Schedule of Readings

Week One: Earths, Worlds, Globes

Strategy for Reading:

The first part of this week's assignment is designed to alert you to how you visualize Earth, and perhaps how the virtual experience of seeing-Earth has affected the way you see other things as well.

The second part of this week's assignment presents you with two stories oriented around the words and concepts used to describe the sorts of pictures you will have just looked at. Take note of those concepts and also the historical claims made on their basis. I also suggest you consider a hypothesis: that a gap has arisen between our pictures and our words, or, between the ways we intuitively visualize Earth and the language we have used to describe it.

The last part of our reading, from Robert Poole's Earthrise, provides a more conventional historical account of how human beings first came to see the Earth as a whole. There's lots to think and feel about in the Poole -- please do note your "feels"! -- but be sure to consider whether Poole can help us with the question about the relation between our visions and vocabularies.


(a) Our vision ...

Look at this picture and jot down whatever comes to mind, and I do mean, whatever comes to mind, even if it seems irrelevant or strange or unsavory (I won't ask you to turn this in).

Now look at this picture and do the same.

Now this one.

Perform an image search with Google or another engine for: "earth" and "world" and "globe." Jot down and organize your thoughts about what the search yields. Do you notice any patterns? Anything you hadn't expected?  Do any of those terms seem to encompass the others? In other words, which of the three would you nominate for the prize of "master icon"?

If you know other languages, try the foreign-language equivalent of these searches on Google's other country sites.

Last, take a look at these slides.  All, in their way, are images of Earth.  Pick one or two, dwell with them for about five minutes, and jot down whatever comes to mind.

(b) ... our vocabularies ...

W.J.T. Mitchell, "World Pictures: Globalization and Visual Culture" (ereserve)
Denis Cosgrove, Apollo's Eye, preface, 1-8, 14-16 (ereserve)

Optional

  • Timothy Ingold, "Globes and Spheres: The Toplogy of Modern Environmentalism" (ereserve)
  • Peter Sloterdijk, Sphären (3 vols)

(c) ... and one hypothesis about how it happened.

Robert Poole, Earthrise, chs 1- 2, 5, 10 (link on moodle page)

UNIT ONE: EARLY BEQUESTS

Week Two: Looking Up, or the Adventures of the Copernican World

Strategy for Reading:

Copernicanism is often associated with a metaphysical "trauma." It hurt, this story goes, to realize the Earth revolves around the sun, because it challenged our sense of being at the center of things (perhaps it would be better to call it a "narcissistic injury" instead). One way to orient yourselves this week is to try and piece together a story about how ideas of being at the center -- geocentrism, anthropocentrism, and noocentrism (the centrality of mind or reason) -- change over time, from deep prehistory to our post-Earthrise present.

Another point of entry to this week's reading, especially (c), would be for you to consider in detail: what is it like to fall?  You may find it helpful to jot down as much as you can recall about a lived experience of falling.

There's lots more to talk about, and for a detailed guide to reading, go here.

(a) Prehistory, or the Human Condition

Hans Blumenberg, Genesis of the Copernican World, 3-7 (ereserve)

Optional

  • Blumenberg, "Cosmos and Tragedy" in Genesis (ereserve)
  • Edward Grant, Planets, Orbs, Stars
  • Michael Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, Antiquity to 1915, a Sourcebook
  • David Lindberg, The Origins of Western Science

(b) Copernican Worlds

Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, 3-73
Voltaire, "Micromegas" (ereserve)

Optional

  • Galileo Galilei, Sidereus Nuncius, or the Sidereal Messenger
  • Thomas Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution
  • Michael Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750-1900
  • Alexandre Koyre, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe
  • Immanuel Kant, "Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, or, An Essay on the Constitution and the Mechanical Origin of the Entire Structure of the Universe Based on Newtonian Principles" (online)

(c) After Earthrise

Poole, Earthrise, ch. 6
Blumenberg, "Reflexive Telescopics and Geotropic Astronautics," in Genesis, 617-21, 675-85 (ereserve)
From Hans Blumenberg, The Plenitude of the Stars:

When the first photos from space showed the earth glimmering blue in the universe, there were perhaps others like me who were momentarily astonished to see nothing of the net of latitude and longitude, nothing of the line of the equator, as every globe had impressed it in the photographic memory

Every globe, even the most artful of globes illuminated from within, would forever more appear with a hitherto unremarked wretchedness, for the simple reason that a star can't look like that -- only a construct.

These Slides may help you consider Blumenberg's remark.  You may also find it of interest to reconsider this.

Optional

Week Three: Looking Down, or the Adventures of the World Map

Before you do the reading for this week, I suggest you spend some time looking at several artifacts at Special Collections: in roughly chronological order, Ptolemy's Geography and the "Prima Affri" map made on its basis, the Hereford Mappamundi, and Mercator's "Orbis Terrae..." Which of these maps is most astonishing to you? Most beautiful? Most true? Your reactions need not be "scholarly" or "academic" - just take note of both your initial thoughts, whatever they may be, and how those thoughts change. The aim is for you to register what you make of historical artifacts before you have the context to understand them. This will enable you to specify the assumptions you bring to your investigations.

Next week we will read an essay by the philosopher Martin Heidegger called "The Age of the World Picture." Heidegger's basic claim is that the modern age "sets up" the world as a picture to be manipulated or fabricated at will. Frank Borman's reaction to the sight of an Earthrise is a good example: he was looking at Earth, but his response indicates that intuitively he saw Earth as one instance of the larger species -- picture. In Heidegger's language, Borman's words disclose or reveal the Earth as picture. A useful point of entry into this week's material is to ask yourself: how do you think a given map "disclosed" Earth or world to those for whom it was made? We'll try to construct a mini-history of world-disclosure from Ptolemy's time to our own.

We'll spend most of our time with the maps discussed by Brotton, but perhaps you will find some of these Slides of interest as well. And go here for a comprehensive guide to this week's reading.

(a) Antiquity

Jerry Brotton, A History of the World in Twelve Maps, 1-29, 41-53
Skim: Ptolemy, Geography, Book 1, Sections 1-5, 22, 24 (ereserve)
Strongly recommended:  David Woodward, "The Image of the Spherical Earth" (ereserve)

Optional

  • Ptolemy's Geography and "Prima Affri" (special collections)
  • Evelyn Edson, Mapping Time and Space

(b) Worlds on Cloth: Medieval Mappaemundi

Brotton, 12 Maps, 82-113
Mappa Mundi Exploration

Optional

  • Hereford Mappamundi (Special Collections)
  • Evelyn Edson, The World Map, 1300-1492
  • "The Map That Changed the World" (link)
  • "Where the Wild Things Are"
  • Richard Ellis, Monsters of the Sea

(c) Toward the Modern World Picture

Brotton, 12 Maps, 218-222, 241-59

Optional:  Brotton, 146-166 and 373-404

Optional

  • Ortelius, "Americae Sive Novi Orbis" and Mercator, "Orbis Terrae" (special collections)
  • A Map of the World on Mercator's Projection (in Special Collections)
  • Mercator: a monograph on the lettering of maps, etc. in the 16th century Netherlands with a facsimile and translation of his treatise on the italic hand and a translation of Ghim's Vita Mercatoris (in Special Collections)

OPTIONAL Mini-Essay/Reflection:  You may recall that Hans Blumenberg felt surprise when he saw the first images of the Earth from space and saw -- of course -- that the Earth lacked graticule. In other words, the conventions of mapping had insinuated themselves into his intuitive picture of the Earth as whole. You've just spent a week thinking about maps. Do the images you considered in the first week of class -- "Earthrise," "Blue Marble," "128 Details," your world-picture -- look quite the same to you now? Did map-like conventions inform your initial response, as they did for Blumenberg? Should we think of "Earthrise" and "Blue Marble" as maps in their own right?  You may find it helpful to read this article by Tim Ingold: "Earth, Sky, Wind, and Weather" (ereserve) Reflect on these questions as a way of taking stock of the course thus far. Anywhere from 2-3 pages, double-spaced, DUE FRIDAY, 12PM, via Moodle.

UNIT TWO: THE MODERN WORLD-PICTURE

Week Four: The Age of the World-Picture

Strategy for Reading

This week's material is quite difficult.  The best thing you can do to prepare is to give yourself the time to read through and reflect on the Heidegger several times over several days.  Even then, you won't get every detail.  That's fine, but I do expect that you will have devoted sustained and serious effort.  I think you'll find that with Heidegger, episodic and playful attention can help, too.

Another point of entry is embodied in this juxtaposition.

(a) One view ...

Martin Heidegger, "Age of the World Picture" (plus appendix 9: esp pp. 147-50 (top) and 152-53) in The Question Concerning Technology
Strongly Recommended:  Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology"

The following exchange in the linked interview:

SPIEGEL: One could naïvely object: What do we have to come to terms with here? Everything functions. More and more electric power plants are being built. Production is flourishing. People in the highly technological parts of the earth are well provided for. We live in prosperity. What is really missing here?
HEIDEGGER: Everything functions. That is exactly what is uncanny. Everything functions and the functioning drives us further and further to more functioning, and technology tears people away and uproots them from the earth more and more. I don’t know if you are scared; I was certainly scared when I recently saw the photographs of the earth taken from the moon. We don’t need an atom bomb at all; the uprooting of human beings is already taking place. We only have purely technological conditions left. It is no longer an earth on which human beings live today.

Here and here are the pictures Heidegger had in mind.  I suggest you also consider what Heidegger might have made of the Ptolemy projection, the Hereford mappamundi, and Earthrise/Blue Marble.

Slides

Optional

  • Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology," in The Question Concerning Technology
  • Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, introduction (ereserve); "Man's Conquest of Space" (ereserve); and "The Archimedian Point" (ereserve)
  • Responses to Arendt (ereserve)
  • Benjamin Lazier, "Earthrise, or, the Globalization of the World Picture" (ereserve)
  • Dipesh Chakrabarty, "The Planet: An Emergent Humanist Category" (ereserve)

(b) ... or many?

Martin Jay, "Scopic Regimes of Modernity" in Force Fields (ereserve)

Here are Slides of the images mentioned in Jay's article.  Be sure to spend a few minutes with the first.

Optional


  • EJ Diksterhuis, The Mechanization of the World Picture
  • Manfred Steger, The Rise of the Global Imaginary

Week Five: Whole Systems, Whole Earths

Strategy for Reading:

This week focuses on the origins and development of the "systems" metaphor as a way of describing Earth. But not just Earth. It turns out that the ideas behind the notion of an ecosystem would also be applied to the inorganic world, the world of material artifacts, and to human interactions. Be sure to note how, especially as you encounter the phenomenon in the pages of the Whole Earth Catalog.

To set this week's material in conversation with earlier material, I suggest you consider: does Heidegger read any differently now that you have dwelled for a bit with the rise of systems thinking?  You may wish to consider what he could have meant in the following exchange:

SPIEGEL: And what takes the place of philosophy now?
HEIDEGGER: Cybernetics

(a) Whole Systems

William Bryant, "Whole Earth, Whole System," 22-73, 118-135 (ereserve)

Optional

  • Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics
  • Hannah Arendt, "Lecture on Cybernetics" (ereserve)
  • Strongly recommended: "Koyaanisqatsi" (moodle stream)

(b) Whole Earths

Poole, Earthrise, ch 8 ("From Spaceship Earth to Mother Earth")
Brand, Whole Earth Catalog (review entire catalog, and undertake a close reading of 3-4, 5-6, 31-32, 41-42, and 2 other 2-page spreads of your choice)

 

Optional

  • Simon Sadler, "An Architecture of the Whole"
  • Barbara Ward, Spaceship Earth
  • Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
  • Stewart Brand, Space Colonies
  • Robert Smithson, "Entropy Made Visible" in Collected Writings (ereserve)
  • http://www.wholeearth.com/index.php
  • Whole Earth Review
  • Co-Evolution Quarterly
  • The No Earth Catalog

 

Week Six: Biospherics

This week's assignment is an extension and elaboration of last week's reading.  It focuses on the biosphere -- as a concept and a practice -- and the various ways it could embody a vision of Earth as a techno-ecological system.

(a) Intellectual Origins: Biospheres and Noöspheres Between the World Wars

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, 163-184, 213-215 (ereserve)

Optional

  • Noösphere World Forum
  • Samson and Pitt, eds., The Biosphere and Noösphere Reader
  • Vladimir Vernadskii, Biosphere

(b) Gaia (Biosphere I)

Poole, Earthrise, 170-178
James Lovelock, Gaia, preface, chs. 1, 4, 8-9

Optional

  • Lovelock, Gaia, chs. 3, 7
  • Scientific American, September, 1970

(c) Biosphere II

Allen, Biosphere II, 1-36, 51-57, 101-03, 115-16,127-29, 147-53 (link) N.B.: I've made short selections, but I encourage you to take a look at the photographs throughout the book and peruse further at your discretion.
Recommended: Peder Anker, "The Ecological Colonization of Space" (ereserve)
Recommended: 1970s Space Colony Artwork

Slides

Optional

  • Film: "Spaceship Eearth" (2020)
  • Jane Poynter, Biosphere 2 (video)
  • Dorion Sagan, Biospheres: The Metamorphosis of the Planet Earth
  • Rebecca Reider, Dreaming the Biosphere:  The Theater of all Possibilities
    Stephen King, Under the Dome
  • Timothy W. Luke, "Reproducing Planet Earth? The Hubris of Biosphere 2"
  • Kevin Kelley, Out of Control
  • Bryant, "Whole System, Whole Earth," ch. 4

MID-TERM ESSAY DUE FRIDAY, OCTOBER 11, 12PM, FORMATTED IN 11-POINT COURIER FONT, DOUBLE-SPACED.

UNIT THREE: GLOBALISMS AFTER EARTHRISE

Week Seven: Global Environments

Terms like "global environment" and "global economy" are now second nature for most of us.  And this can obfuscate their novelty.  Along with words like "globalization," their rise is coincident with the dissemination of photographs like "Earthrise" and "Blue Marble."  The next few weeks of our course are designed to register the fact and to explore historical hypotheses about why.

(a) Environments and Globes

Tim Ingold, "Globes and Spheres: The Topology of Modern Environmentalism" (ereserve)

(b) Global Warming

Cathleen Fogel, "The Local, the Global, and the Kyoto Protocol" (ereserve)
This ngram

(c) Global Ecologies

Wolfgang Sachs, Planet Dialectics, preface, pp 27-28, 33-45 (ereserve)
Vandana Shiva, "The Greening of Global Reach" (link)

Optional

  • Dipesh Chakrabarty, "The Climate of History: Four Theses" (ereserve)
  • Dale Jamieson, "The Philosopher's Symposium on Climate Change" (ereserve)
  • Vladimir Jankovic, "Climatological Citizenship" (ereserve)
  • Matthias Dorries, "Nuclear Winter and Global Climate Change" (ereserve)
  • Angel Saiz, "Globalization, Cosmopolitanism, and Ecological Citizenship" (ereserve)


Week Eight: Global Economies

(a) Market Globalism and its Discontents

Lang, "Globalization and its History," 901-914 only (ereserve)
Manfred Steger, Globalisms, 1-19, 51-95 (ereserve)
Iain Boal, "The Cartographic Logic of Late Capitalism" (ereserve)
Browse Radical Cartography:  in particular, I recommend One World II, Human Hemisphere, and French Kisses

Optional:

"The Yes-Men" (film)
Burtynsky, "Manufactured Landscapes" (film)
David Harvey, "Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils" (ereserve)
Patrick McHaffie, "Decoding the Globe" (ereserve)

(b) Eco-nomies and Eco-logies

Kenneth Boulding, "The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth" (ereserve)

(c) Third World, Whole Earth, Global South

This ngram
Alfred Sauvy, "Three Worlds, One Planet"
Alina Sajed, "From the Third World to the Global South"

Optional

  • Wolfgang Sachs, "Globalization and Sustainability" in Planet Dialectics (ereserve)
  • Club of Rome, The Limits of Growth (ereserve)
  • Brundtland Report (ereserve)

Week Nine: Global Humanities (1): Cosmopolitanisms

REQUIRED FILM: Sun Ra, "Space is the Place" (1974)

Joshua Yates, "Mapping the Good World: The New Cosmopolitans and Our Changing World Picture" (link)
Sun Ra, "Space is the Place" (1974) (film)
Gil Scott-Heron, "Whitey on the moon" (link)

If you'd like to put this week's material in conversation with the Biosphere II project, you might consider the following from John Allen, one of its founders:

"Western civilization isn't simply dying. It's dead. We are probing into its ruins to take whatever is useful for the building of the new civilization to replace it. This new civilization will be planetary. The whole earth will be our home. We are no longer Americans, or Westerners, even though as individuals we were once trained in that tradition. We will build a series of centers in various parts of the world to demonstrate the new way of life. This ranch is merely our first training ground" (in Reider, Dreaming the Biosphere, 17)

Week 10: Global Humanities (2):  Humanitarianisms

Before we convene this week, concoct an "elevator pitch" for your final project.  About 30 seconds to one minute.  It should describe what you're doing in a way that will leave others in the elevator wanting to hear more.  We'll pitch our pitches to one another in class.

(a) Humanitarianism

Lisa Parks, "Digging Into Google Earth: An Analysis of 'Crisis in Darfur'" (ereserve)
We are the World

(b) Terrorism

Faisal Devji, The Terrorist in Search of Humanity (ereserve)

Optional

  • Google Earth Visualizations: CO2 Emissions, Disappearing Forests, Endangered Mammals, Endangered Indigenes
  • Islamic Imagery Project (esp. "globe")
  • Amanda Ufheil-Somers, "Keeping Watch From Space: Genocide and Technologies of Witnessing in the Age of Digital Surveillance," Reed Thesis, 2008.
  • Kristin Ross, May '68 and its Afterlives, 158-169 (ereserve)
  • Cornelius Castoriadis, "Ecology as a Revolutionary Movement" (ereserve)
  • James Traub, "Statesmen Without Borders" (ereserve)
  • Manfred Steger, Globalisms, 145-57 (link)

Week Eleven: Aesthetic Encounters with a Planetary Earth

FINAL PROJECT PROPOSAL: Posted via moodle, describing plans for your final project or paper. DUE FRIDAY, NOV 22, 12PM, NO EXTENSIONS.

Strategy for Reading:  

This week's material focuses on Robert Smithson's monumental work of land-art, "Spiral Jetty," in Utah's Great Salt Lake.  It was conceived in conversation with "mapping procedures that refer to the planet Earth," as he put it in his article "Gyrostasis."  For that reason, I decided to title this week "aesthetic encounters with a planetary Earth."

You haven't encountered anything quite like this material before, at least not in this class.  

One strategy for reading is just to ask how the various categories and concepts we've encountered this semester are invoked, embodied, embraced, ignored, or contested by Smithson's work.  You could think, from week one, about the concepts of earth, world, and globe.  From week two, about life on Earth, anthropocentrism, heliocentrism, the Copernican trauma.  From week three, mapping and projection (n.b.  "Jetty" comes from the French jeter, to throw; the suffix -ject can also mean "to throw").  From week four, world-pictures and Heidegger and scopic regimes. From week five, whole systems and whole Earths.  From week six, biospheres, noospheres, technospheres, lithospheres.  From the last three weeks, diverse forms of globalism.  All of these are in play, in some form or another, in the reading and viewing for this week.

REQUIRED FILM: Robert Smithson, "Spiral Jetty"

Anyone up for a road trip?

From Robert Smithson, Collected Writings

  • "Gyrostasis" (ereserve)
  • "Cinematic Atopia" (ereserve)
  • "Spiral Jetty" (ereserve)

Martin Heidegger, "On the Origins of the Work of Art," in Basic Writings, 149-51, 167-73 only (ereserve)
Gary Shapiro, Earthwards: Robert Smithson and Art After Babel, 5-20, 113-40 (link)

If you find yourself getting into this material, I'd also recommend the following from Smithson's Collected Writings:

  • Recommended: "The Domain of the Great Bear" (ereserve)
  • Recommended: "A Sedimentation of the Mind" (ereserve)

Also recommended:  Terry Williams, "I am haunted by what I've seen at Great Salt Lake" (link)

Slides

Optional

  • Roberth Smithson, The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam
  • Robert Hobbs, Robert Smithson: Sculpture
  • Susan Boettger, Earthworks: Art and the Lanscape of the Sixties
  • John Beardsley, Earthworks and Beyond
  • Ron Graziani, Robert Smithson and the American Landscape
  • James Turrell, The Roden Crater Project
  • James Turrell, The Other Horizon
  • James Turrell, The Art of Light and Space
  • Jori Finkel, "A Secret Kind of Outside Art" (link)

Week Twelve: Virtual Earths + Synthesis + Project Discussion

(a) Google Earth

Before you read, consider what it means to view this image on a computer screen. Then spend some time with this image, and jot down whatever comes to mind. Then consider those first two images alongside this one.  Last, spend some time with Google Earth and describe the experience of using it.

Brotton, 12 Maps, 405-436

(b) Synthesis

Consider how you might re-write Poole's big-picture story about the origins of Earthrise and its afterlives, given what you've read this semester, your responses, and what you've been working on for your finals. Is it a happy story, a sad one, ambivalent? Is it comedy, tragedy, absurdist drama? Is it a story that includes space whales? I hope so. Last, consider how two earlier efforts to make sense of this material -- one by a former student, one by me in an essay -- try to answer the BIG QUESTION: what the heck was this course about?  You might also approach this question by considering how you describe this course to others.  

Review Poole, Earthrise (esp. chs. 1, 10)
Camille Charlier, Iconocalypse
Optional:  Benjamin Lazier, "Earthrise, or the Globalization of the World Picture"

Optional

(c) Project Discussion

We will use some class time to provide constructive feedback on one another's final projects.  Please be sure to read your classmates' proposals before we convene.

Week Thirteen: Presentations/Party

FINAL PROJECTS DUE 12PM, WEDNESDAY, DEC 4, VIA MOODLE.  NO EXTENSIONS.

We will meet for presentations, film screenings, dramatic readings, general merriment, and self-congratulation.