised openness of psy­ place.11 In particular, the evolution of technical objects chic-social processes and to the opening up of media­ proves to be the driving enlightening force. What tion; but at the same time, the all-encompassing matters is that all encyclopaedisms as such are always cyberne­ticization and computerization of our form of coupled with the history of technical objects. This life has brought with it a new form of closure, a new coupling is crucial, even extending as far as the emer­ dogmatism, and a new form of bondage through media­ gence of so-called open objects, open machines, tion and processuality. The cathexis and exploitation and technical ensembles, which are to be regarded of mediation and processuality by the big data indus­ as operators of a new, cybernetic Enlightenment that, tries that today—following Guattari—dominate our according to Simondon, eventually occurred in the post-media era, form, at the very least, the scene of our mid-twentieth century: “Cybernetics is giving to man contemporary alienation; and it is against this that we a new type of majority.”12 In this way, Simondon char­ have to invoke a new, fourth, indeed ecological encyclo­ acterized, in 1958, the third, technological encyclopae­ paedism, which is able to work out the new sense of dism. Due to the operationalization of finality as such, mediation and processuality at the level of the evolution which is probably its core undertaking, cybernetics of technical objects and of the historicity of object­- ends the long-lasting regime of finality and the subordi­ hood or objecticity in general, advancing relational nation to always already given ends. Simondon writes: thinking. “Man overcomes enslaving by consciously organising

9 Mark B. N. Hansen offers an initial 11 Transindividuality is “a relation, which 13 Simondon, Du Mode d'Existence des elucidation of this field in “Engineering Pre- connects individuals not by means of the Objets Techniques, op. cit., 103 individual Potentiality: Technics, Transin­ constitutive individuality that originally dividuation, and 21st-Century Media,” separates them from one another, nor by 14 Ibid., 106. SubStance, issue 129, vol. 41.3 (November means of that which is identical in every 2012): 32–59; see also my article, “Simon­ human subject, such as the a priori forms don’s General Ecology” (forthcoming). of sensory perception, but via this charge of pre-individual reality, this natural 10 Gilbert Simondon, Du Mode charge which is preserved alongside the d'Existence des Objets Techniques (Paris: individual­ being and contains potentials Éditions Aubier, 2005 [1958] ), 95–6. and virtuality.” (Ibid., 248) The invented technical object is both symbol and vehicle of the transindividual relation. (See also ibid., 247).

12 Ibid., 104. For the concept of the open object, see Gilbert Simondon, “Technical Mentality,” in Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology, ed. Arne de Boever et al. (Edin­ burgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 1–118.

123 A Thousand Ecologies

The historical evolution of objects—which is the strict­ realms of being, has been characterized by a profound est precondition of ecological encyclopaedism—has evolution of technical objects and a far-reaching set long since begun to exceed all objectivity as such, so of consequences for the culture of sense (or sense- that the concept of the technical object has itself be­ culture / Sinnkultur). First—and this is the genesis of come, because of its fundamental environmentalization, a new sense of technology—the work-tool, the instru­ problematic, if not obsolete. Mark B. N. Hansen ment, the utensil, and finally even the machine become describes the present and future condition thus: “We object-historically obsolete. Along with this, in par­ must reconceptualise the coupling of human and tech­ ticular, that which is associated with the corresponding nics beyond the figure of the ‘technical object.’ In objective formations, is devalued, including the princi­- the wake of computational technologies that distribute ple of the model of the working subject, its concen­ sensibility beyond consciousness, the correlation trated action or active power and its peculiar meaning- between human-implicating individuation and technics focused sense-culture; object-relations and worldly has moved beyond what we might think of as its objec­ relations as dominated by instrumental, use-oriented tive stage […] and has entered a properly processual objects; and the corresponding ontological scheme stage in which technics directly intensifies sub-percep­ which frames this use-oriented sense-culture, namely, tual dimensions of human experience. […] The technical hylomorphism. The transcendental subject—the epito­ object had to make way for technical processes that me of this traditional sense-culture which, virtually operate through far more complex imbrications with from the moment of its recognition, has itself also been human activity.”15 Instead of a technical mediation in a perpetual state of crisis—reveals itself to be an of perception, today’s concern is “the more indirect untenable illusion. Secondly—and this is the genesis of technical mediation of an environmental sensibility.”16 a new sense of sense—there is a parallel rise of techno­ In contrast to the ever-repeated refrain of a new imme­ logical ensembles and networks as new directives for diacy, into which we (re)enter in the age of ubiquitous the sense-culture. With these directives, the formation computing, ubiquitous media, intelligent environments, of fundamentally passive objects by active subjects, and so on, we are in fact now dealing with the absolute which had previously been the central activity of the prioritization of mediation. The reconceptualization of sense-culture, is now moved a bit further into the back­ processuality and relation, non-subjective subjectivity ground, as technical objects in general lose for the and experience, which correspond to this new object- first time their minority position in the sense-culture historical position, and ultimately the redescription and take on a majority and autonomous status. The of agency and collectivity under the condition of a radical power of action is dispersed among and through them technical distribution, all this amounting to a working- and is no longer focused on or assigned to the working- through of the question of what (technical) mediation meaning subject. This dispersion concerns not only today actually means, as well as the corresponding sub­jectivity and the subject, but incorporates, as we amendment of the traditional ontological and epistemo­ have already seen, objectivity and the constitution of logical frames that necessarily results from this: all this the object itself, namely in the form of its dispersal into comprises the task of thinking in the age of the fourth distributed technical processes. This entails the active encyclopaedism, which will be ecological; and this is and self-acting, not to say “intelligent” technological precisely what the title of a general ecology stands for. (in an eminent sense) object-cultures, or rather pro­ cess-cultures, which are more and more migratory and submerged within our environments, informing our General Ecology of Media and Technics infrastructure, processing the backgrounds of our being and experience with the highest computational The great upending of the history of sense, in which we intensity, operating in new, micro-temporal regions, have found ourselves for more than half a century and and which are shaping the face and the logic of contem­ which encompasses all possible universes of values and porary cyberneticization. Contemporary technical

15 Hansen, “Engineering Pre-Individual Potentiality,” op. cit., 51 and 55.

16 Ibid., 48.

124 Erich Hörl

ensembles and networks reveal a formerly concealed, also to say, in the technical infrastructure of the envi­ yet in principle original participatory constitution, ronment” have for the first time “brought into the open proving in fact to be agents of a primordial participa­ and made accessible a human condition that is origi­ tory condition, which they now make legible. They nary,” establishing what Hansen calls “our originary represent non-signifying, multi-agential assemblages environmental condition.”20 Hansen has begun to and ultimately demand the elaboration of a radical explore the very originarity of this condition, to carve relational ontology of participation able to give an out the ways in which “twenty-first-century media— account of this situation. It originates the new sense- the host of contemporary technologies that record and culture of technology—with multiple, transversal agen­ analyze data beyond the reach of our human sensory cies beyond the centralization and monopolization of apparatus and that operate in Libet’s missing half the working-meaning-perceiving human subject. Its second”21—are media which engineer “the very sensi­ decoding is the challenge faced by the new encyclo­ ble continuum” by which “experience occurs”:22 sensa­ paedic effort.17 tions, feelings, or rather micro-sensibilities and micro- The more advanced contemporary theories of media temporalities, are edited, worked, or processed by focus on this environmental constitution, on which the environmental media cultures. As a result, potentiality general cyberneticization converges. The enormity as such, the process of individuation, indeed of becom­ and urgency of the need for ontological and epistemo­ ing, mutates into a form of media-technological engi­ logical reconceptualization—which reveals itself in neering. “Put bluntly, today’s media no longer target the course of this working-through—conversely gives human subjectivity as such (perceptual consciousness),” current media theory a key role to play in contempo­ writes Hansen, “but rather aim directly to target the rary theoretical endeavors. Mark Hansen, whom one non-subjective subjectivity at issue in worldly micro- could refer to as one of the first main protagonists sensibility.”23 of this attempt, has analyzed the radicalized technical Luciana Parisi (to cite another important voice in media distribution of agency by twenty-first-century media ecology) likewise very plausibly conceives of the corre­ as an explosion of “environmental agency” (rather than sponding techno-medial configurations that cyber­ concentrating on the formerly privileged individual neticize the modes of sensation by advancing the bio- agents of human subjectivity); and in so doing, he has informatic integration of sensors, mobile media, grasped the conceptual difficulties of a non-reductive and digital atmospheres, as “technoecologies of sensa­ understanding of non-trivial environmentality.18 In view tion.”24 Drawing on Lynn Margulis’ concept of the of the multiscalar medial surroundings, he stresses ecology of symbiogenesis (an autopoietic ecology of the necessity of a “radical environmental perspective” the “community of microorganisms of which we are upon which “a radical generalization and reconceptual­ made,” in a broader sense an original ecology of the ization of subjectivity” beyond the modern human living, running from the micro- to the macro-scale, subject could be based.19 According to Hansen, media from prokaryotes to the autopoietic planet of Gaia, also today, due largely to the colonization of everyday life encompassing media and technology), Parisi has re­ by digital devices, smart chips, and sensors, have ferred to this new cybernetic affectivity that brings relocated from the site of the classical media functions together the biological and the digital, as “symbiosen­ such as recording, storage, and transmission “to a sation: the felt experience of a nonsensuous related­ platform for immediate, action-facilitating interconnec­ ness between organic and inorganic matter adding on tion with and feedback from the environment.” Here, a new gradient of feeling in the thinking-flesh.”25 In her the meaning of technological media itself is transformed earlier work on “the new digital matrix” of our age of and an unprecedented media function emerges, which algorithms and of its new computational aesthetics, indeed ultimately brings to light the absolute inevitabil­ characterized by the processing of large quantities ity of mediation and the primacy of technicity: the of data such that algorithms are exposed as new, non- “recent developments in technical distribution, which is human key actors, Parisi goes deeper into the analysis

17 For a more precise description of the 19 Mark B. N. Hansen, “Medien des 21. 21 Ibid., 57. 24 Luciana Parisi, “Technoecologies of technological shift in meaning, see Erich Jahrhunderts, technisches Empfinden und Sensation,” in Deleuze |Guattari & Ecolo- Hörl (ed.), Die technologische Bedingung. unsere originäre Umweltbedignung,” in Die 22 Ibid., 56. gies, ed. Bernd Herzogenrath (New York: Beiträge zur Beschreibung der technischen technologische Bedingung, ed. Erich Hörl, Palgrave, 2009), 182–99. Welt (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011), 7–53, op. cit., 367. 23 Ibid., 57. See also Mark Hansen, “Ubiq­ especially 7–23. uitous Sensation: Toward an Atmospheric, 25 Ibid., 192. 20 Hansen, “Engineering Pre-individual Collective, and Microtemporal Model of 18 Mark B. N. Hansen, “System-Environ­ Potentiality,” op. cit., 33. Media,” in Throughout: Art and Culture ment-Hybrids,” in Bruce Clarke and Emerging with Ubiquitous Computing, ed. Mark B. N. Hansen (eds.), op. cit., 113–42. Ulrik Eman (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2013), 63–88.

125 A Thousand Ecologies

of so-called “algorithmic environments”—computa­ and the production of spiritual values, which—and this tional environments bursting with algorithmic objects. is what is noteworthy—highlights the originary technic­ The cybernetization of media has turned them “from ity of object relations and the primordial artifactuality articulations of (human) expression, or from the of desire that lies at its core. Stiegler’s analysis demon­ aesthetic power […] to modulate affects” into “pre­ strates that the distributed technical milieu of the hensive machines of the un-articulable and un-repre­ current processes of individuation and disindividuation sentable.”26 is now increasingly being recognized as a libidinal Jussi Parikka’s description of digital culture as univer­ ecology, or, as he puts it, as an “ecology of the spirit.”34 sal viral machine, analyzes viral codes as non-human Stiegler’s entire pharmacology of care revolves around actors and as a constitutive part of the “general media this new ecology, which can be understood to be three­ ecology of network culture,”27 as entities “internal to fold, as a “re-articulation of psychic, collective and the media ecology of digital capitalism.”28 He developed technical individuation.”35 a “conceptual perspective of media as an ecology”29 in One could cite many more neo-ecological studies, from light of the contemporary media condition: his take on Katherine Hayles’ technological redescription of cogni­ “unnatural ecologies” led him to elaborate what he calls tion;36 via Dirk Baeker’s next society of the computer “a milieu approach,” mapping media “beyond the usual ruled by the “ecological principle”;37 Brian Massumi’s confines of technology and human intentions”30 as investigations of “environmentality” and the contem­ “intensive capabilities that are constitutive of worlds,” porary “ecology of powers”38 as our coming form of and as “brains that contract forces of the cosmos, governmentality; to Matthew Fuller’s neo-materialistic cast a plane over the chaos.”31 “Media,” he writes, media ecology.39 These programmatic discoveries “con­tract forces, but also act as a passage and a mode show how a new semantics describing the contempo­ of intensification that affords sensations, percepts, and rary techno-medial condition is beginning to crystallize thoughts.”32 And if, up until now, Parikka has primarily around the concept of ecology, whereby the concept employed media ecology as another media ethology of ecology itself is situated indisputably in processes of the living, he has more recently focused on the com­ of displacement, reformulation, and indeed revaluation. plementary aspect of a media geology of the non-living, Notably, this is not about the mere metaphorization of a kind of media history of the deep time of matter, a term that, in its original definition, would be bound to of the minerals and of the underground of our media strictly biological, ethological, or life-scientific refer­ culture.33 ences. Quite the opposite, it is more likely the case that Finally, to name one last example, Bernard Stiegler’s the traditional concept or discourse of ecology causes pharmacology of the current media-technological a breakthrough and imparts a principle form to the condition, and his critique of the associated hyper- conceptual constellation, which as a consequence in the industrial system of experience along with the symbolic, course of techno-medial development, ascends to the aesthetic, and spiritual misery it produces, focuses level of a critical intuition and model for the description on the problem of an escalating destruction of the mind of the new fundamental position. Canguilhem already and of both psychic and collective disindividuation anticipated precisely this when he wrote in 1947: “The caused by the systematic exploitation, depletion, and notion of milieu is becoming a universal and obligatory destruction of desire. He works on reformulating mode of apprehending the experience and existence of political economy as a libidinal economy of sublimation living beings; one could almost say it is now being con­

26 Luciana Parisi/Erich Hörl, “Was heißt 31 Ibid., xxvii. 35 Ibid. Dominic Pettman, in Human Error: as both a de-anthropologizing as well as Medienästhetik? Ein Gespräch über algo­ Species-Being and Media Machines (Min­ a re-anthropologizing operation. This rithmische Ästhetik, automatisches Denken 32 Ibid., xxvi. neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, anthropocentric inscription in Stiegler’s und die postkybernetische Logik der 2011), 171–77 emphasizes the anthropo­ libidinal ecology is the inherent limit of his Computation,” Zeitschrift für Medienwis- 33 Parikka developed this perspective in centric tenor of Stiegler’s key distinction ecolo­ gy, always already constraining it, senschaft (ZfM), no. 1 (April 2013): 35–51. a lecture he delivered at the Bochum Col­ between désir (desire) and pulsion (drive). bending it back from being a general loquium for Media Studies (bkm) on January According to Stiegler, humans are libidinal ecolo­ gy into a restricted one. Stiegler’s 27 Jussi Parikka, Digital Contagion 16, 2013, titled: “An Alternative Deep Time animals: only humans have desire and are adherence to the concept of the (technical) (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 10. of The Media: A Geologically Tuned Media capable of sublimating drives into desire, object at the point of entering into a dis­ Ecology.” whereas animals are driven only by instincts tributed process-culture repeats this 28 Ibid., 5. and drives. More is needed on the relation­ same political-theoretical operation. It is 34 Bernard Stiegler/Frédéric Neyrat, ship between drive and instinct. But this therefore unsurprising that his theory 29 Ibid. “Interview: From Libidinal Economy to the anthropocentric bias, which is a fact, is leads further and further towards a Ecology of the Spirit,” Parrhesia, no. 14 already inscribed in Stiegler’s thinking of neo-humanistic position whose remain­ 30 Jussi Parikka, Insect Media: An Archae- (2012): 9–15. See also Erich Hörl, “Wun­ the originary technicity of man as the fun­ ing anthropocentric content is yet to be ology of Animals and Technology (Minne­ sch und Technik. Stieglers Genealogie des damental primordiality of (de)fault and lack. discussed and clarified. apolis: Minnesota University Press, 2010), Begehrens,” in Bernard Stiegler, Hyper- This key figure within his theory of technics xviii. materialität und Psychomacht, ed. Erich and desire must be read simultaneously Hörl (Zurich: diaphanes, 2010), 7–33.

126 Erich Hörl

stituted as a category of contemporary thought.”40 this is where the central conceptual- and theoretical- In my view, this is exactly what we are now witnessing: political battles and innovations of the past decade can the technological object-cultures with which we are be found, as well as their entire puissance. coupled are currently driving the ecologization of Jean-Luc Nancy, most recently, has made a far-reach­ sensation, with the additional consequence, however, ing attempt at an appropriate redescription, working of ecologizing cognition, thought, desire, and libido, for more than a quarter-century on the upending of the as well as power and governmentality. In this respect, constitution of sense through technology. Until recently these new object-cultures form the pivotal moment there has without doubt been in Nancy’s work a certain in a correspondingly altered sense-cultural situation, fixation on human actors and agency, which charac­ whose technological unconscious from now on can terized his thought of the “being-with” and thus inevita­ generally be referred to as an ecological unconscious. bly revealed the limits of his thinking on technology In so doing, they unhinge the sovereignty and power of and of his reflections on the historicality of sense. In enactment accorded to the meaning-giving transcen­ his work “De la struction” he abandons precisely this dental subject, which found its model in the working fixation in favor of a cosmo-political if not cosmo-tech­ subject and had been long since subverted by technol­ nological condition. He has now begun, in a certain ogy. And it is these unnatural ecologies which have sense, by placing it on an equal footing with our techno­ begun not only to bring about the far-reaching ecologi­ logical condition, to conceive of the pure technicity of zation of sense-culture, but are also furthering the the being-with and the new sense-historical position as ecologization of the critical theory which accounts for radically distributed: “What we are given consists only them, and necessitating a general ecologization of in the juxtaposition and simultaneity of a co-presence, thought. whose ‘co’ has no specific meaning beyond the conti­ There have already been many attempts to come guity or juxtaposition within the limits of the universe to terms conceptually with precisely this new techno- itself.”41 It is precisely in this exposition of “struction,” ecological sense of sense, which can no longer be in the sense of struo as accumulation (amasser) or grasped through the key distinctions and premises of hoarding (entasser), that the “lesson of technology” the era of meaning. These attempts have developed would be located, according to Nancy. In the technologi­ concepts including (but not limited to) assemblage, cal age, and this is the key point, a “shift, a curving of the ensemble, montage, composition, hetero-genesis, phenomenological dispositive” manifests itself, in the symbiogenesis, being-with (être-avec, Mit-Sein), being- course of which the mere appearing-with/compear­ together (être-ensemble), appearing-together/com­ ance is rendered as the “sense of the world.”42 It is no pearance (comparution), as agency or as the entangle- longer, as it was before, about an existential (and in ment of human and non-human entities or actors. One turn, anthropocentric), but rather, a bare categorical of the true chal­lenges and focal points of today’s con­ “with.” This revelation (in the sense of denudation) ceptual politics is to redefine completely the constitu­ marks precisely, according to Nancy, the sense-histor­ tion of sense-culture across many areas, using the ical situation of “struction,” in which we are (re)located aforementioned concepts, which collectively have through technics and on account of which it is incum­ begun to constitute the new general ecology as well bent upon us “to discover everything anew; and above as the basis on which subsequent epistemological and all sense.”43 Shortly thereafter he further deepened ontological reforms can take place. I would argue that this lesson and identified the “catastrophe of sense,”

36 Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digi- 40 Georges Canguilhem, “The Living and 41 Jean-Luc Nancy, “Von der Struktion,” tal Media And Contemporary Technogen- Its Milieu,” in The Knowledge of Life, eds. in Die technologische Bedingung, ed. Erich esis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Paola Marrati and Todd Meyers (New York: Hörl, op. cit., 54–72, 63. 2012). Fordham University Press, 2008), 98. 42 Ibid., 66f. 37 Dirk Baecker, Studien zur nächsten Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: 43 Ibid., 72. Suhrkamp, 2007), 225.

38 Brian Massumi, “National Enterprise Emergency: Steps Towards an Ecology of Powers,” Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 26, issue 6 (2009): 153–85.

39 Matthew Fuller, Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Techno­ culture (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2005).

127 A Thousand Ecologies

to which we have been exposed, and thus explicated the sein) and of the being-at-home (Zu-Hause-sein) are “becoming-catastrophic” (Katastrophisch-Werden) always preferred, such that it pertains only to a restrict­ of sense itself, the “itself-shifting” (Sich-Wenden), the ed ecology—ecology as religion. The general ecology, “being-comprehended-in-revolt” (Im-Umsturz-begriff- on the other hand, which is emerging as the next eco­ en-sein), the “collapsing-upon-one-another” (Auf-ein- logical principle in the wake of the re-evaluation of ander-Einstürzen) as the core of the great sense- the sense of ecology, obeys another, different, general historical transformation.44 On the basis of “intercon­ economy. This is an unnatural, non-natural, and, one nection” he eventually recognized the key charac­ might say, subtractive ecology; an ecology that elimi­ teristic of the present condition in a general ecology nates the immunopolitics of ecology.48 It is an eco­- of sense: Nancy is explicit that this concerns “a kind logy of a natural-technical continuum, which the gen­- of generalized environmentalism (environnementalisme eral environmentalization through technology and généralisé), in the course of which everything is envi­ the techno-sciences and the concomitant explosion roned, enveloped, and developed according to the of agency, schematizes as the core of our current and, interconnectedness of what has been called the tech­ even more, of our future basic experience.49 nological unconscious—‘unconscious’ meaning above all,” here as elsewhere, the “interwoven fabric of all beings.”45 Whilst Nancy had previously brought the Wild Ecologies concept of “eco-technics” (écotechnie) into play in order to describe the general becoming-technical of The French psychoanalyst and theoretician Félix the world, it is now, ultimately, a generalized ecology Guattari tried from the late 1970s on to translate and itself that figures as the pivotal moment in our highly convert this movement into a philosophical-political technicized sense-culture. Put simply, the contem­ program. He not only drafted a heterogenetic image of porary sense-historical position is, in a generalized being that is highly virulent today—teeming with crea­ sense, environmental. tive processes and emergences—but also ended up If general ecologization thus represents a significant evoking a new image of thought: one that is pre-person­ moment in the movement of our era and leads, under al and pre-objective, resembling the logic of primary the new technological condition, into a new ecological processes—a polyvalent “eco-logic.”50 The elaborating paradigm—to echo Félix Guattari—then it also entails of this “new ecosophical logic”51 was assigned as the an extensive revaluation of the sense of ecology. Eco­ task of a “mental ecology,” which has already cut through logical discourse has repeatedly invoked figures of both the collective-social and the material-technologi­ the undamaged and unscathed, the unspoiled, intact, cal ecology, and has thereby been able to outline the and immune, the whole and holy. It participated in a general ecologization. However, the background of all “reaction to the machine,” and to the uprooting, delo­ these interests was also (and not least) for Guattari calization, and expropriation which resulted from what formed to a large extent by media-technological issues: Derrida called the “tele-techno-scientific machine”:46 on the basis of the potential of post-media practices— in this unswerving “drive to remain unscathed,”47 figu­ from video, Super8, pirate radio to video text/minitel, in­- rations of the self, of the being-with-oneself (Bei-sich- teractive databanks, and finally, the computer—Guattari

44 Cf. Jean-Luc Nancy, L'Équivalence 47 Derrida “Faith and Knowledge,” 49 Although the difference between 50 Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, des catastrophes (Après Fukushima) op. cit., 45. a general and a restricted ecology is a trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: (Paris: Galilée, 2012), 20. systematic difference—formulated in Continuum, 2005 [1989] ), 30. For a 48 I hesitate to call it, as Timothy Morton line with Bataille’s distinction between a heterogenetic image of being, see his “The 45 Ibid., 59. has, “ecology without nature.” It is not general and a restricted economy which new aesthetic paradigm,” in Félix Guattari, essentially a matter of rejecting nature Derrida referred to so concisely as an Chaosmosis, trans. Paul Bains and Julian 46 Jacques Derrida “Faith and Knowl­ as such, but rather, of a new thinking and economy of sense—there is also a certain Pefanis (Bloomington: Indiana University edge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the reconceptualization of nature; namely, as historical bias within this distinction. I Press, 1995 [1992] ), 98–118. Limits of Reason Alone,” trans. Samuel the nature-technics with which we are con­ think we have a tendency to move from a Weber, in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and fronted by the necessity of general ecol­ restricted to a general ecology, at least in 51 Guattari, The Three Ecologies, Gianni Vattimo (Stanford, CA.: Stanford ogy. Those celebrating the end of nature terms of conceptual and political theory. A op. cit., 34. University Press, 1998). For an essential misjudge nature’s historicality. With regard re-reading of Bataille would demonstrate text on the immunopolitics of the unscathed to the possibility of a speculative view of that his own general economy is already a see Frédéric Neyrat, Biopolitique des Ca- nature at the level of the technological con­ general ecology. I need only mention the tastrophes (Paris: Éditions MF, 2008); and dition, such as Simondon’s pre-individual text “L’économie à la mesure de l’univers” likewise, his book L'Indemne. Heidegger et la nature, see for instance Debaise’s “What is (1946) where he speaks of the “principle of destruction du monde (Paris: sens et tonka relational thinking?” op. cit. life itself” being an economy of the sun, and éditeurs, 2008). even of “le sens du soleil,” the sense of the sun. Many thanks to David Wills for insisting that the relation of general economy and general ecology needs more development.

128 Erich Hörl

became predominantly interested in the emerging lectives, belongings, kinships, and cosmologies—from forms of a subjectivity that is detached, not just from Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, and Donna Haraway the person or subject, but also from the human, and through to the whole spectrum of post-humanistic which undermines in particular the subjectivity that has approaches—bear witness to this. There is also, been serialized, standardized, and normalized by the in particular, a strong new interest in animism within mass media. Finally, according to Guattari—and this ethnology and social anthropology—I need mention is the crux—“animist cartographies of subjectivity”52 only the work of Nurit Bird-David, Philippe Descola, should take account of a non-subjective subjectivity that Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Alf Hornbog, and Tim is distributed in a multiplicity of relations. Guattari Ingold; although all of these approaches are very differ­ held that which is being implemented upon us through ent from one other, what they have in common is the media technology to be a “machinic animism,”53 a presentation of animist systems as radical, relational techno- and media-animism, as I would call it, precisely ontologies and epistemologies. These purely relational because this coming order might display a certain systems appear to act as alternative cartographies similarity and resonance with the non-modern, radically for a non-modern reframing of our present and future participatory assemblages of wild animisms, i.e. as­ technological world. The wild cosmologies may serve semblages or collectives that prioritize participation as metamodels for the urgent cosmo-technological as the primary and constitutive relation. The crucial reconceptualization of participation as constitutive rela- intuition that the ecological encyclopaedism of the tionality and therefore too of agency, relationship and present must incorporate, with which it must connect relatedness, experience and subjectivity, all of which we and which it must work out in all its breadth, is the need if we are to understand our no-longer-rejected intuition of the virulence and valence of the concept of originary environmental condition in a non-reductionist participation for the conceptualization of a strict rela­ way. As Viveiros de Castro puts it, we need “richer tional thinking: only the latter is able to cope with the ontologies”56 than the traditional ones, through which modes of subjectivity and objectivity that are distrib­ we can account for this condition.57 But at the same uted through environmental media technologies, and time, it is of course always important to approach and the irrefutably multi-agential, distributed nature of intensify these questions counter-animistically, in order the agency that this entails. to stay on the lookout for forms of participation, which The great theoretician of primitive mentality and men­ at least in (neo)animistic contexts, go beyond the pre­ tor of a radical participatory thinking, Lucien Lévy- vailing focus on modes of belonging, to the interrupting Bruhl, already wrote in his Cahiers in 1938: “For the of belongings, to participations without participation, primitive mentality, to be is to participate.”54 With this for example, imitation.58 phrase, he established the motto for describing wild In a certain sense, Simondon (to return to him once Being and its non-alphabetical sense, which today, on more in closing) is also a pioneer of this non-modern the basis of media-technologies, is acquiring a surpris­ mapping of environmentality. By making the question of ing topicality and coming close to being re-invoked.55 participation central to the general-ecological consti­ All of the growing number of neo-animists of the pre­ tution, which led him to formulate an entire metaphysic sent, who study alternative conceptualizations of col­ of participation, he also recognized, at least in its rudi­

52 Félix Guattari, “Entering the Post- 55 In my book Die heiligen Kanäle. Über 56 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Ex­ 57 Already in 1988, Paul Bouissac noticed Media Era,” in Félix Guattari, Soft Subver- die archaische Illusion der Kommunika- changing Perspectives: The Transforma­ “the tendency toward a scientifically based sions. Texts and Interviews 1977–1985, tion (Berlin: diaphanes, 2005), I have tion of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian neo-animism which could radically trans­ ed. Sylvère Lotringer (Los Angeles: extensively detailed the extent to which the Ontologies,” in Franke (ed.), Animism, form not only the attitudes of contemporary Semiotext(e), 2009), 301–6: 302. elaboration of the concept of animism at the op. cit., 227–43. humans towards animals, but the whole end of the nineteenth century and beginning gamut of cultural definitions and philosophi­ 53 See also Angela Melitopoulos and of the twentieth, and particularly in the cal assumptions upon which the twentieth Maurizio Lazzarato, “Machinic Animism,” work of Lévy-Bruhl, already represented century’s global civilization has been in Animism (Volume I), ed. Anselm Franke a reaction to the rise of an essentially non- constructed.” He also spoke of a necessary (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010), 97–108. alphabetic, electromagnetic transmission “shift in cosmology which seems to be a culture, and was thus already essentially a prerequisite for steering human industri­ 54 Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Carnets (Paris: first, historically marginalized indication of ousness in a more adaptive direction.” (Paul Presses universitaires de France, 1949), the post-alphabetic situation. Bouissac, “What is a human? Ecological se­ 22. miotics and the new animism,” in Semiotica, vol. 77, no. 4 (1989): 497–516, here 514.)

58 Thanks to Mark B. N. Hansen for raising this issue in a discussion we had.

129 A Thousand Ecologies

mentary form, an upcoming neo-animistic disposition. His evolutionary theory of technical objects did not just begin with an originary “magical unity”: the latter is characterized as “the relation of a vital link between man and the world, defining a universe that is simul­ taneously anterior to every distinction between object and subject, and consequently also to every appear­ ance of a separated object”;59 whereby here, absolutely nothing occurs unmediated: he emphasizes that “the mediation is still neither subjectivized nor objectivized,” consisting of nothing more than “the simplest and most fundamental of all structurations of the milieu of a living entity.”60 In this sense, animistic systems are ways of representing an originary and unavoidable mediation. But Simondon also contemplated beyond this a kind of displaced recurrence of this condition within our radical techno-ecological formation, which brought in pre-subjective and pre-objective dynamic network milieus that are always developing, becoming (rather than retaining a fixed structure)—and which, indeed, are themselves the structuring agencies most respon­ sible for shaping our contemporary existence and experience. Of course, Simondon at the time could not yet have divined the full extent, indeed the ubiquity of these milieus, as that which was to bring about the total cyberneticization. “In taking the size of the networks, technical reality turns back at the end of its evolution towards the milieu which it modifies and structures (or rather, textures) by taking account of its general lines; technical reality adheres to the world once again as at the point of departure, before the tool and the instru­ ment.”61 This is not to claim that we would ever have been ani­ mistic, or ever will be. It is rather a question of the many minor ecologies whose description began under this heading and which we can only today begin to grasp, in light of the general-ecological effort with its full capac­ ity for modeling the non-modern work of mapping the present and coming techno-medial world. It is a matter of that which almost certainly lies at the heart of the ecological encyclopaedism—a thousand ecologies.

Translated from the German by James Burton, Jeffrey Kirkwood, and Maria Vlotides

59 Simondon, Du Mode d'Existence des Objets Techniques, op. cit., 163.

60 Ibid.

61 Gilbert Simondon, L'Invention dans les techniques. Cours et conférences, ed. Jean- Yves Chateau (Paris: Seuil, 2005), 101.

130 Jack Goldstein Untitled 1983 | Acrylic and spray paint on canvas | 152 × 152 cm Collection Daniel Buchholz and Christopher Müller, Cologne

131 The Limit of Limitlessness — Eva Meyer

There is a feeling called “oceanic”—most likely due It is as if this man wants to regress from the adult’s to its connectedness with a sensation of “eternity,” “ego-feeling” to the infant’s “pleasure-ego,” which, of “something limitless, unbounded.” It is a “peculiar how­ever, cannot escape “rectification through experi­ feeling,” Freud cites his friend Romain Rolland as say­ ence.” “Originally the ego includes everything, later it ing, who supposes it to be “present in millions of peo­ separates off an external world from itself. Our present ple.” In himself, Freud cannot discover an “oceanic” ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of a feeling, but instead discovers his own limit: “It is not much more inclusive—indeed, an all-embracing feeling easy to deal scientifically with feelings.” An “intellectual which corresponds to a more intimate bond between perception” is accompanied by a “feeling-tone,” and the ego and the world about it.” Yet in “the mental field,” risks attuning itself to it. we may assume “the survival of something that was Freud is referring to the perception of the ideational originally there alongside of what was later.” “Since we content “which is most readily associated with the overcame the error of supposing that the forgetting feeling,” namely, “a feeling of an indissoluble bond, we are familiar with signified a destruction of the mem­ of being one with the external world as a whole.” This ory-trace—that is, its annihilation—we have been idea stands in contrast to the certainty of the “feeling inclined to take the opposite view, that in mental life of our self, of our own ego,” that “normally” appears nothing which has once been formed can perish—that to us as “something autonomous and unitary, marked everything is somehow preserved and that in suitable off distinctly against everything else.” Yet psycho­ circumstances (when, for instance, regression goes analysis teaches that “such an appearance is deceptive, back far enough) it can once more be brought to and that on the contrary the ego is continued inwards, light.” However, since sequences occur “only by jux­ without any sharp delimitation, into an unconscious taposition in space,” and the “same space” cannot have mental entity which we designate as the id and for which “two different contents,” a representation of these it serves as a kind of façade.” The lines of demarcation “characteristics of mental life” is hardly possible. Yet maintained against the external world may become for Freud, resorting to a Beyond is not an option. If uncertain, too, when we find ourselves in that “admit­ his friend—although rejecting “every belief and every tedly unusual”—although not “pathological”—state illusion”—wants to call himself “religious” because of Freud assumes to exist “at the height of being in love”: his oceanic feeling, Freud sees in it merely the “attempt “Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who at a religious consolation,” a way of later “disclaiming is in love declares that ‘I’ and ‘you’ are one, and is pre­ the danger which the ego recognizes as threatening pared to behave as if this were a fact.” it from the external world.” Another friend’s “insatiable

132 craving for knowledge has led him to make the most letters and words, and so operates with symbols rather unusual experiments” and given him “encyclopaedic than images, he still insists on that space in which we knowledge.” In his case, it is “the practices of Yoga” perceive things. However, the “man-machine” does with which “by withdrawing from the world, by fixing the not just consist of the miracle of energetic and natural attention on bodily functions and by peculiar methods processes that seek to balance differences if these are of breathing, one can in fact evoke new sensations and differentiated “in the order of the message and the coenaesthesias in oneself, which he regards as re­ calculation of chances,” as information increases. gressions to primordial states of mind which have long Whether at a distance of two centimeters, or in Vienna, ago been overlaid. He sees in them a physiological Paris, New York, California, or on the moon—instead basis, as it were, of much of the wisdom of mysticism. of being “an isolated and closed circuit”—the man- It would not be hard to find connections here with a machine has found its place in a “universal game” and number of obscure modifications of mental life, such is programmed by its formal language. Yet the gains as trances and ecstasies.” Though not just Freud, but of such a program are not simple. The man-machine also I find it “very difficult” to “work with these almost fulfills it only by contributing to it. intangible quantities,” which is why I suggest changing It is as with the agents in Poe’s tale “The Purloined direction. Letter,” whose “true subject” Lacan identifies as the Like every “re,” the “re” of regression is easily misun­ letter. “Were we to pursue a bit further our sense derstood. In principle with no end or distinct point of that we are being hoodwinked we might soon begin departure, what makes it move is not its content but to wonder whether […] it is not, indeed, the fact that the drive of its movement, its recursiveness. Because everyone is duped which gives such pleasure here.” Yet it inherently keeps missing identity, it loops back into to the extent that, in the unsuccessful search for the itself, only to miss itself anew. Yet this is precisely what letter, the theoretical “exhaustion of space” has been constitutes its chance: in missing itself anew, it opens conducted “literally,” namely in spatial “compart­ up something new—though not a new perception of the ments,” we have to ask ourselves how it happened that past that keeps filling the same space with two different the letter was “not found anywhere” even though it contents. It uses time to produce the dimension of had been looked for “everywhere.” We cannot say, a future space, and identifies and iterates itself as it as we do of other things, “it must be or not be some­ transitions. where.” Like the unconscious, it takes a detour; it has Our “mental apparatus”—which Freud had sought to “a trajectory which is proper to it” and “will be and not picture as a hydraulic system or a mystic writing pad be where it is, wherever it goes.” Because of this simple —is described by Lacan not only as a language, but adjunction, and … and so on … and so forth, the letter also as one that understands all natural languages as directs the “entrances and roles” of the agents who, for a web of syntactic relations. Lacan associates it with their part, operate like blanks. If the letter comes into the field of cybernetics that was emerging at the time, their possession, they become possessed by its mean­ but then goes on to misunderstand its “automatic ing without ever discovering its content, which only recreation” of identity as follows: “Read anything by serves to prolong its detour: “the robber’s knowledge Mr. Norbert Wiener; its implications are huge. Among of the loser’s knowledge of the robber,” and so on. Since his many paradoxes he presents this strange myth its detour lasts for the entire length of the tale, it under­ of transmitting a man by telegraph from Paris to New mines causality. The letter purloins itself from the York by sending exhaustive information on everything space of the self and delivers itself to it anew: “the that constitutes his individuality. Since there is no limit unconscious is the Other’s discourse” in which we are to the transmission of information, the point-by-point always already involved without ever being identical resynthesis, the automatic recreation of his entire true to it. identity at a distant place, is conceivable. Such things So let us move on to the gains of this program that are are curiously deceptive, and everyone wonders at them. neither simple nor simply are. The fact that the uncon­ They are a subjective mirage which collapses as soon scious is structured like a language does not mean that as one points out that it would be no greater a miracle it is a language. Connected to the “concrete, universal to telegraph over two centimeters. And we do nothing discourse, which has been unfolding since the beginning less when we move ourselves through the same dis­ of time,” it is “what has truly been said or rather really tance.” Although Lacan no longer depicts his concept been said.” No one can remember it as his or her story, of the unconscious using analog images, but draws on but everyone can rewrite it. So let us write it as a think­ a language that consists of discrete elements, such as ing environment to which everyone contributes by

133 The Limit of Limitlessness

not only disjoining but also adjoining, without ever being rather, that through which the quantitative acquires its identical with the self or the environment. If we then own kind of quality, becoming thereby, a remarkable come across qualities hitherto attributed to a mental form of the great. […] As soon, however, as the gigantic, life, we will gain access to ourselves in a new state in planning, calculating, establishing, and securing, of consciousness. Though what here sounds like an changes from the quantitative and becomes its own oceanic feeling-tone is actually rather liminal. special quality, then the gigantic and the seemingly A thinking environment is not a heaven of ideas from completely calculable become, through this shift, incal­ which we choose at random or by necessity. In varia­ culable. This incalculability becomes the invisible tions on a topic that cannot be directly determined, shadow cast over all things when man has become philosophy has abandoned transcendent regions and the subiectum and world has become picture.” In the imported them as transcendent or existential grounds shadow, Heidegger sees an indication of something the of subjective immanence that determine its thinking “knowledge of which, to us moderns, is refused,” that transcendentally or logically. Yet if the prime sources is, as long as we go around “merely negating the age,” of philosophical thinking still draw on a Beyond, then which “the flight into tradition, out of a combination of Gotthard Günther understands the situation of con­ humility and presumption” cannot avoid either. Although temporary philosophy as follows: having emptied the in Heidegger’s issue of Being, the “man of the future” Beyond of its mythological content and personified is transported no further than to that “in-between powers, it stands at the limit of this secularization in which he belongs to being and yet, amidst beings, process. It is a limit impossible to eliminate, for it be­ remains a stranger.” Along with Hölderlin, he sees and longs just as much to the Beyond as it does to the Here. counts the number of his years. “But the years of the It is secularization-proof and separates us like a veil peoples,/Have they been seen by mortal eye?” Not a from the multitude that we do not reach by this one mortal eye but Günther’s “thinking that calculates” with way of thinking from which we proceed. Yet instead many-valuedness can see that the “endless iterativity of being motivated by myths or religion, we are now of negativity” does not even stop “where the truth of the motivated by a limit. Being of all beings has long vanished in negation.” In In doing so, Günther also resorts to the conjunction the “truth of the negativity of nothingness,” the years “and.” He investigates it as the relation between unity of the peoples do count and open themselves up to the and multiplicity, and positions it—in a decisive dismissal freedom of their “technical activities.” of the humanities’ prejudice against numbers— In this transition, philosophy turns away from Being and between concept and number. As is well known, the towards “that ‘second’ metaphysics” that is spoken of Leibnizian binary system uses two numerical symbols: “in the yoga system, in the negative theology of Diony­ zero (0) and one (1), which we usually identify with sius the Areopagite, in Kabbalist Isaak Luria’s idea of negation (Nothingness) and affirmation (Being), whose the Tzimtzum, and more recently in Heidegger.” Yet terrestrial opposition we can only connect in the super­ numbers—which for Aristotle both counted in the Here mundane, for instance, when asking how something and served a function in the ideal Beyond—only live can come from nothing. Günther suspends this classi­ up to their double role if they direct us away from any cal meaning of number when he insists that Leibniz only sort of metaphysics and its problem of representation, arrives at his distinction by ascribing “zero the function toward a being-underway with no representation in of a blank in which the number one can occur in random front of us, so that we are able to move on. The gigan­ repetition. To allow the number one to be repeated at ticness of number is not endlessly extended emptiness, will, the blanks are also repeatable at will” and show— but potentiality, a shift in temporality in which it is fun­ if the repetition is consistently executed—that it is not damentally impossible to anticipate the real. We experi­ about the representation of value, but about sequences ence it in “unmeasured relational landscapes” that of positions. We can still map classical values on them, demand new concepts, such as temporal irreversibility, though we might also ask whether a “more powerful feedback, or self-referentiality. At last we find what transclassical system of logic” is opening itself up we could not have represented and, precisely for this here, one that connects subterraneously if its number reason, might have thought: the unconscious, the letter, not only repeats what is the same, but also registers the transclassical machine that we ourselves have differences and, in the quantitative accumulation of become. differ­ent qualities, becomes ambiguous. Günther cites Not space but time establishes a relationship between Heidegger’s “The Age of the World Picture” as saying cosmo-theological and human developments. It frees that one is thinking “too superficially […] if one takes us from internal evidence, which Günther mistrusts the gigantic to be merely an endlessly extended empti­ because it results from mentally producing a common ness of the purely quantitative. […] The gigantic is, historical fate, and—threatened rather than enhanced

134 Eva Meyer

by the external world—makes totalitarian territorial demands. In exile in America, Günther (his wife was Jewish) escapes the spiritual climate in Europe, which to him seems deluded by speculative concepts and historically doomed. In science fiction and cybernetics, he discovers an American pragmatic motif for future thinking. The experience of evidence is not sought in an inner conviction but is fictionally or technically exter­ nalized in its feasibility: “For any logical expression satisfying certain conditions, one can find a net behav­ ing in the fashion it describes.” The experience of evidence becomes the liminal experi­ ence of its processing that, in relations and interac­ tions, registers a great number of qualities and differ­ ences. Even though everyone can claim objectivity, it is not representative for anyone else, just as the “I” is not representative of the “you.” At times the “I” behaves as if things were so, at times it grasps that there is a difference, and consequently, it can use this experience only by losing some evidence and moving away from itself. Now it is at the limit of “counting and recounting,” and counts and recounts a new access to itself.

Translated from the German by Catherine Kerkhoff-Saxon and Wilfried Prantner

References

Freud, Sigmund. “Civilization and Its Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Discontents.” In The Standard Edition, Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory vol. XXI. Edited by James Strachey, and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis translated by Joan Riviere. New York: 1954–1955. Edited by Jacques-Alain Vintage, 2001. Miller, translated by Sylvana Tomasell. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1988. Günther, Gotthard. “Selbstdarstellung im Spiegel Amerikas.” In Philosophie in Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Selbstdarstellungen II. Hamburg: Felix Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses 1955– Meiner, 1975. 1956. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Russell Grigg. New York: Günther, Gotthard. “Martin Heidegger und W.W. Norton & Company, 1997. die Weltgeschichte des Nichts.” In Beiträge zur Grundlegung einer operationsfähigen Meyer, Eva. Zählen und Erzählen. Für eine Dialektik III. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1980. Semiotik des Weiblichen. Vienna/Berlin: Medusa, 1983; Frankfurt/Basel: Heidegger, Martin. Off the Beaten Track. Stroemfeld, 2013. Edited and translated by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge: CUP, 2002.

Lacan, Jacques.“Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter.’” In Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006.

135 Sharon Lockhart Models of Orbits in the System of Reference, Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation System: Sphere Seven at Three Points in Its Rotation (top) Sphere Six at Three Points in Its Rotation (bottom) 2011 | three framed chromogenic prints each | each 50 × 39.7 cm | each edition 5/6 + 2 AP Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin Photos: Jens Ziehe, Berlin

136 Boundless Interior

1 2 3

4

1 Richard Brautigan | All Watched over by Machines of Loving tial differences between spirit and Grace | San Francisco: The Communication Company, 1967 | Boundless Interior © Richard Brautigan matter, nature and culture, tech­ 2 San Francisco Oracle | Vol. 1, No. 1, September 1966 | The photograph of Earth from space nology and the animate—as well as Courtesy The Estate of Allen Cohen and Regent Press, publishers was followed by a historical period the related social demarcations of the San Francisco Oracle Facsimile Edition of the symbolic “return to Earth,” and pathologies. Overcoming dual- 3 Robert Fludd | “Microcosm Diagram” | 17th century | which, from a cybernetic perspec- ism would allow a new cosmic in Heinz von Foerster, Cybernetics of Cybernetics (Minneapolis: Future Systems, 1995 (1974)), xii | © Future Systems Inc. tive, is a process in which we humans harmony in which a far-reaching 4 Heinz von Foerster | “Course Description” | in Heinz von learn to perceive ourselves as al- unity of individual consciousness Foerster, Cybernetics of Cybernetics (Minneapolis: Future 5 ways having been part of systems, and the cosmos formed the horizon Systems, 1995 (1974)), xiii | © Future Systems Inc. as nodes and patterns within energy of expectation. Self = world: this 5 Sally Hoskins | “Holism” | in Heinz von Foerster, Cybernetics and information flows, and simulta- equation serves as the source of Cybernetics (Minneapolis: Future Systems, 1995 (1974)), 79 | © Future Systems Inc. neously to act within them. That the of spiritual, therapeutic, and self-­ 6 Heinz von Foerster | “Personalities, Affinities, Genes and logic of expansion, the grand Ameri- optimizing training programs to Happenings” | in Heinz von Foerster, Cybernetics of Cybernetics can narrative of the frontier, en- this day. (Minneapolis: Future Systems, 1995 (1974)), 344 | © Future countered a natural end in California The search for unity and harmony Systems Inc. did not mean an end to the dissolu- and the departure from the instru- tion of boundaries and colonization. mentalized and objectified world the “first systems theory book.” However, every further advance with its numerous dichotomies and And today, “Taoism for managers” now appeared, whether deliberate boundary phobias was fuelled by is considered a natural part of or not, to be connected with the a massive import of ideas, especially the ideological furniture of neo­ creation of new interior spaces. from the Far East. From Zen liberalism. The delimiting circle permanently Buddhism to the Tibetan Book of replaced the distant horizon. Every- the Dead, the Eastern wisdom intro- thing exists as part of a unity, which duced by avant-garde figures, such 3456 The early issues of CoEvolution precedes everything and has always as the Beat Generation poet Allen Quarterly contained various contributions existed; a unity that still needs, Ginsberg and the composer John by Heinz von Foerster, member and however, to be (re)realized by alien- Cage, increasingly became linked, secretary of the Macy Conferences, and ated modern man through a shift in especially in California, with the founder and director (1957–75) of the consciousness. “We can’t put it drug culture, new therapeutic meth- Biological Computer Laboratory at 6 together. It is together,” we read on ods, and psychological experiments. the University of Illinois. It was there the back cover of the Whole Earth In order to free the self, to change that he coined the term “second-order Catalog. A common belief, closely consciousness, and thus ultimately cybernetics,” which was conceived as connected to the ecology move- the world, it no longer appeared a “cybernetics of cybernetics”: a system ment, is that Western civilized man sufficient to combat the superego that observes the processes of system must learn to reintegrate himself by anti-authoritarian means: observation. Von Foerster’s discovery and into a nature conceived of as harmo- a romantic-­spiritual effort was also conceptualization of the observer problem nious and self-regulating. required to pull down the “walls —the observer is always a part of the Technological progress, in the form of the ego.” The Blue Planet was now system—had a far-reaching influence on of the military build-up, had led man joined by the mandalas and the Yin the development and practical success to the moon. The view from there, and Yang, the Taoist symbol of inter- of systems theory and Radical Construc­ back to Earth, concretized the per- connected forces, which is expres- tivism. ception that everything on Earth sive of a higher order of cosmic unity — was connected to everything else. in which opposites are mediated. Those who strove to realize this Far Eastern spirituality appeared to 89 Francisco Varela (1946–2001) was connectedness identified the dualis- point the way out of the prison of a Chilean biologist, who, with his teacher tic modern world view as a hostile rationality and discipline in which the and colleague Humberto Maturana, devel- ideology. The task was now to over- neurotic self of mass society imag- oped the program of Radical Construc­ come the consciousness that ined itself to be imprisoned. Stewart tivism. At the heart of this epistemology emerged from “Western dualism” Brand once called the Tao Te Ching, is the concept of “autopoiesis,” which de- and established fundamental, essen- written by the Chinese sage Lao Tzu, scribes self-generating or self-organizing

137 Visual Essay

7

138 Boundless Interior

8 : =

: ; < Ricardo Levins Morales, Northland Poster Collective | If all the beasts were gone | 1992 | Courtesy Center for the Study of Political Graphics, Los Angeles | © Ricardo Levins Morales

; Fritjof Capra | The Tao of Physics | Cover | Berkeley: Shambhala Publications, 1975 7 < Stewart Brand (Ed.) | The Updated Last Whole Earth 9 David Bohm | Wholeness and the Implicate Order | Cover | Catalog | May 1974 | Courtesy Stewart Brand London: Routledge, 1980

8 Stewart Brand (Ed.) | The CoEvolution Quarterly | = Michael Katz, William P. Marsh, Gail Gordon Thompson No. 10, June 1976 | Courtesy Stewart Brand (Ed.) | Earth's Answer: Explorations of Planetary Culture at the Lindisfarne Conferences | Cover | New York: Lindisfarne Books / 9 Franz Reichle | Monte Grande | 2006 | Film still | Harper and Row, 1977 Courtesy T&C Edition > Jordan Belson | Re-Entry | 1964 | 6 min, color, sound | 16 mm | Film stills | © Center for Visual Music processes, a concept which has also been > important for German systems theory. It was initially applied to biological systems a higher level of consciousness where “The film does manage to transport by Maturana and Varela, and then extend- this has always existed? This search for a whoever is looking at it out of the ed to social systems by Niklas Luhmann. higher “cosmic” unity of consciousness boundaries of the self. At that very — and the world in the New Age movements moment is when the foundation slips came at the price of abandoning political out from under us and very rudely :;<= Mother Earth criticism of exploitation, exclusion, and we’re brought back to Earth. It’s all demarcation. very much like the process of space- The idea that the entire Earth and its bio- — craft reentry. You’re out there, free, ­sphere could be understood as an eco­ totally free from the limitations of system led to contrasting visions of the = Cultural historian William Irwin earthly distance, and, suddenly, you wholeness and connectedness of nature: Thompson founded the Lindisfarne Asso- have to come back and it’s a very the claims to truth of reductionist, special- ciation in 1972 as a retreat and think painful thing.” ist, scientific paradigms often stood tank. He envisioned that green technology, Jordan Belson, quoted in Gene Youngblood’s Expanded opposed to so-called holistic approaches. eco­logical sciences, and the esoteric Cinema (New York: Dutton, 1970), 167. In turn, these have been confronted, to teachings of the “great religions” would this day, by anti-holistic, politicized con- come to form one future “planetary cul- cepts of nature in which all relevant inter- ture.” The stated goals of Lindisfarne are Stewart Brand was the first to publish the connections are examined along lines of to lay spiritual foundations for governance Gaia Hypothesis in a non-specialist journal. conflict. The resulting visions and models “beyond present ideological systems,” It was in the pages of CoEvolution Quar- differ significantly, for example when it to foster a new balance between nature terly and through a letter to the editor by comes to the conception of the connec- and culture through technology and Heinz von Foerster that the Gaia Hypoth- tions between the parts and their relation- compassionate economies, and to realize esis became linked to the second-order ship to the whole. The transference of the inner harmony of the religions and the Chikhai Bardo, is the experience of psychic cybernetics concept of “autopoiesis.” We conceptions of nature to social orders is spiritual traditions. Members of Lindis- happenings at the moment of death; the cannot look at Gaia as a planetary system deemed a classic of demagogy, with farne have included Francisco Varela, second, Chonyid Bardo, is the dream-­state without looking at ourselves, as part of catastrophic political consequences, not Gregory Bateson, James Lovelock, Lynn that comes immediately after death and Gaia, looking at Gaia. “Objectivity” is just, but most notably, in the first half of the Margulis, Esalen-founder Michael Murphy, involves what are called karmic illusions; superseded by participation. twentieth century. In the second half of poet Gary Snyder, and astronaut Russell the third, Sidpa Bardo, is the onset of — the century numerous utopian conceptions Schweickart. the birth instinct and of prenatal events. of an ecological future also appealed to — With imagery of the highest eloquence, @ABCD Earth’s femininity, as implied ideas about the nature of ecosystems, Belson aligns the three stages of Bardo by the Gaia thesis and the proverbial seeing the possibility for a balanced society > Spiritual Imports and Orientalisms with the three stages of space flight: “motherliness” of this planet, to­gether with in its adaptation to the harmony of nature leaving the Earth’s atmosphere (death), the structural parallels between patriar- as a whole. The idea that nature has an Jordan Belson’s film Re-Entry (1964), moving through deep space (karmic chal order, industrial society, capitalism, antecedent harmony, made plausible by which deals with mystic reincarnation and illusions), and reentry into the Earth’s and the exploitation of the Earth, was also cybernetic concepts of self-regulation and actual spacecraft reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere (rebirth). important for feminist art of the 1970s. feedback, has long belonged to popular atmosphere, is informed by John Glenn’s — The suppression of women and the instru- misconceptions about the nature of eco- first space flight, and the philosophical mental appropriation of nature in the systems. concept of Bardo, as set forth in the ? Understanding the Earth as a whole rationalist West led to an alliance between Within scientific and political circles, the ancient Bardo Thodol, or Tibetan Book of system predestined Stewart Brand to essentialist forms of feminism and nature- idea of a planetary ecosystem had long the Dead, a fundamental work of Mahayana become interested in the Gaia Hypothesis, centered ideas and movements, whose been linked to the hope of generating a Buddhism which had a strong influence in developed by the chemist and follower of motifs appear repeatedly in the visual art computer model of the entire system, and hippie circles and was frequently referred cybernetics James Lovelock in the 1960s. of the period. subsequently controlling it. In the 1970s, to by those such as Timothy Leary. How- The Gaia Hypothesis states that the entire — at the threshold of the New Age move- ever, the esoteric dissident of psycho­ Earth is a living, self-regulating organism, ment, these attempts to provide a rational, analysis C. G. Jung already had great par­ticularly, that the Earth’s atmosphere The Expanded Mind mathematical modeling of a diametrically respect for the Book of the Dead. He is a buffering device maintained by the opposed phenomenon were increasingly described Bardo as being similar to a state com­plex interaction of the physical aspects Art and Technology program: from 1967 replaced by spiritualized attempts to of limbo; Bardo is symbolically described of life on the planet: a vision of sentient to 1971, the Los Angeles County Museum reconnect with nature and the Earth as a as an intermediate state lasting forty-nine biospheric interconnectedness in which of Art (LACMA), ran the “Art and Tech­ whole. If it isn’t possible to achieve unity days between death and rebirth, which the whole Earth is one life. nology” program, designed to bring artists and consensus in society, is there perhaps is divided into three stages: the first, together with Californian companies

139 Visual Essay

?

140 Boundless Interior

@ C E F

A C Heresies Collective | Heresies #5, A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics: The Great Goddess | Vol. 2, No. 1, 1978 | Courtesy Joan Braderman (www.heresiesfilmproject.org)

D “Tree of Life” | 1976 | in Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, Sculpture and Performance 1972–1985 | Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2004 | © Ana Mendieta

E Maxwell Maltz | Psycho-Cybernetics: A New Technique for Using Your Subconscious Power | Cover | Hollywood: Wilshire Book Company, 1965 (1960)

F Maxwell Maltz | The New Psycho-Cybernetics | Cover | New Jersey: Prentice Hall Press, 2002 (1998)

B “The individual mind is immanent but not only in the body. It is immanent also in pathways and messages out- side the body; and there is a larger Mind of which the individual mind is only a sub-system. This larger Mind is comparable to God and is perhaps what some people mean by ‘God,’ but it is still immanent in the total ? Stewart Brand (Ed.) | The Next Whole Earth Catalog | interconnected social system and September 1980 | Courtesy Stewart Brand planetary ecology.” @AB Andy Abrahams Wilson, Anna Halprin | Embracing The Gregory Bateson, “Form, Substance and Distance,” Earth: Dances With Nature | 1995 | Film stills | Courtesy Andy in Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthro- Abrahams Wilson pology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 467. to work on new art forms. Participants included John Baldessari, Larry Bell, Frederick Eversley, Robert Irwin, John McCracken, and James Turrell. Partici- “Since it is the total ecological pat- pating technology companies and insti­ D tern, not the self, which the Gestaltists tutions included Lockheed Air Corpora- postulate as basic, one cannot speak tion, the RAND Corporation, and the of personal agencies which do this, or Garrett Corporation. cause that. Rather, one must imagine James Turrell and Robert Irwin suggested processes happening of their own ex­perimenting with isolation cells, for accord, producing the numberless sensory deprivation, and so-called Ganz­ symbiotic patterns and balances we feldern, total visual or sonic fields. The call ‘nature,’ and among them that work was never realized. pattern of mind, body, and society we — call human consciousness. Thus one recognizes that Gestalt theory is, EF Concepts for the development and fundamentally, a species of Taoism expansion of consciousness were not just disguised rather cumbersomely as to be found in the counterculture. In the Western psychiatry. What is this early 1960s programs such as “Mind ‘organism / environment field,’ after Power” were disseminated by popular all, but Lao-tzu’s Way? Goodman psychology bestsellers from authors such himself turns to the mystic tradition as Norman Vincent Peale and Napoleon more than once to present a Gestalt Hill, which especially appealed to readers idea. How do people lessen the pain of self-help books. Maxwell Maltz, a New of suffering? ‘By finally ‘standing out York plastic surgeon, who repeatedly of the way,’ to quote the great for­ encountered patients who were unhappy, mula of Tao. They disengage from even after a successful operation, gleaned their preconceptions of how it ‘ought’ ideas and concepts from cyber­­netics in to turn out. And into the ‘fertile order to advance the thesis that the void’ thus formed, the solution comes mind only needed to be correctly pro- flooding.’ Surely much of the charm grammed, like a computer. the young discover in Goodman’s — thinking derives from its subtle un- derlying connection with the oriental LM Esalen mysticism that has enjoyed so much youthful popularity in the postwar In 1962, with the help of prominent sup- period.” porters such as Aldous Huxley, the Esalen Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Institute was established in Big Sur, a Cali- Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (New York: Anchor Books / Doubleday & Co, fornian coastal strip already famous for its 1969), 110. dropouts and bohemians, and popularized by Henry Miller in his novel Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (1957) and who explored Zen, Hindu, and Buddhist Jack Kerouac in his novel Big Sur (1962). medita­tion in weekend therapy sessions The founders were two devotees of tran- held in training groups (T groups) based scendental meditation, Michael Murphy on behavioral therapy models. The ses- and Richard Price, both graduates of sions extended to include less traditional Stanford University. Esalen became formats such as transcendental meditation a Mecca for people in search of meaning, and so-called out-of-body experiences,

141 Visual Essay

G

H

142 Boundless Interior

I

J

GHIJ Stewart Brand (Ed.) | Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog: Find your Place in Space | July 1970 | Courtesy Stewart Brand 143 Visual Essay

144 Boundless Interior

K

145 Visual Essay

L M N

N Alan W. Watts | Psychotherapy East and West | Cover | O New York: Ballantine Books, 1969 (1961)

O Everett Opie | Cartoon | in The New Yorker, October 29, 1973 | © Everett Opie / New Yorker Collection / www.cartoonbank.com

K Stewart Brand (Ed.) | The Updated Last Whole Earth Catalog | May 1974 | Courtesy Stewart Brand power, the sense of alienation between man L San Francisco Oracle | Vol. 1, No. 12, January 1968 | Courtesy The Estate of Allen Cohen and Regent Press, and nature leads to the use of tech­nology publishers of the San Francisco Oracle Facsimile Edition in a hostile spirit—to the ‘conquest’ of M San Francisco Oracle | Vol. 1, No. 6, February 1967 | nature instead of intelligent co-operation Courtesy The Estate of Allen Cohen and Regent Press, with nature.” (Alan Watts, “Psychedelics publishers of the San Francisco Oracle Facsimile Edition and Religious Experience,” in California Law Review, Vol. 56, No. 1 (January 1968): inspired and supported by experimental 74–85.) practices with LSD, which was legal — in California up until 1966. The Esalen Institute Newsletter states that: “Esalen Architectures of Immersion started in the fall of 1962 as a forum to bring together a wide variety of approaches T Trips Festival: in 1966, Stewart Brand to enhancement of the human potential […] organized the “Trips Festival,” a three- including experiential sessions involving day event held in the Longshoremen’s Hall encounter groups, sensory awakening, in San Francisco. The festival brought Gestalt awareness training, related disci- together rock bands such as the Grateful plines. Our latest step is to fan out into Dead, composers and musicians con­ the community at large, running programs nected to the San Francisco Tape Music Gregory Bateson acted as the head of in cooperation with many different institu- Center, light and projection artists John Lilly’s dolphin laboratory. Bateson “The rapid spread of this ecstatic tions, churches, schools, hospitals, and such as Tony Martin, and a diversity of writes about dolphin communication spirit is due to the recent availability government.” other activists from the counterculture. and the testing of psychology of dolphins of brain-change neurotransmitters The founders, Michael Murphy and — in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972). and electronic communication appli- Richard Price, both graduates of Stanford John Lilly proposed that dolphins may act ances accessible to individuals. When University, were adherents of transcen- as ideal therapists for humans. these psychedelic foods activate dental meditation. Price also participated “A brain still geared to a primitive — the brain and when these electronic in experiments with LSD conducted on world delimits our reality and im- devices start gushing electronic patients by Gregory Bateson at the Palo pedes many kinds of mental function- information, people’s minds begin Alto Veterans Hospital. ing. Now psycho-chemistry may be in “Dating back to the early 1960s and opening.” — the process of shaping a new, more emerging out of research into hydro- Timothy Leary, The Politics of Ecstasy desirable brain-world balance. What (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1968), 6. dynamics (it was briefly thought that N Alan Watts was a popular author of the is most important is that we thus the study of dolphin swimming might psyche­delic and hippie culture who em- may alter an evolutionary course that lead to improvements in torpedo ployed fragments of Eastern religions in seemed headed toward production Interspecies Communication design), the U.S. Navy’s work with his writing and played a decisive role in of an almost exclusively logical, captive Tursiops eventually gave rise the interpretation of LSD experiences and rational, neo-cortical man, lacking U The 1950s and 1960s also saw the to a then-secret plan to deploy those of other hallucinogens. His ideas in imagination and other necessities emergence of a new and widespread cul- trained dolphins in Vietnam, as part on such matters had a strong influence on of artistic creation, and ever more tural preoccupation with the undersea of an effort to capture and/or kill Viet Timothy Leary, with whom he jointly pub- a robot or glorified ant at the mercy world. The dolphin—hated fish thief in the Cong sappers raiding the ammunition lished. Watts, who appeared frequently at of his computer-like brain and its late nineteenth century—was seen, by depots of Cam Ranh Bay. […] Mine- the Esalen Institute, wrote that: “Inability mathematical precision.” the 1970s, the age of Aquarius, as a super­ sweeping dolphins (often outfitted, to accept the mystic experience is more Robert E. L. Masters and Jean Houston, Psychedelic Art intelligent, ultra-peaceful, erotically cyborglike, with undersea cameras than an intellectual handicap. Lack of (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 128. uninhibited, smiling incarnation of soulful and other equipment) were used at awareness of the basic unity of organism holism, and was taken up as a totem of the the start of the most recent Iraq war. and environment is a serious and danger- counterculture. Today, for many, the […] The latest plan is to use Navy ous hallucination. For in a civilization dolphin represents a cetacean version of Tursiops to ratchet up port security equipped with immense techno­lo­gical our better selves. From 1962 to 1963, in the war on terror: trained bottle-

146 Boundless Interior

P S

Q

T

R

S Yale Joel | “New Experience that Bombards the Senses: LSD Art” | in Life Magazine, September 9, 1966 | © Getty Images

T Susan Elting Hillyard | Tony Martin at the Trips Festival 1966 | © Susan Elting Hillyard

U Stewart Brand (Ed.) | Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools | Spring 1969 | Courtesy Stewart Brand

PQR Stan VanDerBeek | “Culture: Intercom and Expanded Cinema” | in Tulane Drama Review, Vol. 11, No. 1, Fall 1966 | Courtesy The MIT Press “This idea came from Bateson, who speak to them, ideal psychothera- wrote to Lilly shortly after reading pists for humanity, so obscenely nose already assist in perimeter loving radicals from such organiza- Man and Dolphin to propose that, if obsessed with things, and so inept monitoring in the open water around tions have attacked Navy marine Lilly was right about dolphin intelli- in relationships.” moored military vessels at a base in mammal facilities on several occa- gence, there was reason to think that D. Graham Burnett, The Sounding of the Whale: King’s Bay, Georgia, and a similar sions over the years, in efforts to these animals had evolved to apply Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 613. arrangement is slated for deploy­ liberate animals or damage equip­ the bulk of their cognitive capacity to ment later this year at a Navy ship­ ment.” the social world, rather than to the yard in Washington State, not far D. Graham Burnett, “A Mind in the Water,” Orion Magazine material world (roughly speaking, from Seattle. Not surprisingly, a (June 2010), http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/ because they had no hands). Bateson articles/article/5503/ [last accessed May 1, 2013]. number of animal protection groups suggested this might mean that the oppose these projects, and dolphin-­ dolphins would make, if we could

147 Visual Essay

U

148 Ant Farm Dolphin Embassy Viewed from Directly Astern 1977 | Drawing Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; purchase made pos- sible through a bequest from Thérèse Bonney, by exchange, a partial gift of Chip Lord and Curtis Schreier, and gifts from an anonymous donor and Harrison Fraker Photo: Benjamin Blackwell, University of California

Expedición Delfín at Bahia Los Angeles, Baja, Mexico Doug Michels explaining the Dolphin Embassy to a dolphin in a tank (Jim Nolman and Curtis Schreier playing music for dolphins) Surfers Paradise, Australia 1977 | Photograph 1977 | Photograph Courtesy University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Courtesy University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive | Photo: Chip Lord Pacific Film Archive | Photo: Ant Farm

149 “After we knew that the Earth was a sphere”

Spherical Consciousness in the Work of Stan VanDerBeek and Richard Buckminster Fuller — Flora Lysen

Science Friction

As “a serious spoof of contemporary madness,” Stan VanDerBeek’s nine-minute animation Science Friction won the Creative Film Foundation 1960 Award of Distinction and the film was selected for screening at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.1 The award review praised the film’s audacious ridiculing of the “rocket-infatuation of our time.”2 In the film, a nervous, rattling sound accompanied a high-speed, insane ani- mation parade of little Eisenhower and Khrushchev newspaper cutouts furiously launching missiles at each other. Rockets, satellites, and girls in lingerie came crashing through television screens and mission con- trol rooms. Science Friction mocked the American obsession with the space race and anxieties of new Stan VanDerBeek nuclear technologies that had come with the Russian Science Friction 1959 | 9:46 min, color, sound | Film still launch of Sputnik in 1957. In the final sequence, the film Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York turns black and we see a stop-motion sequence of a

1 Wallace Thurston, “Creative Film Award Winners: 1959 and 1960,” Film Quarterly, vol. 14, no. 3 (Spring 1961): 34.

2 Ibid., 33.

150 small, luminescent-blue Earth spinning in a big black Closed World void. A hand picks the little globe from the sky and smashes it on the edge of a pan—the Earth makes a The final spinning-Earth sequence of Science Friction is perfectly fried egg. characteristic of an era in which new space and satellite Eight years after Science Friction screened at MoMA, technologies allowed the imagination of a new outside astronauts snapped the first man-made photographic perspective of Earth, a view that turned it into a vulner- images of the Earth through the window of the Apollo 8 able little thing, but also rendered everything inside spacecraft in 1968. After the three big ego-smashing the Earth visible and graspable, like an edible object. divides in intellectual history—the Copernican revolu- VanDerBeek’s animation is rife with scientists looking tion (our Earth is not at the center of the universe), the into microscopes, politicians prying into telescopes, Darwinian revolution (we are not that different from data processors, and communication switchboards. animals), and the Freudian revolution (unconsciousness This, said VanDerBeek, had also been the purpose of shows we are not the masters of our ego)—this repre- his film, “to attack some of the aspects of super-reality sentation of Earth was said to be the fourth blow, since that has been so hastily and carelessly built around us it “displaced the human ego by making it conscious of […] a massive involuntary joke of living in a monolithic the physical limitations of the space it inhabits.”3 Much society and statistical age.”6 As historian, Paul N. has been said about the impact of these first photo- Edwards has noted, these Cold War technologies were graphs of Earth from outer space, about the way a little part of a “metaphorical understanding of world politics blue ball has been read to express our human ability to as a sort of system subject to technological manage- map, measure, and master the world by ingenious new ment” and constituted a “Closed-World discourse,” in technologies. Or, conversely, the way that images of the which the world was envisioned as an enclosed space, Earth have been understood to evoke sublime feelings encircled and conserved by American power.7 of interconnectedness between humans and the planet, VanDerBeek might have experienced a particular con­ as pictures that reveal the vulnerability of the Earth, ception of the world as a closed system when he met and the necessity of planetary stewardship.4 Here, it is the architect and designer Richard Buckminster Fuller, important to emphasize that the symbolic power of the who was guest teacher at Black Mountain College at Apollo images had been predetermined. As historian, the time VanDerBeek attended the school in the early Sheila Jasanoff has noted, the images of Earth pro- 1950s. When Fuller visited Black Mountain, he was duced by the Apollo program did not hit a terrestrial about to patent his newly invented architectural struc- tabula rasa. Before the photographs of Earth from ture named the geodesic dome, a lightweight, cost- space became the symbol of the planet whose system effective, and easy-to-build dome structure that was was measurable and understandable, preexisting quick to assemble as a shelter. With a pile of old vene- discourses on environmental control and system sci- tian blinds, Fuller taught the Black Mountain students ences had already speculated on the potential sym­- the ingenuity and strength of the triangle-patterned bolic power of this particular image to dissolve political structure; photographs of his workshop show at least boundaries and build a global community.5 Here, a ten students hanging from the plywood slats. On a closer look at pre-1968 global spheres and spinning, more theoretical level, Fuller most probably lectured blue balls in the work of filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek the students about the role of design in a new techno- and his teacher, the architect R. Buckminster Fuller, logical era. Repeatedly, Fuller told them that humanity will show a peculiar search for a spherical form to should finally make a shift from the cosmology of flat express a global consciousness. empires to the conception of a spherical Earth. If we

3 Sheila Jasanoff, summarizing Laurence Robert Poole, Earthrise: How Man First 6 Stan VanDerBeek, “On ‘Science Fric- 7 Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Tribe (1973) in “Image and Imagination: Saw the Earth (New Haven: Yale University tion’,” Film Culture, no. 22–23 (Summer Computers and the Politics of Discourse in The Formation of Global Environmental Press, 2010); Benjamin Lazier, “Earth­rise; 1961): 168. Cold War America (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Consciousness,” in Changing the Atmos- or, The Globalization of the World Picture,” Press, 1997), 7. phere: Expert Knowledge and Environmen- American Historical Review, vol. 116, no. 3 tal Governance, ed. Clark A. Miller and Paul (June 2011): 602–30. N. Edwards. (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 20 0 1) , 3 17. 5 Sheila Jasanoff, “Heaven and Earth: The Politics of Environmental Images,” in 4 For example: Denis Cosgrove, “Con- Earthly Politics: Local and Global in Envi- tested Global Visions: One-World, Whole- ronmental Governance, ed. Marybeth Long Earth, and the Apollo Space Photographs,” Martello and Sheila Jasanoff (Cambridge, Annals of the Association of American Geo­- MA.: MIT Press, 2004), 42. graphers, vol. 84, no. 2 (1994): 270–94;

151 “After we knew that the Earth was a sphere”

only took the sixteenth-century sailors seriously, said What would this new form of spherical consciousness Fuller—“after we knew that the Earth was a sphere”— look like? Fuller sneered at library globes and planetar­ we would finally realize that we live in an “omni-symmet- iums, they were something of the past: fascinating, rical closed system,” a “finite unity,” and we could thus pretty, but misleading and ineffective. When he visited measure and understand the world as a whole.8 Fuller the show “Airways to Peace: An Exhibition of Geo­ argued that a new age of air-bombings and commercial graphy for the Future” at MoMA in New York, he was air-flight made the world increasingly aware of its similarly disappointed. The centerpiece of the exhibi- spherical nature, it made people perceive the world like tion, a colossal walk-in globe, turned outside in: with sailors had always seen it. “A need has risen for new the geographical data that was usually on the exterior methods of peeling data off the globe and for assem- of the globe inverted, to examine it, viewers could stand bling the peelings in such a manner as to gain use­- inside.10 For Fuller, the globe was useless, since visitors ful knowledge of the spherical coursings.”9 Fuller’s could never get a full grasp of the whole Earth. “This goal was to invent a satisfactory form that would item disgusted the sailor.”11 Instead, in 1965, Fuller make people conscious of the Earth’s spherical meas- would propose his own vision of spherical consciousness urability. in a keynote lecture at “Vision ’65,” a three-day confer- ence sponsored by the International Center for the Typographic Arts at Southern Illinois University. A news- Spherical Forms ­paper report of the conference dubbed it a “super teach-in,” that tried to define a visual language for a new age and examine more creative ways in which designers and communicators could use computers. The pro- gram included graphic designers, computer scientists, and cybernetic theorists, as well as the well-known media theorist Marshall McLuhan. Stan VanDerBeek also received an invite to the program, to show his new experiments in animation and multiple-screen projec- tions. Fuller’s ideas would leave a lasting impression on the artist. In what must have been a marathon lecture of several hours, Fuller unfolded his plans for the “geosphere,” a 200-feet-diameter miniature Earth covered with aerial photographs of its surface and millions of little light

Gottscho-Schleisner, Inc. bulbs. Hooked up to a computer, the lights would blink Airways to Peace exhibition, Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. at different intervals and accurately render visualiza- 53rd St., New York City. Close-up of globe July 6, 1943 | Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints tions of an endless range of world data, such as popula- & Photographs Division, Gottscho-Schleisner Collection tion distribution and information about the weather. [reproduction number LC-G612- 43752] Complementary to the computerized geosphere, was the development of a game entitled “How to Make the World Work,” in which a huge data bank filled with variables on physical resources and demographic data

8 Richard Buckminster Fuller, “Vision 9 Richard Buckminster Fuller, “Fluid Ge- 10 Peder Anker has speculated that Fuller 11 Fuller, “Fluid Geography,” op. cit., 137. ’65 Keynote Lecture,” in World Design ography” [1944], reprinted in Your Private might in fact have inspired the creation of Science Decade, 1965–1975: Phase II Sky: Discourse, ed. Joachim Krausse and the exhibition: the director of the museum, (1967). Document 5: “Introduction to Com- Claude Lichtenstein (London: Springer, Monroe Wheeler, was inspired to produce prehensive Design Strategy,” ed. Richard 20 0 1) , 137. the show by an article in Life magazine with Buckminster Fuller and John McHale the headline “Global war teaches global (Carbondale: World Resources Inventory, cartography,” which might have been of Southern Illinois University, 1967), 64. Fuller’s hand. Peder Anker, “Graphic Available at: http://bfi.org/about-bucky/ Language: Herbert Bayer’s Environmen- resources/world-design-science-decade- tal Design,” Environmental History, no. 2 documents [last accessed March 21, (2007): 258. 2013].

152 Flora Lysen

would enable the simulation of world economics. Fuller picture language.”16 Movie-Dromes would be a tool for envisioned competitive teams from around the world “world communication,” offering “feedback” to local playing the game by testing their alternative world- communities worldwide and “a sense of the entire world improving theories, feeding them into the data bank picture.”17 and reflecting on the simulated results, visualized worldwide on gigantic geospheres. Theories bringing the world prosperity would win; those that started war The World as an Information System would lose. According to Fuller, with these computer visualizations, the educated public could force political In his Movie-Drome interpretation of Fuller and leaders to take the right decisions. A “competently McLuhan’s ideas, VanDerBeek became part of a gen- programmed computer” could provide “clear eration of artists and designers influenced by a vision unbiased answers to questions heretofore held to of the world as information system. As historian Fred be unsolvable.”12 Turner has noted, through the writings of Norbert One reviewer of the conference scantily remarked that, Wiener, Buckminster Fuller, and Marshall McLuhan, hopefully, in future meetings, the participants would con­- “young Americans encountered a cybernetic vision of centrate more on finding practical solutions, and would the world, one in which material reality could be imag- place less emphasis “on the designer’s urge to play ined as an information system.”18 In a “science friction” God and redesign the whole universe.”13 VanDerBeek world of nuclear anxieties, this “cybernetic notion of however, was much inspired by Fuller’s speech on the globe as a single, interlinked pattern of information computerized geospheres and by the ideas of McLuhan, was deeply comforting: in the invisible play of informa- who claimed that satellites had provided the Earth tion, many thought they could see the possibility of with electronic extensions that turned the planet into global harmony.”19 Whereas the mainstream American “content” and the environment into a “work of art.”14 public understood cybernetics as the science of con­- Their interconnecting ideas gave VanDerBeek a boost trol and feared the management and mechanization to build the Movie-Drome, a dome structure of aluminum of their lives and their minds, VanDerBeek followed panels with a smooth inside surface that functioned Fuller and McLuhan in embracing the possibilities of as a projection screen. VanDerBeek constructed a new technologies and the language of information.20 prototype of the Movie-Drome in the backyard of his Contrasting Buckminster Fuller’s geosphere and house in upstate New York, a few months after “Vision VanDerBeek’s Movie-Drome, however, shows to ’65.”15 Visitors could lie down at the outer edge of what immensely different directions the idea of the the dome with their feet towards the center, the dome- world as spherical system of information could be screen thus filling almost their complete field of vision. developed. Thousands of images, simultaneously projected on Fuller continued to improve his concept for “How to the dome’s entire interior surface, would thus envelope Make the World Work” and the geosphere into what he the visitors in an excessive bombardment of slides, would call the “World Game and the World Simulation films, rattling sounds, and the heat of electrical equip- Center.”21 For Fuller, the “World Simulation Center” ment. VanDerBeek envisioned the dome as part of showed that we could do away with politics and should a worldwide network of Movie-Dromes, which would fully accept the authority of science; when finished, it connect with satellite technology and could share would in effect be a “World Brain,” which promised real-time experiences in a “non-verbal international to free the “mind from occupations of brain slavery.”22

12 Fuller, “Vision ’65 Keynote Lecture,” 15 Gloria Sutton also emphasizes the 17 Ibid., 16, 17. 21 Mark Wasiuta, “The Persistence of op. cit., 71. influence of “Vision ’65” on VanDerBeek’s Informational Vision: World Game 1969, work, see “Stan VanDerBeek’s Movie- 18 Fred Turner, From Counterculture to 2009,” Journal of the Society of Architec- 13 Eugene A. Hosansky, “Vision ’65,” Drome: Networking the Subject,” in Future Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole tural Historians, no. 68 (December 2009): Industrial Design (1966): 79. Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary After Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital 590–93. Wasiuta charts the develop- Film, ed Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago ment of “World Game,” which remained a 14 See Marshall McLuhan, “Address at (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2003), Press, 2006), 5. relatively modest practice, in the 1970s Vision ’65,” in Essential McLuhan, ed. Eric 136–43. and ’80s. Fuller continued to rally for a McLuhan and Frank Zingrone (New York: 19 Ibid., 5. monumental “World Simulation Center” in Basic Books, 1995), 219–32. There is 16 Stan VanDerBeek, “Culture Intercom: the 1970s, but failed to secure funding at more to say about the important influence A Proposal and Manifesto,” Film Culture, 20 For a detailed account of the different the United States Congress. of Marshall McLuhan on Stan VanDerBeek, no. 40 (Spring 1966): 16. responses to cybernetic theories, both but this is beyond the scope of the present anxious and appreciative, see Joel Syder, 22 Fuller, cited by Peder Anker, text. “Shaken out of the ruts of ordinary percep- “Buckminster Fuller as Captain of Space- tion: Vision, culture and technology in the ship Earth,” Minerva, vol. 45, no. 4 psychedelic sixties” (Ph.D. diss., University (October 25, 2007): 417–34. of Southern California, 2009), 240–68.

153 “After we knew that the Earth was a sphere”

This blinking World-Brain-geosphere would be the From Tripping Out to Inter- and Intro-Realization amplification of the individual human brain, which Fuller described as a kind of computerized television studio: In Science Friction, VanDerBeek had reacted precisely the brain monitors all the incoming shows, it videotapes against such a computer-steered world of techno- incoming news, compares it to previously experienced mania. In the film, he seems to suggest that our Cold similar events, in order to design new scenarios that War obsession with measurement and control is per- seem logical in the present situation.23 In the summer haps an unconscious drive or a trick played by the mind: of 1969, the first World Game workshop took place in in the opening sequence of Science Friction we see a lecture hall of the New York Studio School for Draw- doctors performing brain surgery on a little cutout of ing, Painting, and Sculpture.24 For six hot, summer Freud, whose skull cracks open to give birth to a screaming Khrushchev. The opening credits of the film follow. VanDerBeek seemed to play with the possibility of escaping all this madness. In the film, he briefly turns the camera upon himself, seated behind his desk in a red-lit animation studio. He drinks a strange home- mixed substance from a test tube and starts to feel dizzy. His eyes seem to glaze as he gazes upward and the camera slowly pans with him, out of the scene, “tripping.” VanDerBeek’s Movie-Drome constitutes an important hybrid between the contained, computational geo- sphere of Buckminster Fuller and the possibility of escapism in hallucinatory drugs hinted at in Science Friction. Although Movie-Drome, like the geosphere, Matter Film relied on a spherical space with computer-steered New York Studio School World Game Workshop 1969 | b & w | 16 mm | Film still | Courtesy Alex Matter film projectors and a satellite system, he envisioned the “brains” present in his dome quite differently. On an individual level, the purpose and effect of the immersive image-flow would be to “penetrate to unconscious levels”; these “emotion-pictures” would provide images weeks, Fuller’s assistant and about twenty art students that inspire the “basic intuitive instinct of self-realiza- closed themselves in a space plastered wall-to-wall tion.”25 “Each member of the audience will build his with world maps and scattered with dossiers of world own references from the image-flow […] each individual statistics. Together, the student’s individual brains makes his own conclusions or realizations.”26 On a made up a communal “World Brain” in a contained communal level, VanDerBeek, perhaps naively, thought space—an imaginary sphere—of data calculation. that his Movie-Drome network could ensure the Fuller’s form to represent new global, spherical con- exchange of these experiences; that each individual sciousness was not a small, spinning, blue ball, but spectator would connect to a larger, global whole. a massive, spherical mission-control room, a giant The Movie-Drome could thus reach for the “emotional computer. denominator” of all men, and “inspire all men to good

23 Richard Buckminster Fuller, “Intro- 24 Documentation and a black-and-white 25 VanDerBeek, “Culture Intercom,” duction by R. Buckminster Fuller,” in Gene documentary of Fuller’s visit to the New op. cit., 17. Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: York Studio School by Herbert Matter are Dutton & Co., 1970), 28. in the archive at the Department of Special 26 Ibid., 16. Collections, Stanford University Librar- ies. A little clip of Matter’s documentary is accessible on the website of the Special Collections: http://collections.stanford. edu [last accessed March 21, 2013].

154 Flora Lysen

will and ‘inter and intro-realization.’”27 Distancing himself from Buckminster Fuller’s geosphere, VanDerBeek’s form for a spherical, global conscious- ness was a computer-based network of dome struc- tures, animated by individual minds with personal opinions, both part of local communities and a global Movie-Drome society. The little, blue ball of Science Friction, cracked and fried by Cold War technologies, gave way to an imagined communal sphere of image exchange. Nevertheless, even though VanDerBeek’s network tried to offer an escape from a disciplined and contained Closed-World subjectivity, his Movie-Drome relied on—and could be conceived because of—pre- cisely the same communication and networking tech- nologies that were being developed by the United States military in their global defense strategies. The appearance of VanDerBeek’s self-made domes and stop-motion animations obscured the way his Movie- Dromes relied on the nascent development of new possibilities of control and “science friction.”

27 Ibid.

155 Bruce Yonemoto La Vie Secrete (Moi) 2001 | C-print mounted on aluminum | 162.6 × 124.5 cm Courtesy the artist

156 Adrian Piper Self-Portrait from the Inside Out 1965 | Acrylic on canvas | 103 × 7 7.5 c m Courtesy Collection Emi Fontana Milano/Los Angeles Photo: Roberto Marossi

LSD Womb 1965 | Acrylic on canvas | 65 × 65 cm Courtesy Collection Emi Fontana Milano/Los Angeles Photo: Roberto Marossi

157 Richard Serra Boomerang 1974 | 11 min | Digital Betacam transferred to DVD | Film still Distributed by Arsenal Distribution, Arsenal - Institut für Film und Videokunst, Berlin

158 Medium Earth: Seismic Sensitivity as Planetary Prediction — Kodwo Eshun

March 5, 2013. The online issue of Nature, the inter­ Earthquake of March 11, followed by another frequency national weekly journal of science, reported that the of 6 mHz, approximately an hour afterwards. GOCE subaquatic earthquake that shook Tohoku in northeast had become the world’s first orbiting seismometer, the Japan on March 11, 2011, triggering a tsunami and a first in what might become, at some point in the near partial nuclear meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi Power future, a new generation of high-altitude seismometers Plant, was powerful enough to be “heard from space.” dedicated to monitoring earthquakes in remote loca- Physicists in France and The Netherlands reported tions. This generation of satellites modeled after the that the sound waves of the magnitude-8.9 quake GOCE would be sensitive enough to detect the seismic reached as far as a European Space Agency satellite, waves of blind-thrust faults moving far below the ocean which was orbiting 260 kilometers above the Earth. floor and planetary surfaces. Could these satellites Seismic incidents of this intensity resound like a giant sense the frequencies of active fault-strands before subwoofer, generating waves that travel through the they surface? Could it be that, in the near future, satel- surface of the Earth, producing infrasonic waves lites will act as infrasonic prediction devices? that catapult through the ionosphere. What perturbations might this technology of sonic pre- Working with the Gravity Field and Steady-State diction introduce into the vast machine of infrastruc- Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE), which uses its six tural geoscience? More precisely, how might this accelerometers to monitor minute variations in gravity new global data and the new models it would generate over the Earth’s surface, physicist Raphael Garcia shift the ongoing debate on the prediction of temblors? and his colleagues at the University of Toulouse used Such a global question might be better posed within a computer-generated model to filter out atmospheric a specific context such as California. As Mike Davis dynamics, such as gravity waves, emanating from argues in Ecology of Fear: The Imagination of Disaster the polar region unrelated to earthquake-borne infra- in Los Angeles,1 the science of seismology is divided into sound. opposing camps. There are scientists who claim that The physicists concluded that GOCE had detected an the assumed regularity of fault behaviour makes earth- infrasonic frequency of 14 millihertz (mHz) occurring quake prediction and forecasting possible within rea- approximately thirty minutes after the Great Tohoku sonably narrow time bands, and those who argue that

1 Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: The Imagination of Disaster (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998).

159 Medium Earth

great earthquakes are unique historical events whose conviction, which authorizes itself through bodily self- variable, rather than constant parameters cannot evidence. The fact that the sensitive is affected—indeed be predicted by extrapolation from the recent history attacked by involuntary sensations—provides its of fault systems. own proof, which science can affirm but not deny. The Beyond the global architecture of the earth sciences seismic sensitivity that American biological sensitives lies the popular imagination of disaster, what modes experience resonates with Bruno Latour’s recent of audibility and visibility might become feasible if, and call for the construction of a post-global aesthetic. when, infrasonic prediction leaks into the amateur In “The Anthropocene and the Destruction of the Image fascination with the calculation of disaster? What might of the Globe,” Latour’s fourth Gifford Lecture deliv­- emerge when vernacular practices of conjuration ered on February 25, 20133 he looks forward to a become entangled with media reports that summarize prospective mode of sensitization that is released from GOCE’s previously unimaginable capacities of geo­ its latent state by acts that destroy the false belief in acoustic detection, seismic apprehension, and remote the Whole: “It is our Globe, our ideal idea of the Globe sensitivity? In a contemporary context in which the that should be destroyed for any work of art, any ambient threat of seismic activity throughout California aesthetic to emerge—if you agree to hear in the word combines with scientific disagreements on the predict- aesthetic its old meaning of being able to ‘perceive’ ability of future quakes and with televised broadcasts and to be ‘concerned,’ that is, a capacity to render by the United States Geological Survey that recon- oneself sensitive, a capacity that precedes any distinc- struct the causality of tectonic upheaval, what emerges tion between the instruments of science, of art and is an ecology in which fear is inseparable from permis- of politics.” sion. Fear is the modality through which permission is Without intending to, the earthquake sensitive embod- lived as a habitual, unconscious experience. ies an anti-holistic consciousness. They embody, in The conflicting temporalities of potentiality, predict- terms both hyperbolic and vulgar, Latour’s hope for an ability, variation, and retrospection each attempt to indistinct and indivisible practice of life that is incapable manage the portentous time of imminent threat. Eco- of being disciplined by forms of authorized knowledge. logically speaking, California’s psychological climate, one of fluctuating spikes and troughs, is not just appre- hensive. It is also, equally, a permissive environment March 2, 2013. Evening. Sixty-five year-old earthquake that licenses amateurs to embark on autodidactic sensitive Charlotte King is talking with Eddie Middleton, practices of prediction, premonition, prophecy, and host of the Night Search radio program broadcasting preemption. In The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, live from Memphis. When Middleton asks King to Prediction and the Fault Line between Reason and identify “precursors” that might indicate that “some Faith, David L. Ulin points to the ways in which its citi- major quake” is about to occur “in some place in the zens enjoy “taking the random pandemonium of an world,” King responds by saying: “Well, we’re expec—, earthquake and reconfiguring it to make unexpected we’re expecting, uh, Oregon’s stirring a little bit, sense.”2 because the vision’s getting really bad, and Oregon is The passionate pedagogy of earthquake sensitives always vision. And I’m not concerned. It’s just probably emerges from and participates within this milieu. Sen- an aftershock to the 5.1 we had a couple days ago. And, sitives distinguish their practice from psychic pre­ um, left lower ribs and back are hurting again. That’s diction by emphasizing the material and scientifically Oceania, probably New Zealand, Australia, in that area, testable nature of their methods. It is precisely this because they’re due, they’re also due for an aftershock attachment to the scientific rather than the spiritual, that they, that … that’s the area that’s been real uncom- which indicates that sensitives practice a contempo- fortable lately. And my right knee and … an—, and hip rary form of occult thinking denounced by Adorno in and, um, leg has been hurting, and that’s Peru, Brazil, 1952 in his critique of the Los Angeles Times Astrology and Colombia.” column, while he was living in Pacific Palisades. What In the body of the earthquake sensitive, seismic upheav- informs the scientism of the sensitive is a mediumistic al is a force that is experienced and endured. Seismicity

2 David L. Ulin, The Myth of Solid 3 http://www.youtube.com/ Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction and the watch?v=4-l6FQN4P1c&list=ECEA946 Fault Line between Reason and Faith 7E8E8D991AE&index=3 [last accessed (New York: Viking, 2004), 21. March 27, 2013].

160 Kodwo Eshun

expresses itself as sensations translatable into symp­ I think it was Illinois. I’m not sure. I don’t remember. But tomology. The victim learns to read each localized pain it was felt in sixteen states. I believe it was a, um, 5.7 as a symptom that anticipates seismic activity. The or something like that. And it was felt in sixteen states. planet, according to Charlotte King, is an involuntary And then I knew that’s exactly what it was.” condition that is part cartography and part acupunc- The distance between corporeal and geographical ture. How do the fragments of this physical geography place collapses even as the gap between bodily and assemble themselves? In conversation with Middleton, chronological time implodes. King calls her symptoms King hesitantly reconstructs the process through “precursors.” She sees visible evidence in non-human which she came to recognize her “connection with the behavior. Only days after first hearing low frequencies earth.” Without warning, one day in 1979, she hears a in 1979, forty-one sperm whales inexplicably beached low frequency sound that is inaudible to everyone themselves in Oregon; three or four days after that, around her. She suffers intense headaches. The onset King recalls, Big Bear in San Bernardino, California, of seismic and volcanic activity in Mount St. Helen in undergoes four moderate earthquakes. King connects Washington, by a process of non-sensuous similarity, her prevision to the “subsonic sound level” that the leads her to the understanding that there is a relation whales may have heard. She shares the sensitivity of between the place and time of pain and the time and whales; she suffers from their death. Anomalous animal place of the event. Planetary waves impress themselves behavior alerts King to the onset of geological activity. upon her body as low frequency sounds, back pains, Whales that beach. Cats that vomit fur balls. Ants as “intestinal flu” and “seismic flu.” that leave the ground to climb walls. Earthworms that These sounds, these aches, these agonies, happen in leave the soil to inch their way across the driveway the same place with the same intensity. Their regularity outside her garage. More worms that squirm their teaches King to translate suffering into symptoma­ way up the three concrete steps to the entrance of tology. Their reliability and recognizability authorize her office. her to predict the location and the time of imminent This activity provides the evidence she needs to author- seismic activity. Tectonic forces teach King how to ize herself to announce the onset of a “timeline”—the correlate time and space with date and location. After countdown to imminent seismic activity. A pulled muscle the quake, she begins to understand that these sensa- or a headache prompts King to note its onset and index tions are understandable as premonitions. Charlotte its date to possible seismic activity. Precursor activity King is a patient who behaves like a physician, diag­ moves the timeline forward. It shifts its threshold of nosing each discomfort as an alert. She is the victim uncertain certainty forward by twelve, twenty-four, of a syndrome whose dimensions are planetary and forty-eight, or seventy-two hours. King announces this whose reach is prospective. traveling timeline through e-mails posted to 100 sub- What King calls “seismic flu” is only one symptom of scribers. Many of these people suffer from pains simi- this syndrome that attacks without warning. Once, when lar to those King describes. This remote resemblance she was on stage in Lincoln City, Newport, Oregon, creates a distributed commonality that reinforces she “was lecturing and was just about done with the the calculation of disaster. King extrapolates from her lecture. And all of a sudden, my lower back felt like some­ group sensitives to imagine the existence of a trans­ body—like I’d been kicked by a mule. And I started national assembly composed of “hundreds and thou- getting teeth-chattering chills, and I started a symptom sands of people” that “feel the same symptom at which I coined ‘seismic flu.’” The symptom arrives the same time in the same part of their body, no matter ahead of her interpretation: “And they said, ‘what is it?’ where they live.” And I says, I said, ‘I don’t know.’ I said that ‘something Marching ants, earthworms, e-mails, vomiting cats, is gonna happen within a few hours, and it’s gonna be voices communicating via the telephone, whales strand- really felt.’ I said, I think, I said, ‘I think it’s along, um, the ed: Charlotte translates these involuntary acts and Wasatch or New Madrid, but I don’t know, because,’ illnesses into a vocabulary of foresight that is unable to I said, ‘the low back is hurting so bad.’ And so I went prevent the event it envisions. Predicting fault activity home, and a few hours later, they had that quake in, um, requires King to predict, in turn, how her community

161 Medium Earth

of sensitives might respond to possible seismic threat. Her plea to call her at home any time of day or night hints at the escalation produced by summoning a future that multiplies ways of responding to those possible futures. It indicates the ways in which popular practices of prediction amplify the volatility of the present in its state of becoming the future they seek to affect. Through the peculiar quasi-causality of prediction, King and her followers produce pockets of localized temporal anomalies. But within these pockets of instability, it is clear that forms of agency emerge, far from the remote sensing arrays deployed by the United States Geological Survey to translate the dynamic behavior of plate tectonics. Situated within the thresholds of a continually shifting timeline, the sensitives of California, Oregon and beyond live four days in the future. They send reports back to the present from which they have partly absconded. Their bodies are partially inhabited by the millennial time of seismicity. As Lorraine Daston has argued,4 the advent of the era of the Anthropocene can be characterized by the collapse of the distinctions between the limits of human, technological, and geo- logical time. Such a collapse implies the envisioning of a post-human perspective that is capable of appre- hending such a collapse. The community of earthquake sensitives within America offer one possible version of inhabitation of that collapse and embodiment of that perspective.

4 Lorrain Daston, “Objects: A Rock and a Floppy Disk,” lecture delivered at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, January 10, 2013 on the occasion of The Anthropocene Project: an Opening.

162 Apocalypse, Babylon, Simulation

1 2 Apocalypse, Babylon, Simulation

The Blue Planet was not the first photograph of the whole to circulate within global mass culture. In dissident and sub-cultural circles in particular there was a powerful forerunner: the mushroom cloud, and associated with this, the apoca- 3 lypse, the end of human civilization. This image was not just linked to the public debates of the 1950s, playing a decisive role in the formation of anti-war movements worldwide. It also connected, in numerous collages, the idea of the whole visible planet with the possibility of its complete destruction. Thus it was also a picture marking the transition from positive to negative concep- tions of the planetary, from world peace to images of the apocalypse increasingly understood in ecologi- 1 Paul Kantner, Grace Slick, Marty Balin, Jack Casady and Jorma cal terms. That the whole is false— Kaukonen (Jefferson Airplane) in One P.M. by D. A. Pennebaker, a system, a life-form condemned Jean-Luc Godard, Richard Leacock | 1971 | Film still | Courtesy to destruc­tion—found expression Pennebaker Hegedus Films from the middle of the 1970s onwards in talk of “Babylon.” Origi- Airplane. Nothing came of the film project, Ecological Apocalypse nating in the neo-Testamentary however D. A. Pennebaker and Richard resistance religion of the Rastafar- Leacock, who were involved in the work, 23 The book The Limits to Growth, ians, it found its way into pop and filmed Godard as he staged a performance published in 1972 by Dennis Meadows and punk culture. Here the apocalypse of Jefferson Airplane on the roof of a New other scientists commis­sioned by the was a permanent threat, inviting York skyscraper. The film project One( Club of Rome, emphasizes, with its whole- exodus—whether to a mythical, P.M. or One Parallel Movie) was completed planet perspective, the idea that every 4 pre-colonial, biblical Ethiopia in the without Godard. local, concrete, individual action has global case of the Rastafarians, or just — con­sequences—above all, of a negative the freedom of urban sub­cultures or character. The book became a bestseller the artificial paradise of Ganja. In 1 “The House at Pooneil Corners” in the early 1970s. A picture of the planet the 1980s the intellectual version of also appears here, which, however, is the permanent threat of world You and me, we keep walking around now being blindly trampled. destruction, especially popular in And we see all the bullshit around us. — the visual arts, was the talk of […] “simulation,” derived from the Mankind is Doomed but Great: 2 Adam Curtis | All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace writings of Jean Baudrillard. Now Everything someday will be gone except Nature Triumphs 2011 | Film still | Courtesy Adam Curtis & BBC the Blue Planet situation was re- silence 3 Dennis Meadows, Donella Meadows, Erich Zahn, Peter Milling | versed: the visible was no longer And Earth will be quiet again! “Eskimo Blue Day” Die Grenzen des Wachstums. Bericht des Club of Rome zur the starting point for a new way of Lage der Menschheit | Cover | Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, Seas from clouds will wash off the ashes of 1973 (1972) thinking; the signs of commodity violence Snow cuts loose from the frozen culture in mass circulation, together 4 John “Bud” Cardos | Kingdom of the Spiders | 1977 | Left as the memory of men; Until it joins with the African sea with their media, no longer referred Film still | © 1977 Arachnid Pictures, Ltd. All rights reserved. There will be no survivor, my friend! In moving it changes its cold and its name Courtesy of MGM Media Licensing to any reality. Thus, during the The reason I come and go is the same course of its becoming visible, Suddenly everyone will look surprised, Animal game for me In “Eskimo Blue Day,” which first appeared exposing it to all manner of attacks, Stars, spinning wheels in the skies, You call it rain on the album Volunteers from 1969, adher- the planet was also lost. Interest- Sun is scrambled in their eyes But the human name ents of anthropocentrism are looked ingly, Baudrillard, just like disillu- While the moon circles like a vulture! Doesn’t mean shit to a tree down upon from a superior, laconic LSD sioned hippies, members of com- [...] […] perspective. However, not from the munes, and Land-art artists, sought Energy dies without body warm perspective of those who savor the de- refuge in the Californian desert That’s the last hour to think anymore. Icicles ruin your gun struction of civilization from a distance, but (seemingly) devoid of signs. Jelly and juice and bubbles, bubbles on the Water my roots the natural thing from the supposed perspective of nature: floor! Natural spring to the sea “Consider how small you are / … / The Sulphur springs make my body float human dream / Doesn’t mean shit to a Castles on cliffs vanish Like a ship made of logs from a tree tree …” Grace Slick hurls with consider- Apocalypse Cliffs like heaps of rubbish Redwoods talk to me able violence at her listeners, for example Seen from the stars hour by hour Say it plainly the dreamy, spaced-out public at Wood- The Apocalypse is Great, as the Squares As splintered scraps and black powder! The human name stock. will also Die Doesn’t mean shit to a tree — From here to heaven is a scar, Snow called water going violent 1 “From here to heaven is a scar…” In their Dead center, deep as death! Dam the end of the stream 4 No, Shit! Nature: That is, not Rivers song “The House at Pooneil Corners,” Too much cold in one place breaks and Streams, but Spiders! Jefferson Airplane devise an apocalyptic All the idiots have left! That’s why you might know what I mean scenario which is sarcastically celebrated The idiots have left! Consider how small you are However, there is another perspective on by the group’s three singers—Marty Balin, Compared to your scream the apocalypse: not the triumph of the Grace Slick, and Paul Kantner. A huge Cows are almost cooing, The human dream nobility of nature over civilized man; that scar extends from earth up into heaven, Turtledoves are mooing, Doesn’t mean shit to a tree Nietzschean object of despisal, but the and all around nothing but the trash of Which is why a pooh is poohing triumph of the revolting, seething, uncon- consumption and the bullshit of ideology. In the sun. Jefferson Airplane trolled living over an entrenched man­- The prospect of the apocalypse is cel- “Eskimo Blue Day” kind bravely defending itself in the old ebrated in anticipation of the death of the Sun! 1969 frontier manner. Best of all as portrayed idiots and an earth finally cleansed of Lyrics by Paul Kantner / Grace Slick in a B-movie such as John “Bud” Cardos’ the memory of mankind. Jefferson Airplane © EMI Music Publishing Kingdom of the Spiders, at the end of Following his film with the Rolling Stones “The House at Pooneil Corners” — which the Blue Planet has turned white, One Plus One, Jean Luc Godard planned to 1968 completely wrapped in spiders’ webs. make a film about an American group Lyrics by Paul Kantner / Marty Balin — (One A.M. or One American Movie) and © EMI Music Publishing / Universal Music Publishing Group decided on the politically radical Jefferson —

163 Visual Essay

5 6

7

8

5 Ron Cobb | Mah Fellow Americans: 155 Editorial Cartoons So we gonna walk—through de roads from the Underground Press Syndicate | Amsterdam: Real Free of creation: Press, 1971 | Courtesy Ron Cobb We the generation Trod through great tribulation. 678 The Apocalypse will be an Apocalypse of Commodity Society Exodus: Movement of Jah people! 9 : Exodus: Movement of Jah people! In Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, […] the police shoot at black students taking part in a revolt. The protagonists of the Bob Marley white counterculture flee into the desert. “Exodus” Following their flirtation with militancy, 1977 the various rebellions of the white male Lyrics by Bob Marley individualist and his pacifist girlfriend have © Universal Music Publishing Group failed. All that now remains is the desire — for a huge explosion, the pleasurable destruction of capitalist society, whose : Babylon, from a London Perspective commod­ities break up into their compo- of the capitalist economy, and the gift of 678 Mina Totino | Study after Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point nent parts in slow motion before the In Great Britain, “Babylon” was adopted as an escapist and servile ideology of well­ness, 1999 | Oil on canvas | Courtesy Mina Totino | Photo: Stan Douglas eyes of the protagonists. a battle cry, among others by the punk fitness, and the New Age. 9 Eddie Mallin | Bob Marley live in concert in Dalymount — movement. The riots of the late 1970s and Biafra devises a totalitarian state of “Zen Park on July 6th, 1980 | 1980 | © Eddie Mallin 80s, and the street battles waged between fascists” who control whether their : Rioting in the Handsworth Lozells area of Birmingham in 1985. Babylon police and youth, punk rockers as well as subjects are wearing the obligatory smiling The Handsworth Riots | 1985 | © with and beans / Alamy diasporic Carribean youth, were known face, radiating a good mood, and where In the 1970s Babylon became an expres- collectively under the battle cry “Babylon the “uncool” are transported to concen- Close your eyes, can’t happen here sion for a universal state of oppression, is burning.” Babylon was now the name for tration camps by secret police wearing Big Bro’ on white horse is near derived from the biblical story of the an urban reality that affected everyone. suede and jeans. When Ronald Reagan, The hippies won’t come back you say Babylonian captivity. Originally used to Also young people, who did not understand another former governor of California, Mellow out or you will pay describe the capitalist West by the Rasta- themselves as members of a diasporic is elected Pre­sident of the United States farians, the adherents of a syncretic culture, took up the cry. a short while later, Biafra sings “We’ve [Chorus] African diasporic liberation religion based — Got a Bigger Problem Now” to the melody on Old Testament motifs, it increasingly of his Jerry Brown vilification. Now it is 1984 became a planetary expression for the The Clash capture this mood when they — Knock-knock at your front door false world in which it is not possible to live transfer the Jamaican riot song “Police It’s the suede/denim secret police a correct life. Only an exodus can help, and Thieves” to British conditions, appear- “California Über Alles” They have come for your uncool niece or Armageddon—a complete end to ing on stage wearing Red Brigade T-shirts. this false world. Through the victory of Around 1980 the different models of I am Governor Jerry Brown Come quietly to the camp reggae as the first globally successful the end, the revolution, the exodus from My aura smiles You’d look nice as a drawstring lamp post-colonial pop music a new popular Babylon, and the nuclear catastrophe— And never frowns Don’t you worry, it’s only a shower category emerged, which conceived of the perceived as imminent—replaced hope Soon I will be president For your clothes here’s a pretty flower. whole as a false whole. Nevertheless, this in the whole. was initially dominated by the idea that — Carter Power will soon go away Die on organic poison gas life in Babylon was preceded by a depor­ I will be Führer one day Serpent’s egg’s already hatched tation which can be reversed by returning ; “California Über Alles: I will command all of you You will croak, you little clown to the roots. Your kids will meditate in school” Your kids will meditate in school When you mess with President Brown — One of the sharpest and thorough reck­ [Chorus] [Chorus] 9 Babylon, from a Jamaican Perspective onings with the counterculture was carried California Über Alles out by the Dead Kennedys and their singer California Über Alles Dead Kennedys “Exodus” Jello Biafra in their 1978 single “California Über Alles California “California Über Alles” Über Alles,” directed, above all, against Über Alles California 1979 Exodus: Movement of Jah people! the hippie-governor and ecolo­gist Jerry Lyrics by Jello Biafra / John Greenway Exodus: Movement of Jah people! Brown. Zen fascists will control you © Sound Diagrams / Decay Music The former oppositional power is held Hundred percent natural — Men and people will fight you down respon­sible for the development of what You will jog for the master race When you see Jah light. would later be known as Californian ideol­ And always wear the happy face Let me tell you if you’re not wrong; ogy: the perversion of liberation ideas Everything is all right. into liberation of markets, the liberalization

164 Apocalypse, Babylon, Simulation

; Simulation

“I don't even know whether “No monuments and no history: the El Salvador exists at all—perhaps exaltation of mobile deserts and the television news invented it!” simulation. There is the same wilder- Blixa Bargeld, in Spex 9, (September 21, 1981): 21. ness in the endless, indifferent cities as in the intact silence of the Bad- lands. Why is LA, why are the deserts = In West Berlin the apocalypse of the so fascinating? It is because you are post-counterculture scenes combined delivered from all depth here.” with the simulation discourse derived from Jean Baudrillard, America (London: Verso, 1988), Baudrillard. The thesis, espoused in the 123–24. name of Baudrillard that the circulation of the signs of commodity-culture no longer referred to any form of reality, a thesis > In 1996 Chris Kraus, together with the common in art and subculture worldwide, Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, was now mixed with the discourse of the organized the festival “Chance—3 days Blue Planet’s imminent demise, predicted in the desert,” held at “Whiskey Pete’s for the next few years (“For me now is the Casino” in Stateline, Nevada. It featured a time of destruction, the end time. Things group called The Chance Band, made up will only last three or four years,” Blixa of, amongst others, Mike Kelley, George Bargeld). Planetary thinking appears here, Hurley, and Dave Muller, and organized by so to speak, in its complete negativity: Tom Watson. Jean Baudrillard stood on it has now rid itself of the world, like the stage with this band, wearing a tuxedo and earth, or affirmed its unattainability. reciting texts to their music, which on the — live album released in 2002 would carry the collective title Suicide Moi. > Interestingly, Baudrillard took a great — interest in the Californian desert, that frontier at which the end or the beginning of the lost earthly realities can appear— or be lost for ever. Thus for Baudrillard on the Pacific coast, the image of California < becomes a flip image. The un­designated character of the desert becomes a test case for the loss of the world. In this manner one can either lose it forever or start to reclaim it. —

“Hence the phantasy of a seismic frac- ture and a crumbling into the pacific, which would be the end of California = and of its criminal and scandalous beauty. For it is unbearable, while one is still alive, to pass beyond the diffi- culty of being, simply to pass into the fluidity of sky, cliffs, surf, and deserts, into the hypothesis of happiness alone.” Jean Baudrillard, America (London: Verso, 1988), 122.

“All that remains of a violent and historical demand is this graffiti on the beach, facing out to sea, no longer calling upon the revolutionary mass- es, but speaking to the sky and the open space and the transparent deities of the Pacific: PLEASE REVO- LUTION!” Jean Baudrillard, America (London: Verso, 1988), 122.

>

; Dead Kennedys | California Über Alles | 1979 | Cover | Fast Product | © Sound Diagrams/Decay Music

< Raymond Pettibon | No title (O. D. a Hippie) | 1982 | Ink on paper | Courtesy Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin | Photo: Jochen Littkemann

= Peter Gehl | Festival der Genialen Dilettanten | Poster | 1981 | Courtesy Peter Gehl

> Jean Baudrillard with The Chance Band | Suicide-Moi | Live at Whiskey Pete's Casino and Hotel | 2002 | Cover | Compound Annex Records

165 On the Californian Utopia/Ideology — Maurizio Lazzarato

“We’re facing 25 years of prosperity, freedom and a itself firmly as the political system of the twenty-first better environment for the whole world. You got a century and of humanity as a whole. Market, democracy, problem with that?” and technology, at last, turned the liberal dream into Wired, 1997 a reality via their full involvement. One of the most important books associated with The financial crisis, characterized by subprime mort- Californian ideology (Out of Control, by Kevin Kelly),1 gages and sovereign debt, firmly signed the death repeatedly uses the concept at the root of political warrant of the Californian ideology, which was the last eco­nomics—that of the famous “invisible hand”—devel- avatar of a particular neoliberalism that married oped by Adam Smith. Kelly uses the concept to explain “markets” and “cybernetics,” self-regulation of the the emergence of a “global mind,” as opposed to that economy with new technologies. of market forces, while basing his argument on the The free-willed, self-determined, and entrepreneurial importance of high technology rather than the individu- individual had found fulfillment in what then was termed al. The only difference being that real-time connectivity The New Economy, thanks to intelligent machines. With provided by computers replaces trade. “The global it came countless promises: the end of crises, a con- mind is a union of computer and nature, of telephones tinuous increase in productivity, an optimal and fair and human brains and more. It is a very large complex- allocation of economic resources, etc. “General Equi- ity of indeterminate shape governed by an invisible librium” theory—that obsession of political econom- hand of its own.” ics—had evolved into its technological incarnation, Perhaps it is Friedrich Hayek who most knowledgeably thereby guaranteeing everlasting stability and pros- and skillfully creates the symbiosis between cyber­ perity for all. The market and the Web, the economy netics and a dogmatic, fundamentalist liberalism that and cyberspace, no longer required regulation from will become the hallmark of the American neocon­ an external political body. Real-time connectivity guar- servative political machine. anteed inherent governance, so that democracy, The cyber-machine is the expression of the free nature reincarnated as “market democracies,” would impose of the market, which guarantees a duality of autono-

1 Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World, Chapter 11 (New York: Basic Books, 1995). Available at: http:// www.kk.org/outofcontrol/ch11-e.html [last accessed March 14, 2013].

166 mies: the autonomy of the individual and the autonomy The machine should link to its social, human, and of the market. Individual actions, dictated by selfish- physical environments and to its theoretical, economic, ness, coordinate automatically to give life to a new and political-cultural contexts—just as André Leroi- entity—that of the market—which emerges spontane- Gourhan did with the hand / tool. If one does not de- ously out of this interaction. center the essence of the digital machine onto all vari- People are free because they can take effective actions, ous forms of “software” (which are also psyche, life, whereas the market is a “free entity” as no will or circulatory systems, emotions, theories, etc.), then one “design” has created it. The market is “autonomous” is left with a reductive view of the machine. It is there- in the sense that it cannot be reduced to individual fore necessary to decenter the essence of the machine components as, by nature, it is far more complex. The from its “visible aspect towards its intangible or non- parts (individual components) and the whole (the collec- physical aspect.” tive) link, not in a reductive relationship, but in one It is in its relationship to capitalism, however, that the of cyclical codetermination, found in the cybernetic techno-scientific Californian ideology displays its concepts of “system” (Paul Weiss) and “complexity” greatest shortcomings, since “it is not the machines (von Neumann). that create capitalism but capitalism that creates the However, even this cybernetic version has limits episte- machines” (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari), which mologically in the subject/object dualism on which integrates them into its workings. political economic theory has been built since Adam During the financial crisis, machines failed to provide Smith. for any measure of self-regulation (ninety percent of Subjectivity, based on the “free and sovereign” indi- share price valuations are automatically generated). vidual, is completely stripped of any object (be it nature, On the contrary, their automation often amplified the machines, signs, etc.). Once individual subjects react disequilibrium. The machines did not demonstrate any with or against one another, they create an “objectivity” “autonomy,” because they always operated within a that transcends them. The actions taken by the subjects network of which they were merely constituent parts, create a depersonalized process, a process “without intentionally open and connected to “otherness” and subject.” “externalities,” of which the most important were The main failing of these theories lies not only within this proved once again to be the workings and valuation mysterious transition from subject to non-subject, of “capital.” but also with the concept of the “cybernetic machine” Globalization, gratified under the aegis of the market or information technology, which lies at the heart of and of intelligent automata, has become a “systemic” the Californian ideology. crisis, because the New Economy evidently never really Félix Guattari makes a distinction between cybernetic operated according to the strictures of Californian modeling, which relates to the machine conceived as utopianism. There never was any inherent self-regula- structure, and his concept “machine,” which, instead, tion within technology; neither has there ever been is an interruption or break within the structure’s action. any self-government. The cybernetic design “implies feedback loops” that The subprime crisis is not only fascinating in that it involve a concept of totalization, which it itself con­trols. showed that the “self-regulation” of the markets pro- The machine operates via inputs and outputs designed duce increasing instability; that disequilibrium is an to make it operate “along a principle of eternal return”; inherent function of capitalism’s workings; and that the machine continues to forever depend on external liberals and economists confuse the “market” with factors, because it continues to forever be in dia- “capital”; but because it revealed the true nature of ­log with otherness. The machine emerges at the cross- “self-regulation” and of self-government. roads of a multiplicity of universes (technological, The type of governance witnessed throughout the dia­grammatic, industrial, imaginary, political, eco­ crisis—massive state, political, and institutional inter- nomic), a multiplicity that one can neither reduce nor vention including intervention from banks and multi­ enclose within the structural conditions of the cyber- national companies, all that “libertarians” abhor—had netic machine. been operational throughout neoliberalism. Neither

167 On the Californian Utopia / Ideology

politics nor the state has made a comeback, since This individualization is neither standardizing nor they had always been very active in constructing the identificatory, and the intervention is less of a “type of supposed automatic functioning of the markets. In internal subjugation of individuals than an environmental the same fashion, the crisis demonstrated that capital- type of intervention” (Michel Foucault), using techniques ism does not center on individuals but on economic, to create a space both open and restrictive enough communicational, and social mega-machinery, and that, for the “dividual” to act, whereby his actions provide “free” and “sovereign” individuals are merely compo- the “data” needed to intervene upon him and his nents or cogwheels of these mega-machines. environment. Today, the Californian Utopia continues to thrive within In this new light, the Californian Utopia becomes a night- the ideology of “social networks.” The networks, mare: contrary to all liberal ideology, the deployments machines, and logarithms of a cyberspace more openly of control view the individual not as a given, but as a receptive to the “outside” and to “otherness” would con­struct of business and governance. Indeed, this entail a further step towards greater democratization, applies not just to the individual but also to the whole participation, and involvement, and moreover, towards of reality, as there is no longer anything “outside” the self-government and self-regulation. relations of capital. In fact, this deployment or dispositif—contrary to “libertarian” discourse—is in the process of creating I wish to thank Francesca Bria for discussing with me a form of centralization and hierarchy that is unprec- the theories contained in this text, for which she took no edented in history. Search engines such as Google and responsibility in writing. social networks like Facebook—as well as nation-states through their computerized welfare systems—form databases that archive, calculate, and compare each Translated from the French by Maria Vlotides fragment of information left behind by our behaviors, relationships, connections, and actions. As opposed to the market, the design of this novel machinal deployment is not to be a “process without subject.” On the contrary, its functional purpose is to subject the subject to the ruling orders and to sub- ject the consumer to business. Under this sort of deployment of control, the individual is treated, not as a single unit under the control of discipline, but as a “dividual” (Deleuze), whose sub­ jectivity is continuously reconstituted from a precari- ous and temporal multiplicity of needs, relationships, and emotions that require both monitoring in real time as well as being fed with suitably adapted products and services. Subjectivity is the construct of the endless modulation of components and behaviors of subjection, rather than a single, unified mould. This modulation does not act according to predefined parameters (normal/abnor- mal, inclusion/exclusion); neither does it impose a norm on which the components are based; nor does it aim at constructing an identity. It normalizes differentials, working towards differential inclusion within the econo- my and within governance through which it thus claims to uphold the uniqueness of each individual. These deployments intervene, as Foucault predicted, in “the temporal and the random,” via actions that affect “events that individuals, populations and groups create with the quasi-natural events that are created around them” such as economic or demographic phenomena etc.

168 Jack Goldstein Untitled 1984 | Acrylic on canvas | 244 × 91.4 × 5 cm Vanmoerkerke Collection, Belgium | Image © We Document Art

169 HEXEN 2.0 / Tarot / Seven of Chalices – Utopia Suzanne Treister HEXEN 2.0 / Tarot / Knave of Pentacles – Technogaianism Archival giclée prints on Hahnemuhle Bamboo paper | each 29.7 × 21 cm HEXEN 2.0 / Tarot / King of Pentacles – Economic Cybernetics © the artist | Courtesy Annely Juda Fine Art, London HEXEN 2.0 / Tarot / Knave of Swords – Interplanetary Internet

170 HEXEN 2.0 / Tarot / Seven of Chalices – Utopia Dara Birnbaum HEXEN 2.0 / Tarot / Knave of Pentacles – Technogaianism Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman HEXEN 2.0 / Tarot / King of Pentacles – Economic Cybernetics 1978-79 | 5:50 min, color, sound | Video | Film still HEXEN 2.0 / Tarot / Knave of Swords – Interplanetary Internet Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York

171 The Power of Information: A Journey Back in Time to the Faultlines of Globalization, Art, and Media in the Early 1990s — Mercedes Bunz

Whether Peter Weibel marks the beginning or the end played to artists sometimes the role of an overbearing of an epoch isn’t easy to determine: surely in 1999, uncle, who despite family ties, one didn’t really want when still more humans than e-mails traveled around to be embraced by. Today, the global no longer needs our globe, the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit importing from elsewhere. Thanks to the Internet, it interviewed the Austrian avant-garde artist and media is everywhere. Despite being uninvited, it happily visits art curator (Ars Electronica, among others) in his us in the home office, where it sprawls unpleasantly feverish capacity as the nomad from Karlsruhe. Always on our laps: our work competes with visitors from the in search of the artistic avant-garde, the freshly ap- entire world. A three-minute video from the London pointed director of the Center for Art and Media flew artists’ collective LuckyPDF with the title School of restlessly around the globe for his new job, and de- Global Art2 explains the precarity of the new situation. scribed himself as an “information hunter.”1 It is this Their PowerPoint presentation from 2012 begins with mobile lifestyle which was of primary interest to the words: “We are all artists and we are all global.”3 the reporter. For his middle-class readership of Die Presumably, Joseph Beuys, who originated the phrase, Zeit fixated on the family home, he drew a portrait imagined things differently back then. The presentation of nomad Peter as one of those fantastic creatures shows, among other things, the photo of a group of who courageously ventured out into a new, somewhat people who no longer simply smile for the camera, but unsettling epoch: globalization. Today, less than fifteen also embrace each other for the picture, to which a years after the interview, we can see that things have computer voice articulates the slogan “you take the turned out rather differently. learning with you.” But is knowledge still power in any Globalization, as found back then in Peter Weibel’s sense? And do we still need to hunt information? suitcase, has not come about. In his day—traveling from If one follows the intelligent observations of the English one luxury hotel to another—he still had to generate art critic Claire Bishop,4 then information in contempo- globalization with his own body. Hunting down new art rary art no longer connotes power but “abundance.” forms around the globe, and presenting them at exhi­ It seems that in the beginning of the 1990s, during the bitions in locations such as Graz or Karlsruhe, he also early days of the Internet as a mass medium, there

1 Alexander Stenzel, “Die fantastischen 2 LuckyPDF, School of Global Art. 4 Claire Bishop, “Digital Divide,” Vier/Peter Weibel,” Die Zeit (December 2, Available at: http://vimeo.com/39347255 Artforum (September 2012): 434–41. 1999). Available at: http://www.zeit.de/ [last accessed February 20, 2013]. 1999/49/199949.entscheiden_noma.xml/ seite-2 [last accessed February 20, 2013]. 3 Ibid.

172 was a completely different understanding of informa- tion within art—an interesting shift or “tendency,”5 as Walter Benjamin would say. At the start of the twenty- first century, an information age, the emergence of this new tendency is, naturally, of burning interest. Also it gives rise to a practical side-effect: Benjamin once called it a “truism” that “political tendencies are implicit in every work of art”6 and become visible in the fissures of the works. At a time when we no longer appear to have any political tendencies, however, we feel the need Peter Fend / Ocean Earth Construction and Development to get to this truism. With the goal of tracking down Corporation today’s political tendencies, this text visits the deep Global-Feed Viewing Station Installation for the annual conference of the British Association for formation “tendency” in the artworks’ fissures. Thus, the Advancement of Science, Exeter, UK. Part of the Ocean Industry similar to Peter Weibel, it embarks on journeys to the services of Ocean Earth Development Corporation, NY/NZ. 2004 | Courtesy Peter Fend | © Ocean Earth / University artworks of the 1990s in order to hunt down the new of Plymouth, with data from GeoEye and NOAA (AVHRR), 2004 tendency based on the status of “information.” Thus, we Photo: John Melville examine curiously the following art projects, all built on information: Ocean Earth, largely directed by Peter Fend, the mailing list The Thing, and the approach of with the French marine architect Marc Lombard, Ingo Günther. models were invented for the cultivation and harvesting of algae. New perspectives developed for Haiti locat­- ed its new territory in its prospective fertile seas. The End of the Political Similar scenarios were sketched for the Gulf region in general and for southern Iraq and Shatt-Al-Arab in The Ocean Earth logo shows a picture of spiral-shaped particular. And at the request of Algeria, interventions waves spreading across the northern hemisphere. into a desolate terrain were proposed with the purpose They stop shortly before California. The company was to create a system of wild species, pushed by a sys­ founded in 1980 in New York as a society set up by and tematic satellite monitoring. for an artists’ collective—of which Jenny Holzer and One gesture united these nature projects scattered Richard Prince are the most well known. The corporate across the globe: free both scientific information and goal of the Ocean Earth Construction and Development technological means from the constraints of politics. Corporation is to provide “media services” and “archi- Thanks to a perspective renewed by a globally active tectural components,”7 inspired among other things art, it is possible to enact a re-creation of the earth. by role models such as Robert Smithson’s 460 meter- In this perspective, information acquires an interesting long “Earth-art” wall sculpture Spiral Jetty, and mani- double role. It becomes a service provided to the globe. festo-like considerations from the 1970s: “Agriculture With this, Ocean Earth assigns to its project informa- as practiced now will destroy us. Art as produced tion a central role taken from conceptual art. In fact, the now shows means to survival. We shall imitate the art project Ocean Earth displays a good number of the in order to evolve.”8 This radical future concept also characteristics which art historian Hal Foster identifies includes the imperative to terminate the regime of the as constitutive of an “anti-aesthetic.” These he sketches political, which requires to fundamentally change our as follows: “a critique of Western representation(s) […] perspective: in order to abandon the habit of dividing a skepticism regarding autonomous ‘spheres’ of culture the globe into continents and nations, common practice or separate ‘fields’ of experts […] a will to grasp the to this day, Ocean Earth flew out over the open sea. present nexus of culture and politics […] and to affirm Mapping the outlines of sovereign bodies of salt water a practice.”9 as if they were countries or continents, their forms Ocean Earth fulfills all of these requirements. It is no were justified with a scientific underpinning. Together wonder that the aroused art context enthusiastically

5 Walter Benjamin, “Reply to Oscar A. H. 7 Peter Weibel (ed.), Ocean Earth: 1980 9 Hal Foster (ed.), “Introduction,” in The Schmitz,” in Selected Writing, vol. 2, part bis heute, trans. Mercedes Bunz (Stuttgart: Anti-Aesthetic: Essays On Postmodern 1, 1927–1930, ed. Michael W. Jennings et Oktagon, 1994), 13. Produced for the Neue Culture (Port Townsend, WA.: Bay Press, al. (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Galerie at the Landesmuseum Joanneum 1983), xvi (ix–xviii). Press, 1999), 16. Graz and the K-raum Daxer.

6 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 16.

173 The Power of Information

embraced the project, elevating it to the status of public safety by showing the public what endangers it, the poster child of post-modern conceptual art, and be that pollution, soil exhaustion, mineral depletion, in 1994, the information hunter Peter Weibel issued climatic changes, or hostile military preparations. a catalog on this new avant-garde—which no longer Space Force exposes the dangers to public safety to wished to be regarded as such—but remained one public view, with state-of-art advances in video and film, nonetheless. At the beginning of the 1990s documenta in photography and television, most dramatically and (1992), but also galleries such as American Fine Arts most instantaneously on television.”10 in New York (1991), Le Case d’Arte in Mailand (1990), With the help of international art, information escapes and Tanja Grunert and Esther Schipper in Cologne the falsifying construct of the nation. Thanks to the (both 1990) or Anne de Villepoix in Paris (1993), had satellite images, art is in possession of a global vision, already presented Ocean Earth projects. In the and thus an “ultimate arm of political power” synony- presentations one is confronted with discrete modern mous with “the army, the navy and the air force”:11 shelves or a few monitors, while scrawled scientific Space Force. A weapon to promote peace instead sketches that point to the central role of information of war. Probably thanks to the cool-minimal installation are never far away. However, in the case of Ocean style coupled with scientific references, Ocean Earth Earth, we can observe something more: from the managed to avert the suspicion of crazy hippiedom for artistic idea that in one form or another wrestles with truth (affirming a truth of its own, negating an existing truth, or proceeding with an uneasy feeling in the stomach), finally emerges the idea of information as the ultimate truth. How this power could be used to affect social miracles is demonstrated in the project of Space Force.

Social Sculpture

In the 1980s, Ocean Earth together with other artists, succeeded in cheaply acquiring digital satellite data for geographic analyses and weather observation. Peter Fend Model Desert Mountain Meanders Apart from Peter Fend, Wolfgang Staehle presented 1994 | Ytong, pigments | 89 × 62.5 × 117 cm | Installation view | their pictures under the title Surveillance at the LACE Ökonomien der Zeit | Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, 2003 | Gallery in Los Angeles in 1986, and Ingo Günther Photo: FBM Studio, Zurich exhibited them at documenta 8 in 1987. The sifting of the satellite data and its processing into images re- quired considerable computing power. Besides art, Ocean Earth found in the news industry a secondary quite some time: messy politics and longwinded voting business. The media purchased their images interested procedures were replaced with clean technology, in what were then war zones, and announced the and the information, filtered by art, stood out, thanks spectacular discovery of five mobile rocket-launching to its astounding clarity. stations for SS-20 intercontinental missiles in the In the tidy 1990s the honey-smeared pathos of the Urals. This put the political establishment under pres- always-concerned Joseph Beuys was clearly too sure, but, according to Ocean Earth, it would not exist controversial to serve as an open point of reference. for much longer anyway. When satellite-assisted infor- Nevertheless, one can discover common features mation is freely and directly available to the citizens both in the works of Space Force and the “extended of the world (and not just to art), the people themselves concept of art” (Beuys). Duchamp had rejected decide on the reaction (and not national governments). “retinal art.” Extending this artistic approach to the Then a new power will unfold: “Space Force effects social, Beuys proposed creating social structures

10 Ibid., 218.

11 Ibid.

174 Mercedes Bunz

not through material, but by thought and speech. Now Hello, New Tendency technology enabled the re-creation of these social structures. Of the three artists and art projects examined here, the The mailbox discussion forum The Thing manifests this work of Ingo Günther manifests the new tendency of concept most clearly. Set up firstly in New York in 1991 today’s superpower economy, most clearly. For the by Wolfgang Staehle, servers in Cologne and Vienna media artist, who for a long time was Nam June Paik’s followed a year later, then further nodal points spread assistant, the better society could not be established across the Western world. Staehle transferred the with the assistance of information any longer, even when Beuysian idea of a social sculpture into the depths it continues to play a central role. Instead, art uses of electronic communication. Based initially on a bulletin information to make visible what already exists, and board system, the mailbox discussion forum switched therefore, is a medium that complements journalistic to the World Wide Web in 1995 for its presentation print and audiovisual media. Günther gives a clear at Ars Electronica—incidentally, the last to be curated statement of this position in his essay “Der Künstler als by Peter Weibel. However, the fundamental principle Informant” (The Artist as Informer).13 Since 1988, he of The Thing remained the same: one sent in contri­ had been informing the world via the project World butions, read those of others, and posted comments. Prozessor, for which he built hundreds of floor lamp- Within the space of a few years, it developed into an international communication network mainly run by Germans. Beginning with artistic issues, it extended to discuss social themes. The tone was serious. Discussions conducted at high level. Meaning was created. By using The Thing, artists didn’t just create an institution for art, the project even assembled the genuine avant- garde of a technology that would soon change the whole world. From time to time, so-called Flame-Wars in the mailing lists consumed energy. Then the under- belly of an organization which possessed little struc- ture, swelled out of the downloaded messages. Follow- Ingo Günther ing an initial pioneer phase, it suffered the same fate Refugee Republic—Wien (Netbase) as Facebook and the Arab Spring—dissipation. From 1996 | Installation view | Courtesy Ingo Günther time to time, the orphaned mailing list received a new lease of life, only to suffer abandonment again. “Are we still connected?? Please reply.” Jörg Sasse pleaded on 1/6/1994. Wolfgang Staehle answered: “We are still like luminous globes that would count today as data connected, however all theory activity has shifted to journalism: they visualize energy consumption, prison Symposia. You know these dynamics […] people just population, corporate income compared to national flock to where the action is.”12 income, military spending, time zones, population den- Over the course of the years, The Thing reinvented sity, or the distribution of wealth. Different from Fend, itself. In 1998, Staehle registered it as a nonprofit for whom art creates an international world with organization, which, in addition to media art, offered the assistance of science, Günther discovers in these a platform for online activism. The idea of realizing right globes the post-national society as a readymade—an now an alternative society by using technology was approach also recognizable in his project Refugee swapped with a classic counterpublic. The magic of Republic (1992). In the 1980s, Günther had received information, which carried the power of a new, more accreditation as a United Nations correspondent and just society within it, had subsided. The new tendency visited a refugee camp in Thailand. In the 1990s, he had appeared on the screen. worked with this experience but redefined the role of refugee from that of displaced victim to a promising

12 Cf. Conversation on The Thing. Availa- 13 Ingo Günther, “Der Künstler als In- ble at: http://old.thing.net/html/intershop. formant,” in Interface 1 – Elektronische html [last accessed February 20, 2013]. Medien und künstlerische Kreativität, ed. Klaus Peter Denker (Hamburg: Hans- Bredow-Institut, 1992), 85.

175 The Power of Information

ment, really have lost its effectiveness or have we fallen prey to a market-driven logic when we assume that more knowledge that is available leads to its devalu­ ation? Is it not the case that art’s fissure is less an indi- cation of the failure of the once powerful weapon, “information,” than of our crisis of hope for a better society? A society which not only holds up in admonition the divide between rich and poor, but also mitigates it; where the goal is to reduce citizens’ fear, that one day they may lose their jobs, to the minimum and Ingo Günther not to the max; where social interactions are of value Refugee Republic—Berlin, Reuterplatz 1994 | Installation view | Courtesy Ingo Günther even when they can’t be reduced to “payment for services.” If that is the case, then we shouldn’t condemn the new, omnipresent information. Instead of being bitterly future avant-garde. In an interview explaining the pro- disappointed we should use it to tackle social concerns. ject’s title “Refugee = Capital” he explained to a Societies are still organizational structures. The world shocked journalist:14 “The distinctions between jet set, has never been easier to organize than with digital international commercial travelers, economic refugees information. And in art, these deep tendencies of our and migrants, cultural refugees etc. are blurred. new epoch have manifest themselves: in world politics A temporary melting pot occurs in the airplane where today economy is the superpower, which is one more the Refugee Republic is realized according to the rules reason why the new organizational potential should of the airline com­panies.”15 not be economy driven alone. We need to occupy this In 1997, Günther received the Siemens Media Art Prize potential as quickly as possible, and this will not be easy. for these “striking views”; incidentally, Peter Weibel LuckyPDF clearly demonstrates today’s difficult ten- stood on the podium with him as joint winner. If father dency: like cars wedged together following a mass figures such as “inventor” or “genius” still played a role collision and strewn across the highway, the derailed today, then history would award Ingo Günther with promises of the postmodern avant-garde shunt a central place. However, thanks to the new tendency through the animated PowerPoint presentation, School “economy” this is no longer the case. Originals, once of Global Art. All this we need to overcome. Once addressed as the first of their kind, are now simply upon a time, groups of avant-garde artists directed legally protected brands. While data journalism and our societies forward, hereby often forming tight, cozy infographics are commonly used within journalism, friendships and communities to withstand enemy immigration policy openly aims to attract well-healed contact of a conservative society that didn’t want to foreigners to one’s own country as well as preferring change. Now we all find ourselves connected in friendly to let refugees rot at home. Still, Ingo Günther, networks to motivate each other in our ambitions, in one of the first to flag up all of this, is only a dazzling order to reach the next level. Today, LuckyPDF may figure. A figure who once held in his hands all the not share a prize but they do occupy a common virtual threads that then converged in a completely different podium with uncle Weibel: Facebook. Here one can manner—of course, the Refugee Republic never read that Peter Weibel now lives in Karlsruhe. Wel- came about. come to the new epoch. Information has become omnipotent and has lost its magic in the process. We now encounter it every­- where, but it does not promise a better society. Noth- Translated from the German by Colin Shepherd ing provides a more concrete demonstration of the new powerlessness of information than to fear its overload. Or are we merely supposed to believe this? Is this not precisely the political tendency of our time? Can education, this double-edged sword of enlighten-

14 Ingo Günther, “Flüchtling=Kapital,” in 15 Miriam Lang, “Rolls Royce ohne Räder. Kunst im Weltmaßstab, ed. Hans-Werner Ingo Günthers Refugee Republic,” Telepolis Schmidt (Kiel: Kunsthalle Kiel, 1993), 44. (June 1996). Available at: http://www. heise.de/tp/artikel/1/1040/1.html [last accessed February 20, 2013].

176 Self Incorporated

1 2 3 4

Self Incorporated

Many of the diverse aims and obses­ sions of the counterculture were embraced by mainstream society. However, this acceptance was rarely a pure success in the sense of an assertion of the original goals. More than the directly political de­- mands, it was usually the commer­ cial and cultural manifestations 5 of these ideals that took hold, often separately from the original con­ tent. The emergence of the porno­ graphy industry as a reaction to the call for sexual liberation is an extreme example of the cultural- economic­ distortion of an emancipa­ tory political cause. In a much broader sense, this also holds for the category of the self, which—in terms such as “self-actu­ alization,” “the true self,” or “self- discovery”—stood at the center of many countercultures, especially their non-political, more esoteric factions. Today, the self has cur­ rency in mainstream society as an immaterial resource. Innumerable courses, therapies, and self-help books offer the full range of the personality’s constituent parts as cheap modules for purchase and assembly. The actualized, emanci­ pated, admired, narcissistically 1 Booth’s Advertising | 1965 | in Thomas Frank, The Conquest 2 Abraham Maslow | Motivation and Personality | Cover | spiced-up self has become, above of Cool (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) New York: Harper, 1970 (1954) all, an ingredient in many of the 3 Nathaniel Branden | The Psychology of Self-Esteem | intangible products and production Cover | los Angeles: Nash, 1969 forms that have come to play such advance compared to Fordist indus­- 4 Arnold Mitchell | The Nine American Lifestyles: Who We Are an important role in the postindus­ trial labor. The dependently em­ and Where We’re Going | Cover | New York: Scribner, 1983 trial economy. The feeling of ployed have struggled for this 5 Rik Walton | David Bowie in the Newcastle City Hall, UK | committing oneself to the task at advance—including in the manifes­ June 2, 1972 | © Rik Walton / ArenaPAL hand not only ensures one’s strong tations of the counter­culture— identification with the job, it also even if they haven’t succeeded in Nathaniel Branden helped kick off the David Bowie has thought up an array of guarantees a certain voluntary achieving it for themselves. self-esteem movement with The Psychol- new humans in his career, and has let them spirit. Jefferson Airplane’s “volun­ ogy of Self-Esteem. Branden argues that fail tragically or politically—or elevated teers of America” go about their self-esteem is a human psychological them as heroes. Most of his fictitious new postindustrial cultural work with VALS = Values and Lifestyles Program: need and that to the extent this need people display aspects of the counter­ a great sense of purpose and for beginning in 1978, the Stanford Research remains unmet, pathology (de­fensiveness, culture’s queer gender politics. “All You little money. In an increasing number Institute carried out an extensive study on anxiety, depression, difficulty in relation­ Pretty Things,” from his masterpiece of production sectors, from galler­ life­styles and conceptions of the self that ships, etc.) tends to result. He defines Hunky Dory (1971), is an anthem to those of ies to the gastronomic trade and had emerged from the countercul­- self-­esteem formally as “the disposition unclear gender that culminates in the from tourism to taxi-driving, good ture. Was it possible to classify the self- to experience oneself as competent to call—somewhat disquieting in its biologi­- looks, tasteful clothes, a certain actualizing individuals who didn’t want cope with the basic challenges of life and cal terminology—to “make way for the charisma, and other personal char­- to sub­ordinate themselves to any conven­ as worthy of happiness,” and proposes homo superior.” acteristics are seen as more impor­ tion? The program’s large-scale surveys that, while others (parents, teachers, — tant attributes of the workforce yielded a taxonomy of nine lifestyle catego­ friends) can nurture and support self- than are the learned skills acquired ries, each of which constituted a target esteem in an individual, self-esteem also 6 Erhard Seminars Training (est), a form in educational institutions. Therapy group for products and advertising relies upon various internally gener- of group therapy that built on and radical­ and psychological self-observation campaigns. In a trade journal, the VALS ated practices. ized the methods of the Human Potential are no longer solely the voluntary program was celebrated as a significant — Movement, achieved extreme popularity pursuits of countercultural individu­ breakthrough in the market research in the 1970s. Drawing from Alan Watts’ als seeking well-being, but are now of the 1980s. 5 David Bowie: “All You Pretty Things”: understanding of Zen, est founder Werner necessary for professional survival. — in many self-descriptions of the counter­ Erhard propagated the notion that the There are two interpretations of culture in statements and songs, its self is an intrinsically insubstantial, empty this oft-described development. 23 Psychologist Abraham Maslow’s adherents appear as higher beings, as a function and can therefore be freely trans­- One is pessimistic, as represented theory of self-­actualization according to a new type of human being, almost as a formed. est training promised participants by Thomas Frank (The Conquest hierarchy of needs, originally published race rather than just a movement. In Joni that the program would enable them to of Cool); it is a view of the counter­ in Motivation and Personality, formed an Mitchell’s anthem “Woodstock,” for free themselves of their past and, using culture as merely a department of essential foundation for both the philoso­ example, the hippies are “children of God” the “technology of trans­formation,” take capitalistic development that paved phy of the Esalen Institute and the analy­ses on their way to a new Eden. In Goodbye complete individual responsibility for the way for cultural and nonmaterial of the VALS program. Maslow co-­founded, and Hello (1967), Tim Buckley also raves themselves and their lives. Werner Erhard production, helping to break up with Rollo May and Carl Rogers, a human­ about a new mankind. Jefferson Airplane also founded the controversial Hunger and devalue the institutions of the istic and “transpersonal” psychology and, is slightly more ambivalent when it calls Project in 1977, an aid organization with old labor movement. The other is building on this, a self-help and therapy the hippies and others like them the “crown a special focus on Africa that set itself less pessimistic, as exemplified in culture that achieved great popularity, not of creation,” but the notion that liberation, the goal of ending world hunger by 1997. the environment of the Italian post- least by invoking spiritual and cosmo­- if it doesn’t succeed entirely, should keep — Operaismo, not least by Antonio logical dimensions. a plan B open, an escape route for the good Negri. This position holds that while — guys, was widespread. And, of course, 7 That liberation was often paid for with the less hierarchical, nonmaterial fantasies of “exodus” (Paolo Virno, Bob new imperatives was the experience of, labor con­ditions of post-Fordism 3 An apostle and lover of Ayn Rand, the Marley) and “exile” (the Rolling Stones) are in particular, the feminist struggle to break represent a new stage of capitalist proponent of an extreme form of capital­ completely understandable, although they down barriers to self-realization. As early value creation, they also constitute an ism without state or social obligations, rarely avoid becoming elitist and exclusive. as the late 1970s, the feminist media artist

177 Visual Essay

6 8 9 :

7

; < =

6 Adam Curtis | The Century of the Self | 2002 | Film still | Courtesy Adam Curtis & BBC

7 Dara Birnbaum | Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman | 1978–79 | 5:50 min, color, sound | Film still | Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York

Dara Birnbaum, examining common stereotypes of the mass culture, recog­ nized in magical media-world über-women like the comic figure Wonder Woman not only clichés of subjugation, but also signs of excessive demand and bio-exploitation. These themes have only been discussed more widely as a result of the publication of Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello’s study The New Spirit of Capitalism in 1999. — > ? @

8 – B Therapy and Self-Value turn into the Discourse of Power

8 Muriel James, Dorothy Jongeward | Born to Win: A B Transactional Analysis With Gestalt Experiments | Cover | Boston: Addison-Wesley, 1971

9 Rollo May | Power and Innocence: A Search for the Sources of Violence | Cover | New York: Dell Publishing, 1981 (1972)

: Robert J. Ringer | Winning Through Intimidation | Cover | Los Angeles: Fawcett Crest Book, 1973

; Robert A. Caro | The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York | Cover | New York: Knopf, 1974

< Arnold Hutschnecker | The Drive for Power | Cover | new York: Evans & Company, 1974

= Carlos Castaneda | Tales of Power | Cover | New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974

> David McClelland | Power: The Inner Experience | Cover | new York: John Wiley & Sons, 1975

? Michael Korda | Power ! How to Get It, How to Use It | cover | new York: Random House, 1975

@ Morton Mintz, Jerry S. Cohen | Power, Inc.: Public and Private Rulers and How to Make Them Accountable | Cover | New York: Viking Penguin, 1976 A Carl Rogers | On Personal Power: Inner Strength and its Revolutionary Impact | Cover | New York: Delacorte Press, 1977

B Jack Newfield, Paul DuBrul | The Abuse of Power: The Permanent Governemnt and the Fall of New York | Cover | new York: Viking Adult, 1977 178 Networks and the LonG Boom

1 2 4

3

1 “Illustration einer Gesellschaft, die sich nach der Installation in the digital era as software. In 1983, entsprechender Kommunikationskanäle selbstständig in die encouraged by the literary agent John „Ziel­figur“ optimiert” | 1971 | in Claus Pias (Ed.), Cybernetics – Kybernetik. Band 2 (Zürich: diaphanes, 2004), 31. | courtesy Brockman (The Edge Foundation), Claus Pias Stewart Brand began to adapt the struc­ 2 “Advertisement for computer dating with cupid holding a punch tures of the Whole Earth Catalog to card” | in Daily Californian, Berkeley, Vol. 14, October 18, 1966 | the digital revolution. But the catalog itself Call Number CU-149 | courtesy The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley wasn’t a success. Computer programs developed too quickly, and networks and 3 Stanford Research Institute, Douglas C. Engelbart | Original announcement of the 1968 Demo | 1968 online content would soon take over the Networks and the Long Boom After the fall of the Iron Curtain, it functions of the Whole Earth Catalog. 4 Stewart Brand | “Space War: Fanatic Life and Symbolic appeared to many people that Death Among the Computer Bums” | in Rolling Stone Magazine, — Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth the vision of “one Earth” was within No. 123, December 7, 1972 | © Rolling Stone LLC 1972. Catalog played an important role in reach. The new universal discourse All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. 8 In the 1970s, an amateur computer permanently transforming the image on globalization, networks, ex­ scene that developed in the Bay Area gave of the computer. While the student change, mobility, and communica­ ize learning processes and the workplace. rise to desktop microcomputers and firms Free Speech Movement had seen tion seemed to be washing away the Cybernetic thinking made the ARC an such as Apple and Microsoft. At the end IBM computers as an embodiment demarcations. Especially in the ally of, on the one hand, military research of the decade, microcomputers became a of the big anonymous machine and New Economy, new self-regulating and industry, which financed the ARC’s mass product for both offices and private the “technocracy,” this image under- and proto-democratic social col­ work, and on the other, the Whole Earth households. When Apple released the went a fundamental change begin­ laborations seemed to be replacing counterculture, which propa­gated the idea first spreadsheet program VisiCalc in ning in the late 1960s with the help of hier­archies and ideologies. Where of a future community based on the cyber­ 1979, it laid the cornerstone for the small the Whole Earth Catalog, due problems in this global, socio-­tech­ netic principles of self-organization and company’s future global success. VisiCalc, largely to the fact that computers nological ecosystem arose, these information. Stewart Brand helped Engel­ which initially ran only on the Apple II, were becoming smaller and thus were ascribed to residual obstacles bart in the organization and development immediately became an indispensable more accessible. For Stewart Brand, and rigid structures that stood in of the event, known retrospectively as instrument for the financial sector. By the “personal computer” increas­ the way of the flow of information, “The Mother of All Demos.” Brand also allowing the manipulation of parameters in ingly assumed the role of the proto­ people, capital, and goods. documented the event on film. tabular form, a tedious task by analog typical tool—empowering individu­ — means, VisiCalc made it possible to carry als, opening up new possibilities out financial calculations in very little time. of collaboration between them, and 4 In 1972, Stewart Brand wrote an But the huge success of VisiCalc also lay giving them the freedom to express 3 Douglas Engelbart: The Mother of all influential article for Rolling Stone maga­ in the graphic appearance of the program. themselves and realize their full Demos: an important part of the develop­ zine, titled “Fanatic Life and Symbolic The display had become an interactive potential. To Brand, the develop­ ment of the computer as the personalized Death Among the Computer Bums,” about chart that could be grasped intuitively. In ment and interconnection enabled technology we are familiar with today the computer scene, with a parti­cular an attempt to characterize this effect, one by computers constituted a further took place at the Augmentation Research focus on the San Francisco Bay Area. The magazine said: “Though hard to describe “outlaw zone,” a field of experimenta- Center (ARC) at the Stanford Research accompanying photos were shot by Annie in words, VisiCalc comes alive visually.” tion for technocultural evolution. Institute (SRI). The ARC was directed Leibovitz. Brand profiled the work—and — He even suggested that the com­ by Douglas Engelbart, whose life’s work the games, such as SPACEWAR—of puter was “the new LSD.” was devoted to the integration of humans the developers at Xerox PARC, the Stan­ 1984 Hackers Conference The Whole Earth Catalog became a and computers. His team at the ARC ford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, platform that mediated between the developed a forerunner to the Internet, and MIT, among other institutions. Here, 9: In 1984, Apple introduced the counterculture and the computer the so-called “oN-Line System” or NLS, Brand describes the computer develop­- Macintosh com­puter. The advertising engineers of industry and research as well as a range of elements which have ers as visionaries, coins the term “per­ campaign presented the technology as institutes. When internal power become standard computer equipment, sonal computer,” and lends the scene and liberating: thanks to the Mac­intosh, struggles pre­vented the commune such as the computer mouse. its protagonists both glamor and coun­ 1984 wouldn’t become 1984. The same movement, for which the Whole In December 1968, just days before tercultural credibility. In keeping with year, Stewart Brand began to openly Earth Catalog was originally pub­ the launch of the Apollo 8 mission, Douglas the vision of the Whole Earth Catalog, he address the computer culture as the heir lished, from realizing its vision of Engelbart and his team demonstrated casts the world as an infor­mation system to the counter­culture, and as the avant- a self-regulating, harmonious NLS to an audience of hundreds of com­ and argues for taking cutting-edge tech­ garde of civi­lizing technological evolution. community, the networked computer puter developers and engineers at nologies out of the hands of large hierar­ He and his team—which included Kevin increasingly presented itself as a the Joint Computer Conference in San chical organizations and placing them Kelly, later the pub­lisher of Wired, the cybernetic information tech­nology Francisco. The event was the first in those of individuals. world’s most influen­tial magazine for that could provide the infrastruc­ live demonstration of the computer as a — digital culture and the New Economy— ture for the realization of this vision communication medium of the future, organized the first “Hackers Conference.” of a non-hierarchical community, capable of transmitting images and text 7 The Whole Earth Software Catalog: Inspired by the 1984 book Hackers: and even a new civilization, popu­ over great distances. The mere compu­ what the Whole Earth Catalog was to the Heroes of the Computer Revolution­ by lated by freely self-realizing individ­ tational performance of computers counterculture,­ the Whole Earth Software Steven Levy, who was a member of Brand’s uals inte­grated in an “environment” no longer stood in the foreground, but Catalog was supposed to become for Whole Earth team, more than 100 self- of collective information. rather their potential to join individuals the computer culture: a medium that gave described “hackers” registered for and collectives in networks, to revolution­ users access to the “useful tools” known the three-day event. Among them were

179 Visual Essay

5

180 Networks and the LonG Boom

6

181 Visual Essay

7 8 :

9

“I felt the energies on the WELL. It reminded me of the Open Land com- munes I’d been to in the 1960s. The tribal need is one our culture doesn’t recognize; capitalism wants each of us to live in our own little cubicle, con- suming as much as possible. The WELL took that need and said, ‘Hey, let’s see what happens if we become a disembodied tribe.’” Ramón Sender Barayón quoted in Katie Hafner, “The Epic Saga of the WELL,” in Wired, issue 5.05 (May 1997), 109. 8 A screenshot of VisiCalc running on an Apple II computer | Courtesy Steven Weyhrich, apple2history.org

9 Fabrice Florin | Hackers: Wizards of the Electronic Age | 1984 | Film still | © Fabrice Florin toward being independent biological sys­- : Steven Levy | Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution | tems, it is important not to exercise com­ New York: Anchor Books / Doubleday & Co., 1985 (1984) plete control over these networks, but rather to under­stand ourselves as a part of them, as the product of a “co-evolution” in which we are produced by technology just “The discussion and dialog contained as it is produced by us. By implication, and archived on the WELL are its Kelly saw biological life as the most highly primary products. The WELL ‘sells developed technology; life would soon be its users to each other’ and it consid- designed on the computer and the future ers its users to be both its consumers negotiated at the interface of informatics and its primary producers.” and biology. Kelly calls on us to see our­ 5 Cliff Figallo, one of the WELL’s early hosts, in “The WELL: Stewart Brand (Ed.) | Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog: Small Town on the Internet Highway,” 1993, http://www. selves as a node within a universal “vivi­ The Outlaw Area | January 1970 | Courtesy Stewart Brand “Access to computers—and anything colorado.edu/geography/gcraft/notes/ethics/html/ system” and to behave “ecologically” within small.town.html [last accessed May 1, 2013]. 6 Stewart Brand (Ed.) | Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools which might teach you something this, that is, to adapt to the life of the sys­- Spring 1969 | courtesy Stewart Brand about the way the world works— tem. Promoting the biologizing of vivi­ 7 Stewart Brand (Ed.) | The Whole Earth Software Catalog should be unlimited and total. Always systems and “ani­mating” these becomes Spring 1984 | courtesy Stewart Brand yield to the Hands-On Imperative! […] “virtual community.” That which had failed an imperative. All information should be free. […] to materialize in the communes—egali­ — Mistrust Authority—Promote tarian, harmonious, and self-regulating “I think hackers […] are the most Decentralization. […] communities built on cybernetic princi­ > In his book Bionomics: The Inevitability interesting and effective body of intel- Hackers should be judged by their ples—had, in the view of the hackers, of Capitalism from 1990, considered a lectuals since the framers of the U.S. hacking, not bogus criteria such as become reality in bodiless “cyberspace.” kind of bible of Silicon Valley, the economist Constitution. No other group that I degrees, age, race, or position. […] The WELL was conceived as a utopian Michael Rothschild translates the cyber­ know of has set out to liberate a tech- You can create art and beauty on community, as a self-organizing bio­ netically informed and bio­logistic under­ nology and succeeded. They not only a computer. […] technological system whose human users standing of ecosystems to economics. did so against the active disinterest of Computers can change your life for would develop along with the machine Just as life is controlled by the information corporate America, their success the better.” and its capabilities. system of DNA, the economy is a quasi- forced corporate America to adopt Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution Many of the more prominent members of biological, natural, and evolutionary pro­ their style in the end. In reorganizing (New York: Nerraw Manijaime / Doubleday, 1984), The WELL contributed to magazines such cess controlled by technological infor­ 28–33. the Information Age around the in as Wired in the 1990s. It is to be attrib­- mation and the know-how of people. The dividual, via personal computers, the uted in particular to the activity of the metaphors generated from the paral­ hackers may well have saved the The WELL: In 1985, the Whole Earth journalists and WELL members Howard lelization of economics, cybernetics, and American economy. […] High tech is Catalog became the model for one of the Rheingold and John Perry Barlow that ecology were among the most plausible now something that mass consumers most influential computer networks in “virtual community” and “electronic and effective tools in the realization of do, rather than just have done to history: the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link frontier” became the basic, defining neoliberal concepts—seen as having no them. […] The quietest of the ’60s (The WELL), which was only recently concepts for the perception of the early alternative—and the corresponding sub-subcultures has emerged as the sold. The network was founded by Stewart Internet. “structural adaptations.” most innovative and most powerful— Brand and the computer entrepreneur — — and most suspicious of power.” Larry Brilliant. Its success was based on Stewart Brand, “Keep Designing: How the Information the fact that it offered the network estab­ ;<= In his book Out of Control: The New ? In 1996, John Perry Barlow, former Economy is Being Created and Shaped by the Hacker lished by the Hackers Conference an Biology of Machines, Kevin Kelly, executive Grateful Dead lyricist (“Estimated Ethic” (an edited transcript of the “Hackers” conferences, organized by Brand, Levy, and others in 1984), in Whole enduring infrastructure and platform. editor of Wired magazine and formerly Prophet”) and co-founder of the influential Earth Review 46 (May 1985), 44. Technologically, The WELL didn’t differ a member of Stewart Brand’s team, pro- Electronic Frontier Foundation for civil from other contemporary networks of gresses a step further in mod­eling human liberties on the Internet, published its kind: it was a tele­conferencing system society and capitalistic economics eco­ “A Declaration of the Independence of employees of Apple, amateur program­ whose members could dial up a central systems and networks from biology. Cyberspace.” It was posted online on mers, and representatives of MIT. At the computer and send messages asynchro­ For Kelly, computer networks had become February 8, 1996, as a direct response to core of the conference was the discussion nously or in real time. What set The WELL more than just machines; they had taken the Telecommunications Act signed by of the hacker values formulated by Steven apart from similar projects was its low on the character of organic systems and President Bill Clinton the same day. It Levy, which connected the different prices, its members, and above all, its their further devel­opment in this direction shows what, by 1996, had become of the generations of computer freaks. topics and “values”; here, the avant-garde seemed inevitable to him. According to “outlaw areas” that Stewart Brand and — of the “electronic frontier” gathered in a Kelly, in order to promote their evolution R. Buckminster Fuller had imagined forty

182 Networks and the LonG Boom

; <

“What should we call that common soul between the organic communi- = A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html? ties we know of as organisms and A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

by John Perry Barlow ecologies, and their manufactured

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the counterparts of robots, corpora- future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself tions, economies, and computer always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear. circuits? I call those examples, both Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though made and born, ‘vivisystems’ for it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our cul- the lifelikeness each kind of system ture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions. holds.” You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different. Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization (London: Addison Wesley, 1994), 1. Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here. Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-in- “Like a deep-sea volcano bursting to terest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose. the surface, spewing out vast new

In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us. lands soon to be inhabited by a com-

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you plex ecosystem, the Web is creating entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate > the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat. a virtual landscape that will soon be In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard occupied by an awesome array of posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media. economic organisms. […] It’s evolu- Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost.The global conveyance of thought no tion at warp speed. Strap yourself longer requires your factories to accomplish. in.” These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts. Michael Rothschild, in an address at the 5th Annual Bionomics Conference “Now What? Living With We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before. Perpetual Evolution,” organized by the Cato Institute Davos, Switzerland and the Bionomics Institute (November 1997).

February 8, 1996

1 von 1 14.05.13 16:58

“Capitalism [is] the inevitable, natural state of human economic affairs. Being for or against a ;< Wired Magazine: The Long Boom: A History of the Future, natural phenomenon is a waste of 1980–2020 | Issue 5.07, July 1997 | © Condé Nast time and mental energy.” = Kevin Kelly | Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines | Michael Rothschild, Bionomics: Economy as Business Cover | london: Fourth Estate, 1995 (1994) Ecosystem (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1990), xv.

> Michael L. Rothschild | Bionomics: The Inevitability of Capitalism | cover | new York: Henry Holt and Company, 1990

? John Perry Barlow | “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” | davos, Switzerland, 1996 | © John Perry Barlow https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html “The apparent veil between the [last accessed May 1, 2013] organic and the manufactured has crumpled to reveal that the two really are, and have always been, years prior: zones without government or of one being.” power hierarchies of any kind, whose Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological social organization would instead be built Civilization (London: Addison Wesley, 1994), 3. on the “shared inner grammar” of the energy and information flows created by nature, machines, and humans. —

183 Andy Warhol Outer and Inner Space 1965 | 33 min in double screen, b&w, sound | 16 mm film © 2013 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute All rights reserved. | Image Courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum

184 Silvia Kolbowski Excerpted from Here and There, exhibited at Nature Morte Gallery, New York, December 1986 In FILE No. 28, 1987 | Courtesy the artist

185 Nabil Ahmed Radical Meteorology 2013 | 4:12 min, 3:46 min, 5:43 min, 3 channel installation, color, sound | Video | Film stills

186 THE EARTH IS NOT WHOLE

1 2 The Earth is Not Whole

Although the image of the whole Earth was, of course, never taken seriously as a concept, it was none­ theless an image that gave rise to all kinds of ideas, utopian concepts, 3 and thought possibilities. In inform­ ing us that we are all living on one planet, it did not contain anything new. But it wasn’t obvious from the outset that an idea invoking the common interest of all people with­ out at the same time recognizing the political causes of their differ­ ence and separateness had to re­ main mere ideology. The temptation posed by an impressive picture that transcended borders should not be underrated. In the culture of the 4 late 1960s, it became apparent that it was no longer a revolt informed by a universal historical position that could cope with the contemporary situation, but rather one that in­ 1 Peter Davis | Stokely Carmichael at the Dialectics of Liberation, 4 The Californian promises of harmony volved a “patchwork of minorities,” London, 1967 | 1967 | Courtesy Peter Davis (www.villonfilms.ca) and unity have culminated in a culture like as Jean François Lyotard called it. the one portrayed in the comedy series The way these minorities—minority One of the most effective appearances was Curb Your Enthusiasm. The New York pro­ positions of all kinds, in the sense by the radical African-American ac­tivist ducer and author Larry David plays himself used by Gilles Deleuze, i.e. not just Stokely Carmichael, who strongly called as he comes to grief in the face of Califor­ minorities in terms of numbers— into question the idea of the common nian etiquette, in which sensitivities and were later mostly to represent only struggle and a common movement— taboos lurk at every turn, though they are particularistic interests contributed so long as it was put forward by children always disguised as cosmopolitan, enlight­ to the de-politicization of the coun­ of the white middle class. ened outlooks on life. Complicated rules 5 terculture as much as the fact that — of protocol, often deriving from goals as­ the only standardizing forces were sociated with the counterculture and those of the market and of techno­ 2 The “Biosphere 2” is a complex of emancipatory movements, can no longer logical development. The dialectic buildings in Oracle, Arizona, that was built be mastered by any intuition: Larry David argument of the minority revolt— at the end of the 1980s with the aim of has nothing more to hold onto than his the idea that the legitimacy of the creating a self-sustaining ecosystem inde­ own particular, unbearable position, falling uni­versal demand can be tested only pendent of the outside world. The experi­ back completely on the unreflected and through the fate of the minority— ment was meant to prove that life in the opinionated attitudes of an aging, white frequently fell into disregard, and long term in an independent, closed eco­ heterosexual. In this series, there is no seems to have reemerged only in the logical system is possible. From Septem­ other means of communication—either last few years of re-politicization ber 26, 1991, eight people lived for exactly between the different factions of the after the bank crisis: now, however, two years in the “Biosphere,” completely culture-­producing middle class or during no longer with emphasis on the isolated; the experiment was discontinued their encounters with the people working picture of a unified Earth. after a second try in 1994. on its margins in the service sector— The attempt to construct a balanced and than the grumpy defense of rights and self-regulating ecosystem that is also privileges that have always been felt to inhabitable for humans proved to be ex­ be under threat. The whole Earth has 6 tremely difficult. Not only were there major turned into a malicious, hopelessly divided fluctuations in the atmosphere and the middle class that is doomed to perish. “The whole is the untrue.” animal populations, but social relations — Theodor W. Adorno, California, 1941–1949 among the inhabitants also turned out to be problematic under these conditions. Nabil Ahmed (opposite page) made refer­ Today the “Biosphere” is a research insti­ ence in his work to particular sights of 1 From 15 to 30 July 1967, the “Dialectics tution of the University of Arizona. interest (typhoon over Bangladesh) in the of Liberation Conference” took place — 1972 “Blue Marble”-image of the whole in London, organized by the American Joe planet. Two years earlier, at the same geo­ Berke, an educational scientist and psy­ 3 Citizen Tania is the second of the video graphical spot, the devastating typhoon chotherapist who was also interested in movies that make up Raymond Pettibon’s Bhoha killed hundreds of thousands and the healing properties of cannabis and in series on counterculture. Citizen Tania led to political upheaval resulting in the in­ family therapy. He invited representatives recreates the story of Patty Hearst, the dependence of Bangladesh from Pakistan. from different factions of the counter­ heiress of a media empire, who became In response to typhoon Bhoha, ex-Beatle culture and the liberation movement, who famous for being abducted in 1974 by George Harrison organized what would probably did not encounter each other a pseudo-leftist radical sect called the become the first in a series of benefit spec­ 2 Biosphere 2 near Tucson, Arizona | 1998 | © Wikimedia very often in the United States. One “Symbionese Liberation Army” and short­ tacles through which rock stars articu­ Commons / Public Domain speaker was Herbert Marcuse, a leftist ly thereafter raiding banks as one of lated their sense of responsibility for the 3 Raymond Pettibon | Citizen Tania | 1989 | intellectual who upheld the continuity of its members. Hearst’s case has come to Earth as a whole. The post-situationist 87 min, color, sound | Courtesy the artist, Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin critical theory and counterculture from be seen as typical of the Stockholm group Culturcide expressed a contrary 4 Larry David, Robert B. Weide | Curb Your Enthusiasm: California against Jürgen Habermas and Syndrome—the identification of victims view in a parody: “They’re not the world / The Group | Season 1, Episode 10 | 2000 | © HBO even against his former colleagues Adorno with their abusers in situations of acute They’re not the children / They’re just 5 “Theodor W. Adorno with Lily Latté and Fritz Lang” | and Horkheimer, who had returned to danger, or in situations in which the enemy bosses and bureaucrats and rock’n’roll In Adorno. Eine Bildmonographie | Frankfurt am Main: Frankfurt from California. But there were seems superior both strategically and has-beens.” Suhrkamp, 2003 | Theodor W. Adorno-Archiv / Suhrkamp Verlag also appearances by proponents of an symboli­cally—which here, with some met­ — 6 Culturcide | Tacky Souvenirs of Pre-Revolutionary America | activism colored by oriental spiritualism, aphorical intensification, is applied to the 1986 | Cover | © 1986 Culturcide anarchism, and drug experimentalism, entire counterculture. Pettibon’s crude, such as the poet Allen Ginsberg. Ronald D. fictionalized version of Hearst’s story is a Laing presented positions from the early study of “revolutionary” politics, alienation, days of anti-psychiatry and the great and the fate of negation in counterculture. questioning of normality and normativity. —

187 The Otolith Group Otolith I 2003 | 23 min, color, sound | Video | Film stills Courtesy The Otolith Group and LUX, London

188 DIEDRICH DIEDERICHSEN

Tony Martin | Multiple Light Projection for Silver Apples of the Moon by Morton Subotnick | 1967 | © Tony Martin

Musical Stations of the Counterculture to the Beatles, especially to the band 2. California, Communes, and Sects —A Playlist with Comments member responsible for spiritual matters, George Harrison (“The Inner Light,” The British progressive rock band Van 1. Planetary Consciousness, Utopia, and 1968, “Within You, Without You,” 1967). der Graaf Generator described the late Counterculture However, the exploration of outer worlds hippies and other counterculture adher­ was also addressed. The early, pre-­ ents as diasporic, vagabond refugees and Emerging in the 1950s, at approximately kitschy Pink Floyd (under the direction displaced persons who orientated them­ the same time as space flight and as an of Syd Barrett) discovered a world selves to every point of the compass, only image-supported format linked to youth dominated by space science (“Astronomy to end up in the West. Accordingly, they and subcultures, early pop music was Dominé,” 1967) and traveled into outer saw California as the concrete Utopia closely connected to the perspective from space beyond our planetary system with (“Refugees,” 1970), a view others had al­ space. It quickly became global and gener­ their fantastical instrumental “Interstellar ready emphatically evoked: these listening ated a cultural synchronization that the Overdrive” (1967). From out there, a to “San Franciscan Nights” (1967) from satellites, shot into orbit by Soviet and voyeur equipped with suitable optical tech­ Eric Burdon & The Animals were instruct­ American rockets, would only realize tech­ nology might also see what Sky Saxon ed to travel to San Francisco “if not for nically at a later date. In the 1960s various from the Seeds noticed: “900 Million the sake of this song, but for the sake of bands and artists discovered the planetary People Daily All Making Love,” (1968). your own peace of mind.” Frank Zappa was perspective, and frequently combined it This is precisely the sort of vision of many quick to ridicule the tourist aspect of with political-utopian or psychedelic-­ Utopias based on globality, planetary con­ the counterculture. The lyrics of “Flower rebellious ideas typical of the counter­ sciousness, and the bringing together Punk” (1967) quote the question and culture at the time. of existing positive energies—through to answer formula of the huge hippie hit “Hey The Byrds, who emerged from the folk the first Internet generation. However, Joe,” and tell the story of a young fool who rock of the early 1960s, repeatedly ex­ even hardcore esoteric hippies such as plans to go to San Francisco “to join a plored technical progress and its psy­ the Incredible String Band repeatedly psychedelic band.” Meanwhile, no other chological and psychedelic effects: their asked: “What is it that we are part of, what band more clearly defined the spirit of the leader Roger McGuinn named jet airplanes is it that we are?” (“The Half-Remarkable capital of the counterculture than the as his central sound inspiration. The Byrds Question,” 1968), before founding one Grateful Dead. For Stewart Brand, who were also probably the first to link being of the grandiose self-conceived religions hired the band for his “Trips Festival,” physically and psychologically high (“Eight (“Creation,” 1969) that shot up around they were the triumphators, sweeping Miles High,” 1966). With “5D” in 1966 they 1970 throughout the entire post-hippie everyone else aside: “It was the beginning added a fifth dimension to the fourth world. In the meantime, the Fugs were of the Grateful Dead and the end of every­ dimension, which had been an important offering a version of paradise that appears body else.” Excerpts from their trademark idea to the avant-garde of the early twenti­ more sexual and physical: “The garden improvisational piece “Dark Star” (1969) eth century, and they quickly adopted that is open / the juices begin to flow” (“The can be heard on the soundtrack to Michel­ other product of the planetary age, the Garden is Open,” 1967). angelo Antonioni’s film Zabriskie Point “Spaceship Earth” idea: that the view of (1970). The short text of the song, written the Earth from beyond leads to the aware­ by Robert Hunter, is also rich in imagery ness that one is living in an interior and that and features a space image at its center. one’s gaze must be directed within (“Mind Another songwriter from the Grateful Gardens,” 1967). This idea also appealed Dead, John Perry Barlow, later became

189 Musical Stations of the Counterculture

Tony Martin | Multiple Light Projection for Desert Ambulance by Ramon Sender | 1963 | © Tony Martin

one of the main representatives of Califor­ numbers of celebrities came to LA and San Francisco Tape Music Center, which nian libertarianism, with its hostility to the settled in canyons such as Laurel Canyon, from 1962 onwards contributed to the social state, which he championed through which was graced by both the “father” meeting of such diverse cultural factions his Electronic Frontier Foundation. He of British blues rock, John Mayall (“Cali­ as the rock and hippie culture, the experi­ wrote these hymn-like lines in praise of fornia,” 1969), and the Beatles (“Blue mental composers’ scene, whose mem­ the western state for the Grateful Dead: Jay Way,” 1967), and was where others bers would later teach at Mills College, and “California, preaching on the burning discovered the first tender beginnings others involved in advanced electronic shore / California, I’ll be knocking on the of a feminist perspective on rock culture music. Multimedia approaches were also golden door / Like an angel, standing (Joni Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon, promoted by the “Trips Festival” of in a shaft of light / Rising up to paradise, 1970). In his heroic “Revolution Blues,” 1966, which emerged from the SFTMC I know I’m gonna shine.” The Dead re­ (1974) Neil Young describes how Charles milieu and was where rock musicians corded this song, “Estimated Prophet,” Manson’s murder fantasies—where the (Big Brother & The Holding Company, for their 1977 album Terrapin Station. Family’s armed forces, descending from Grateful Dead), electronic music (synthe­ Prophets and sect leaders had long played the mountains in thousands of dune bug­ sizer constructor Donald Buchla, com­ a large, suspect role in the other Califor­ gies, take over the city—were directed poser Morton Subotnick), the first light nian metropolis, Los Angeles. The LA band at precisely these new canyon residents: shows, especially from the painter and that most defined the city’s culture was “I hear that Laurel Canyon is full of famous light artist Tony Martin, and the avant- naturally the Beach Boys, in their various stars / I hate them worse than lepers and garde of the SFTMC’s conceptual com­ incarnations. Their wonderful song “Never I’ll kill them in their cars.” posers, for example Ramon Sender, met. Learn Not to Love” (1968) is easily recog­ In contrast, in “Plastic People,” (1967), Two members of Grateful Dead who were nizable as an unaccredited version of the Frank Zappa pictured an invasion of from the New Music scene, Phil Lesh song, with the less friendly title “Cease classic, government-supported fascists, and Tom Constanten, also belonged to the to Exist,” from the racist sect leader and “marching down Sunset Boulevard” in circle around the SFTMC. Pauline Oliveros inciter to murder, Charles Manson. The the center of Los Angeles, supported by and Terry Riley, who met at the center new knowledge about space and Earth, citizen consumers, not soldiers, “and there and became classical composers in the along with the fact that the patriarchal in Crescent Heights, you see the worst American New Music scene, conducted order and disciplinary structure had sud­ quality of Plastic People.” It was precisely basic research in improvised music and denly disappeared or been undermined, at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and ambient sound, with Sender and others created a power vacuum that allowed sect- Crescent Heights that a multiplex cinema designing formats that integrated sound founding mania to breed. Another case and a Virgin Megastore were later erected from the city’s environs, such as the was the popular Jim Kweskin Jug Band, —though they are now long gone. In “Who participative outdoor work “City Scale” whose banjo player Mel Lyman founded a Are The Brain Police” (1966) omnipotent (1963). Morton Subotnick was probably sect, albeit in Boston, which attracted forces plan total control. the first electronic composer who enjoyed amongst others the Zabriskie Point co- immediate success in the counterculture, stars Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin, influencing many pop musicians, including daughter of the avant-garde choreog­ 3. The San Francisco Tape Music Center the band Silver Apples, an early electronic rapher Anna Halprin. Frechette was (SFTMC) duo from New York who named themselves arrested as he was carrying out a bank after his most famous piece, and in turn robbery for the sect, and died in prison in An important institution in the early days strongly influenced later electronic bands: un­explained circumstances. Increasing of the Californian counterculture was the from Suicide to Pan Sonic.

190 DIEDRICH DIEDERICHSEN

Tony Martin | Desert Ambulance by Ramon Sender with Pauline Oliveros performing | 1966 | © Tony Martin

4. Cosmic Music combines his private interpretation of the Urantia mythology with a dedication In the fourth movement of his second String to America’s real space flight. However, Quartet (1907/08), Arnold Schönberg as evidenced in his first performances in employed a number of lines from the Germany in 1970, the real world is long German poet Stefan George, which have gone for Sun Ra (“It’s After the End of the subsequently been repeatedly quoted in World”). In order to say that something connection with musical experiments: is a myth, one must recognize that some­ “I feel the air of other planets.” Since then, thing else is real. But who determines this, musical experimentation that appears in­ who has the power to say this? For George comprehensible to its contemporaries has Clinton, who follows on from Sun Ra in been regarded as astronomical, as music many respects, although with a greater of the stars or of aliens. Herbert Marcuse orientation to the post-Black Power cul­ commented that the dreamt-up other ture of Funk, as opposed to revolutionary worlds of bourgeois composition were atonal Free Jazz, the rescuing Mothership first given social meaning by the African- also plays a large role, albeit more strongly American and youth culture music of the embedded in a comic-like, satirical rheto­ 1960s: the other planet, which appears ric. In contrast, German cosmic music of in this music as an Other, is now our own. the 1970s —much reviewed and revisited Furthermore, in contrast to the European in global retro-culture—which appeared variety, Afro-futurist “cosmic music” did on labels such as Die Kosmischen Kuriere, not conceive of the “other planets” as alien founded by eccentric journalist Rolf Ulrich but as the starting point of its displaced, Kaiser, tended to be unintentionally funny. diasporic culture—with the UFO as the In collaboration with the Berlin band Ash rescuing Mothership re-establishing con­ Ra Temple, Kaiser managed to convince nection to the home planet. Interestingly, the controversial guru of psychedelic drug the central artist of Afro-futurism, Sun Ra, use, Timothy Leary, to participate in the discovered the esoteric publication The making of a cosmic rock album (Seven Up, Urantia Papers (1955) at the same time 1973). as Karlheinz Stockhausen in 1970/71. This anonymous text, which is well known and influential in the United States, relates the prehistory of the biblical mythologies, situating it throughout space and on a wealth of inhabited stars and planets. Stockhausen’s scenic composition “Sirius,” which was commissioned by the German Federal Government as a gift on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the United States of America in 1976,

191 Installation Views

The Whole Earth. California and the Disappearance of the Outside Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, 2013 Installation views Photos: Andreas Müller

192 Installation Views

193 Installation Views

The Whole Earth. California and the Disappearance of the Outside Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, 2013 Installation views Photos: Laura Fiorio

194 Installation Views

195 On the Artists and their Works Compiled by Diedrich Diederichsen and Anselm Franke

page 186 pages 3, 120

Nabil Ahmed (b. 1977 in Bangladesh) is an artist, Eleanor Antin (b. 1935) moved from New York to musician, author, and curator. He is a cofounder of the California in the late 1960s, where she began prod­ London-based sound-art collective Call & Response. ucing narrative and performance works that today His work deals with political geographies and the trans­ belong to the canon of feminist and Conceptual art. formations of postcolonial nation-states. The focus of These include her photo series 100 Boots (1971–73) his most recent works is an analysis of the relationship and her works with various personae, the King, the of catastrophes, especially natural catastrophes, to Ballerina, and the Nurse. Antin plays with stereotypic political events and upheavals. themes of Western politics, culture, and mythology. In the photo series Roman Allegories from 2004, working with a group of actors in roles based on char- page 149 acters from the commedia dell’arte, Antin transplants events from antiquity, the “cradle of Western culture,” Ant Farm, a collective of artists and architects es­ to the landscape of Southern California. The images tablished in California in 1968, and active until the late quote genres of the European pictorial tradition such 1970s, was known for its architectural works and as the Salon painting of the nineteenth century, within performances. Inspired by Buckminster Fuller and the which there was an idealization of antiquity that served utopian architectural understanding of, for example, to bolster France’s claim as the rightful heir to Rome, the avant-garde group Archigram, its projects dealt while out in the wider world imperial expansion raged with the relationship between industry, the consumer in its final phase. society, and the environment. While it took up the In the scene shown here, polemically titled Going Home counterculture’s critique of American mass- and con- (2004), the group of actors can be seen on a Califor- sumer society, its actions and media installations were nian beach. Antin makes reference to the rootlessness char­acterized by a playful, ironic distance. One of its of the nomadic existence, to banishment and the longing mobile, inflatable structures—conceived as “nomadic for a return to roots which have long since ceased to architecture”—was once used as the production site exist, except in the imagination. In other respects as of an issue of the Whole Earth Catalog. The “Dolphin well, it is an archetypal scene: at the terrestrial limit Embassy” is an unrealized design for a mobile meeting of Western expansion—here, the beach in San Diego— place—a proposal for an infrastructure to address the “wall of the Pacific” poses the question of origins. the Californian counterculture’s desire to communicate with other species.

196 pages 65, 66 aforementioned text likewise bears the title “The Envi- ronmental Witch-Hunt.” The book was designed by Martin Beck creates a multilayered portrait of a Ivan Chermayeff of the famous New York design agency historic moment of upheaval in his installation Panel Chermayeff & Geismar, which was influential in shaping 2—“Nothing better than a touch of ecology and catas- the emerging consumer culture of 1960s America. trophe to unite the social classes …” (2008/2013). For the book, Chermayeff used different illustrations His subject is the International Design Conference in with varying aspen leaf patterns. In the section “Polari- Aspen (IDCA), which had been held in Aspen, Colorado, zation,” the pattern is unsettled, almost disorderly. since the 1950s. In 1970, under the title “Environment by Design,” the conference was specifically devoted to environmental issues for the first time. The IDCA was page 10 an important meeting point for designers, architects, and industry. The location itself takes its name from the Jordan Belson (1926–2011) was born in Chicago and native aspen trees, whose roots are interconnected moved to California in the 1950s, where he became underground to the extent that the trees dominate the a pioneer of experimental film. Many of his works deal landscape as one great netlike organism. Their leaves with the translation of psychedelic-spiritual experi­ tremble in the slightest wind, allowing more sunlight ences into visual compositions. Influenced by the abstract to reach the lower leaves and thus increasing the trees’ cinema of Oskar Fischinger and Norman McLaren, photosynthetic productivity. Belson took up their visual vocabulary and system­ Beck, whose work deals with authorship, the history of atically developed it as a meditative and immersive, the exhibition, architecture, and the ideology of design, sensual experience in which visual perception and the translates the historic moment in this installation, which “inner eye” are meant to merge. His main points reflects the transformation of capitalism in the face of reference were space flight and Eastern spiritual of the counterculture and ecological crisis. The installa- traditions. In his “cosmic cinema,” outer space tion’s subheading quotes a statement made by the and conscious­ness, outside and inside, are one and French Group at the Aspen conference in 1970. It was the same space; the immersive circle, in the form penned by Jean Baudrillard and addressed to, among of the mandala or planetary cycle, is the constant domi- others, the renowned architecture critic Reyner nant motif. Banham, who had advised the conference (and, as a speaker, appeared before a geodesic structure and a satellite photo showing a full view of the Earth). The page 69 French Group argued that the post-1968 focus on the environment had led to political powers pushing Ashley Bickerton (b. 1959) belonged to a group of mid- the present ideological conflicts onto “rivers and na- ’80s object artists to which Haim Steinbach and Jeff tional parks.” Koons were also considered to belong. Bickerton, how- Beck’s installation consists of a number of “panels” ever, combined very direct jokes (small comments ad- made of silkscreen prints with various aspen leaf pat- dressed to the gallery workers on the underside of his terns, a series of chrome-steel cubes reminiscent of assemblages) and political statements with his interest the Minimalist form language, and a brochure on the in the aesthetic jargon of advanced consumer culture. 1970 conference. Two documentary videos are addi- Bickerton’s Anthroposphere (1989), exhibited for the tionally presented: one of these is a film about the 1970 first time thirty years after Jack Smith’s exploration of conference, while the other shows the Aspen Movie rubbish heaps and, ironically, in the year Smith died, is Map. The latter was sponsored by the US military and a pure display case of garbage untouched by human tested for the first time in Aspen in 1978. This spec­ attempts at reappropriation—placed beside an analog tacular forerunner of today’s GPS navigation used a Commercial Piece (1989) decorated with logos from combination of virtual and current images and was art and consumer society. intended to allow the user to quickly gain orientation in unfamiliar surroundings. The Environmental Witch- Hunt (2008), a video filmed by Beck in the forest in page 171 Colorado, completes the ensemble. In 1974, Reyner Banham published The Aspen Papers. Even as far back as the mid-1970s, Dara Birnbaum This book on the history of the conference contains (b. 1946) combines feminist approaches with a new a section called “Polarization,” in which Baudrillard’s understanding of media art in which similar critical

197 Biographies

attention is given both to the images in public circulation that operates an archive, library, and exhibition space and to the medium-specific form of their presentation. in Los Angeles. The common denominator of CLUI’s Her video installations, which refer to everyday TV projects is the exploration of the massive transforma- formats such as quiz shows, series, soaps, and adver- tions of, and cultural inscriptions in, the surface of tising, engaged strongly at the end of the 1970s and the Earth due to human influence. Taking into account start of the 1980s with the dialectic of the invisibility the central role land ownership and use have had in and the exhibitable potential of women as stars and sex American history, CLUI interprets contemporary objects, which Birnbaum synthesizes in her adaption American culture by means of territorial analyses and of “Wonder Woman.” The neoliberal imperative of self- cultural archaeology. The members of CLUI carry optimization first of all affects women, who have always out their investigation, documentation, and analysis been immaterial and spiritual workers. primarily in California. For the exhibition The Whole Earth, CLUI documented solid-waste landfills in the surroundings of Los Angeles. page 81

Erik Bulatov (b. 1933), probably the best known of the page 50 Moscow Conceptualists, has often painted landscapes in a specific, pointed, objectifying style, treating them Bruce Conner (1933–2008) was one of the central as conceptual objects. In so doing, he has made it pos- figures of California’s artistic avant-garde. He gained sible to thematize the career that image ideas and recognition in the 1960s for his assemblages and in- conceptualized images, such as pictures of the globe stallations. Conner searched for an artistic language or Californian desert landscapes, have had in adverti- for the suppressed side of the reality of American life. sing, the public sphere, and the fine arts in the West. His works deal with social disintegration and violence He does not use existing iconographies to do this (such in the broadest sense. They include repeated refer- as those of Western Pop art), but instead employs a ences to the imaginary in the counterculture, although form of stylization he developed himself, one that, he gave the counterculture’s penchant for ornament a how­ever, completely disregards individual obsessions. decidedly surrealistic turn. Conner is also among the pioneers of experimental film: he worked with found film material as early as the late 1950s. Crossroads, made page 90 in 1976 shortly after the end of the Vietnam War, is entirely based on archival material of “Operation Angela Bulloch (b. 1966) was born in Canada and grew Crossroads,” a series of nuclear tests carried out by up in Great Britain. She studied at Goldsmiths, Univer- the US armed forces in 1946 on Bikini Atoll. In this film, sity of London and has exhibited at many venues, from Conner used footage from the “Baker” atomic test the Vienna Secession to the Guggenheim Museum of July 25, 1946. The tests on the atoll were followed by in New York. She works mostly with new media tech- hundreds of cameras, making them some of the most nologies, with sound in particular playing a major role, visible events in the world up to that time. Counter to but from a conceptual angle. In her exhibition at the the initial impression made by the film, Conner insisted Lenbachhaus in Munich, “The Space That Time Forgot” that he had not manipulated the playback speed of the (2008), she engaged with unusual theories about images. He wanted to show that the bomb produced space. Using a commonly available computer program, a shift in spatial and temporal coordinates. Many com- she calculated the view of the universe to be had from mentators spoke of the explosion as a “cosmic” view remote stars and their planets. The alternative panora- of destruction or the genesis of “a new world.” mas for the series Night Sky are simulated observa- tions from the exoplanets that, according to the pre- sent state of knowledge, provide the conditions for pages 51, 52 Earth-like life. For the Swedish-Brazilian artist Öyvind Fahlström (1928–76), the map was a means of highlighting and page 97 productively questioning political situations and con- nections, long before “mapping” became a term for The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), cognitive and argumentative strategies. It is precisely founded in 1994, is a research and educational institute not the photographed whole, but representations

198 Biographies

of the fissures and interconnections in relationships page 70 of exploitation and power, drawn using devices from comics and caricature and the graphic styles of under- Nancy Holt (b. 1938) is known for her installations and ground culture, which produce the false wholeness of sculptures, which made her a protagonist of the Land the Earth in his work. art movement. Her Sun Tunnels (1973–76), among other Earthworks, were conceived as optical appara- tuses that place a given landscape and the viewer in pages 116, 117 relationship to the position of the sun and stars. Holt began her career as a video artist and photographer, Robert Frank (b. 1924), photographer and filmmaker, producing, alongside her sculptures, numerous photo- was born in Switzerland and has lived in the United graphic works and films. These include East Coast, States since the early 1950s. He became famous with a West Coast (1969), in which she and her husband large-scale photographic documentation of the United Robert Smithson (1938–73), who was also a promi- States, for which he traveled the country from 1955 nent Land art protagonist, act out a dialog satirizing to 1956 and took 28,000 photographs. He compiled the clichés and respective artistic positions of the intel- eighty-three of these in his book The Americans, which lectual, analytically cool East Coast and the relaxed, exposed and impressively documented the social reali- intuitive West Coast. ties beneath the surface of the consumer culture. The Americans was first published in 1958 and was reprint- ed the following year with an Introduction by Jack page 71 Kerouac. A close friend of Allen Ginsberg, Frank also became the photographer and documentarist of the Lawrence Jordan (b. 1934) became known as a vision- Beat culture. From 1958, he largely turned away from ary collagist and experimental animation filmmaker of photography and concentrated on filmmaking. He was the Beat culture. His 1958 film Triptych in Four Parts is present at a number of events organized by Stewart emblematic of the San Francisco Bay Area drug culture Brand. Liferaft Earth is his film documentation of the of the 1950s—particularly its quasi-religious dimen- 1969 event of the same name, which is discussed in sion—which paved the way for the general “spiritualiza- the Whole Earth Catalog pages that are reproduced tion” of the counterculture and flowed into the culture here. of the New Age. In this film, Jordan journeys through the hinterlands of Mexico and Texas in search of peyote with the poets Michael McClure and Philip Lamantia pages 7, 19, 131, 169 and the artists John Reed and Wallace Berman.

Jack Goldstein (1945–2003) was a graduate of the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and was des­ page 185 ignated by his biographer Richard Hertz as the central figure of a “CalArts Mafia.” He was one of the artists Silvia Kolbowski (b. 1953) is an Argentinian artist who who made known in New York the laconic perspective moved to New York in the late 1970s. In the tradition that informed the Californian critique of the cultural in- of the Conceptual art of the 1960s and ’70s, her instal- dustry—with his films and vinyl record objects, for ex- lations deal with the claim to objectivity asserted by ample. In the 1980s, Goldstein began painting sublime statements, whether these are in the form of images, pictures of real and fictitious natural events. In a certain tones, or gestures. She calls these statements into regard, he thus advanced the experience of the visibility question and politicizes them. Her artistic practice of the whole, the Blue Marble shock: “Because the grew out of an intensive critical examination of femi- images that I search for are images that have a sense nism, feminist film theory, avant-garde film, and psycho- of totality to them,” he said in an interview with Chris analysis. Dercon. Dercon added: “And everything comes from heaven, from the sky.” To which Goldstein replied: “That’s the way it happens, you know. Because heaven is that which cannot be seen, or heaven would be that which has nothing to do with the senses.” Or maybe it does.

199 Biographies

page 34 hedonist, a fashionable New York female hedonist, a putatively authentic Indian). Here, the desert stands Philipp Lachenmann (b. 1963) is a German artist for the beginning and the end of Californian Utopias, who has also lived in California. In his work, which is while the conceptual limitations of the road movie nar- an exploration of the history of film and media, he rative stand for the limits Lamelas had experienced systematically exploits the possibilities of digital image previously. processing and montage. One such case is SHU Still (2002 /08), which Lachenmann has produced in both photographic and video form. The piece shows page 136 a maximum-security prison in California’s Mojave Desert during the “blue hour.” In the piece, the prison Four years ago, the Californian artist Sharon Lockhart floodlights have been switched on and the lights of (b. 1964) encountered the work of the Israeli choreo- oncoming airplanes appear in the evening sky. grapher and dance composer Noa Eshkol (1924– The pictured prison is the California Correctional Insti- 2007), which she then presented in new interpretations tution (CCI), which the artist selected as a location in a number of exhibitions and projects—always in while working in the archive at the Center for Land Use col­laboration with friends and acquaintances of the Interpretation (CLUI). The CCI is one of four Califor- deceased artist. Eshkol not only had a very special nian maximum-security prisons containing the notori- strict and modernist attitude to movement; she also ous Security Housing Unit, or “SHU,” a block that holds developed a universally applicable notation for the prisoners in solitary confinement, in some cases for life. human body that caught on not only with cyberneti­cians, Solitary confinement, or preventive detention, is, after but also with NASA. Heinz von Foerster found Eshkol the death penalty, the most severe punishment in the a professorship at the University of Illinois. The basis US penal system. Since 1998, Amnesty International for the movement notation was small, standardized has classified the detention category SHU Solitary globes, in each of which a stage of movement could be Confinement as “torture.” Airplanes were filmed during entered. the early evening hours as they approached for landing at the Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York, and Frank- furt airports, and the images were then digitally incor- page 99 porated into the picture of the CCI. As a montage of an unrealistically large number of approaching airplane As far back as 1961, Piero Manzoni (1933–63), the lights (heading toward a point somewhere behind the Italian precursor of laconic, proto-Conceptual Arte viewer) and the “documentary” image of a maximum- Povera, was able to show that the Earth does not need security prison in the evening, SHU Still functions at any representation, just a pedestal: the Earth is already the production level of classic romantic moments of finished as an artwork and requires no doubling. With longing, with references to old children’s books as well his artistic strategies and with this kind of planetary as Hollywood animation and science fiction films. How- thought, which immediately rejects its potential as ever, the combination of the prison and the lights in a joke, Manzoni was a few years ahead of his time. the sky is, above all, a variation on the “Sleeping Beauty Castle with Stardust” which is found in the Disney company logo, and which, by way of California, has page 188 been adopted as a universal motif for romance, magic, and animation. The Otolith Group (founded by Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun, London, 2002) takes its name from the organ in the inner ear that governs our sense of page 67 balance. The group’s works deal with the concept of the future as well as the afterlife of the utopian projec- David Lamelas (b. 1946) is an Argentinian moving-­ tions of the late-modern era and political movements image Conceptualist who has lived in London, Brussels, of liberation and solidarity, in particular in the former and Los Angeles. His film The Desert People (1974) is “Third World.” a formally rather strict road movie in which he lists the Otolith I (2003) is the group’s first film. It places us themes of the counterculture by assigning them to in a future in which extended periods spent in the weak five people who represent certain archetypes (a pro- gravity on the space stations have led to a chronic gressive man, a feminist woman, a Californian male disturbance of the inhabitants’ sense of balance, leaving

200 Biographies

them unable to readapt to Earth’s gravity. They tation and structures of consciousness, in the 1970s have lost their connection with the Earth. Everything she increasingly devoted herself to a radical critique is weightless and out of balance. From this imagined of identity attributions, especially racial and gender scenario in the year 2103, a certain Dr. Usha stereotypes. Since 2000, the predominant themes in Adebaran-Sagar of the International Space Station her work have been drawn from the Vedic tradition. looks back at the space program of the Soviet Union. At the same time, the grandmother of the narrator reports from the past on the significance of the space page 53 program for the socialist and feminist movements on the Indian subcontinent. Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) is frequently called the pioneer of Pop art. He became known in the 1950s for his “combines”—paintings initially made pages 11, 59 using everyday objects and trash from the streets of New York, and later also found pictorial material— No one has criticized the old counterculture more as well as for iconoclastic works like Erased De Kooning sharply than the new counterculture of the punks, Drawing (1953) and collages such as Earth Day (1970), which was represented in the late ’70s in California by shown here. In 1966, Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver bands like Black Flag and Dead Kennedys. However, founded the organization Experiments in Art and Tech- it was never clear whether the criticism was leveled at nology, which promoted collaboration between artists tenets of the old counterculture or its betrayal of these and engineers. Rauschenberg was one of the artists tenets, such as the development of business and gov- who, at NASA’s invitation, attended the Apollo 11 rocket ernment models. The graphic artist and video film­ launch in 1969. maker Raymond Pettibon (b. 1957), who, before his career as a fine artist, designed countless flyers and record covers for the LA punk scene, engages with page 119 these inter-countercultural conflicts sarcastically in different media and formats. In 1989, he made four Ira Schneider (b. 1939) was among the first generation feature films on the history of the old counterculture, of video artists who dedicated themselves to the explo- using a cast of actors from the post-punk scene. Two ration of the conditions and possibilities of this new of them are shown here—The Whole World’s Watching: technology and worked for a radical democratization Weatherman ’69 and Citizen Tania (both 1989) of the media landscape in the historical setting of —along with a drawing and poster. the counterculture. Schneider produced numerous well-known works in video, notably The Woodstock Festival (1969) and Manhattan is an Island (1977). He page 157 was one of the founders of the video culture magazine Radical Software. The video presented here was Adrian Piper (b. 1948), an artist, philosopher, and yogi, specially produced for the exhibition using material lived on the East Coast of the United States for many from Schneider’s archive and the countercultural years before moving to Berlin in 2005. Although these Raindance Foundation, and includes excerpts from early works from her series of LSD Paintings (1965– speeches by Buckminster Fuller and Gregory Bateson, 67) only became publicly known several years ago, they as well as footage from the original Earth Day (1970). are now considered part of the canon of psychedelic art. Immediately following this phase, Piper turned her attention to Conceptual art, and became one of the page 158 protagonists of the first generation of this movement. In the works shown here, central themes emerged that Richard Serra (b. 1939) gained fame for his giant Piper has pursued ever since. The radical questioning sculptures: spherical constructions formed out of of the concept of the self (seen here in the form of orna- sheets of steel. These works are part of the Minimalist mental liquefaction) and of normative moral attitudes movement and stand in the art-historical tradition of is a theme of her philosophy in her engagement with the sculpture’s critical examination of monumentality. In Enlightenment classics, as well as in her reference to relationship to space and materiality, Serra investi- the spiritual dimensions of yoga. While she continued in gates the experiences that are predetermined by the her early Conceptual art to work with themes of medi- dimensions of the human body. He also made a series

201 Biographies

of films that belong to the canon of Conceptual explora- page 98 tions of the grammar of the film medium from the 1970s. Boomerang (1974), which was produced for In the 1990s, the Austrian artist Josef Strau (b. 1957) public television, can be understood as a meditation developed a special procedure for appropriating pho- on the feedback loop between the self and the media-­ tographic images. As assistant to the German photog- produced image. In the video, we watch the artist rapher Thomas Ruff, Strau persuaded Ruff to give him Nancy Holt trying to speak while, at a slight delay, a print of each of the latter’s astronomical sky images hearing through headphones what she has just said. during their production. Strau then divided these large Observing her difficulty in coordinating language and sky images into smaller sections. With this scaled-down the thought process in this situation, opens up a media- version (of which a domestic version can also be made) conditioned space of reflection. he countered the classical experience of sublimity, a form of which is admiration of the image of the Earth, both at the level of auratic originality and that of the page 2 endless expanses of the universe.

Alex Slade (b. 1961) studied until 1993 at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), among other places. He pages 32, 33, 49, 89, 170 works with the concept of landscape (inside and outside of cities), mostly using devices of photography and Suzanne Treister (b. 1958) is the creator of the project sculpture. He has exhibited at the biennials in Prague HEXEN 2.0 (2009–11), which deals with government- and Liverpool, in many Californian and US museums commissioned scientific research programs on the (Hammer, California Museum of Photography, MoMA), control of the masses in media democracies, and with and also in Hamburg and Berlin. Cogentrix SEGS II/ the points of contact between these programs and Yarrow Ravine Rattlesnake Habitat Area, Daggett, CA; activist movements and the counterculture. HEXEN 2.0 Nextera SEGS VI-IX/Harper Lake Wildlife Viewing addresses the political-military framework created by Area, Lockhart, CA; and Calenergy Geothermal Gener- the United States after the Second World War. Under ating Plants/Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wild- the banner of cybernetics, this framework brought life Refuge, Calipatria, CA (2013) were commissioned about the interleaving of technology and the social sci- for this exhibition. They show the interplay between ences that led to the development of the Internet and, the Californian deserts and other peripheral areas, full with Web 2.0, general data collection on an unprece- of philosophical, utopian, and dystopian connotations, dented scale. In particular, HEXEN 2.0 traces the and their contemporary, often drastic ecological paths of participants in the Macy Conferences, the and economic situation. Slade lives and works in Los declared objective of which was to create the basis for Angeles and teaches at the Otis College of Art and a general science of the functioning of the human mind. Design. Treister’s artistic translation—“mappings”—makes reference to scenario planning and projection, the aesthetics of secret occult societies, tarot cards, and page 68 alchemistic diagrams.

Jack Smith (1932–89), the legendary inventor of both a queer cinema populated by sexual characters page 184 and inspired by the actress Maria Montez, and of the slowest performance events of all time, was also an For Outer and Inner Space (1966), Andy Warhol con- economist and a critic of capitalism; as such, he was fronted his superstar Edie Sedgwick with television above all interested in the objects that have fallen out of pictures of herself that he had taken with one of the first circulation, garbage. While the waning hippie culture video cameras, which had been given to him to test. The of California saw itself perishing in mountains of gar- much-refracted situation differs from a hall of mirrors bage, Smith’s creatures had already begun in the early in that, as was later the case in Dan Graham’s work, the 1960s to celebrate commodity-free zones on the different versions of the same person are separated rubbish heaps of New York, as can be seen in Smith’s from one another not just ontologically (in terms of short film Scotch Tape (1959–62). media) but also temporally: the inner or the outer Self are, respectively, either nearer to death or birth—and they are apparently absolutely separated by the media

202 Biographies

barrier. It is always possible to enter new internal and external spaces, but they never join up again. Edie is amused.

page 156

Bruce Yonemoto (b. 1949) is one of the most important Californian media artists. In his work, he has often re- acted to the visibility of the Earth and its objectification. This is particularly the case in the work Journey to the Center of the Earth (2002), where he shows an altered version of the 1959 film based on Jules Verne’s novel of the same title inside a globe—and thus contrasts the questionable gain of a new interior with the loss of the exterior, within the new immanence of an ecological view of the world.

Translated from the German by Michael Dills and Tim Jones

203 Biographies

The Curators The Contributors

Diedrich Diederichsen was the editor and Sabeth Buchmann, art historian and critic Norman M. Klein, a cultural critic, media John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog publisher of music journals in the 1980s. (Berlin /Vienna), has been Professor historian and novelist, is Professor at are architects and urbanists, who have co- In the 1990s he taught at universities and for Modern and Post-Modern Art at the the California Institute of the Arts. Among founded Territorial Agency. The London- colleges as a visiting professor / lecturer Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, since 2004. his best-known works are: Seven Minutes: based independent organization works to in Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Pasadena, Offen- She contributes regularly to art journals, the Life and Death of the American Ani­ integrate complex spatial transformation bach, Giessen, Weimar, Bremen, Vienna, books, and catalogs, and co-edits—with mated Cartoon (1993); and The History processes. Its projects combine contem- St. Louis, Cologne, Los Angeles, and Helmut Draxler, Clemens Krümmel, and of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure porary architecture and urbanism, re- Gainesville, among others. From 1998 Susanne Leeb—Polypen, a series of books of Memory (1997). His newest novel is a search and action, and operate through to 2007 he was Professor for Aesthetic on art criticism and political theory. Her wunderroman (a book that extends into the recomposition of local and internation- Theory / Cultural Sciences at the Merz publications include: Denken gegen das a media interface). Entitled The Imaginary al stakeholders. Together with the photog- Academy, Stuttgart. Since 2006 he has Denken: Produktion–Technologie–Subjek- Twentieth Century (2013), it navigates rapher and filmmaker, Armin Linke, and been Professor for Theory, Practice and tivität bei Sol LeWitt, Hélio Oiticica und through an archive on how the twentieth curator, Anselm Franke, they are working Communication of Contemporary Art Yvonne Rainer (2007); Film, Avantgarde, century was imagined during its earliest on the “Anthropocene Observatory,” a in the Artistic and Cultural Sciences de- Biopolitik (2009, as co-editor with Helmut years (1893–1925). Along with the multidisciplinary project at the Haus der partment of the Academy of Fine Arts, Draxler and Stephan Geene); Art After printed volume, there is an online interface Kulturen der Welt, which documents and Vienna. His most recent book publications Conceptual Art (2006, as co-editor with of over 2,000 images (www.imaginary intervenes into the discourses developing include: The Sopranos (2012); Psicodelia Alexander Alberro); and Hélio Oiticica 20thcentury.com). His next book will be around the Anthropocene thesis. y ready-made (2010); Über den Mehrwert and Neville D’Almeida: Block-Experiments History of the Present: The Dismantling (in der Kunst) (2008); Kritik des Auges: in Cosmococa (2013, with Max Jorge of the American Psyche (2014). Texte zur Kunst (2008); and Eigen­ Hinderer Cruz). Laurence A. Rickels is Professor for Art blutdoping: Selbstverwertung, Künstler­ and Theory at the Academy of Fine Arts, romantik, Partizipation (2008). Maurizio Lazzarato, sociologist and phi- Karlsruhe. From 1981 to 2011 he was Pro- Mercedes Bunz is a cultural studies losopher, lives and works in Paris. He fessor for German Literature and Com- specialist living in London and Lüneburg. conducts research on immaterial work, parative Studies and Adjunct Professor for Anselm Franke is a curator and critic. In Lüneburg she heads a team researching the ontology of work, post-socialist move- Art and Film at the University of California, From 2006 to 2010 he was the Artistic digital publishing and does research on ments and cognitive capitalism. He addi- Santa Barbara. Since 2005 he has been Director of Extra City, Kunsthal Antwer- digital media, society, and criticality. tionally writes on the subjects of cinema, Sigmund Freud Professor for Media The- pen. Until 2006 Franke was curator at She has been a technology reporter for video, and new technologies for the produc­ ory and Philosophy at the European Grad- the KW Institute for Contemporary Art the Guardian and editor-in-chief of Der tion of images. Most recently, Lazzarato uate School (EGS). His book publications in Berlin. His project Animism was pre- Tagesspiegel Online, and did her Ph.D, has dealt with various forms of insecure include: Nazi Psychoanalysis (Vol. 1: Only sented in different versions in Antwerp, under Joseph Vogl, on the history of the work—taking as a starting point the situ­ Psychoanalysis Won the War; Vol. 2: Bern (2010), Vienna (2011), Berlin and at Internet. Her most recent publication is ation of artists and technicians whose Crypto-­Fetishism; Vol. 3: Psy Fi, 2002); e-flux New York (2012). Franke has edited Die Stille Revolution: Wie Algorithmen employment is limited to, for example, the Ulrike Ottinger: The Autobiography of Art numerous publications and regularly con- Wissen, Arbeit, Öffentlichkeit und Politik periods of production of films. His book, Cinema (2008); The Devil Notebooks tributes articles to magazines such as verändern, ohne dabei viel Lärm zu machen The Making of the Indebted Man (2012) (2008); and I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick Metropolis M, e-flux journal, and Parkett. (2012). takes on the subject of debt. (2010). He was also curator of the 2012 Taipei Biennial and in January 2013 took over as head of the Visual Arts department at Kodwo Eshun, writer, theorist, and film- Flora Lysen is an art historian and curator Fred Turner is Associate Professor at the the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. maker, teaches Aural and Visual Cultures based in Amsterdam. She is currently a Department of Communication and the in the Department of Visual Cultures at Ph.D candidate at the Institute of Culture Department of Art and History, Stanford Goldsmiths College, University of London. and History at the University of Amster- University, as well as Director of the Pro- His book More Brilliant than the Sun: dam, where she is researching artistic gram in Science, Technology, and Society. Adventures in Sonic Fiction was published models and metaphors of the brain from Among his publications are: Echoes of in 1998. Written in a style that makes the mid-twentieth century to the present. Combat: The Vietnam War in American extensive use of neologism, reappropri- Previously, she has worked as a re­ Memory (1996; revised 2nd edition 2001); ated jargon, and compound words, the searcher, curator, and teacher at various and From Counterculture to Cyberculture: book explores the intersection of black in­stitutions, including the Haus der Kul- Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, music and science fiction from an Afro-­ turen der Welt in Berlin, the Royal Acad- and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (2006). Futurist viewpoint. In 2002 Eshun co- emy of Art in The Hague and BAK, basis His next book, The Democratic Surround: founded The Otolith Group with Anjalika for actuele kunst, in Utrecht. She has co-­ Multimedia and American Liberalism from Sagar. Based in London, the group’s work written “Introduction: The Smooth and the World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties, will engages with archival materials, with Straited,” Deleuze Studies, no. 1 (February be published in 2013. In his ten years as futurity, and with the histories of trans­ 2012): 1–6, together with Patricia Pisters. a journalist, he wrote for newspapers and nationality. He writes regularly for maga- magazines such as Boston Phoenix, Boston zines such as Frieze, i-D, The Wire, and Globe Sunday Magazine, and Nature. Sight and Sound. Eva Meyer, author and filmmaker, lives in Berlin and currently teaches at the Zurich University of the Arts. Her publications in- Erich Hörl is Professor for Media Tech­ clude: Zählen und Erzählen: Für eine Se- nology and Media Philosophy at Ruhr-­ miotik des Weiblichen (1983; new edition University, Bochum. He is head of the 2013); Architexturen (1986); Die Auto­ Bochumer Kolloquium Medienwissen- biographie der Schrift (1989); Der Unter- schaft (bkm). His current research pro- schied, der eine Umgebung schafft: Kyber- jects are the general ecology of media and netik-Psychoanalyse-Feminismus (1990); technologies, and the history and future Tischgesellschaft (1995); Faltsache outlook of cybernetization. His most (1996); Glückliche Hochzeiten (1999); recent publications include: Die techno­ Von jetzt an werde ich mehrere sein (2003); logische Bedingung: Beiträge zur Be- What does the Veil know? (2009, as co-­ schreibung der technischen Welt (2011, editor with Vivian Liska); and Frei und in­ as editor); “Luhmann, the Non-trivial direkt (2010). Her radio plays include: Machine and the Neocybernetic Regime Der Kriegstourist (2009); and Das digital of Truth,” Theory, Culture & Society, geborene Ich (2011). Her films (with Eran no. 3 (December 2012): 94–121; “Le Schaerf) include: Documentary Credit nouveau paradigme écologique: Pour une (1998); Europa von weitem (1999); Flash­ écologie générale des techniques et des forward (2004); Sie könnte zu Ihnen ge- medias,” Multitudes, no. 51 (February hören (2007); Mein Gedächtnis beob­ 2013): 68–79. achtet mich (2008); and Pro Testing (2010).

204 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This exhibition and catalog would Nor without the assistance and not have been possible without generosity of: support from:

Stewart Brand Adrian Piper Research Archive APRA Diana McCarty Adam Curtis Foundation Berlin Fareed C. Majari Fred Turner Irene Albers Angela Melitopoulos the HKW team The Andy Warhol Museum Pittsburgh Members of the Centre for Research the participating artists and authors Annely Juda Fine Art London architecture Goldsmiths College Polly Armstrong Barbara Morgenstern and the Arsenal – Institut für Film Chor der Kulturen der Welt und Videokunst Berlin Aram Moshayedi The Bancroft Library University Christopher Müller of California Berkeley Murderme Eric Baudelaire Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen Martin Beck The Museum of Fine Arts Houston Daniel Buchholz Tim Neuger and Burkhard Riemschneider Sabeth Buchmann neugerriemschneider Berlin Center for the Study of Political Christopher Newfield Graphics Los Angeles Albert Oehlen Center for Visual Music Los Angeles The Öyvind Fahlström Foundation La Cinémathèque québécoise Montreal and Archives The Conner Family Trust San Francisco John Palmesino Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin Hila Peleg Detlef Diederichsen Glenn Phillips Paul N. Edwards Robert Poole Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) New York Wilfried Prantner Elvinger, Dessoy, Dennewald Luxembourg Prelinger Archives and Library Esalen Institute Big Sur California Juliane Rebentisch Esther Schipper Berlin Regen Projects Los Angeles Collection Emi Fontana Milano Ronald Feldman Fine Arts New York los Angeles Margit Rosen Galerie Andreas Binder Munich Anjalika Sagar Galerie Aurel Scheibler Berlin Cologne Eva Schmidt Galerie Buchholz Berlin Cologne Erhard Schüttpelz Galerie Jan Mot Brussels Nicolas Siepen Avery F. Gordon Alex Slade Natascha Sadr Haghighian Valerie Smith HEART – Herning Museum of Gabriella Spierer Contemporary Art Herning Sprüth Magers Berlin London James T. Hong Stefanie Schulte Strathaus Erich Hörl Mayo Thompson International Institute for Vanmoerkerke Collection Belgium social History Amsterdam Eyal Weizman Branden W. Joseph Gordon Wheeler Thomas Keenan Heiko Wichmann John Knight Brian Kuan Wood Zak Kyes Tirdad Zolghadr Bruno Latour Maurizio Lazzarato Lehmann-Art Ltd. and Rachel-Art Ltd. Lehmann Maupin New York Hong Kong Sharon Lockhart Chip Lord Sylvère Lotringer Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst Aachen LUX London

205 COLOPHON

This book was published on the occasion The Whole Earth. California and Haus der Kulturen der Welt of the exhibition The Whole Earth. the Disappearance of the Outside California and the Disappearance of the Outside, from April 26 to July 1, Curators: Director’s Office Technical Department 2013, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. Diedrich Diederichsen, Anselm Franke Director: Technical Director: Bernd M. Scherer Mathias Helfer Authors of Visual Essays: Exhibition Architecture: Diedrich Diederichsen, Anselm Franke, Kooperative für Darstellungspolitik Third-Party Funding: Technical Coordination: Syelle Hase, Flora Lysen, Sonja Oehler; (Jesko Fezer, Anita Kaspar, Kirsten Einfeldt Gernot Ernst & Team, Christian Dertinger borrowing from Fred Turner, From Andreas Müller) Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Building Facilities: Brand, The Whole Earth Network, and Exhibition Graphics: Visual Arts and Film Department Frank Jahn, Benjamin Brandt & Team the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: Studio Matthias Görlich University of Chicago Press, 2006). (Tobias Becker, Matthias Görlich, Head: Video Editing: Charalampos Lazos) Anselm Franke Stefan von Chamier

Curatorial Assistance, Program Coordination: Project Coordination: Daniela Wolf Communications Department Sonja Oehler Program Assistance: Head: Curatorial Assistance : Janina Prossek Silvia Fehrmann Syelle Hase Processing: Editorial Office: Curatorial Advisor: Cornelia Pilgram Axel Besteher-Hegenbart, Fred Turner Franziska Wegener, Julia Bierstedt Trainee: Curatorial Researcher: Miriam Greiter Press Office: Flora Lysen Anne Maier, Anna Bairaktaris Interns: Mathieu Girard, Tim Roerig, Internet: Nada Schroer, Magdalena Wiener Eva Stein, Gabriel Stolz, Corinna von Bodisco

Public Relations: Christiane Sonntag, Sabine Westemeier, Philipp Lang

Education Program: Maria Fountoukis, Eva Stein, Yasmin Welkenbach

206 COLOPHON

Editors: © 2013 the editors, authors, artists, Haus The Whole Earth. California and Diedrich Diederichsen, Anselm Franke der Kulturen der Welt, and Sternberg the Disappearance of the Outside Press is funded by: Managing Editors: Martin Hager, Syelle Hase The HKW thanks all copyright owners Editorial Associates: for their kind permission to reproduce Sonja Oehler, Cornelius Reiber their material. Should, despite our intensive research, any person entitled Editorial Assistance: to rights have been overlooked, legitimate Mathieu Girard, Miriam Greiter, claims should be compensated within Tim Roerig, Nada Schroer the usual provisions. Please contact [email protected]. Image Research: Marlene Rudloff Published by: Copyediting: Sternberg Press Joy Beecroft, Mandi Gomez, Caroline Schneider Supported by: Carolyn Jones Karl-Marx-Allee 78 Embassy of the United States of America D-10243 Berlin Translations: www.sternberg-press.com The Whole Earth. California and James Burton, Michael Dills, the Disappearance of the Outside James Gussen, Tim Jones, is part of the Anthropocene Project Catherine Kerkhoff-Saxon, Jeffrey Kirkwood, Wilfried Prantner, Haus der Kulturen der Welt is a division John Rayner, Colin Shepherd, of Kulturveranstaltungen des Bundes in Maria Vlotides Berlin GmbH (KBB).

Graphic Design: Haus der Kulturen der Welt Chairman of the Supervisory Board: Studio Matthias Görlich John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10 Bernd Neumann (Tobias Becker, Matthias Görlich, D-10557 Berlin Charalampos Lazos) www.hkw.de Director: Bernd M. Scherer Image Editing: Felix Dölker, Felix Scheu General Manager: Charlotte Sieben Typeface: A2 Grot10 (A2-TYPE) Haus der Kulturen der Welt is funded by:

Paper: Munken Polar Rough

Printing and Binding: Brandenburgische Universitätsdruckerei und Verlagsgesellschaft Potsdam mbH

ISBN 978-‐3-‐943 365-‐64-‐1

207 The Whole Earth Catalog Cover Collages based on the Whole Earth Catalog covers, Spring 1969, Fall 1969, and October 1974 Studio Matthias Görlich, 2013