The Blue Marble is a famous photograph of the Earth taken on December 7, 1972, by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft en route to the Moon at a distance of about 29,000 kilometres (18,000 mi). It shows Africa, Antarctica, and the Arabian Peninsula. Image credit: NASA.
The story, perhaps a legend, goes something like this: a handful of photographs of the earth in space, supplied by the Apollo missions during the nineteen-sixties and early seventies, clarified for humankind the wholeness and lonely fragility of our planet. In an instant, all wars became civil wars, all fights fights between family, and the necessity of caring for our shared environment a shattering revelation.
Ritual re-tellings came last December in news articles commemorating the fifty-year anniversary of “Earthrise,” taken by the astronauts on Apollo 8. The photo provided “a unifying expression of vulnerability,” said the story in The Washington Post. The photo became the environmental movement’s icon, the story in The New York Times reported, “a gift of perspective at the end of a dark year.” As iconic as “Earthrise” is “The Blue Marble,” taken by Apollo 17 in 1972, which has been called “the most environmental photograph ever taken.”
This view of the rising Earth was captured by Apollo 8 astronauts on December 24, 1968 as they came from behind the Moon after the fourth nearside orbit. The photo is displayed here in its original orientation, though it is more commonly viewed with the lunar surface at the bottom of the photo. Image credit: NASA.
The story is often accompanied by some version of this flourish: Isn’t it ironic that these very images that made us newly reverent for the environment came from the space program, which the environmentalists of the time had disparaged? The unspoken message being, of course, good thing we didn’t listen to them! What I’m suggesting here is what if these photos–“Earthrise,” “The Blue Marble,” and their like, as exquisite as they are–didn’t mark change but continuity? What if what is celebrated as new perspective was actually the stubborn persistence of the old?
These questions are among several I took from viewing “Inside,” a recent lecture by Bruno Latour, available on Youtube. An October 2018 article in The New York Times Magazine alerted me to it, a piece by Ava Kofman about Latour, about his new book, Down To Earth, and about our particular post-truth moment. Latour attributes much of that moment to the fact that we find ourselves disoriented in time and space, due largely to a misleading cosmology. Images of the earth in space are only the most prominent example of an insistence on perceiving ourselves from outside the world. It is as if we’d actually lived Plato’s myth and exited the cave into an ether of pristine abstraction and objectivity. This perception of our home as a globe in space has paralleled our striving for universals in political life and the globalization of the economy.
As an alternative, Latour invites his audience to join him back inside “caveland,” where it’s dark, wet, complex, and confusing. The lecture is a collaboration with some artists and designers whose projected 3-D images surround Latour on the stage as he speaks, sometimes obscuring him completely. Watching and listening, I was reminded of the outdoor installations I saw last year at the AURORA exhibit in downtown Dallas, which I wrote about here on the blog. Latour and his collaborators, like the AURORA artists, seem to begin from the premise that we require radical reorientation to bring perception and experience into sync.
The cave image works as commentary on Western thought, but a cave, enclosed and underground, obscured more by an absence of light than by apparent complexity, isn’t really what Latour offers as an alternative to the image of the globe. Rather, he describes our home as a “critical zone,” a thin layer of sun-energized life atop the compressed remnants of the past. The critical zone consists of “nothing but the activity of the living.” It’s sensitive, fragile, far from equilibrium, and hard to know. Most of all, though, it’s relatively small and thin—”tiny, tiny, tiny,” “a varnish, really”—yet containing “everything we care for, everything we have ever encountered.”
The Apollo photos do capture something of this in the earth’s surface glow, a vibrancy indicating organization and life. Seeing this from outside, however, extracts us from it, Latour argues. We can’t represent home and be in it simultaneously. The critical zone is an attempt to overcome this paradox. By inverting the globe, flattening and refolding it “like a tart,” he and his collaborators place us inside a kind of whirlpool, a vortex of processes in the sunshine, some of those processes close and moving quickly, others moving more slowly and thus harder to detect. The systems theorist Gregory Bateson would likely have smiled on this conception of complexly interrelated circuits running transforms of meaning in varying spans of time.
On Christmas Day, 1968, the day after “Earthrise” was first published, poet and writer Archibald MacLeish offered an appreciation which was published on the front page of the Times. His brief column may indeed be the source of the “Earthrise” legend, or in any case, it’s first telling. “Men’s conception of themselves and each other has always depended on their notion of the earth,” he begins. He then employs a history of thought that, while not uncontested, is still in use today. First there was “the medieval notion,” which placed men at the center of the universe. Later there was “the nuclear notion,” which removed them from that center and made them “helpless victims in a senseless farce.” But now, with this photograph, we’d seen earth for the first time “from the depths of space,” “whole and beautiful and round and small.” Perhaps now a new notion of the earth, and of ourselves, was possible, and we could see ourselves “together, brothers on that that bright loveliness in the eternal cold.” Senselessness, might be exchanged for solidarity, presumably, and “man may at last become himself.”
Although shorn of patriarchal language and modernist despair, Latour’s scheme is formally similar. Instead of “medieval” and “nuclear,” Latour uses the terms “local” and “global.” Whereas MacLeish presents a linear march forward, one notion replacing the one before, Latour recognizes the local and the global as concurrent modes. The West’s current political situation is such that the universals of the global have been discredited and so are being abandoned for the walled-off assurances of the local. Meanwhile the denial of the climate crisis, a crucial intellectual component to this movement, allows the new localists to blame the failures of the global on those outside the walls. Latour’s critical zone is an attempt to “triangulate” the local and global in a different way–a way that faces climate deterioration full on.
The strength of the critical zone as a representation, as Latour himself admits, is that it foregrounds “processes and transformation.” That seems right. As a scholar trained in intellectual history exploring the environmental humanities, I’ve written numerous sentences over the years about the need to reorganize perception, to provide a new account of reality, a new imaginary, etc. So I applaud and admire the efforts of Latour and his collaborators to do just that.
This is especially impressive because I also often wonder, can this actually happen? Can epistemology be rebuilt from the ground up? Can we provide an answer to our current disorientation–an alternative notion, to use MacLeish’s word–that isn’t so strange as to disorient ourselves all the more? At times I wonder if it hasn’t already happened, and that the many attempts at articulation are merely part of the vast apparatus of habit catching up to minds and hearts. Annoying questions! The jury is still out. The jury’s always out–it’s almost never in, come to think of it, living inside the critical zone.
A version of this post appears at the Society for US Intellectual History blog.
Anthony Chaney 