The Whole Earth California and the Disappearance of the Outside
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The Whole Earth The Whole California and the Disappearance of the Outside the Disappearance of the and California 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 emu lating 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.