3 - Who Made the Planets Sad?
Sad planets, will they miss us when we're gone?
We asked this question last time: What haunts Palo Alto, California, such that its supposedly happy children come to take their own lives in such astonishing numbers? Is their despair localizable at the site of so much atrocity committed first on the native population, and now on the entire world, in the name of technological progress? Is the place haunted, cursed, like in one of those movies?
What makes a young person with all the material advantages of growing up in suburban California want to die? Is it by any chance the same kind of thing that makes a robot interplanetary explorer sad? This book, Sad Planets, by Dominic Pettman and Eugene Thacker, presents a series on meditations, little vignettes from the annals of collapsology. Like this:
“My battery is low. And it’s getting dark”... the last transmission from the Opportunity robot, stranded on the surface of Mars... Is the pang many of us felt at this story merely a viral case of the pathetic fallacy...? Or is there something objectively sad about a machine with a purpose, left to face its end on its own, perhaps the only moving thing on this planet?
... Creatures no doubt experienced sad situations long before there were humans around... Perhaps it’s a form of arrogance to assume that only humans can experience what Spinoza called “the sad passions” and what Virgil called “the sadness in things”. Perhaps a courageous laborer made of the world’s most expensive nuts and bolts is imbricated in an affective atmosphere as much as an elemental one.
The quote reveals the kind of writing going on here: philosophical speculations, pop science, alchemy (‘imbricated’, ‘elemental’) and a kind of metaphysical mish-mash that you either love or consider infuriatingly French. So much, then, for a robot adventurer on a lifeless planet and the sadness it brings. What about our own planet, becoming less and less amenable to life by the day?
Climate seems at once distant or remote, and at the same time the most intimate and immediate... As instances of climate migration increase around the planet, at what point will human beings find themselves exiled from the planet itself? Behind the climate event lurks the specter of human extinction... A rift begins to grow between the planet and its now temporary human inhabitants.
A culture of climate, a confusion of affects. Is it going to happen soon, or is it happening now? To feel climate and to feel about climate. The weather ‘out there’ and the weather right here, at my doorstep...
Now, in considering all the Sad Planets orbiting all the forlorn stars in the universe, the question begins to extend on a cosmic scale. Is our particular planet becoming sad because the burgeoning life it bears is coming to an end, choked with plastics and heavy metals, rendered infertile by chemical pollution? Is Earth saddened by the biological mistake it has hosted for the last million or so years, at first so happily and symbiotically, now so parasitically death-driven and destructive?
But there are countervailing questions. Could planet Earth understand all the monetary value it is creating just by being gutted and its biosphere depleted towards a critical collapse point? Could the notional cash value generated, literally trillions of dollars, be some compensation for its loss of vitality, of life energy? Maybe the planet understands value in other ways.
It could be that all the other planets are sad because of all the magnificence they are home to but lack witnesses to see. While, by contrast, Earth has plenty of witnesses to its planetary glory, but finds these consciousnesses instead much more interested in little dramas playing out on their pocket miniscreens. On phones which are made of the plundered minerals from Earth’s very bowels and which will poison the ground and the water again when they are discarded. Which planet wouldn’t be sad?
If you like to wander the hinterlands of philosophy, culture theory, literary criticism, alchemical speculation, politics, occultism and science, seeking out unexpected material to stoke the fires of inspiration, this might be a perfect text for you to get lost in. This collection of aphoristic mini-essays, or thought-bites, or meditations, is one of the most fascinating things to come along since Nietzsche swung his hammer, or maybe since Giordano Bruno went up in flames in February 1600.
Did I just claim that this book is the most interesting thing published in the last four-and-a-quarter centuries? It really isn’t, but at times it seems so. Clearly an exaggeration, then, but who else considers the words of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, his “pale blue dot” or his rhapsodising about “billions and billions of stars”1 – who else takes Sagan’s TV commentary, the pop science of 50 years ago, and treats it as the metaphysical poetry which it very clearly is?
In reading this, you’ll drift through the cold of space and its unimaginable enormity, through dark meditations on melancholy on an inhumanly universal scale, on climate, on change and on horror. There’ll be time for body horror and cosmic horror and everything in between. New mythopoetic combinations ringing new bells as you go along, from the most intimate to the most expansive of scales.
All this despite some dreadful punning – truly, the English disease, the verbal scabies of the pseudo-wit – used in chapter headings, such as “A Mir Formality”, playing on the name of a Soviet space station from the 1980s-90s, a pun of such execrable dimensions that it combines esoteric space-dweebery with the stalest of Dad humour for a tour-de-force of awfulness. As reader you should try to disregard this tiresome crap, which I suppose to be the work of an uninspired but overenthusiastic editor, to concentrate on the body of the text, which is quite glorious food for thought and imagination.
As with Eugene Thacker’s earlier hyper-pessimistic works, the scope of this text is enormous. However the style is never forbidding and abstract, but rather up-close and intimate, discursive and highly accessible. It’s a bit like dipping into provocative continental theorists like Deleuze and Gattari, or Lyotard or Baudrillard, but without all the forbidding jargon and obfuscation. In fact the direct style of aphoristic address is much more reminiscent of later Nietzsche, but spiced up in this case with a hefty helping of contemporary issues.
Nietzsche understood that the animals judge us for our histrionic ways and for being the drama queen of the animal kingdom. “I fear that the animals see man,” he wrote, “as a being like them who in a most dangerous manner has lost his animal common sense – as the insane animal, the weeping animal, the miserable animal.”
This first creature [Laika the dog] to leave Earth... circled the globe as a singed corpse for five long months before finally receiving an organic cremation when Sputnik 2 disintegrated on re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere... after circling the Earth 2,570 times.
Anyone who’s followed this series of ‘Brilliant Blade’ essays so far might detect a common thread of inexorable doomer logic weaving through it – true enough as far as it goes, as a first impression of what the ‘Brilliant Blades’ are actually cutting through - but I assure you this pessimism represents only half the story.
First we had Cruel Optimism – desires for things that that leave you worse off, goals that leave you weaker after you’ve achieved them. Then we had The Hauntology of The Future (as represented in Silicon Valley’s Palo Alto) – desires to create a new technological and commercial frontier, a kind of techno-liberating pioneer spirit, that ends up replicating the original California frontier of 1849, with all its exploitations, its exterminations and its utter moral exhaustion.
And now the Sad Planets – a planet, a solar system, a universe entire, given over to melancholy, a cosmos that desires for life to teem but discovers that this very life that spawns within it desires nothing more devoutly than to extinguish itself with its cruel optimism and its seeking for new frontiers to exploit and dominate. Life and its thrusting self-extermination, its cosmic thanatos, threatens to leave the cosmos even sadder than when it just was, existing before consciousness came along to ruin everything.
In all cases these three works mark a distinct concern with affect – with how our existence feels emotionally, rather than the more abstract phenomenology or ontology of being. There is moreover a centrality of desire – that same will to power that makes us want to thrive but through the evil alchemy of Verschlimmbesserung (an attempted improvement that only makes things worse) causes us so much pain and disappointment and is ultimately the engine of our catastrophe.
If you’re going to be a doomer, in other words, do it right. Be a godamn doomer, embrace the doom to its fullest extent. Don’t whine about storms to come and the replacement of your pathetic racial identity, or your fragile masculine privilege, parochial shit that merely reveals you to be concerned with the trivial nuts-and-bolts of apocalypse, as if you’re a mechanic in Mad Max performing an oil change and tire pressure check. All of this plaintive verbiage just betrays the anxiety of an ego concerned solely with its own precious anxiety, a worm of self that eats its own tail, a mere princely whinger:
“You’ve got to worry about a job, you’ve got to worry about family life, you’ve got to worry about housing, you’ve got to worry about all of these things. Then you put the climate – the very thing we live, breathe and walk around on – on top of that? So no wonder we’re having a lot of mental health challenges coming along.” [Prince William, Crown Prince of England 2021]
Perhaps the likely future king is right, and anxiety is the dominant mood of the times. Others may nominate anger, or indignation, as the signature affect of our age.
No, if you’re dooming, don’t be a pampered princelet pretending to be consumed with anxiety about things that don’t affect your luxurious though meaningless life. Be a real blackpill-swallower, doom along with the best: absorb the Schopenhauer-flavoured cosmic blackstuff, the Philipp Mainländer hopelessness, the Thomas Ligotti misanthrophy, and suck up all the sadness and bitterness until you’re fit to burst.
And then... allow in some hope. Because the flip side to all this anxiety about our pathological self-defeating will to power is this insight – if we can just curb this individualistic desire, the apparently instinctual Will to Power, and most especially the economic and social manifestation of this thanatos death-wish which dominates our time, then we can begin to carve out a space for some true (non-cruel, revolutionary) optimism.
For the will to power, the very same death cult that sweeps through Palo Alto and on from therethrough the whole world beyond, is the hierarchical dominance of those who have more, and then more, and then more and more, the late-late-capitalism show that’s approaching the end of its runtime:
Happiness is a collective resource, and cannot be hoarded without great psychic cost.
To overcome this beast possessing our human spirit like a demon requires a special something, a kind of optimistic faith in the strength of our power to cast out the devil that haunts us. And the story of how we do that actually begins with in a little Basque town, where a rogue Catholic priest is preparing to exorcise the final boss of the death cult that rules the sad planet.
He has to start small, because you can’t cast out the Big Bad all in one go – not even Max von Sydow could do that - so you have to start by slaying the little devils.
And 70 years later the anti-death-cult is preparing to go head-to-head in the greatest exorcism of all – the casting-out of the modern corporation. The Co-operative Enterprise - the workplace of the future, the thing that will ultimately save us from ourselves, if we let it, has come to town with bell, book, and candle…
NEXT TIME - Optimism strikes back, doom is given a beating.
Everything for Everyone by Nathan Schneider.
“Billions and billions”, a phrase I and my cousin Jim used to repeat with a mixture of glee, hilarity and awe, reproducing Sagan’s ponderous enunciation exactly, over and over and over again during the late 70s.
PLANETS
PLAN- E.T's
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kGHJg0JhRw