Paper presented to the New York University Department of Media,Culture, and Communication, April 10, 2014

COSMIC OPEN SOURCERY: ANXIOUS THOUGHTS ON ARTIFACTS OF FALSSE WITNESS AND THE

HYPERMEDIACY EFFECT

Debbora Battagliadbattagl@mtholyoke.edu

Today, I’ll be turning my attention to open sourced anxieties of fast futuring and accelerated worlding as a socioaesthetic issue – drawing on a paper that I presented at a recent American Anthropological Association session titled Open Sourcery by the ever-creative Susan Lepselter, and on an earlier E-Flux journal paper. The question that concerns me today is: Where might we look for a productive response to what I think of as “the open source effect” in our experimental searches for peace of mind andpeace on Earth and off Earth, in the contemporary Anthropocenic moment? For the purpose, I take my cue from misbehaving things from outer space nature and culture, and what these might tell usabout themselves in relation to ourselves as “digital natives”1of our various mediaspheres.

Backstory

In the Summer of 2011, my interest in the anthropology and cosmopolitics of science and technology brought me in mysterious ways to the Czech Republic, where I participated as an invited “observer” in an international conference to devise terms of reference for an International Code of Conduct for the Peaceful 1 The term is from Mark Pensky’s (2001) study of students born into the digital age, but I apply it here in reference to those “born again” into hypermediated moments and relations.

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Uses of Outer Space. By midway through the conference it was apparent that the urgent problem of the day was the massive amounts of debris in outer space, and the threat this representedof an accelerating rate of risk to life as we know it on planet Earth, to scientific research and extraterritorial diplomacy, andperhaps most importantly, to telecommunications capacities “on the ground.”

Haunting the conference hall were two event icons. One was targeted destruction, and the other accidental destruction of spacecraft and satellites on Low Earth Orbit.

Standing in for the first category, the targeted destruction of objects in space, was “The Chinese” – shorthand for the action, in 2007, of the Chinese military shooting down one of its own satellites in a region of space occupied by U.S. spy satellites and space-based missile defense systems. The U.S. response almostexactly one year later of shooting down one of its own satellites, SA-193, supposedly heading towards Earth filled with toxic fuel, raised the specter of an international arms race in space, and inspired worldwide protest2.

2 http://www.boston.com/news/world/asia/articles/2007/01/19/china_s

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In the category of accidental destruction in space was “Iridium” – a reference to a U.S.-built communications satellite that was demolished when a spent Russian Cosmos 255 slipped out of orbit and collided with it over Siberia, in 2009.3 This is the scenariothat inspired the dramatic possibilities of the blockbuster movieGravity – no special effects team required.

In the case of the Chinese missile, the impact spalled off more than 150,000 debris pieces larger than 1 cm. – so, trackable, andcapable of creating yet more debris. The American debris cloud matched this.

hoots_down_satellite_drawing_protests_worldwide/

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23265613/ns/technology_and_science-space/t/navy-says-missile-smashed-wayward-satellite/#.Tx3P8G_OXzE

3 http://www.space.com/5542-satellite-destroyed-space-collision.html

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So all in all, we are talking about some hundreds of thousands oftrackable bits, not to mention self-forming globules of toxic fuel, along with radioactive materials already orbiting from diverse sources which include machines disabled by natural objects such as meteorites, stuff discarded by inhabited spacecraft, and debris that had moved from the space graveyard orbital zone into lower altitudes by lunar perturbations, radiation pressure, atmospheric drag, and computer failure. And like booster rockets and other fragments from launches both successful and failed, all this can free-fall to Earth as “space junk.”

Here is what one small fleck of paint did to Challenger’s front window, on STS-7:

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But it was “The Chinese” and “Iridium” that were buzzed around incoffee breaks in Prague by experts who needn’t have mentioned them, but always seemed to need to. Since that time, the issues have continued to occupy space policy conferences and workshops, as well as government documents such as the European Space PolicyInstitute’s Report 44, titled “Space Crisis Management: Europe’s Response” (March 2013), which focuses entirely on global crisis scenarios precipitated by debris blindsides.

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What interests me in both these scenarios is the element of cosmically co-produced and accelerated exo-surprise, as I have termed it, and the epistemic power of surprise more generally-speaking to fuel imagination for slowing down open-sourced blindsides of objects, material or conceptual. As I first began thinking about this matter I was inclined to take the space-bornedebris field as an iconic event-site of and for living in the Anthropocene – something akin to other “black hole ontologies” (forthcoming, Antunes-Almeida and Battaglia). But this function forecloses the open-sourcery of imagination and discovery and effectively reduces difference to sameness. More interesting in my view is to move to slow motion technologies and operations (Haraway addresses these for a post-cyborgic age; Shlovsky for any age) which can resist accelerationist politics and poetics, in hypermediated times. Doing so begins with understanding the embrace by accelerationism as (not good) politics, and (an interesting) aesthetic.

Listen to Jean Moreno’s fine summation of accelerationist politics, voicing Benjamin Noys’ Persistence of the Negative (2010):

Embracing capitalism’s penchant for always undoing more and more in its quest for self-perpetuation and growth, for treating any blockage as an incentive to crank up its rhythms, accelerationism experiments with the possibility ofspeeding up and intensifying capitalist relations and ways of living, exacerbating its dissolutions and its velocities,until something breaks. Accelerationism aims to rev up crisis and render it unsustainable, to pipe even more energyinto processes of social fracture, to exacerbate the fragmentation of experience, and to intensify sensorial overload and subjective dispersal in order to drive masochistically toward an incompatibility between capitalismand forms of excess it can’t accommodate (2012).

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While such a position is not, she concedes in tandem with film theorist Steven Shaviro, a workable politics, it might found an aesthetic force to be reckoned with – a technology for bearing witnessing to otherwise unimaginable or worse, habitually naturalized, outcomes of run-amok capitalist extraction. One can produce, for example, art work excessive for the sake of excess, the better to bear witness to economies of the contemporary moment.

Interesting things happen when we translate this tactical orientation to the extreme environment of outer space. For one thing, the effect that accelerationism aims for is already a given there; the work of extreme velocity has been taken up by the disinterested force fields and entities of space nature - space as itself, as I have elsewhere termed it (Battaglia 2012) – threatening in consequence the collapse of global communications and other infrastructures. The implication is that if anything, the purview of accelerationism is not extreme enough: centrally, it has not given voice or any degree of agency to nonhuman actants, and the question is why not – especially given the Anthropocenic realities we are already living with and through.

Here, I want to consider how mainstream media aesthetics normalize what Deleuze terms “control society” performativity through images of the depersonalized alien threat of space debris; how as “parallel narratives” (Peter Sloterdijk’s terms) such images are capable of shattering under-control futures in intimate spaces that don’t see them coming. Distinct from government-generated cold war narratives of fear control which, as Masco (2008) argues brilliantly, persist as present day extreme weather disaster management and government-sponsored response planes, space junk imaging trades specifically on the velocity of exo-surprise and the uncontrollability of space nature -

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displacing to the cosmos accountability for earthlings’ failings.Represented as co-productions of nature and technoculture which exceed terrestrial limits at the start, which is to say they can appear as at the start transcendent forces relative to social conflict on Earth (cf. Arno 2009), space junk materializes a claim for blindsiding at speed, as is culturally natural to socialities hypermediated (Noys 2010), and habituated to crisis. It is this view that urgently requires counternarratives.

Where Space Junk is Concerned, Nobody Likes Surprises

Not long ago, as I was clicking through the stations of the television in my study, I caught the tail-end of an ad on the SyFy Channel which brought my channel surfing to a halt and made me laugh. It showed a space capsule crashing through the ceilingof a university classroom into a gigantic jack-in-the-box, startling some student insurance agents as their Farmers Insurance professor stood by, unphased. “Obscure space junk falling from the sky? We cover that.”4

4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCrc0IastdI

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The “Jack-in-the-Box” ad spot, with its theme of out-of-nowhere material threats had, as it turned out, appeared just a few days earlier on great-ads.blogspot.com, in fact, as I sat down to write the first draft of this paper. It included information thatthe capsule actually weighed as much as it appeared to in the ad,which the director, known for sitcoms, had insisted on for verisimilitude; it mentions the effect of the collision with actual tin, dust particles flying, and how the sound affected theactors. And the chimp was animatronic - no computer graphics imaging was used in the campaign.

Such props, and the ad spot itself, are instances of what in a recent piece I and my co-author, Rafael Antunes Almeida (2014), have termed onto-dispositifs: protentive devices that incline towards“hacking” the relations comprising recombinant worlds that we maythink we understand. Creating in the process a new relation to ones that have been hacked, the onto-dispositif can arrest our attention, such that we open to unforeseen futures for particularly vulnerable ontologies, and possible zones of exchange across power differentials. In other words, the concept’s use for imagining resistance to dominant culture world-making practices and assumptions is of particular interest, in our view – cuing human actors to be on the lookout for devices that source to unbeautiful ontologies (such things as global mining technologies of extraction or PAC media campaigns come immediately to mind) – perchance to slow them down.

But the Farmer’s Insurance spot and its theme of irritating and otherwise slowing down life as usual seemed somehow familiar. Andindeed, I eventually recalled another famously ll successful ad campaign for State Farm Insurance, likewise telling its audience that that damage to property from “space junk” is covered by State Farm – Farmer’s competitor and the company they were most concerned to distinguish themselves from (personal communication).

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I went to YouTube5. This ad, too, is strikingly arresting, but ina video game sort of way. It features a huge robot from outer space bent on random destruction of a suburban neighborhood that Deleuze would understand as “any-space-whatever,” as a couple of onlookers comment on what is happening to their unfortunate neighbor, Bob – again, matter-of-factly as meanwhile Bob is removed through the roof of his house by a robotic claw still seated in his Lazy Boy recliner and dropped from a great height (but unharmed) onto his perfect lawn. This particular ad campaignhad actually sparked an online interactive version of itself, allowing players to virtually destroy their own homes - and afterward call a State Farm agent in their area. Here was an onto-disposif fully taking on a life of its own, not unlike the avatars that Tom Boellstorff (2010) describes in Coming of Age inSecond Life which evolve material world effects, for example, organizing ppolitical campaigns which influence actual voting practices offline.

Of course, insurance companies do know their algorithms and theirmarketing strategists know their psychosocial science. So one canassume that editor-in-chief Holly Anderson’s piece on the State Farm Learning Center webpage isn’t coming out of nowhere when shewrites:

Americans were enthralled this month as to where debris fromthe Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) might fall.  Anyone wonder if the resulting damage to your home or vehicle is covered?

NASA deployed the UARS, via the space shuttle Discovery, in 1991. After 20 years in orbit, it was expected to crash through Earth's atmosphere Sept. 22. While most of the

5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQs6EUry4EM

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debris from the UARS satellite will burn up as it accelerates through the atmosphere, NASA predicted several dozen fragments of debris to impact the Earth.

Anderson continues, “While claims are handled on a case-by-case basis, you might be surprised to learn damage from satellite debris, a.k.a. space junk, likely would be covered under most insurance policies.”6i At the time this statement was published, a NASA space debris expert, Nicholas L. Johnson, was giving one in trillions odds against UARS debris striking any one person on Earth7ii. And soothing voices on network news were reminding us that Earth was, fortunately, mostly water (not so fortunate for sea life but, still. . .)8

All to say that when the jack-in-the-box commercial made an appearance in my study via the SyFy Channel and then again later during a Patriots-Cowboys football game - this time closer to thepredicted date of impact of space debris from yet another monsterspacecraft, the 13-ton Russian scientific research probe Phobos-Grunt - I felt fairly certain that the “creatives” at RPA agency in Santa Monica and DDBChicago (respectively) had gambled that myworld wasn’t feeling all that predictable, much less safe or

6 http://learningcenter.statefarm.com/auto/insurance/is-damage-from-space-junk-covered/ downloaded 11-01-2012. By Holly Anderson, of the State Farm Learning Center.

7 Chang, Kenneth. Sept 22, 11. NYT. Satellite’s Fall Becomes Phenomenon. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/23/science/space/23satellite.html downloaded 1-14-12

8 http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/nasa-uars-satellite-crashes-earth-location-unknown/story?id=14595092#.TyahK1zOXzE

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secure, and on another level that my anxiety wouldn’t be discriminating between terrestrial and extraterrestrial objects, or between actual and possible ones.

Of course we could deconstruct to death these so-called “content marketing” ad spots, and someone should. But the relevant point here is how this educative model engages its practitioners. One content marketing conference-goer tweets: "Find/create the relevant truth, deliver it in a fresh way, and people will care."Another: “Our job is to create relevance, not awareness” [emphases mine]. Particularly as applied to accident insurance, which trades on hyper-vigilance, the capacity of content marketing to cut loose the awareness function of mainstream media suggests that this already has a naturalized place in the cultural order of things, or else is free to find one somewhere categorically otherthan compensatory security for purchase. The closest relative at hand is reportage - the technology of choice for delivering social facts for which relevance can be taken as culturally given, and social awareness as the primary work at hand.

William Mazzarella (2006) cuts to the point of the commercial-news relationship in recognizing affect at the armature of socialprojects’ efficacy, “if by efficacy we mean its capacity to harness our attention, our engagement, and our desire” in our “interpellated” lives as “consumer-citizens” (299). And indeed, the hyphenation works here as an invitation to dwell on the affinity of reportage and commercial advertising in terms of the aspirational gap between them. Reportage, which might be taken asappealing to “the legal assemblage of citizenship and civil society,” “seeks affective resonance” for moving us to awareness,without relinquishing objectivity; the ad spot, meanwhile,

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reaches out for “legalistic justification” for its message of relevance by “get[ting] us in the gut.”9 (299)

Raising the question of fear control’s historical place in media discourse of alien threat. In his important work on the US government’s management of fear in post-nuclear America, Joe Masco (2008; 2010) argues that government propaganda films from the 1950s systematically scripted an American response to nuclearthreat, targeting audiences for education in ways that carry forward to this day the idea that extreme scenarios, from the “war on terror” to weather disasters and the effects of global warming, can be and are being managed; further, that civil obedience has ecological as well as human nature-controlling rewards. Effectively setting out the “American Way of coping,” hewrites, “fear becomes the basis for both a new concept of global order and a new kind of American society—simultaneously militarized, normalized, and terrified” (2008:31). For all intents and purposes, then, these government-sponsored films’ psychological fear control strategies position the US government as an all-knowing professoriate - the “character armored”10 professor of the Farmer’s Insurance is its personification, extending his lesson to the commercially “manageable” realm of cosmic exo-surprise.

Yet as a further declension of citizen-character making, the contemporary digital media that I’ve been considering here would appear to be fashioning a new narrative for the new world order

9 For expressions of what Deleuze terms “the control society” (1992) one need look no further than “the relentless marketing and ‘branding’ of even the most ‘inner’ aspects of subjective experience,” as film theorist Steven Shapiro insightfully puts it(2010:1).

10 The term is psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich’s (1972 [1945]).

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out of space debris which has taken on a life of its own beyond mere mortal control. This emergent narrative is the dangerous one of resignation to natural (cosmic) forces and inevitabilities. Senior NASA scientist Donald Kessler has said it: “We’ve lost control of the environment.”11iii What remains, it appears, is to plan for the worst-case scenario, commit on faith to digital tracking technologies, and to automatize our psyches to hyper-vigilance.12

11 http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/breaking-news/clean-up-space-campaign-needed-scientists/story-e6freuyi-1226127766918

12 Of course, behind the screen, as it were, mechanical solutionsare being sought and even found a spot on BBC News during one “uncontrolled fall” episode as a quirky story of the “eccentric British inventor” variety. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19803461 Downloaded 12 October 2012.

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In contradistinction to marketing models and against the grain, too, of reportage, governments are charged, then, to generate awareness, while undoing as effectively as they can, relevance: the aerospace gods might be crazy but their governments are victims of the random vicissitudes of “space weather” and of cosmic open sourcery.

I lived this new consciousness over the space of three days when I was perched at my computer desk (next to a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows) as the fiery descent of the 13-ton Phobos-Grunt Mars probe was lighting up network news. The initial projection

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was that it would fall to Earth “somewhere between 51 degrees north and 51 degrees south”; then, a couple of pages on in my writing of a draft of this paper, on or near Madagascar; then, asI was cleaning up the Introduction, on or near The Falkland Islands; then, as I was taking a break for Chinese food, on or near Argentina, until on the projected day of impact, January 15,2012, I could read on the online Daily Mail that “experts admit they have no idea when and where it will hit. . . due to constantchanges in Earth's upper atmosphere, which is strongly influencedby solar activity.” The end was announced shortly thereafter: Phobos-Grunt had vanished from tracking screens somewhere south of Chile, probably in the ocean, but not on New Zealand.13

It is not surprising to learn that launch nations are insured fordamage claims, although like any insurance policy there are loopholes. Famously, the folks of Esperanza, a tiny town in northern Australia, had finally to resort to sending NASA a ticket for “littering” when in 1979, parts of the Skylab space station crashed into their township.14 And when a piece of space debris from a Meridian satellite launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan demolished part of a house on Cosmonaut’s Street in the village of Vagaitsevo in Siberia (a husband and wife were at home but miraculously unharmed), the owners had to content themselves with the Russian government’s promise to make full reparation.

In sum, the post-nuclear fear control narrative that continues to influence American life has, under hypercorporatization and hypermediatization, given way to a narrative of inevitably misbehaving entities. Detached from controlling powers, “junk

13 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16491457 Downloaded 15 Jan 2012

14 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1583173/Australian-farmers-space-junk-discovery.html Downloaded 4-21-2013

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happens” in the naturally hostile environments where it belongs. This dangerous unmarked elision makes use of the gap between accidents in space that can produce “Iridium,” and “The Chinese” intentionally working in mysterious ways, for perversely spinninga new narrative from the elements of “cosmopolitics” (Stengers 2010), and what Latour appreciates as its conceptual work: that “cosmos [will] protect against the premature closure of politics,and politics against the premature closure of cosmos” (2004:454).This new spin would have cosmic force fields and their entities colluding with accelerationist politics as if their partnership were written in the stars of consumer-citizens.15

In this scenario, to borrow terms of accelerationist politics theorist Benjamin Noys (2010:54), cold war “affirmationist” narratives lose their grip on imagination, as do injunctions to “surge forth” against destructive forces of hyper-extraction-affirming ways of life. And while relinquishing designs on cosmicsovereignty may be an entailment of the resignation narrative, this script sets itself apart from corporate designs on outer space colonization. So how could an aesthetic so baldly in service to the accelerant of revved up capitalist expansion leaveme feeling so uncannily detached in its amplifying presence – as if the crisis were permanently elsewhere and elsewhen?

Again, the point to emphasize here is the relation between what appears to be the matter, namely, things coming literally out of nowhere which threaten prevailing social orders with evidence of these orders’ vulnerability, and the greater danger that public attention to space junk will mask the platforms and multinationaltechnologies of militarism to which insecurity actually sources. Beyond this, alarming images of dangerous blindsides - media artifacts of false witness to the long, slow, and still unfolding narrative of the military-industrial misalliance - deny space

15 See Latour 2004, commenting on Stengers’ concept.

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debris discourse its historical contexts of production, deny it any affinity to a rhetoric of accelerating threat, and too, deny it any kind of social future. . . other than as science fiction: As I prepared to hit the “send” button to deliver this piece for online publication, I was distracted by an ad spot for Star Trek IV: Into the Darkness – embedded within the frame of an info-mercial on “space junk awareness” produced by the European Space Agency and featuring a scene where a space vehicle from one worldaccidentally crashes into the Star Ship Enterprise, jolting the crew, and sending sparks and objects flying. The offending driverapologies via the ship’s communication screen and the two partiesenter into a civil conversation about what just happened in outerspace, presumably for reaching a settlement and moving forward.16

In Conclusion: De-Accelerating the Accelerationist Real

If a take is lengthened, boredom naturally sets in for the audience. But if the take is extended even further, something else arises: curiosity. – Zizek (2012) referring to Tarkofsky

Enter the surprise that this paper offers of a third media treatment of space junk, from the ethnographic film Space Tourists (2009), which I learned of in Prague from a key functionary thereand expert in space law who insisted that I track it down.

The film, which opens with a quotation from the great Russian filmmaker of slow takes, Tarkovsky, tells the story of a visual anthropologist’s depicts the ethnographer’s encounters with commercial users of Russian spacecraft, focusing on the first paying space tourist, on the one hand, and local scrap metal dealers working the informal sector of the official space economy, on the other. Slipping the problem of being approached

16 http://www.space.com/9818-expanding-danger-space-debris-fragmentation.html Downloaded 23 April 2013.

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as an artform, the documentary can refuse any thought that, as Shaviro puts it, “art restores potentiality [to enunciate utopia]by derealizing the actual”17 and the concomitant issue of whether this kind of restoration is “still practicable, in a time when negation and counter-actualization have themselves become resources for the extraction of surplus value” (2010:163, emphasis his). The answer is: It is.

The film’s ambling pace irritates ontological sensibilities attuned to hypermediacy, as it takes its own good time dawning a consciousness of vast sociocultural gaps between the out-of-this-world dreams that money can buy, and the hardscrabble lives sent scrambling for rocket booster scrap in the bleak steppes of Khazakstan – folks at home and in café-bars meanwhile watching the launch and the plummeting booster stages on ancient jury-rigged television sets.

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17 Shaviro (2010:163) references what he takes to be the shared vision of Deleuze and Adorno on the topic of modernist art.

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The cover of the video box I received foregrounds a young shirtless boy with binoculars trained at the sky, and in the background bronzed men in t-shirts looking towards the stars. They are scanning for signs of freshly fallen space junk. But this is not the prevailing online cover image, which features, inthe style of Soviet realism, the first tourist of outer space, Anousheh Ansari.

“Just the facts” of these different worlds are revealed through “being there” voicings of the ethnographer and sharply contrastedscenes: Space tourist Anousheh Ansari preparing to visit the International Space Station gazes up at the shuttle that will deliver her to the International Space Station - “cost: 20 million U.S. dollars”/ impoverished Kazakh dealers training theirbinoculars on the skies for falling rocket booster stages. And soforth. Far from capturing the action disinterestedly, the ethnographer narrates his implication in that action as one who has in his own professional life traveled from sites of elite culture to sites of rural poverty and across international and cultural boundaries – a move which places him to translate the starkly different realities he looks into, rather than at.

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Against scenes of Ansari’s self-assured excitement, her high design space suit, her mother in Chanel sunglasses excitedly watching the moment of lift-off, the rocketry which transports her into the sublime cosmos of her dreams, are scenes of the dulling, tedious work of scrap metal rendition. The material realities of the dealers’ lives appear in low-action “just the facts” images: a rudimentary house, vodka, bread, cigarettes, toast, a man welding a horseshoe onto the huge ugly truck that joins a convoy to the collecting fields of space junk, sending updust in its wake, a couple staring at an old television where thelaunch coverage is being broadcast. Then, Ansari: “How can you put a price on a dream?” Cut to the driver of the truck: “We’ll get the job done,” as he turns his jerry-rigged vehicle towards the spot where a booster has landed, setting off small grass fires. We see the burnt carcass of an animal. There is a large amount of chemical residue in these boosters, we are told; it must be drained off. We see this. But there is also high-grade aluminum alloys and titanium, which can be sold to China. Cut to the ISS where Ansari is playing with balls in weightlessness, brushing her teeth, commenting on “an Earth without borders. . . . no sign of trouble, just pure pure peace and beauty.” The scrap renderers pull out a chain saw and start cutting up the rocket, pull out knives and start slicing a potatofor a stew in a pot made from a part of the rocket. Ansari eats rice with perch from a little can. On the ground and 2000 miles farther north, we hear, is a more densely populated area; sometimes rockets fall on houses there, including proton rockets fueled by hepton, “a known carcinogen and fairly toxic chemical.”Ansari is playing with wobbly globules of water in microgravity.

Effectively, the filmmaker has interrupted the violence of the montage not for communicating a testimonial to an imperfect scientific ontology, but for creating breathing spaces grabbed from the ground of an alternative episteme that casts natural spaces as becoming-generic ones. It is as if, taking a cue from

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Moreno on Deleuze’s conception of any-space-whatever, the entire Earth, and not just built environments of capitalism’s great mall-ist structures, have been “unplugged from ‘that which happened and acted’ in it. . . thus dismantling established orders, and clearing the way for unexpected and latent potentials to be actualized.” (2012)18.

Overall, if the “elephant in the room” at the Prague space security conference of 2011 was the threat to global life and security of international brinkmanship, in Space Tourists it is the phenomenal accountability gap between the worlds of the few globally rich who position themselves stratospherically above themany locally poor: the one world’s cosmology, as David Valentine (2012) recognizes this, shielded by faith in its own imaginary, whilst the conceptual and material debris of that dream supplies a groaning ethnoscape with resources, happenstantially. Other than by the magic of film editing, these worlds have no prospect of coming into direct contact, and even in the film they aren’t made to impact one another forcefully: the film puts itself in the way of this. Indeed, it is precisely by mis-en-abyme referencing of the absence of velocity of impact of these worlds that theethnography marks the extreme trending of their otherness to eachother. Refusing an accelerated aesthetic that feeds on crisis andas well a narrative of resignation to control by The Powers That Be, the film documents the insufficiency of both for delivering the sense of cosmic open sourcery as an invitation to make worldsdifferently than by imploding futures.

18 Ironically, it was Eisenstein who speaks of studying over and over again the ethnographic film Nanook of the North – the film thatinspired the coinage of the term “documentary” in the popular press, and which is all but an homage to long takes of everyday life events in out-of-the-way places, from its collaborators’ point of view.

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In contradistinction, then, to art’s despair of ever finding a stable position that holds against the disruptive cultural and natural force-fields shaping the contemporary moment19, ethnographyconcretely engages perspectival instability, which it approaches as an open invitation to address what is getting in the way of connecting across difference, or reducing difference to black hole ontologies. Offering an alternative to fabrications which trade on the “intensity effect” (Shaviro 2010), as both space junk ad spots and reportage do in what Moreno recognizes is a kind of “ingratiating aesthetics in service of [capitalist] acceleration”(personal communication), the documentary’s dawning effect supports socioaesthetic transformation over rupture, tethering the accelerationist romance with violent excess to the very material it draws from – but with the value added of a future in cosmos-regarding bricolage.

Another kind of slow down apparatus is perhaps the next ethnographic site on the horizon: the story behind the scenes of the first experimental technology to be approved by all of the spacefaring nations for cleaning up orbital debris. It is the Stars-2 satellite, short for The Space Tethered Autonomous Robotic Satellite-2 – a coproduction of U.S. and Japanese research and design launched into space just over a month ago. Alongside the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (Jaxa), “researchers at Kanagawa University developed the tether, made from ultra-thin wires of stainless steel and aluminum, with the help of a Japanese fishing net firm.” As researchers describe it:

The tether, measuring 300m in length when fully extended, will generate electricity along its entire length as it passes throughEarth's magnetic field while in orbit. The electricity will

19 See Shaviro’s discussion of the issue in the context of “ubiquitous digital technologies” (2010:131).

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reduce the speed of pieces of junk careering through space – everything from dead rockets to satellites that have ended their missions – and lure them closer to Earth. The cosmic cleanup endswhen the clutter burns up harmlessly as it enters Earth's atmosphere.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/feb/27/scientists-japan-stars-2-satellite-orbit-space-debris

In this paper I have endeavored to describe, first, an

ethnographic encounter with accelerationist scenarios of cosmic

open sourcery – “drawing out ‘what it feels like’ to live in the

contemporary [read, Anthropocenic] media moment, as partially

determined by inhuman displacements” (Bratton 2013 e-flux), and

recognizing “the incessant modulations that subjectivity suffers

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through in control societies” (Moreno 2013). As distinct from a

self-indulgent “conceit of journalistic immediacy” (Marcus

1996:7), this encounter sends a barrage of concrete evidence of

accelerationist aggressivity out to be stopped in its tracks by

labor’s patient tracking and methodical repurposing of skyfalling

debris – manmade (rocket and satellite fragments salvaged for

sale) but also nature-made (billion years-old meteorite fragments

salvaged for science) - and too, in the dawning (read, slow)

ethnographic consciousness that documents this process apace,

coming in at unusual angles.

Acknowledgments: I am grateful for the insights of Gean Moreno and of Abou Farman, who commented on earlier drafts of this paper, and to Allen Feldman’s invitation to present this talk in its current iteration.

REFERENCES

Films

Space Tourists. 2009. Dir: Christian Frei. Good!Movies (2009). Film.

Books and Articles

Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. State of Exception. Trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Antunes Almeida, Rafael and Battaglia, Debbora. 2014. “Otherwise Anthropology” Otherwise: The View From Technology. Fieldwites – Commentary, Cultural Anthropology Online, February 24, 2014.

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