Aerial Spatial Revolution
x:
y:

Lexicon ASR



A

Architectural Aerial Photography

Lisa Henicz

Astronoetics

Emanuel Tandler

E

Earthscape

Tommaso Morawski

F

Feminist critique(s)

Lilian Kroth

Lisa Henicz
USI/OST
[16/10/2024]




[image1] Aerial Photograph from the Hirslanden clinic. 1932, Walter Mittelholzer.

Architectural Aerial Photography


After the First World War, a coinciding of technological improvements within the fields of photography, aviation, and print media facilitated a surge in civil aerial photography. Each nation at war had invested increasing amounts in their newly instated airforces to prevent falling behind the enemies’ technological advances. With the Treaty of Versailles the hope for a lasting peace in Europe’s heterogenous nationscape diminished the immediate need for aerial reconnaissance: Military aviation lost significant funding. The British urban planner Patrick Abercrombie commented in his article “Aerial Photography and Town Planning” in 1919 that “it is to be hoped that the great talent which has been evolved […] during the war will not be lost in peace.” (Abercrombie 1919, 705) In fact, many former military pilots trained in surveillance tried to establish a civil career in aerial photography. The images taken by Swiss photographer and aeronaut Walter Mittelholzer (1894 – 1937) exemplify this international tendency.

Flights during the first decades of the 20th century were dangerous and uncomfortable adventures. Exposed to the elements and likely to crash, the experience of travelling in an airplane was still far from the mode of mass transportation we know today. Therefore, aerial photography was the most promising industry in civil aviation in the 1920s. Founded in 1919, Mittelholzer’s Company Ad Astra Aero was one of several small ventures conquering the Swiss airspace. Ad Astra Aero initially specialized in aerial photographs of villages, estates, and factories and sold them to the owners as memorabilia or advertisement. (see also Lugon 2013; Surber 2014; 2017)

Another area of use for aerial photography was the planning practice. At a time when industrialization caused most cities to break out of their historic walls and expand into the surrounding countryside, aerial photography handed urbanists the needed instrument to grasp the urban organism, whose scale had slipped out of their control. The photo taken from a plane suggested an accurate display of the life below in its entirety. However, photos taken from above implied not only objectivity and totality. The novelty of aerial photography as a technology gave aerial images themselves an air of innovation.

[image 2] State of the art x-ray machine at the clinic. 1932, unknown.



[image 3] Control room for the x-ray machine. 1932, unknown.


The Hirslanden clinic, named after its location in Zurich, was designed by Hermann Weideli, and constructed as well as mostly financed by Heinrich and Marie Hatt-Haller. In 1932, the hospital opened its doors to patients, who were to be treated under the most modern standards in the “best-equipped hospital of contemporary Europe”. ([s. n.] 1932, 29) A few weeks after the opening in May 1932, Walter Mittelholzer went on a “Photo flight”, as he noted in his diary, for “roughly 15 minutes in the evening with arch. Weideli for the hospital Neumünster”. (Agenda 1932, fond VA, signature 38247, Verkehrshaus der Schweiz, Luzern) The first published image the flight resulted in was printed as early as July 2nd in the Schweizerische Bauzeitung as part of an article on the innovative architectural project (see image 1). Apart from the hospital’s location in a large park and the importance of air and light in all patient rooms the article mostly focuses on the technological advantages the new building offers. Published in two parts, the second consists mostly of the detailed technical descriptions of the x-ray machine “the largest not only in Switzerland but generally”, the aseptic installations, and the soundproofing of pipes, elevators and all doors. ([s.n.] 1932, 22) The latter were equipped with felt inlays that mechanically pressed down when the doors were shut, avoiding the installation of thresholds and, thus, any obstacles in the path of the patients’ beds. Mittelholzer’s aerial photograph is shown together with an exterior view and an aerial plan at the beginning of the article. It is one of only four external pictures, while most of the forty images show the rooms with their technologically advanced instruments (see image 2 + 3). The aerial photograph taken from the north only shows the clinic, the street and its park but no neighboring buildings. The shadows are long and the camera facing facades well-lit in the evening sun. A truck is turning from the street onto the driveway leading to the delivery entrance.

The fact that the photograph was published almost immediately after being taken and that the architect joined Mittelholzer during the flight indicates the importance of the aerial photo for the article. Furthermore, the selection and layout of the article’s images show the strong emphasis the author put on the technological novelty. To propagate the innovation of the architectural project, Mittelholzer was hired to document the clinic from a technologically superior perspective.

All translations from German by author.

Cited Works: 

Abercrombie, Patrick. 1919. “Aerial Photography and Town Planning.” Country Life. 45 (1170): 703–5.

Lugon, Olivier. 2013. “The Aviator and the Photographer: The Case of Walter Mittelholzer.” In Seeing from Above: The Aerial View in Visual Culture, edited by Mark Dorrian and Frédéric Pousin, 147–62. London: I.B. Tauris.

[s. n.]. 1932. “Die Privatklinik Hirslanden A.-G.” Text/html,application/pdf,text/html, April. https://doi.org/10.5169/SEALS-582482.

[s.n.]. 1932. “Die ‘Privatklinik Hirslanden’ in Zürich: Architekt Hermann Weideli, Zürich (Schluss).” 

Schweizerische Bauzeitung 100 (2): 20. https://doi.org/10.5169/seals-45525.

Surber, Kaspar. 2014. “Eine Fliegende Dunkelkammer. Walter Mittelholzers ‘Afrikaflüge’ (1926-1934) 

Als Mediale Unternehmungen Um Die Gründung Der Swissair.” Lizentiatsarbeit der Philosophischen Fakultät, Zürich: Universität Zürich.

———. 2017. Walter Mittelholzer Revisited: Aus Dem Fotoarchiv von Walter Mittelholzer = From the Walter Mittelholzer Photography Archive. Vol. 6. Bilderwelten. Fotografien Aus Dem Bildarchiv Der ETH-Bibliothek. Zürich: Scheidegger & Spiess.
Emanuel Tandler
UNIFR
[17/10/2024]


Astronoetics

or Hans Blumenberg's glossary of a cosmological phenomenology of the lifeworld



  • October 4th, 1957: The invention of astronoetics after launching Sputnik 1
  • A guide to close reading Blumenberg's Die Vollzähligkeit der Sterne (1997) (The Completeness of the Stars).01
  • Relevance & extension of astronoetics for planetary thinking in the 21st century


I. «Astronoetics»: An invention in & out of its time On October 4th 1957, the first artificial ‘satellite’ – after Kepler (1611) lat. satelles or russ. sputnik for a ‘celestial body accompanying a planet’ – was launched by the Soviet Union into a lower elliptical orbit around the earth. Two days later, the American news program CBS News Special began with 18 seconds of the recorded beep signal that Sputnik 1 – with its iconic radio antennas mounted on the spherical aluminium body (Fig.1) – sent to earth. “Until two days ago”, the anchor Douglas Edwards proclaimed after this special opening jingle, “that sound had never been heard on this Earth. Suddenly, it has become as much part of 20th century life as the whirr of your vacuum cleaner.”02


Fig. 1: "WE ARE SERIOUS, BUT WITH SMILES" in: LIFE-Magazine (21.10.1957, p.24).


The anchor's comparison between Sputnik 1 and a vacuum cleaner, repeated and amplified with a variety of images and sounds in television, radio and print media, is an appropriate example of what Alfred Schütz, founder of the phenomenological sociology, called “thinking as usual” back in 1944: “This ‘thinking as usual’, as we may call it, (…) includes the "of-course" relevant to a particular social group which Robert S. Lynd describes in such a masterly way – together with their inherent contradictions and ambivalence – as the "Middletown-spirit". Thinking as usual may be maintained as long as some basic assumptions hold true, namely: that life and especially social life will continue to be the same as it has been so far, that is to say, that the same problems requiring the same solutions will recur and that, therefore, our former experiences will suffice for mastering future situation.”03 That the kind of ‘suddenness’ and ‘strangeness’ of the Sputnik 1 case could not simply be absorbed or completely dissolved in an ‘of-course’ attitude, and that even Lynd’s "Middletown-spirit" could not simply undermine the open questions, is shown in one of Hans Blumenberg’s commentaries – which he called “glosses”04 –  in his book Die Vollzähligkeit der Sterne (1997) under the heading XV. Everything as before - everything as always?: “In October 1957, one of the three largest nations in the world was crestfallen and humiliated because a tiny and meaningless device from near-Earth space was emitting beeping sounds over radio waves that no one knew for sure whether they really meant anything [...]. It was an annoying sound, multiplied by the media and in everyone's ear who could not have heard it directly. 

The consequences of this simple fact were unbelievable and remain so to this day. It was the foundation of an institution of rivalry».05  The enervating effect on Blumenberg’s ears apparently did not lead him to minimise the beeping as a usual disturbance in everyday life. On the contrary: he captured it both in the uncertainty of its lifeworld interpretation and in the ‘unbelievable’ consequence of an institutionalized geopolitical rivalry. Blumenberg specifies ‘rivalry’ as a continuation of war by other means. It becomes an arena of the proxy battle between the superpowers USA and USSR at a time when a ‘real’ battle is out of the question. According to Blumenberg, astronautics is comparable to the Olympics and other sporting events: What counts are records. It doesn't matter what the astronauts or the ‘Russian’ dog Laika do and experience up in their space capsules, the only thing that is interesting is “the durability of the stay and the clear countability of its size as duration.”06  Both Blumenberg’s concern and observation are reflected in the TIME Magazine of October 21st, 1957, with its headline – COLD WAR: The Beeper's Message – and its conclusion: “The Russians had scored heavily.”07  And the lead reads: “As Sputnik whirled serenely overhead, a startled world looked at Russia with new respect.” Remarkable is the wide variety of reactions that the TIME Magazine listed apart from those of the two superpowers: they came from Bangkok, Beirut, London, Paris, Indonesia and the non-aligned Afro-Asian nations. From Bonn they quoted the growling Chancellor of West Germany, Konrad Adenauer: “Five hundred and sixty miles is only the distance from Bonn to Vienna. It does not prove they can fire anything parallel to the earth over a distance of many thousand miles.”08  

Adenauer’s reaction not only points to the collective fear in people’s minds that the “tiny and pointless” beeping device above their heads could soon have turned into an intercontinental weapon, but also how Robert S. Lynd’s so-called "Middletown-spirit"  was nevertheless also evident in West Germany, with the attempt to break down the extraordinary dimensions to the more familiar geography of Bonn-Vienna. However, Adenauer's downsizing-strategy did not seem to present a long-term ‘as usual’ solution, as the mood of upheaval in the scientific birthplace of Hans Blumenberg's astronoetics showed. 

The “Sputnik-shock” also reached the small university town of Kiel. Wolfgang Bargmann, the President of Kiel University, brain anatomist and also Vice President of the German Research Foundation, called on his local colleagues to step up their efforts and overcome this technological “disgrace”,  what Hans Blumenberg's echoed in his very last gloss of Die Vollzähligkeit der Sterne: “The circulars were notorious in which he called for programs and grant applications, and they took on a new, more urgent tone in October 1957, when the first false comet, the beeping artificial moon called ‘Sputnik’ orbited the earth, triggering the so-called Sputnik-Schock.”09

The philosopher did not want to evade this appeal and invented with his neologism “astronoetics” a cunning response to Bargmann's slogan “Let's catch up!”. It was “the ironic answer to the question asked everywhere: “And what do we have in comparison?”.10  However, where brain physiology could attempt to obtain expensive microscopes, the philosopher was left without such tools: “Anyone who was embarrassed by the inadequacy of bare brain functions ultimately had to use them; at least to simulate the catch-up process. The author gave in to this urge and applied for an undetermined amount of funding for the purpose of exploring the dark side of the moon through pure thinking.” 11

Fig. 2: "WE ARE SERIOUS, BUT WITH SMILES". In: LIFE-magazine (21.10.1957, p.25).


The fact that the general plight called for ‘invention’ and ‘irony’, ‘false comets’ and ‘beeping artificial moons’ did not make the philosopher Blumenberg an isolated case, but another contemporary witness with wit: WE ARE SERIOUS, BUT WITH SMILES was the title of Life magazine's Sputnik reports (s. again Fig.1). Less than two weeks had passed when the magazine not only mentioned the new Sputnik cocktail, based on vodka of course, but also photographed the first “Space Fashions” for adults and children. New York’s department stores Macy’s even dressed its employees in self-designed space suits, who then presented new  “Space Toys” to the young costumers (Fig.2). In addition to a common thinking-as-usual, people also developed their very own mechanisms for appropriating the new – and in reality so distant – situation in order to render or make it tangible and thus less frightening. Blumenberg as well asks in his last gloss: «What was left for the astronauts who stayed at home? Certainly not only to make glosses, but also as cheerful compensation for the fact that this home did not want to become more cosy.»12 Guided by politics, media, science and consumerism, and furthermore supplied with the rivalry between two superpowers, the public thus crossed the threshold into a new, very real and uncomfortable dimension of collective world-space-imagination. The Historian Angela Schwarz describes this new dimension as a multi-layered “battle for the cosmos”: “The battle of ideologies, social systems, armies and technologies had been expanded to include the battlefield of ideas about the appropriation of the cosmos.” 13 

II. Thinking as astronoeticians In the midst of these battles and agitations, Blumenberg places his “wavering figure of astronoetics” in the form and style of a cheerful and polemical gloss: “Between pastoral idyll, protective pathos and the bare armouring of precise knowledge, the position of this wavering figure of astronoetics asserts or loses itself.”14   The “in-between” is decisive here and is anything but an unstable, fluctuating post-modern preposition, but rather the art of ‘noetics’ that neither falls into the gap of the supposedly precise separation of humanities and natural science like Charles P. Snow's The Two Cultures And The Scientific Revolution (1959) claimed, nor falls prey to the political or pastoral birth of a pathos of security or a humanity as an idyllic “flock of sheep”: “Our increase in knowledge and ability has had only a disproportionately small influence on our thinking: this applies not only to the weighing up of “technological assessments”, it also applies to the assessment of knowledge, which seems to have to do with more harmless things. But also does have to do with such?»15 Blumenberg “does” this by using Edmund Husserl's understanding of ‘noetics’ to subject the pros and cons of the respective harmless, metaphysical or scientific “consciousness of reason to an intuitive phenomenological investigation”.16 In doing so, he does not depart from his time, but rather simulates, scrutinises and explores its increase in knowledge with an eye for its lifeworld: Blumenberg thus succeeds, for example, in reflecting on current ‘considerations of the consequences of technology’ with a comparative leap into another time: “In 1781, William Herschel discovered Uranus. For the first time since antiquity, indeed since the astronomy of the Babylonians, the number of visible planets had been increased by a telescopic one – an almost blasphemous discovery of the first order against the canonical world order. One could again expect something from the heavens.”17 However, in the gesture of the question posed in the title’s gloss, Blumenberg immediately inserts a critical ‘assessment’ of or for the lifeworld: More planets or less pain? And the gloss continues the story, when Herschel’s Uranus news also reached the Göttingen observatory and the astronomer and writer Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, whom Blumenberg himself described as an ‘astronoetician avant la lettre’. He then quotes the following entry of Lichtenberg’s Sudelheft: “To invent an infallible remedy for toothache, which would relieve it in an instant, would probably be worth as much, and more, than discovering another planet.”18 What is shown anecdotally in nuce is an astronoetician’s pensiveness about how to proceed with “technology-assessment” through a historical step-aside-perspective: “What we call reason must be able to prove itself as a reversibility of perspective, as detachable from the contingent conditions of the starting point that we hold.”19 It is important to note that this kind of astronoetic reasoning is phenomenological, intuitive, historical, anecdotal and specially glossatorically free in opening unusual perspectives. Nevertheless, it also proceeds methodically and systematically. This is already signalled in the book’s title, which is not dedicated to the ‘infinity’ of the stars, but to their ‘completeness’. However, this method and systematic approach is not immediately recogniseable when you consider that the reader only comes across the title What is astronoetics? in the very last gloss and pages of the book. Therefore, three reading spectacles alongside examples will be provided in the following paragraph to sharpen astronoetic curiosity and support the lexical endeavor. 

1. Variations - A year and a half after Blumenberg’s death, The Completeness of the Stars was published in 1997 and comprises a collection of around 150 often very short glosses. The author himself organized them into 22 sections with titles such as V. A look back at the earth's inhabitants, VIII. Space-lust - before take-off, IX. Einstein, XII. The intensified view into space, XVII. What remains is the environment or XIX. Lunar physics etcetera. What connects the glosses and sections methodically is said in reference to Husserl's phenomenology: “Astronoetics does not consist of any science fiction, but rather of thought experiments that can be assigned to the phenomenological method of free variation (...)”.20 Quite inconspicuously and in the silence of a night-time-reading, The Completeness of the Stars begins with Two Nocturnes by Hans Carossa. And already in the second gloss with the title-giving headline, we learn what constitutes the specificality of astronoetic variations: «Carossa, as Goethe's successor, would have had the choice between excess and infiniteness [of the stars]. He brought them to the measure, to the completeness of the stars.(...) Stubbornness regardless of Goethe».21 Carossa's example – contrary to Goethe's pathos formulae – makes it clear on a small scale how Blumenberg, in the sense of the poetic function à la Roman Jakobson, always provides a rubric of meaning as a paradigm in order to vary it freely on the syntagmatic axis in the following glosses22.  Like an observational satellite, Blumenberg orbits e.g. in the rubric II. Vertical Drop Studies with a single Wittgenstein sentence - Ideas too sometimes fall from the tree before they are ripe - and varies it with glosses on Thales of Miletus, the mythological fall of Icarus, Voltaire's version of Newton's apple story or surprises at the end of the section with the gloss: Was Freud also the Newton of the soul?23 With each case and “falling”, the horizon and angle of view varies; with each new shot, something becomes sharper or gains in contrast. As a further example, in the rubric VI. Under the moon with the gloss The moon as a poetic phenomenon, Blumenberg states in comparison to the ‘despotic sun’ pointedly and pragmatically: “So we need neither moon creams nor moonglasses.”24 

2. Thought experiments – Without being noticed by Gagarin, Armstrong and their colleagues, Blumenberg maintained his ground station for over three decades – well beyond the long decade of space travel from the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1958 to the moon landing of Apollo 11 in 1969. As a newspaper reader, television viewer and radio listener, he logged and archived the ‘mixed messages’ of the news agencies on The Space Race and used their data for his thought experiments. These experiments are anything but unrealistic or limited to the latest NASA reports. Blumenberg's astronoetic explorations are always a Socratic means for him to reflect on the relationships in the lifeworld above the stars and among the stars. 

Fig. 3: "SPACESHIP EARTH”- Epcot-Park (Florida). In: Sarasota Herlad-Tribune (1982).


In his mind’s eye, he entered e.g. the geodesic dome (Fig. 3) of the Spaceship Earth at Walt Disney’s Park ‘Magic Kingdom’ (Florida) and got involved in its entertainment value: “The center and signature of this social artefact is a huge sphere flashing with aluminum scales, which, according to the concept and will of its designers, is intended to symbolize the earth as a spaceship. Within this sphere, a railway travels through the history of humanity into its future within a quarter of an hour.”25 On the one hand, Blumenberg acknowledges that every great event in human history, such as the moon landing, has its own entertainment value and recognises the necessary relief from reality in his technical simulation in the amusement park; on the other hand he also analyses its price in the next paragraph: “Spaceship Earth is a slander. Earth is the very place where all spaceships return to, unless they are mere robots or probes. Earth is the opposite of a spaceship. It is the zero point of all coordinate systems in which conscious space journeys can move. The sensation of Florida, to see the earth itself from the outside, as it were, is bought with the falsification of its ground function.”26 

3. Leitmotif - What Blumenberg corrects here with Earth as the “zero-point” can be understood as an astronoetical continuation of Husserl’s manuscript series, which are usually named with the short title The earth does not move (1934). ( Husserl's unmoving and flying ark). Although the earth can be understood metaphorically as a ship and since Copernicus and Galileo, theoretically and telescopically as a moving body, for our consciousness and our intuition of movement and orientation, the general rotation of the earth remains an “ark”, that does not move: “The earth itself in its original conceptual form does not move and does not rest; only in relation to it do rest and movement have meaning.”27 The sense of orientation therefore only comes into play when we perceive the earth as a necessarily motionless ‘ground’. Using Husserl’s second dominant metaphor of the ‘horizon’, this means: “I can always continue to walk on my ground and experience its physical being in a certain way ever more fully; it has its horizon in the fact that I can walk on it and experience more and more of it and everything that is on it.”28 In simple words: We experience the earth as ground and not as a rotating celestial body, and we explore it at every turn with a view towards a horizon. In Blumenberg’s words: “All of man's adventures around the world presuppose that he can stand on a piece of solid ground again and again at some point.”29 From this common fixed point, Blumenberg's astronoetics can be interpreted on the one hand as an adaptation of Husserl's geocentric-cosmological phenomenology, and on the other hand as their further development with new reference points as set by The Space Race in the 20th century. “One can say,” as Alberto Fragio Gistau describes Husserl's life-world phenomenology through Blumenberg's cosmological lense, “that the first man on the moon and the accompanying change in the ground of experience was not just a small step for man, but a giant leap for the phenomenology of the lifeworld.”30 The moon landing was an effective crossing of the terrestrial ‘lifeworld-threshold’, and not a telescopic one: “However, it was one thing to observe the moon through a telescope and quite another to walk on its surface. The central question now revolved around the historical transformation of the terrestrial lifeworld of the contemplator caeli into the lunar lifeworld of the astronaut, which involved not only a factual expansion or extension of the human lifeworld, but a real transfiguration of the sense of the earth».31 Although Blumenberg often commented sarcastically on astronautical journeys to the stars because of their disproportion between travelling time and living time, between physical exertion and gaining knowledge, his art and the leitmotif of astronoetics consists in making visible the lines of conflict between the familiar horizon of lifeworld-experience and the new view of the Earth on the lunar horizon; in order to gain the advantages and disadvantages for the former – as an assessment for the lifeworld – in a astronoetic way. 

III. Astronoetics in the future In short, one could conclude that Blumenberg's astronoetics has left us a cosmological phenomenology of the lifeworld of and for the 21st century. The Completeness of the Stars is a treasure trove of glosses that establish points of view that need to be scrutinized and rewritten for current and future, horizontal and vertical points of references and perspectives. 

Fig. 4: Cambodia-Landsat-image from 1995 and 2009 before & after the floods.


We are currently witnessing patterns of human use of the earth that are bringing about a transformation of the earth system that is no longer merely ecological, but geological: they are short-circuiting and changing the condition of the planet. At the same time, earth-spanning systems of data aggregation and calculation enable researchers to track these changes in simulated real time and thus put “planetarity” on our (mental) map (s. Fig.4)32. The architect couple Eyal and Ines Weizman e.g. use before & after satellite-images to show how cleared forests, contaminated areas and melting icebergs are the consequences of overexploitation, war and climate change. What is missing in these images from a vertical perspective from above are two things: on the one hand, the event itself, and on the other, the story behind it: “Such a spatial observation attempts to fill the gap between the images by means of a narrative - but this is neither simple nor clear.”33 A gap and a problem – as Blumenberg glosses aside on The World Second of an event in general – that has long accompanied the vertical perspective: “The epic form of movement is horizontal. All can be reached by all on paths, even if they are sea or air routes. Even when the hero goes to the underworld, he does not overcome the distance by falling or on a rope. Jesus can only be told about when he is wandering (...). That is why the Ascension, as the vertical final event, falls outside all frames of narratability.”34

With their publication Thinking planets, the authors Armen Avanessian and Daniel Felb aim to shed new light on this kind of narrative difficulties with an astrobiologically informed theory that grasps Earth just as one data point in an almost infinite series of planets and planetary histories. For them, astrobiology makes it even possible to temporalize the transition of an unmoved earthly “ark”: “We think we could be in the beginning stages of a so-called Transition 9. 

By that we mean another Major Evolutionary Transition as theorized by biologists John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry, describing how evolution over time adds new mechanisms and agencies to its toolbox, from multicellularity to social insects to human language.”35 Common model representations of planets, which are placed next to each other like differently colored glass spheres, convey a reductive and inanimate planetary image. The same applies to Google Earth, which confuses the Earth with a digitally assembled patchwork of present-day snapshots of a fully mapped and static globe: “To astrobiologically informed eyes, planets appear less as inert lumps of matter or as snapshots, but rather as time sequences and time figures.”36 Astrobiology becomes the “ultimate horizon” for them (s. Fig.5). 

Fig. 5: Image generated by Daniel Falb using DALL-E with the prompt “A number of radically different Earths that have succeeded each other in time.” (25 Sept. 2024)


Instead of always looking at the one story of one Earth, this theoretical horizon operates with serialization and simultaneity of stories of the Earth-Planet: “Instead, we are fascinated by the space of all possible histories of the Earth: we love the planetary model. It is what we want, and in a sense we are much more willing to inhabit this model space than the abyss of the one sequence of events that took place. In this way, astrobiology gives us quality of life.”37 

Hans Blumenberg would not be a spoiler of such efforts to integrate theory into that kind of informed lifeworld, but he points out: “The theory of the lifeworld is always also one of the shallow penetration of theory into its consciousness.”38 And he does this by pointing out that it is no coincidence that language in general and specifically Kant and Husserl do not provide us with a plural in relation to reason or the singular of lifeworld. Meanwhile, the two authors would like to believe in the philosophy of Benjamin Bratton's planetary scale computed “sapience" and quote him as follows: “You would see something unusual: the sprouting of clouds of satellites, and the wrapping of the land and seas wires made of metal and glass. You would see the sudden appearance of an intricate artificial planetary crust capable of tremendous feats of communication and calculation, enabling planetary self-awareness – indeed, planetary sapience.”39  In terms of profile, Blumenberg would probably weigh up the pros and cons of such “planetary sapience” in two ways: Both with a gloss for An Academy for Processing the Disappointments of Reason40  and a sober plea for “pensiveness”. “The Academy” would ask questions like: What can we hope for and think when knowledge no longer fulfills our demands for meaning? What happens when a planetary event itself no longer occurs and mediated with an 18-seconds recorded beep-signal? When a tremendous planetary event transcends the concepts of understanding and develops technically, gradually and continuously unnoticed? How can space in general and lifeworldly be grasped when earth appears as a technological matter with a planetary scale? Altough as a measurable thing, but no longer as easy manageable and stowable like a vacuum cleaner? 

The world does not want to become more comfortable at home, Blumenberg said at the end of The Completeness of the Stars, and added the sober plea in his speech for the Sigmund Freud Prize in 1980: “Pensiveness means: not everything remains as self-evident as it was. That is all.”41 In a free variation, astronoeticians would add from a cosmological point of view: That's almost everything – and add in a nuanced, but also confident manner of an astronoetica activa – or not everything yet.

Notes

  1. All English translations of the following German sources are by the author (ET).
  2. Watch the recording of the CBS News Special broadcast on: https://tinyurl.com/yyqk6b6b (last seen on October 13th 2024)
  3. Schütz (1944), p. 502.
  4. According to OxfordLanguages a “short [polemical] commen-tary (in the press, radio or television) on current events or problems”.
  5. Blumenberg (2011), p. 414.
  6. Ibid. p. 414. 
  7. Time-Magazine (1957), p. 28. 
  8. Ibid. p. 28. 
  9. Blumenberg (2011), p. 547. 
  10. Ibid. p. 548. 
  11. Ibid. p. 548. 
  12. Ibid. p. 549.
  13. Schwarz (2009), p. 55.
  14. Blumenberg (2011), p. 548.
  15. Ibid. p. 549.
  16. Cf. Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Bd. 6, Basel 1984. Section 874.
  17.  Ibid. p. 188.
  18. Ibid. p. 188.
  19. Ibid. p. 321. 
  20. Ibid. 321.
  21. Ibid. p. 18f.
  22. Jakobson (1979), p. 94.
  23. Cf. all the “drop”-glosses in Blumenberg (2011) p. 42-76.
  24. Ibid. p. 177.
  25. Ibid. p. 538.
  26. Ibid. p. 539.
  27. Husserl (1940), p. 312. 
  28. Ibid. p. 312
  29. Blumenberg (2011), p. 482.
  30. Fragio Gistau (2023) p. 114. 
  31. Ibid. p. 115. 
  32. Cf. Weizman & Weizman (2024), p. 36: "The third major wave of destruction in Cambodia is a direct result of climate change. Recent studies of Landsat-images show that the Khmer Rouge's irrigation system is not only functional, but has also been steadi-ly expanded. Thanks to these developments, supported by the World Bank and other international organisations, agricultural yields and self-sufficiency in Cambodia have increased.” Ibid.
  33. Weizman&Weizman (2024), p. 8. 
  34. Blumenberg (2011), p.34. 
  35. Cf. the interview with  Daniel Falb, one of the authours of Thinking Planets, including the reference and ideas to the image (Fig.5): https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/interview-philosophy-of-nature-40 (last seen: 14 October 2024) 
  36. Avanessian & Falb 2024, p. 40. 
  37. Avanessian & Falb 2024, p. 43. 
  38. Blumenberg (2011), p.482.
  39. Avanessian & Falb 2024. p. 17. 
  40. Blumenberg (2011), p.501–504. 
  41. Blumenberg (1981), p. 61.

Bibliography

Avannessian, Armen & Falb, Daniel (2024): Planeten Denken. Leipzig: Merve Verlag.

Blumenberg Hans (1981) “Nachdenklichkeit”. Dankrede. In: Jahrbuch der Deutschen Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung (II/1980). Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, pp. 57–61.

Blumenberg, Hans (2011): Die Vollzähligkeit der Sterne. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Fragio Gistau, Alberto (2023): Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie des Kosmos. Baden-Baden: Karl-Alber-Verlag.

Husserl, Edmund (1940): Grundlegende Untersuchun-gen zum phänomenologischen Ursprung der Räumlich-keit der Natur. In: Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl, hrsg. von Marvin Farber. Harvard Uni-versity Press: Cambridge, Mass., pp. 307-326.

Jakobson, Roman (1979): Poetik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Schuetz, Alfred (1944): The Stranger: An Essay in Social Psychology. In: American Journal of Sociology. May 1944, Vol. 49, No. 6, pp. 499- 507.

Schwarz, Angela (2009): Das Tor in eine neue Dimensi-on? Sputnik, Schock und die Popularität der Naturwis-senschaften. In: Die Spur des Sputnik. Kulturhistorische Expeditionen ins kosmische Zeitalter, hrsg. v. Igor J. Polianski und Matthias Schwartz. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, pp. 31–55.

Snow, C.P. (1961): The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press.

Weizman, Eyal & Ines (2024): Vorher und Nachher. Die Architektur der Katastrophe. Zürich: Diaphanes.

Further readings

Meyer, Martin F. (1999): HANS BLUMENBERG: Die Voll-zähligkeit der Sterne. In: Philosophischer Literaturanzei-ger, 52(2). Meisenheim: pp. 120–125.

Zill, Rüdiger (2009): “Die Erforschung der Rückseite des Mondes durch reines Denken: Technikphilosophie zwi-schen Sputnik 1 und Apollo 11” In: Die Spur des Sputnik. Kulturhistorische Expeditionen ins kosmische Zeitalter, hg. v. Igor J. Polianski und Matthias Schwartz. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, pp. 332–349.

Zill, Rüdiger (2011): “Zu den Sternen und zurück. Die Entstehung des Weltalls als Erfahrungsraum und die Inversion des menschlichen Erwartungshorizonts” In: Michael Moxter (Hrsg,): Erinnerung an das Humane. Beiträge zur phänomenologischen Anthropologie Hans Blumenbergs. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, pp. 300–326.
Tommaso Morawski
SUPSI
[05/08/2024]




Earthscape



The Blue Marble, Apollo 17, 7 December 1972
 Today, it has become commonplace for us, almost a matter of course, to see the Earth represented in a photograph. It is therefore hard to imagine how shocking it was, on a psychological and perceptual level, when, in the 1960s, for the first time in the history of our species, humans saw a representation of their planet from space (Morawski, Vegetti). Having now become accustomed to the ubiquity of the extraterrestrial gaze, we take its recent novelty for granted and fail to appreciate the revolutionary impact of that first “ecumenical disorientation” (Boatto 2013, p. 25). An event that literally pulled the earth out from under our feet and returned it to us as an image. At the very moment when humanity was able to enjoy the view of the Earth from ‘outside’ –  from a real and no longer merely theoretical or fantastic exteriority (as had been the case for philosophers, scientists and men of letters such as Cicero, Kepler, Votlaire and Alexander von Humboldt) – new ‘worldviews’ emerged, with profound asthetic, political, metaphysical and moral implications. The intuition of the Earth as a cosmic object made it possible to experience a previously unprecedented sense of distance and estrangement from our living spaces. This scopic experience had a strong existential value, redefining the coordinates through which the phenomenological reality of the Earth was experienced, imagined, and practised.

Until the first photographs of the Earth were taken from space, humanity had to rely on imagination alone (Cosgrove 2001): however high one climbed, to the top of a mountain, a tower or a belfry, the unity of the globe remained inaccessible from its surface, and to represent it required an act of imagination. We thought geo-graphy as we saw it on maps and could not free our minds from this cartographic drawing (Turri 1998). However, these were often allegories of power with a predominantly decorative function; or, in any case, they were representations that, like milk, have an expiration date (Monmonier 1991, p. 56). Instead, since space travel is no longer a mere fantasy, even though none of us has ever been in space, we feel that we know what the Earth really looks like, that we have a true, no longer distorted view of its geography. And this is so, because when we think of the Earth we now imagine it as a function of the visual products of space travel.

Two photographs in particular have come to exemplify a veritable ‘visiotype’ (Grevsmühl, 2019) of our planetary imagination, forming a kind of ‘optical unconscious’ (Benjamin, 1972) that is shared by the whole of humanity: Earthrise (1968) and The Blue Marble (1972) (Poole 2008). The former depicts the planet rising against the backdrop of the arid lunar soil, thereby bearing witness to the epiphany of humankind’s inaugural encounter with the Earth as a cosmic object. In a word: its discovery (Morawski 2023). The second photograph, taken in December 1972 by Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison (Jack) Schmitt, depicts the totality of the Earth, suspended in space. To this day, it is considered to be the most widely used photograph in the history of mankind; but above all, it is the one that definitively sanctioned the entry of the Earth into the mirror stage, contributing to the objectification of our image of the world, which thus obtained a cognitive proof that had never existed before.

Earthrise and The Blue Marble are two symbols of our time, two icons of the cosmonautical enterprise that have been instrumental in the creation of a complex planetary visual grammar and the sanctioning of the birth of a new landscape consciousness of the cosmos. Yet today they are so natural and obvious that the operations and discourses that produced them and inscribed them in the Western collective imagination have become transparent and invisible. Tracing their genesis is a way of interrogating the operation of “landscaping” (Mitchell 1994) out of which the new astronautical worldview was born: that ‘altered image of the Earth’ (Cosgrove 2001, p. 257) which is the most important and enduring legacy of the ‘astronautical spatial revolution’, the last great global spatial revolution in the air age (Vegetti 2022). As Steward Brand, the founder of one of the most significant magazines of the American counterculture, The Whole Earth Catalogue, renowned for initiating the campaign Why Haven't We Seen a Photograph of the Whole Earth Yet?, summarizes: “The photograph of the whole earth from space helped to generate a lot of behavior – the ecology movement, the sense of global politics, the rise of the global economy, and so on. I think all of those phenomena were, in some sense, given permission to occur by the photograph of the earth from space” (Brand 2008).


Cited Works:

Anders W., 50 Years After «Earthrise», a Christmas Eve Message from Its Photographer, URL: https://www.space.com/42848-earthrise-photo-apollo-8-legacy-bill-anders.html

Benjamin W., A Short History of Photography, trans. S. Mitchell, “Screen”, 13/1 (1972), pp. 5-26.

Boatto A., Lo sguardo dal di fuori, Castelvecchi, Roma 2013.

Brand S., Photography Changes Our Relationship to Our Planet, .Smithsonian Photography Initiative, 2008, URL: https://web.archive.org/web/20080530221651/http://click.si.edu/Story.aspx?story=31

Cosgrove D., Apollo’s Eye. A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore-London 2001.

Grevsmühl S., Planet Earth Seen From Space: A Very Brief Visual History, “Contemporânea - revista de sociologia da UFSCar”, 9/1 (2019), pp. 37-53.

Mitchell W.J.T., Landscape and Power, University of Chicago Press, Chicago-London 1994.

Morawski T., La Terra digitale: sulla Terra come medium, in T. Morawski, M. Vegetti (Eds.), Earthscapes. Le conseguenze della visione della Terra dallo spazio, Donzelli, Roma 2023, pp. 75-88.

Poole R., Earthrise. How Man First Saw the Earth, Yale University Press, New Haven-London 2008.

Turri E., Il paesaggio come territorio. Dal territorio vissuto al territorio rappresentato, Marsilio, Venezia 1998.

Vegetti M., L’ultima rivoluzione spaziale globale. Il mondo nell’epoca delle imprese cosmonautiche, “Thaumazein”, 10/2 (2022), pp. 295-314.
Lilian Kroth
UNIFR
[22/11/2024]


Still from Satellite Séance, 2020; Video by open-weather in collaboration with Matthew Philips, Hanna Rullmann and Jol Thoms.  See more

Feminist critique(s)

and the View from Above




Looking from above and gazing from afar has historically been entangled with a distancing moment, which feminist critique has a lot to say about. As it turns out, though, since earlier developments of satellite vision up until now, this relationship between feminist critique and remote sensing is both a field of different positions and has gone through some significant conceptual shifts. The role of ‘distance’ has been reassessed within the field of feminist critique of remote sensing, with the result that especially over the last three decades, it has been put into question what it means to ‘critical’ towards as well as with remote sensing from a feminist point of view. 01

In the 1990s, one significant line of critique has scrutinized masculinist and positivist underpinnings as a general and indispensable part of Remote Sensing and GIS.02 The extreme distance of their perspective made the satellite’s perspective the masculinist gaze per se. Some positions in the 1990s (with notable theoretical borrowings from post-Heideggerian as well as eco-feminist thought) have stressed that through whole Earth imagery we would arrive at managerial, controlling, and detached views of the planet03, at times resembling a voyeuristic view.04 This would result in nothing but a “distancing flavor”. 05

From there on, it is striking that within three decades, the role of distance seems to have obtained a different ‘flavor’ – in fact, one that is to a certain degree more in line with feminist critiques. A multiplicity of factors play into this: the explicit critique of feminist critiques of GIS and RS around the 2000s, or, the question of critique between epistemology and practice-orientation; the impact of feminism in geography and discourses on fieldwork; the rising interest of feminist critiques in technology; as well as the imbrication of remote technologies in our everyday lives and their massive use in detecting environmental and humanitarian crises. In these widely ranging factors, the role of distance has (also) been rendered productive for feminist concerns. Researchers see problematics of masculinism also in the context of unquestioned access (to the field) and re-evaluate physical distance in its productive relationship to access and care.

Feminist approaches to remote sensing increasingly undermine an assumed division of labor between masculine knowing-from-distance and feminine caring-in-proximity.06 How criticism of remote sensing and GIS has been integrated into its practices is particularly visible in feminist data visualization in GIS;07 critical mapping practices that experiment with ‘feminist ways of looking’, alternative geographies, and DIY tools;08 in mapped relationships between, for example, gender, employment, and childcare availabilities;09 or numerous other co-developments of gender identity and embodiment in the uses of digital geographies.10 Especially after the 2000s, feminist critiques show that geographical distance is not the only, and at times not the decisive factor when it comes to care(-lessness) from both near and far.11 Feminist critique has notably reappropriated the concept of distance, and technologically mediated remote sensing has become an increasing factor through which feminist concerns can be approached.

For further reading, see:
Kroth, Lilian. ‘Remote Sensing and Feminist Critique: Reappropriations of Sensing across Distance’. Environment and Planning F (2024), pre-print online. 
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/26349825241283838.

Notes on the image:
Still from Satellite Séance, 2020; Video by open-weather in collaboration with Matthew Philips, Hanna Rullmann and Jol Thoms. Description of open-weather, see the project’s website: “Open-weather is a feminist experiment in imaging and imagining the earth and its weather systems using DIY tools. We weave speculative storytelling with low cost hardware and open-source software to transform our relations to a planet in climate crisis.” Imagery such as that of projects like open-weather cover integrate satellite technologies and feminist fieldwork methodologies, especially when they ‘plug in’ (in this case, NOAA-19 weather satellite). The image/ film still captures the imbrication of satellite imagery and ‘grounding’ remote data in a form of juxtaposition, while maintaining an openness to imaginative and interpretive aspects (of distance).

Notes

  1. Lilian Kroth, ‘Remote Sensing and Feminist Critique: Reappropriations of Sensing across Distance’, Environment and Planning F (2024) pre-print online, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/26349825241283838.
  2. Susan M. Roberts and Richard H. Schein, ‘Earth Shattering: Global Imagery and GIS’, in Ground Truth: The Social Implications of Geographic Information Systems, ed. John Pickles (New York, London: Guilford Press, 1995), 171–95; Michael R. Curry, ‘Geographic Information Systems and the Inevitability of Ethical Inconsistency’, in Ground Truth: The Social Implications of Geographic Information Systems, ed. John Pickles (New York, London: Guilford Press, 1995), 68–87; Yaakov Jerome Garb, ‘Perspective or Escape? Ecofeminist Musings of Contemporary Earth Imagery’, in Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, ed. Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein (Sierra Club Books, 1990), 264–78; L. Bondi and M. Domosh, ‘Other Figures in Other Places: On Feminism, Postmodernism and Geography’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 10, no. 2 (1992): 199–213, https://doi.org/10.1068/d100199.
  3. Roberts and Schein, ‘Earth Shattering: Global Imagery and GIS’, 183.
  4. Roberts and Schein, 189.
  5. Garb, ‘Perspective or Escape? Ecofeminist Musings of Contemporary Earth Imagery’, 266–67.
  6. Karen T. Litfin, ‘The Gendered Eye in the Sky: A Feminist Perspective on Earth Observation Satellites’, Frontiers (Boulder) 18, no. 2 (1997): 26–47, https://doi.org/10.2307/3346964.
  7. Mei-Po Kwan, ‘Feminist Visualization: Re-Envisioning GIS as a Method in Feminist Geographic Research’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 92, no. 4 (2002): 645–61, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8306.00309; LaDona Knigge and Meghan Cope, ‘Grounded Visualization: Integrating the Analysis of Qualitative and Quantitative Data through Grounded Theory and Visualization’, Environment and Planning. A 38, no. 11 (2006): 2021–37, https://doi.org/10.1068/a37327.
  8. Sasha Engelmann et al., ‘Open-Weather: Speculative-Feminist Propositions for Planetary Images in an Era of Climate Crisis’, Geoforum 137 (2022): 237–47.
  9. Marianna Pavlovskaya and Kevin St Martin, ‘Feminism and Geographic Information Systems: From a Missing Object to a Mapping Subject: Feminism and Geographic Information Systems’, Geography Compass 1, no. 3 (2007): 583–606, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2007.00028.x; Gillian Rose, ‘“Everyone’s Cuddled up and It Just Looks Really Nice”: An Emotional Geography of Some Mums and Their Family Photos’, Social & Cultural Geography 5, no. 4 (2004): 549–64, https://doi.org/10.1080/1464936042000317695.
  10. Sarah Elwood and Agnieszka Leszczynski, ‘Feminist Digital Geographies’, Gender, Place & Culture 25, no. 5 (2018): 629–44, https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2018.1465396; Agnieszka Leszczynski and Sarah Elwood, ‘Feminist Geographies of New Spatial Media’, Canadian Geographies / Géographies Canadiennes 59, no. 1 (2015): 12–28, https://doi.org/10.1111/cag.12093; Monica Stephens, ‘Gender and the GeoWeb: Divisions in the Production of User-Generated Cartographic Information’, GeoJournal 78, no. 6 (2013): 981–96.
  11. Nadine Schuurman, ‘Women and Technology in Geography: A Cyborg Manifesto for GIS’, Canadian Geographer 46, no. 3 (2002): 261–62, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1541-0064.2002.tb00748.x.








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