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12/21/2012. Some say the end is near.  But there’s still time to watch the best music videos about Doomsday.

Tool – Ænema

“Some say we’ll see Armageddon soon – I certainly hope we will” sings Maynard James Kennan. Here, the end of the world means “fret for your figure and fret for your latte and fret for your hairpiece and fret for your lawsuit and fret for your prozac and fret for your pilot and fret for your contract and fret for your car.” Released in 1996 on the Ænima studio album, the song invokes a new beginning, a smoothing of a space striated by a labyrinth of crap. What better song in a time of self-inflicted World crisis. Rejoice, therefore, “my friend … I’ll see you down in Arizona Bay”.

The fan-video above shows the song text. Adam Jones, Tool’s bass player made a video for the song using stop-motion animation, available on the Salival CD/DVD box.

Wagner and Lars von Trier – Isolde’s Tod

„Heller schallend, mich umwallend, sind es Wellen, sanfter Lüfte? Sind es Wogen, wonniger Düfte? Wie sie schwellen, mich umrauschen, soll ich atmen, soll ich lauschen? Soll ich schlürfen, untertauchen? Süss in Düften,  mich verhauchen? In dem wogenden Schwall, in dem tönenden Schall, in des Weltatems, wehendem All, – ertrinken, versinken, – unbewusst, – höchste Lust!“

Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) would have preferred to listen to Beethoven’s 9^th, standing upright, with a glass of red wine in her hand: the perfect bourgeois doomsday gesture. “This is a shitty idea” says Justine (Kirsten Dunst). There is no mask of dignity, no face to keep facing the end of life in the Universe – only melancholy and infinite sadness.  We should take refuge in our childhood dreams, our shelter of hope that makes us, that will have made us human. The most important question to ask ourselves is what we want to have been. Shall we have loved, shall we have hoped like Isolde, or shall we have aped tragic postures? A question that might also give some perspective to many World-preservation ideologies, whatever, green or identitarian, they might be…

Omega massif – Exodus

Speaking of perspective, there is no such time scale as the cosmic one. Compared to it, even geology appears as a science of the event. Exodus takes you right there. Turn up the volume!

REM – It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

There was a time when MTV played music, and a time where a low-budget video could make you happy.  The song was released in 1987 on the Document album. It’s been made into a video by the team of the American painter and director James Herbert, who’s made close to twenty REM videos. It depicts a teenager rifling through an abandoned, collapsing rural home. The floor is covered with old toys. He displays some to the camera. He stands up, holding the photograph of somebody in outdated clothes – we think of his father. The end of childhood is the first kind of a world’s ends. The end of adolescence is another. Some of us were teenagers ourselves when the video was released. But hey, we feel fine. We even have kids on our own.

For the anecdote, the skateboarder’s name is Noah Ray, a boy from Athens, who now fronts the punk band “Music Hates You”, that earned Best Punk/Hardcore Band and Best Live Band honors in the 2006 Flagpole Magazine Music Awards.

More Doomsday songs

No list is exhaustive. For more Doomsday songs, see It’s the End of the World as We Know It: 25 Songs for Judgment Day this post by Pat Pemberton.

“Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet”, said Albert Einstein. The suggestion of the good old genius perhaps contains the answer to the questions which shall be discussed this Wednesday, September 19^th in the Swiss parliament (both in the Conseil National and in the Conseil des États). “Food sovereignty” – coined under that name in 1996 by the global peasant organization Via Campestina – shall be the theme of these discussions.

The two faces of food sovereignty

Of course, the question of food sovereignty in Switzerland takes very different tonalities than it would in Africa, Latin America, or South Asia. The country’s economy is overwhelmingly dedicated to the tertiary sector, it is flourishing in comparison to its European neighbors, and its population isn’t certainly exposed to problems of famine or malnutrition in the near future. The question of food sovereignty is therefore more linked to the conservation of agriculture as a mode of life, and as a part of the commercial image of a rural Switzerland that, in effect, has worked as a great touristic attractor for more than a century. This also implies that the Swiss question of food sovereignty will have nationalistic undertones next Wednesday, since the national mythos is deeply rooted in the country’s agricultural past. This mythos also bears the memory of the “Wahlen Plan”, an agricultural program set up by the Swiss polititian Friedrich Traugott Wahlen in the years preceding and during WWII, in order to prevent war-induced food-shortage (the program never achieved more than 70% of food autarcy, or even less according to certain sources).

Besides this relativization of the question in the Swiss case, one could generally ask whether a discussion on food sovereignty really has the entire place it needs in the national parliament of a single country. World climate change and population increase, factors of dominant impact on agriculture, are matters of planetary concern, and the question of food can only be efficiently discussed at that scale. Highly varying scenarios in terms of food productibility in diverse regions of the world, including Switzerland, can also be imagined: in the long term, national retrenchment might turn out being a very bad strategy.

On the other side, the industrial world has reached an unprecedented degree of exploitation of remote lands. Nation states that now discretely compete for the fertile soils might one day end up in open conflict. Land grabbing, the newest practice in terms of externalization of the agricultural production, reaches extraordinary proportions in low GDP countries, notably in Africa. As an example, 400’000 hectares of soil are rented in Soudan by the US-based company Jarch Capital (source: International Food Policy Research Institute). China rents only 300 hectares to Tanzania for its rice production, but also 5 millions of hectares to Zambia and Congo for making biofuel: another practice in contradiction with the food sovereignty of our planet. The Swiss company Addax Bioenergy participates in the phenomenon by renting 14’000 hectares to the peasants of the Sierra Leone.

The question of food sovereignty is thus mostly interesting if asked in terms of slowing down the agricultural expansiveness of certain countries, to which Switzerland belongs. Thinking about how to cease to live beyond the means of one’s soil could also be seen as a way of maintaining world peace.

Some numbers and the question of meat and milk

Now, biofuel kept apart, a weighty factor in the Swiss agricultural needs is the consumption of meat and dairy products. For every five human inhabitants of Switzerland, the territory also counts six chickens, a pig, and a bovine. In 2010, Switzerland produced 500’000 tons of meat, half of which pork, as well as 4 millions of tons of milk. This sums to 55 kg of meat and almost 500 liters of milk per capita. But the average Swiss consumes more than that and, by this choice, forces himself to import meat, notably poultry, of which more than a half comes from abroad (sources : Union Suisse des Paysans ; Office Fédéral de Statistiques).

Consumption of meat in Switzerland in 2009

Even the meat produced in Switzerland has something imported in it, since the animals are partially fed by matters coming from abroad. The importations of hay, for instance, have reached record level last year with 167’000 tons. To this, add 282’000 tons of soja press cake (tourteaux de soja), 91’000 tons of forage corn, 68’000 tons of forage rice, 62’000 tons of forage barley (orge fourragère), 42’000 tons of colza and sunflower press cake as well as other matters (source: Fédération Suisse des Producteurs de Céréales) ; in all more than a million of tons of vegetal (and animal) matters imported to feed cattle.

This need to import is all the more impressing if you consider the extent of indigenous production of forage: 32 millions of tons, whose culture uses 70% of the Swiss agricultural surfaces (surfaces agricoles utiles) without counting the part of bread grains that actually end up in the stomachs of livestock. Most of those agricultural surfaces are natural or artificial prairies, half of which are situated in a zone of plains and hills, where many other cereals or vegetables could be cultivated. In other words, « there is some leeway », and a significantly higher degree of food sovereignty – whatever its ideological foundations – is plausible… under condition of absorbing less meat and dairy products.

Agricultural surfaces in Switerland, 2010.

Switzerland counts 8 million of inhabitants today, and will count 10 millions in 2050. The planet will probably breach 9 billion at the same date, with growing inland demand in today’s food-exporting countries. If the Swiss maintain their current diet, the need for a massive importation of meat and forage will become both more insistent and more difficult to organize. It is a good thing to reflect on how to change course. In this respect, a debate on food sovereignty might be a good training for our phantasy. To seriously envision this objective would certainly require an intensification of the discussion between dieticians, peasants, land planners and agronomers. One of the astonishing facts that becomes visible in the figure below, for instance, is the relatively small amount of meat being consumed, in comparison with cereals and vegetables, considering the extent of its import and the amount of space allocated for its production. One can also observe the much greater energetic conversion of cereals. Unfortunately, publicly available data of the Swiss Federal Office of Statistics doesn’t say what part of the actual tons of food are being imported or home-grown. Nevertheless, 32’000’000 tons of home-grown forage, compared to the only 3’600’000 tons of vegetal food consumed every year by the Swiss, seem to leave some margin for land-use conversion…

Consumption by product type. Switzerland, 2009

If what the numbers suggest is true, the solution to food sovereignty consists neither in a raise in indigenous food production advocated by right-wing parties, nor in a radical decrease of consumption advocated by the radical green left, but in the optimization of consumption with regard to overconsumption of meat and dairy products. We should be able to tell how many hectares of crop of which type are needed to provide the human bodies of 10 million of citizens with everything needed for a healthy life, as well as how to organize the culture of these crops in order to avoid soil degradation under the specific climatic and conditions of Switzerland. If the idea of food sovereignty is to be taken seriously, research projects in this sense must be concluded in the near future. The expected outcome is not to impose a technocratic solution to human diet but to get a better perception of what part of food importation results from necessity and what part from a particular diet choice.

Hopefully the debate of the National Council will not sink into obscure nationalist concerns. But if one absolutely seeks a Swiss specificity, it can best be found in the low relevance that vegan or strictly vegetarian diets would have in the country. Half of the usable agricultural surfaces remain in alpine zones, unfavorable to the culture of cereals or vegetables, but favorable to pasture and forage production. A possible model of a « Swiss sovereign food diet » would then be a vegetarian one, embellished by occasional meat and dairy from the Alps. Meat would become a pleasant luxury and a social gathering around the event of its preparation. The change of diet would bring about a better health, and perhaps even more pleasure in the taste of meat. Whosoever will can even consider it as an expression of identity.

For further reading

Christian J. Peters, Jennifer L. Wilkins and Gary W. Fick, 2007, “Testing a complete diet model for estimating the land resource requirements of food consumption and agricultural carrying capacity: The New York State example”, Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems, Volume 22, Issue 02, June 2007, pp. 145-153.

First image taken by NASA’s Curiosity rover, landed on Mars in the morning of August 6.

This morning August 6th, after fourteen years of planning and months of anxious waiting, the Curiosity mars rover has landed, sending as a proof of its success a fisheye picture of pebbles, dust, and its own shadow on the surface of Mars.

It is the largest and most advanced machine to ever land on another planet. In its one-ton iron belly pounds a nuclear heart. From now on, it will talk to us, across millions of kilometers, about Mars’ past. And since every story also contains a wish for its own pursuance, it will also tell us about its future, about our future, on Mars and on Earth.

Curiosity shall look for water, condition of life, and for methane, trace of life as we know it. It will perhaps give more ground for our dreams of a new life on Mars, a human life. But it can also corroborate our hidden fear: knowing that where life once had been, remains only iron dust. A foreboding of a future in which Earth, too, is only home to the shadows of whispering machines.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau would have been 300 years old today. He was already 53 in October 1765 when he left the waves of the Lake Bienne, heart-sick, expelled from the Island of St. Peter upon the order of the bailiff of Nidau. His expulsion is almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Fifteen years ago, in his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, he praised the dawn of men, the “early times” which he described as “beautiful coast, adorned only by the hands of nature; towards which our eyes are constantly turned, and which we see receding with regret.”

He will never know exactly who hatched the expulsion order, or why. Even today, long time after his death, the political confrontations around his character remain mysterious at times. In the little Swiss town of Yverdon, for instance, right wing liberals went to great lengths to prevent his work from being commemorated in their streets. In 1912 already, the controversy raged around the bicentenary of the philosopher. The French nationalist Maurice Barres then denounced Rousseau as an “apostle of all anarchies”.

Rousseau, in his lifetime, perceived only the effect of the “dark construction” (édifice des ténèbres) whose paranoid shadow follows him in any shelter. The expulsion from Saint-Pierre is not his first, but this one is different: it marks the end of two “the happiest months of his life,” spent alone, feeling his “own existence without bothering to think”, as he wrote in his Confessions and his Reveries:

“The various soils of which the island, though small, was composed, offered me a sufficient variety of plants to study and to rejoice seeing for the rest of my life. “‘When evening approached, I walked down the peaks of the island and I was happy to sit by the lake in a hidden sanctuary; there the sound of the waves and the agitation of the water layed my senses to rest, chasing all other agitations from my soul, plunged them into a delicious reverie; and the night often surprised me without me noticing.”

He shall find similar conditions only in the grave, in which he’ll be laid on a small island, in the lake of René de Girardin, in Ermenonville near Paris, in the shade of poplar trees. Soon, however, some murderers of the century also came to commune with themselves in this fresh shade: Marat, a native of Reunion Island; Bonaparte, who shall rule, one day, on the parody of an empire – Elba – before his final fade-out on the island of St. Helena. Four years before the birth of Bonaparte in Corsica, the island had asked Rousseau to write its constitution. But the same year Bonaparte was born, the island lost its status of autonomous republic. Its constitution, as Rousseau had written on St. Peter, never enters into force.

Shortly after the philosopher’s death in 1778, however, ten islands similar to his last refuge in Ermenonville, and bearing Rousseau’s name, spread in Europe: the “Rousseau Island” in Geneva, in Worlitz (Saxony-Anhalt), in Berlin’s Tiergarten, in Arcadia Park near Nieborów (Poland).

The peculiarity of the “Rousseau Islands” is that none is far from shore. Only the water of a lake, or a pond, isolates them from the surrounding continent, and from the men who inhabit it. Sometimes there is simply no water, only poplars around a mound of earth, like the “Tomb of J. J. Francois Rousseau” erected by Maurice de Lacy in Neuwaldegg near Vienna. Metaphorically speaking, these islands are perhaps all replicas of this delicate solitude, where man, confronted to no-one, limited only to the capacity of his body, and with nature as his only entourage, can only be “good”, whoever he is.  It is probably easier to be a saint, when isolated from the world and from the sounds of the city, where one sees only “walls, and street crimes”, as Rousseau did. And no doubt more obvious to be “just” when unexposed to friction with otherness – that otherness who can bring forward the ugly creature living in the depth of anyone, but who everybody denies being…

Most Rousseau Islands shall suffer flooding. The one in Geneva is hosting a pub. That of St. Peter ceases to be an island in 1878, becoming a peninsula following the correction of the Jura waters. Rousseau’s body is not to be found on any of them. He was transferred to the Pantheon in October 1794, upon the decision of the Thermidor Convention, a few months after the beheading of Robespierre, who, too, had communed with himself, one day, on the Island in Ermenonville. Cities seem to possess a certain power to absorb their opponents in their necropoleis.

The ephemeral fate of the islands, meanwhile, testifies of a nature very indifferent to the idyllic image the philosopher draws of her. A nature who cares little about its own “idyllic” role and status, in short, but a fragile idyll nevertheless, if the word “idyll” is to designate an environment welcoming to the human species and nature.

As for Rousseau, finally, the most fitting tribute to his life may be found in the Ballad of the Adventurers by Bertold Brecht:

Sickened by sun, with rainstorms lashing him rotten

A looted wreath crowning his tangled hair

Every moment of his youth apart from its dream was forgotten

Gone the roof overhead, but the sky was always there

Oh you, who are flung out, alike from heaven and from Hades

You murderers who’ve been so bitterly repaid

Why did you part from the mothers who nursed you as babies

It was peaceful and you slept and there you stayed

Still he explores and rakes the absinthe green oceans

Though his mother has given him up for lost

Grinning and cursing with a few odd tears of contrition

Always in search of that land where life seems best

Loafing through hells and flocked through paradises

Calm and grinning, with a vanishing face

At times he still dreams of a small field he recognises

With a blue sky overhead and nothing else

Methods and tools

After a day and a half of work and fine-tuning, here we go: the commuting network of all individuals either residing, working or studying in the canton Valais. I’ve used R, with the RStudio GUI, and the igraph library for R. My staring point was the mobility matrix between all communes, including communes outside of the canton, which I’ve calculated from the individual data of the Swiss Federal Census 2000.

I’ve converted my commuting matrix into a directional weighted graph with the graph.adjacency function. I’ve simplified the graph by removing loops.

The vertex size has been determined by betweenness. To reduce size difference, I’ve squared it.

The graphic layout has been obtained with Fruchterman-Reingold algorithm, included in the igraph library.

To determine communities – identified by 11 different colors in the map above – I’ve tried out edge betwenness, leading eigenvector and finally settled for the walktrap community, which gave the most interesting results. Walktrap community, however, remains non-directional. I am still looking for a directional weighted algorithm appropriate for my study case.

The width of the edges depends on the original weights. In other words, thick lines identify paths taken by most individuals.

Some interpretations

As often when reconstructing a network space from a geographical commuting matrix, the resulting space reproduces very closely the topology of the topographic layout of the canton. This is especially understandable in the case of Valais, because of its West to East tree-like structure.

A clear boundary appears between the French-speaking (Monthey, Martigny, Sion, Sierre, Montana) and the German-speaking (Brig-Glis, Visp, Zermatt, Fiesh etc.) communes. Obviously, the linguistic communities exchange only few commuters.

Also interestingly, commuters from Geneva and Lausanne do not connect to the Monthey subnetwork (which would be the closest from these cities further West on the Lac Léman), but share community with Martigny. My earlier unweighted tests with the walktrap algorithm even attached them to Sion. This confirms the hypothesis that larger cities preferentially “interact” with other urban centers, in terms of all types of geographical interaction (commuting, information, financial flows etc.). Smaller cities, like Vevey, Aigle or Montreux, on the other hand, participate preferentially to the Monthey commuting community. Besides their small size, their topographic closeness to the Valais also leads to this.

References

Pons Pascal, Latapy Matthieu (2005), “Computing communities in large networks using random walks” in arXiv:physics/0512106v1 [physics.soc-ph].

Today, the United States are celebrating the 50th anniversary of John Glenn’s orbital flight: three tours of the globe in less than five hours. To mark the occasion, Craig Russell of Space Operations Inc., would have liked to see the mission replayed, but relying on private means only, this time. We get his point, because times have changed since Mercury Atlas 6: power concentrates elsewhere, the resources needed to send men in orbit are no longer in the hands of Nation-States. The conquest of space is no longer a political issue; it is about business. Uunless we look at it differently, that is to say, unless we admit that politics themselves have another owner. A growing private sector is about to own the transportation infrastructure into the margins of our World. Nation-States are its future customers. Google Lunar X Prize promises $ 30 million to the first team capable of sending a robot to the moon without public funding.
100 km above the ground is the Kármán line, where the atmosphere becomes so thin that it no longer provides the required lift for aircraft. Beyond it begins the field of astronautics and orbital flight. From this altitude on, territories and their borders lose their relevance, too: we leave the airspace and enter a “pure space”, even less legislated as the ocean waters. The French philosophers’, Emmanuel Levinas’ fascination for orbital flight, at that time, leads mainly to this: to the possibility of conceiving a space devoid of the cracks of history, and of the logics of separation and deep-rootedness that Europe has barely paid for, such a heavy toll, in the first half of its century. “What matters perhaps above all,” he writes, “is having been able to leave the place. For one hour, one man existed outside of any horizon – everything was sky around him, or rather, everything was geometric space. A man existed in the absolute homogeneous space. ”
Levinas was not talking about John Glenn, though, but about Yuri Gagarin, and his Vostok 1, whose April 12^th 1961 path around the Earth from Baikonur to Engels still leaves a narcissistic scar in the American sky. We do not celebrate the first orbital flight of humanity, today, but only the U.S. one. Gagarin, the Soviet saint, and his eyes filled with infinite solicitude, is still hanging in the corner of the cosmic izba, tucked in his spacesuit like in the gilding of an othodox icon.
The future of space travel, however, commits neither the Cold War, nor metaphysics. Russian Soyuz shuttles welcome American space tourists, providing what the language of economics now calls a “service”: to fall out of the atmosphere at 4g, to hover in weightlessness for a while and to glide to the ground, then, leaving behind the wastes of the dream. In the documentary Space Tourists (2009), the camera of the Swiss filmmaker Christian Frei accompanies Anousheh Ansari on board the International Space Station, where she stayed for 20 million dollars. Down by the cosmodrome, Kazakh scrap dealers roam the steppes in search for spare parts fallen off during the takeoff phases. They cook lamb soup in a piece of rocket. Larger pieces are used for shelter for the night. Here and there, you see a garden or a roof, ravaged by the fallout of cosmic exploration. As writes the journalist Nick Rodick, “forty years on from Neil Armstrong’s ‘one small step for man’, we are still waiting for the ‘giant leap for mankind’.”
Ansari was neither the first woman in space, nor its first tourist. Other contenders – the first non-governmental astronaut, the first teacher in space, the first journalist in orbit… – punctuate the titles of the media since the 1980s, until the arrival of the first official “tourist”: the multimillionaire Denis Tito. “Official” only, though, because who is a tourist if not as anyone who moves away from his daily territory, into an elsewhere, devoid of any logic of necessity or obligation? As such, there is tourism, already, in Gagarin’s feat.
Tourism, in all its forms, is a way of escaping the space-time grid of everyday life. Can masses rushed through airport security locks still be considered as such, by the way? They don’t escape anywhere. The holidays themselves are carefully beaconed, by the soft jingle of travel guides, by family demands, by the need to confirm, back to the office, that you’ve been away from all this. Orbital tourism, in this sense, seems the only way into a real elsewhere. For how long, though? UK carrier Virgin Gallactic has already sold over 500 tickets at $200000 aboard its SpaceShipTwo. So watch out: the planet itself is about to become a landscape, the perfect background for a group picture! Its sighting may remain reserved to the privileged, of course, as the Jungfraujoch railway in its infancy, but this is just the beginning, right? Subsequently, as with all progress, any woman or man will be able to explore the outer reaches of sublunar space. In this respect, bold commentators are almost as touching as the poet Mayakovsky in his Flying Proletarian in 1925. Hearing them, we almost forget that one thing: that good old wood, beneath us, our Carboniferous legacy – wood in the form of oil that we need to burn, still and always, to go anywhere.

Resources

Image: screenshot from Space Toutrists, a documentary film by Christian Frei.

Oberg james, 2012, “Private Spaceflight: Up, Up, and Away. This year, commercial spaceflight will really take off” in IEEE Spectrum, January 2012.

Roddick Nick, 2009, Sell-Out on the Final Frontier.

Joan Johnson-Freese, Brian Weede, 2012, “Application of Ostrom’s Principles for Sustainable Governance of Common-Pool Resources to Near-Earth Orbit” in Global Policy, Volume 3, Issue 1, pages 72–81, February 2012.

Michel Foucault, in his 1984 essay Des espaces autres (Other Spaces), coins the term “hétérotopie”. He uses it to designate places evolving on the margin of what we could today call the territory of production. Foucault’s heterotopoi are cemeteries, brothels, prisons, boats, psychiatric hospitals… places inhabited by those who’ve either been excluded from society, or are no longer its members (being dead), or further by those who choose to step outside, in order to engage in “hidden” practices. Those who gather in heterotopoi have one thing in common: they do not exercise power. At least not in the power’s self-acknowledging way.

By pointing out the existence of heterotopoi, Foucault forces us to acknowledge their role. No territory can be made without them. But they are difficult to accept, even more so today than in his times, because the very fundament of the contemporary territory lies in the negation of everything it’s not. Heterotopy is the modern territory’s little secret, as foul as Guantanamo, as dark as Fritzel’s cellar, as tense as the Korean DMZ, as old as Mount Athos, as well-guarded as the bank vaults of tax heavens. But these heterotopoi, as much as the ones pointed out by Foucault, actually appear as what is left behind, or at best spared, by the integrating process of modernity. They are left-overs. Remnants. Residual spaces, where diverging realities survive, even grow perhaps, but mostly stall, like algae in a river shoal. Should the whole idea of heterotopy be limited to such spaces? Can it be?

I actually believe there is more to the concept of heterotopoi, even beyond Foucault’s own definition of the notion. Of course, it would make no sense questionning the coined meaning of the word if its etymological construction was arbitrary. But it is not. Hetero-topoi are the places of the Otherwise (ἕτερος), of an alternative reality, that can of course be a stalling one, but that is also a yet undetermined reality striving to make space for itself. We cannot let that Otherwise stall in some topological black hole of History, even if it was “only” a concept.  Why? Because heterotopoi are the only places capable of transforming a territory, as I shall show.

The problem with Foucault’s definition of the notion is that it focuses on heterotopoi already present in the margins of the territory. Their otherness is the result of History, which anchors them in the past. The other heterotopoi – the ones I have in mind – are not yet out there. They only exist in an infinite set of possible futures that bifurcate from any given location.

Heterotopoi are not projects (a project is a future reality for which place has already been made). Heterotopoi precede projects. They precede them somewhere, though, and in that sense, are not mere u-topias. The particularity of future-oriented heterotopoi is that they share their location with already materialized realities. In an urban environment, marked by the omnipresence of human beings, any given effective place has its set of heterotopoi. What I mean is that any given urban place also exists otherwise in the imagination of its dwellers: as very concretely filled with other amenities, people, practices.

Heterotopoi and virtual spaces

In the days of Foucault, such imaginary otherness was deemed to remain confined in the minds of individuals. Graphic artists were perhaps the only dwellers empowered to share their heterotopoi with others. This situation has changed, though, along with the trivialization of virtual spaces. What we possess today is a potentially infinite set of formalized alternative spaces called “layers” of geographic information systems. The access to such systems is commonplace, not only for professionals of spatial planning, but to all human individuals connected to the World Wide Web. The most common of them are web mapping services such as Google Maps, Bing Maps or Open Street Map. Behind such systems – or, better said, part of these systems – is a multidisciplinary community of spatial professionals that set up their structure, collect spatial information and adapt it, for it to be integrated in the geographic system. In the last decade, these professionals have managed to open their communities by shifting their roles:  they still produce spatial information, but spend even more time empowering non-professional GIS users to do so. In the case of Open Street Map, this empowering even goes so far as to allow users to produce the very base map used to display thematic information later on (traffic densities, land use types, building’s construction years, etc.). Still, even Open Street Map expects users to only report places that already exist, in the material sense of the expression. What about all the places that could be? I.e.: what about heterotopoi?

What we should be looking for are geographic information systems that gather and synthesize knowledge about all the Otherwise imagined by urban dwellers for any place in their city.  This gathering of heterotopoi, and their synthesis in a common virtual spatial layer, is what I wish to call urban hetorostasis. In a democratic society, only hetorstasis can, in my eyes, legitimate an urban project. Can we conceive a pragmatic system which would bring about, or at least facilitate heterostais?

Towards urban heterostasis

In fact, such systems already exist. One of them I have reported in a preceding article in this blog, consecrated to collaborative augmented reality. CAR, however, requires some degree of fascination for computer interfaces. Relying on CAR for heterostasis would, in very crude terms, lead to a city of geeks. In fact, no technological system will do by itself. Effective heterostasis cannot rely on a system of machines and algorithms. It needs a complex production network, composed of human, non-human (cf. Latour 1999), mechanic and electronic components. Social scientists at ease with human contact need to approach human individuals to sound out their needs. Many different ways to express their localized desires must be provided to urban dwellers: not only in the form of Tweeter tweets, FaceBook likes, virtual Layar drawings or Google Maps tags,  but also in the form of billboards, stickers, material traces in the urban space, that shelter heterotopoi in the form of text, drawing, sculpture, micro-model… A stimulating discussion with Jens Brandt, member of the urban thinktank Supertanker, recently made me discover the wide palette of such practices.

All this material, however, would be meaningless if not brought together at some point in time. While it is simple, for any human individual, to dwell in heterotopia, the aim of a human city is to co-dwell with all those of which it is composed. Precisely at this point, the mapper, the statistician, and the GIS technician step in, producing classes of equivalence between aspects of imaginary places, making them comparable, opposable in a common ontology, bringing them together in a common space, transforming a complex set of heterotopoi into a unique, spatial, representation of desire, that only one further step separates from becoming an urban project.

The task is hard and full of methodological pitfalls. Alain Desrosières, in his history of statistics (2000), belongs to the authors who reveal its complexity, its high stakes, its aporias. But the game’s worth the candle. In urbanism, the only alternative practice to heterostasis is the would-be “esthetic” tyranny of the architect, of the drawer of Sforzinda, of the builder of cities in the (social) desert, of the egocentric demiurge only eager to gather fame in the service of dictators. Urban heterostasis is everything  except that type of urbanism. Heterostasis is the open possibility, for all the inhabitants of a city, to play the role they are able to play in producing a desired urban space.

References

Desrosières Alain,  2000, La politique des grands nombres : histoire de la raison statistique, 2^e édition avec nouvelle postface de l’auteur, La Découverte (1^e édition : 1993).

Foucault Michel, 1967, « Des espaces autres » – Conférence au Cercle d’études architecturales, 14 mars 1967, (publiée in Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, n°5, octobre 1984, pp. 46-49).

Latour Bruno, 1999, Politiques de la nature : comment faire entrer les sciences en démocratie, Paris : La Découverte.

See also

“Hétérostase” in Wikitractatus, 10.01.2012.

Rajesh Kottamasu, 2007, Placelogging Mobile spatial annotation and its potential use to urban planners and designers, MA thesis,  MIT Sensable City lab.

Liina Einla, 2009, The Notion of Heterotopia in the Practice of Landscape Architecture. The Garden of Education – Alnarp, MA thesis, The Swedish University of Agricultural Science, Faculty of Landscape Planning, Horticulture and Agricultural Science.

“Allopatric speciation” occurs when a biological species divides in two distinct populations, due either to the emergence of a natural boundary (river, mountain) or to migration in opposite directions. Over hundreds of generations, the genotypes of both populations evolve on their own until, finally, they become two separate species.

For some species of fruit-flies, this operation takes but months.  For squirrels separated by drifting continents and floods, it takes hundreds of thousands of years. But how about the human species?

We might soon get a chance to figure it out. Or at least as soon as we get to Mars.

November 2011 shall be the month of the Red Planet: the crew of Mars500 will emerge out of its 520 days of simulated travel; two real probes (Phobos-Grunt and  Curiosity) shall be launched later on. These events remind us that Mars travel constitutes a real possibility; its colonization a thinkable horizon of  human action.

However, if humans colonize Mars, and if they survive, they will be lost to most of us. Relatives at 56 millions of kilometers are not the ones you get to see every weekend. They will live their separate ways, develop their distinct survival strategies, their distinct pathologies. Within two or three hundred years, it will be dangerous to visit these remote humans, as our immune systems won’t be apt, anymore, to deal with the unique virus mutations that will occur in the Mars colonies. We will end up living separately, dying separately and will eventually evolve into two separate species.

What will happen then? Will the “Martians” communicate with us? Enslave us? Exterminate us, like the homo sapiens sapiens perhaps did to the homo sapiens neanderthalensis ? Or will it be moral, for them, to farm and eat us, as much as we find it morally acceptable to eat other species today? Will we drift so much apart that we will be to them what pigs, dogs and horses are to us? Will it then be perverse for them, to copulate with earthlings, will they call this “androphilia” and spit and sneeze with despise? Will we drift from racism to specism? Will we found a universal community of sentient beings? Or will our misunderstanding become so great that we’ll eventually lose all interest in each other? How will we deal with the radical otherness of those that have once been exactly like us?

These are the great social questions of Mars. The planet named after the God of War could one day grow to meet its name, but it can also lead us to re-evaluate all our values. Perhaps the mere thought of it can too: the thought of Mars, our most challenging hypothesis.

See also

Echos

This post has been enhanced, translated in French and published here: Ourednik, A. (2011, November 4). “Penser la colonie humaine sur Mars comme une question sociale” in Le Temps, Genève, p. 13.

The Le Temps version has been commented in the Revue de presse internationale de Cecile de Kervasdoue, France Culture.

Philosophy

“Bande de Möbius” in WikiTractatus.

Biology

Rice William R. and Hostert Ellen E., “Laboratory Experiments on Speciation: What Have We Learned in 40 Years?”, Evolution, Vol. 47, No. 6, December 1993, pp. 1637-1653

Roth Louise V. and Mercer John M., « Differing rates of macroevolutionary diversification in arboreal squirrels », Current Science, Vol 95, No. 7, October 10, 2008, pp. 857-861.

Mars travel and colonization

The Mars society. The purpose of the Mars Society is to explore and settle the planet Mars.

“Can people go to Mars?” in Science@NASA.

The Mars Homestead Project: The Mars Homestead Project, the main project of the Mars Foundation, is developing a unified plan for building the first habitat on Mars by exploiting local materials.

MarsNews, Newswire for the new frontier.

Up to the beginning of the 20th century, the Ancient Testament had been the most cited text in societies with Christian heritage when it came to condemning the human hybris and its emblematic spatial figure: the city.  Yet, quite surprisingly, the most anti-urban text contains the perfect set of ingredients to build one. As the prophets write, “behold”:

“The whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top [may reach] unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the LORD said, Behold, the people [is] one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth. ” [Genesis, 11:1-9]

In other words, a human community needs three elements to exist:

• A common language, i.e., a common symbolic space necessary to articulate a coordinate action,
• the mastery of  matter,
• and a name to give itself, in order to make oneself distinct from the rest of the world.

And then one more thing: a common project, i.e., a shared idea of the highest good as Aristotle points out at the very beginning of his Politics. When these three ingredients give them the ability to do anything “which they have imagined to do”, humans only need to imagine something. Jerusalem imagines God. Yet its ingredients are exactly the same as Babylons, who only imagines itself. Precisely here lies the difference and the sin of Babylon in the eyes of the authors of the Bible. Because there are two ways of conceiving a human project.

The first one – and this would be the Jerusalem model – consists in trying to converge to a transcendental ideal. This is the model of religious fundamentalism, of 20th century totalitarianisms, and of our Brave New Worlds. Yet the Jerusalem model is also one in which humans ask themselves what happiness is before undertaking anything. It is a model that prohibits striving unless there is something to strive for.

Babylon strives without goal. It is beautiful and free and terrible and mad. It is the city of those who launch the “arrow of longing” beyond themselves, as Nietzsche would exalt before the end of his century. It is the city of infinite growth, fleeing forward men making themselves – and the world – miserable in their rush out to nowhere. Babylon depletes its environment. It lives on a mountain of high-tech garbage. But it is also the city in which men do not have to be told what to expect in order to live in expectation, they do not have to be taught what to desire in order to feel longing.

While the perfect ingredients of city building have so long been in our hands, we still don’t know which city to build.

Image

Tatlin Vladimir, 1919-1920, Model for the Monument of the 3rd International, sculpture.

Hotel and para-hotel overnight stays in Switzerland in the year 2000. Total numbers and comparison do the residential stay-times.

Who’s the real inhabitant of a place? For a long time, population maps have been constructed as if everybody stood still in their homes. Yet leaving this “domostatic” perspective is to geography like opening Pandora’s Box. All objects of any concern to the discipline must then be understood in a dynamic relationship to the rest of the world. Because any spatially defined area in today’s globalized context is actually inhabited by more people than those that reside in this area, all individuals on the planet can be considered as a potential part of the population of any place. In other words, no place is local. A population map of any territory can only strive for accuracy if one tries to include global-mobility-induced stay-times within the mapped area.

To what extent this is true can be verified by looking at “imported” stay-times I’ve already talked about in a preceding blog . Here is another illustration, based on hotel nights. As you can see can see on this map, the touristic presence can sometimes up to triple the local population in terms of total stay-times, which shows not only the inaccuracy of domostatic measuring but raises also major political questions about “local” governance. In effect, to what extent can a place in which only one third of the actual occupants has political rights and obligations be considered as democratic? To which extent are local constitutions already concomitant with the principles of the World Tourism Organization? To which extent does the basic right to move, protected by the Article 13 of the Human Rights Declaration, need to be extended to the freedom to act, politically, in places other than one’s residence?

The place of the topographic territory in politics will need much thought and attention in the upcomming epoch. No doubt its importance will be both downscaled and coupled to other societal interobjects. The westphalian model of the territorial state is under rising pressure. New models of participation, based on transterritorial societies, will have to be invented, unless we want to see democratic systems turn into unpraticable reliques.

References

Ourednik André, 2010, “Cartografare in due dimensioni la realtà diacronica dello spazio abitato” in Emanuela Casti e Jacques Lévy (a cura di): Le sfide cartografiche. Movimento, partecipazione, rischio, Universtà degli Studi di Bergamo: il lavoro editoriale, pp. 65-77.

Tools

Excel, Spss, ArcGIS, ScapeToad, Illustrator.