We are happy to invite you to our 2nd talk of the Vienna STS Talk Series in 2024W:
FutureSpace Talk by David Valentine
10.10.2024 16:00 - 17:00
We are thrilled to announce David Valentine's Talk on 10th October 2024, 4:00 pm
When You Look at Earthrise, You Are Seeing the Wrong Thing (Or: An Autobiography of Earth)
You can register for the talk here
Abstract
Since the photograph Earthrise was taken — specifically, by NASA astronaut Bill Anders during Apollo 8's fourth lunar orbit on (the Earth equivalent of) December 24th, 1968 CE at 16:39:39.3
UTC— it has been analyzed exhaustively to reveal a broad range of general, universalizing, and uncompromising claims about Earth, humanness, and the future. These claims, however, are also often orthogonal to one another or even contradictory. (Here are
a few: Earthrise shows a fragile biosphere endangered by human excess... or it demonstrates that human technological ingenuity can solve terrestrial problems with outer space resources... or it masks a militarized, nationalist project as a moment of sublime
transcendence... or it shows that humanity is ready to leave Earth’s cradle and spread life elsewhere in the cosmos....) This paper’s concern, however, is not with these analyses nor with their contradictions, but rather with the curious fact of their common
generality and universality despite the spatiotemporal precision and specificity of Earthrise’s provenance.
In this paper, I continue my ongoing project of thinking humanness from elsewhere in the cosmos to argue that Earth’s fundamental conditions (its gravity, active core, radiation profile, magnetosphere,
atmospheric chemistry, solar distance, and more) can sustain multiple—and even contradictory—generalized spatiotemporal analyses of the world, humanness, and the future without the specific autobiography of any individual terrestrial analyst of Earthrise being
of relevance. Indeed, I will argue that Earthrise produces the aesthetic and embodied effect, for terrestrial viewers, of looking at Earth as if you were looking at it from Earth by obscuring the specific autobiographical moment of space-based viewing; the
specific human-nonhuman assemblages and the simultaneous precision and compromise demanded by the always-contingent conditions of such viewing; and their radical non-equivalence to terrestrial spatiotemporal conditions. To put it another way: Any specific
Terran could write an uncompromising and general autobiography of Earth without consequence to the whole world, a possibility that cannot be extended beyond its surface where the specificity of any act can be generally and immediately consequential. I will
conclude by arguing that in looking at Earthrise from elsewhere in the cosmos, a non-Terran you would see not a general view of Earth, but rather, a specific example of how terrestrial humans are privileged to look at themselves in the multiple, contradictory,
and uncompromising ways that their home world still sustains.
Biography
David Valentine is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.
Organiser
FutureSpace (ERC Starting Grant Project), Department of Science and Technology Studies
Location
online via
zoom
Best wishes,
Katrin Hackl
__________
Mag. Katrin Hackl
Drittmittelreferentin
Department of Science and Technology Studies
University of Vienna
Universitätsstraße 7 /II/ 6th floor (NIG)
1010 Vienna / Austria
Tel.: 0043-1-4277-49607