The universe is a pretty big place, it’s bigger than anything anyone has ever dreamt of before. So if it’s just us, it seems like an awful waste of space. – Robert Zemeckis, Contact (1997)
In the second half of the 1990s, a group of Italian artists, part of the larger “Luther Blissett” community making media pranks, hacker attacks and other sorts of conspiracies, formed the “Men in Red” project. Inspired by the thinking of Dante Minazzoli and UFO-themed films of the decade, such as Star Trek, Independence Day or Men in Black, they pursued to spread ideas of so-called “radical ufology.” Melding beliefs in an encounter with intelligent extraterrestrial life together with Marxism or the leftist theory of Antonio Negri and Giorgio Agamben, they developed the concept of “exoplanetarism” – an openness to “autonomous contact” with an “absolute, unconditional, non-codified alterity.”[1] This search for radical otherness was of course not simply about looking for the “little green men,” but was attempting, following Minazzoli or Argentine Trotskyist Juan Posadas, to rescue the UFO (imagination) from mere interpretation of external distant phenomenon and turn it into a “vehicle of change” [2] for the world.”
The Posadist movement, mostly (in)famous for its support of nuclear war as a means of destroying capitalism, or hopes put in human-dolphin socializing, came up in the 1960s with a very distinctive dialectical materialist interpretation of ufology. Based on the high probability of existence of extraterrestrial life, Posadas believed that any cosmic civilization advanced enough to travel faster than the speed of light and therefore able to travel through Space, must have reached a high degree of societal cooperation and thus naturally has to be post-capitalistic.
But none of these intergalactic communists “stayed for any length of time on Earth because human society is at a primitive pre-socialistic level and therefore of no interest to them.”[3] Such reasoning might truly seem unrealistic or deluded, but it challenges a very important notion laying at the very core of many problems human society faces today: the notion of belief. What is there to believe in after the announcement of all the Ends? What we still can dare to hold as possible, if the “End of History” [4] had already happened and if we continue to be told we are left only with “No future”[5] and “No Alternative”?[6]
Facing the deepening many-faceted ecological and social crisis we find ourselves in, we are often confronted with complete absurdity and chaos which, multiplied and disseminated through digital (social) media, makes any attempt to navigate this mess or to beat any stable path impossible. It is why Bernard Stiegler speaks of the Anthropocene as an “Entropocene,” entropy being produced on such a massive scale it makes knowledge “liquidated and automated” [7] to the point it ceases to be knowledge at all.
In such a fuzzy climate, the most common human reaction to this impossibility of grasping or understanding is to sink into the all-pervading lethargy and to give ourselves in to the strong feeling of incapacity and inconclusiveness, by which the late capitalist times are fittingly characterised in Mark Fisher’s famous concept of “capitalist realism.”[8] The “realism” here stands of course for a description of a prevailing everyday reality, but is also meant exactly as an actual opposite of any form of “active dreaming”[9] or imagination of an “utopian leap.”[10]
So under the pressure of this imposed realism of the Anthropocene that makes even simple changes seem “unrealisable,” it is perhaps “just as realistic to fantasize about a queer commune on Mars as drinkable water in Flint” and seemingly naive ideas about “fully automated luxury gay space communism” in fact interestingly respond to this absurd reality by acknowledging that “if nothing is possible, then at least we can demand what we really want, since it remains equally unattainable as our more ‘pragmatic’ concerns.”[11]
“Throughout his militancy, he watched the skies.[12] Already in 1947 […],when the press started to report the first news [of Roswell], [13] I drank coffee with some comrades in Buenos Aires… and told them that for me they were probably space ships.” – Dante Minazzoli
The impossibility to imagine and act seems to reign over the contemporary (human) world the more, the more we are aware we have to change the course, heading nowhere else than to ever greater ecological catastrophes and even very probable human extinction. “The Anthropocene is unsustainable: it is a massive and high-speed process of destruction operating on a planetary scale, and its current direction must be reversed.”[14] But how do we turn the wheel of something we haven’t even consciously set in motion?
As Fisher promptly quotes Foucault: “[W]e must produce something that doesn’t yet exist and about which we cannot know how and what it will be.”[15] Since the consequences of the “Entropocene” are caused by the self-centered orientation of human actions and thinking, narcissistically looking at and up to itself in the mirror for a past few centuries without paying attention to all levels rising right behind the thin window glass, it is no surprise contemporary philosophy tells us to go to the “great outdoors,” urging thereby a much needed trans*formation of human reasoning and (self )positioning (with)in the world. Because, as Karen Barad says: “We’ are not outside observers of the world. Nor are we simply located at particular places in the world; rather, we are part of the world in its ongoing intra-activity.”[16]
A crucial part of this necessary shift is what Lukáš Likavčan describes, following Quentin Meillassoux, as the “affirmation of the existence of exteriority,”[17] tied to the acceptance of our species as only transient and wrapped in a series of both anterior and posterior planetary events and processes completely independent of any human (subject). This need to reach outside, to the “exterior” of human thought through an attempt to think something as unthinkable as our own finitude as a species, thus perhaps seems to be the only way to prevent the actual extinction from happening.
Facing the probable approaching death as well as the chaotic feelings of the “end of times” (at least in the sense of the linear teleological line of progress we used to draw with a hand way too firm), we therefore desperately seek to find some way “beyond” the uncertain fate of both the everyday human life and the Earth’s biosphere. But passing “beyond” the Anthropocene defined exactly by the impact of “human” actions, means not only to overcome the polluted idea of “the entire universe as the infinitely multiplied copy of one original picture-man”,[18] but to abandon or radically change what we consider(ed) to be “human” in the first place.
As Jennifer Gabrys has it: “The genre of the human must be expanded so that other less destructive modes of being human – and being planetary – might be formed.”[19] The obsolete concept of the “human subject” put together predominantly by the humanist project of Enlightenment[20] doesn’t correspond to the complexity of the more and more striking “posthuman reality” and calls for a new mode of subjectivity able to express the intra-connectedness,[21] interdependence and mutual inseparability on a much wider scale. This scale has to be planetary, “exter”–iorizing humans to a position of “mere mediators”[22] of broader and deeper processes in time and space, but should perhaps in the same sense acknowledge the human subject as being composed of particles and fluxes that don’t stop with leaving the Earth’s orbit.
In other words, why couldn’t we try to make a speculative leap further and travel through “exter” all the way to “extra,” as in “extraterrestrial” in the sense of cosmic or even alien?
“You’re all building castles in the sky, dreaming of a better world ‘Is there life on Mars?’ you wonder, as you look up into the heavens above !ere is Come aboard my ship, my dream machine We’ll fly through galaxies To a place you call Heaven […] We don’t need wings to get there Just close your eyes, we’ll make it Together” – Phantasia: Violet Skies (Mental Radio label, 1991)
Patricia MacCormack sees the above-mentioned “impossibility” or unthinkability as a “key element” of posthuman ethics.[23] And it truly might be the right feeling to begin with, because there is no such thing as simple “transition” to any pre-given “trans*human” mode of subjectivity.
Not only because we can, by its definition, never fully know its nature, but because it is not a destination or a goal “to reach” in the first place. The processes of passing “beyond” humanism, anthropocentrism or Anthropocene could not in any case follow the transcendental movement forward, which copies too dangerously the “progressive” teleology of great historical narratives, the individualist concept of isolated self-betterment for the sake of the market and the “straight time [telling] us that there is no future” [24] in the first place. It is therefore not a trans* or post* of going farther or faster, but more of a journey into space with no launch – a process of becoming cosmic without colonising a single space territory. According to Karen Barad’s definition, posthumanism primarily questions “the givenness of the differential categories of ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman’, examining the practices through which these differential boundaries are stabilized and destabilized.”[25] As such, it is rather a many-edged and multidirectional process of mutual “openness of each element to experiencing the other as self and thus self as other,”[26] than any fixed state to grow into. The posthuman is therefore “an opening movement” [27] not towards some actual outside alterity, but in the sense of acknowledging the alien as being always already co-constitutive of the very fabric of the “self,” and by the same token, “the inner of the self [as] belong[ing] also to outside.”[28] We thus need to avoid seeing this necessary transition as a “way out”, be it “outside” of our thought or the Anthropocene, and neither into any “higher” level or outer Space in Muskian view. In this sense, the stars are shining not only above us but also beneath our feet or skin.
“Nobody can be anybody without somebodies around.” – John Archibald Wheeler
A cosmic subject(ivity) could therefore be defined as intra-connected and radically open, both in terms of reciprocal relations and its certain necessary unfinishedness. “The space between the I / Other is one of inevitable connection and we are always and already othered / otherable.” [29] Bernard Stiegler also underlines this openness to mutual change: “[T]he I and the we are two faces of the same process of individuation, at the core of which develops their tendency to become-indivisible.”[30] And he sees this process exactly as always inevitably incomplete, because its completion would actually mean an end to active change and therefore an end of the individual as such: A static, finished, no longer changing, it would be left “without future”.[31] It is therefore only through letting something “other” change us, when we truly individuate and keep ourselves alive and actively present in the world. This sympoetical functioning echoes precisely what Donna Haraway proclaims: “Nothing makes itself,”[32] our own making being enmeshed in patterns of “making-with”, whether we consciously admit it or not.
Similarly, the “intra” in Barad’s concept of “intra-action” aims to emphasize, in contrast to the usual “interaction” between two separate individual agencies, exactly this entanglement and mutual inseparability of interacting agents, constituted themselves only in and through the processes they are engaged in: “[T]hey don’t exist as individual elements.”[33] This bond definitely has a metaphorical level, but based on quantum mechanics research, it has proven to be an actual observable manifestation of particles’ behaviour.
In the so-called “quantum entanglement” phenomenon, two or more particles could be said to “share an existence”: Their quantum state cannot be described independently of the state of the others. This also means that what happens to one particle directly and instantly affects the other(s), whether they are close or many light-years away. The inseparability of particles may seem too abstract and invisible to have an influence on our-scale macroscopic world, but very recent experiments, conducted for example by scientists from Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, proved entanglement possible even between very different and larger objects, [34] entangling a millimetres-long silicon nitride membrane with a fog of atoms and making it buzz lightly when struck with photons. Such revelations create a certain shift in our sense of scale and perspective, as they show something radically unfamiliar about the basic units from which the Earth, our bodies and the whole universe are made of.
Alien “buzzing” of microscopic “spooky action at a distance,” as Einstein famously named the quantum entanglement,[35] (refusing to believe it was real) also seems to be challenging the logic of static differentiating binaries we set between the bodies of people, beings, organisms, bacteria or other types of matter.
The too firm and easily divisible smooth reality of Cartesian space dissolves in all-encompassing vibrations, and together with the subject–object or nature–culture dichotomies collapses under its own untenability into a potentially productive strange mess, dissipating the human “into collective molecular assemblages with environment and cosmos”.[36] Theoretical physicist John Wheeler explains that no matter how “smooth and flat” our everyday experience of space geometry might be, it always shows oscillations when we look closer. He compares this hidden “wiggly business” to an experience of flying closer to the ocean. “Above the ocean, it seems to be a perfectly smooth surface. You come down closer, you see the waves. And if you get so close, you see the waves breaking, you see foam.”[37] So whether we are all humus,[38] stardust or foam, we definitely don’t stand in any stable space with strict borders, dualities or “above” (super)positions.
We were, are and will always be intra-connected in the wiggling flux of unfinished cosmic becoming. And in this sense, searching for the posthuman / post-humus / (anti)-posthumous seems to be nothing more than re-defining the human for what it, in fact, always already has been.
“[W]e want to open our bodies to the bodies of other people, to other people in general. We want to let vibrations pass among us, let energies circulate, allow desires to merge, so that we can all give free reign, to our fantasies, our ecstasies.” – Patricia MacCormack, Posthuman Ethics: Embodiment and Cultural Theory (2012)
Since there are good reasons not to consider the needed opening movement “transcendence,” we might as well call it “alienation,” for it is a path of encountering the unfamiliar, strange and radical Other within the very structure of “our” world and “our” species. Teresa Castro writes that this alienation can also be called “queering,” because queer as a general estrangement from all dualistic identities “has never been only human” and could actually help us in reimagining what being human means in contemporary world of “man-made ecological catastrophe” and thus finding a less “oppressive mode of being human.”[39] Pursuing this process of queer estrangement, we should never succumb to seemingly given categories, especially when they are labelled as “natural,” if only because nature itself, as well as our own nature as a species, is and should be subject to constant change.
As xenofeminism proclaims, it is crucial to refuse “to frame nature as only and always the unyielding limit to emancipatory imaginaries” [40] and to accept it as unfixed and ever co-evolving, allowing us thus to perceive both our biological body and our identity and subjectivity as “reworkable platform[s].” It is in this sense that xenofeminism speaks of “trans* naturalism”[41] that needs to be part of any ecological activism. If we want to stay in the living network, the old “humanist” organisational structures need to be reshaped, widening such concepts as “care” from too limited parental / family level to “better care of kinds-assemblages”.[42] It is in this sense that Haraway instigates us to “Make Kin Not Babies”[43] and MacCormack speaks of stopping to reproduce as entailing “vigilance for immanent lives”.[44] Because such broader “kinship and xenosolidarity might actually encourage a deeper hospitality towards the Other” and prepare us for possible “new arrivals of all kinds.”[45]
“[T]he end of the system of boredom, integrated at the level of endoplanetary spectacle, passes through autonomous ufological practice for the self-determination of an interspecial evolution.” – Men in Red, 1998
In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche writes: “We have invented the concept of ‘end’: In reality there is no end.”[46] We find a similar suggestion in Spinoza’s claim that “nature does not work with an end in view”.[47] In relation to the notion of end, they both address a discrepancy between what is or might truly be “natural” and what we perhaps define as such only by casting reflections of the all too narrow definitions we ourselves invented. Similarly, when xenofeminism claims that “future is a heteronormative construct”,[48] it could perhaps be read in a sense of the “no future” ethos being a socially and culturally conditioned – and therefore potentially surmountable – product supported by those promoting teleological straight line of self-replication.
So what if the apocalyptic future ahead of us, which itself recently became almost a synonym for an approaching end with no possible alternatives, was yet another false boundary to tear down? But if there still is a future for (post)humans as a species, it must be one radically different from the self-centred homogenous projection or the one slowly cancelled by death of biodiversity and imagination. “The alien may be admitted” [49] in exactly to avoid the ubiquitous “replication of the same,” [50] allowing us to enter a new, “different time” of the “post”.[51] But it is important to underline the role of performativity in “constructing an alien future”.[52] Barad speaks of the universe as an “agential intra-activity” made of matter as a substance in constant becoming – “not a thing, but a doing.”[53]
Same as the human doesn’t simply comprise of a separated body and mind, we should pass from considering the primary ontological units of the world “things” and start to perceive them as “phenomena” – “dynamic topological reconfigurings / entanglements / relationalities / (re)articulations”.[54] Because “becoming alien” involves action, which partly resides in our own will to partake, but which, as was already shown, goes far beyond any conscious human involvement. “Agency is not aligned with human intentionality or subjectivity,”[55] but the assemblages, nets and sympoetic arrangements we co-create shouldn’t be taken for granted, as they rely on us and we rely on them to become-with each other in “response-ability.”[56]
Put differently, the dreaming from which the “alien future” arises is an “active” one, in Fisherian terms. It is no coincidence A. M. Gittlitz titled his recently published book on Posadism, UFOs and apocalypse communism “I Want to Believe”. Here is an important contagious joy thriving in the unbounded imagination of tendencies like radical ufology, promising us we have “nothing to lose but the Universe to gain.”[57] And it seems to have a certain strong sense to re-open radical imaginaries of intergalactic queer alien communism now in 2020, a year in which the covid-19 pandemic showed us more than ever before, that the world processes operate on scales both too small and too large for us to truly grasp, with us being nevertheless more embroiled in them than we perhaps want(ed) to admit.
Under these dim circumstances, encountering the alien as the absolute Other can be interestingly linked to sort of an affirmation of the existence of a utopian instance which we so persistently mourn as irrecoverably lost.
“Everything is rich – in other words, everything that is commensurate with the universe.” – Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share
In the book Gittlitz writes that the main point of radical ufology was not to literally make contact with aliens, but to actually prepare “a set of strong emotional attitudes indispensable for independent contact with extraterrestrials, which even if the contact had never occurred would have improved the condition of openness to the world.”[58] This process of letting in the alien, the Other, “the foreign, and the figure of the stranger,”[59] is therefore consequently opening humans to “worlds that spark them into (other) ways of being.”[60]
This twist in perception, in which we uncover our own consciousness as changeable, is what Fisher very similarly describes in his unfinished concept of Acid communism. “If the very fundamentals of our experience, such as our sense of space and time, can be altered, does that not mean that the categories by which we live are plastic, mutable?” [61] He uses the example of altered states of consciousness to question the gap between what we habitually agree on being objectively real and what we truly experience as reality.
Fisher speaks of this combination of acid and communism as of “a provocation and a promise,” the acid part being exactly “a joke of sorts, but one with very serious purpose.”[62]
This paradox could be very well also used to describe the logic of radical ufology or perhaps even posthumanism. Their shared “provocation and promise” seems to be a strong belief that despite the overwhelming uncertainty and despair, “another world is possible.” Sometimes we just have to dare to cross the line and to think on a very different scale, however absurd or uncanny it might feel. Because everything unfamiliar necessarily does.
So if space communism claims that “[t]he revolution will be exoplanetary or not at all,” it has more serious meanings than might at first seem. Because to get through the entropic reality of the unrealisable, we need to open as many fantastic dream-portals as (im)possible. And if “[t]he future remains open as a site of radical recomposition,”[63] it must be a vivid working site populated with multiplying intra-active dreaming. “There are no trans*migrations without trans*imaginations. And while the aliens probably won’t directly make miserable Monday mornings better, they can on a certain level guide us through all the ends into the necessary “wiggliness” of posthuman existence. Constantly alienated in mutual resonance, the “life on Earth will have to link up with the Cosmos in order to continue.”[64]
1. Daniele Gambetta, “Pretendi la terza era spaziale,” in: A.M. Gittlitz, I Want to Believe: Posadism, UFOs and Apocalypse Communism (Pluto Press, 2020) 179.
2. A.M. Gittlitz, I Want to Believe: Posadism, UFOs and Apocalypse Communism, 169.
3. Daniel Gray, David Martin Walker, The A to Z Marxism (Scarecrow Press, 2009) 245-246.
4. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Free Press, 2020). 5. Franco Berardi, After the Future (Chico, AK Press, 2011).
6. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism (Zero Books, 2009); Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke University Press, 1989).
7. Bernard Stiegler, The Neganthropocene (Open Humanities Press, 2018) 51.
8. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism.
9. Mark Fisher “Acid Communism” Darren Ambrose, ed, Mark Fisher, K-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (Repeater Books, 2018) 769.
10. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (Verso Books, 2005) 147.
11. A.M. Gittlitz, I Want to Believe: Posadism, UFOs and Apocalypse Communism 14.
12. A. M. Gittlitz, “The Secret History of Marxist Alien Hunters,” accessed 27 October 2020.
13. ‘The Rosewell UFO incident’ was one of the first and best-known events connected to the history of UFO. It happened in 1947, when a supposedly extraterrestrial object crashed nearby Rosewell, New Mexico. Even though it was later identified as a balloon of US Army Air Forces, many still believed there was a real alien spaceship and proclaimed the official story a government cover-up.
14. Bernard Stigeler, The Neganthropocene (Open Humanities Press, 2018) 52. 15. Michel Foucault, “Remarks on Marx,” Darren Ambrose, ed., Mark Fisher, K-punk 767.
16. Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” accessed 21 October 2020.
17. Lukáš Likavčan, Introduction to Comparative Planetology (Strelka Press, 2019) 72.
18. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” accessed 21 October 2020. 107
19. Gabrys is paraphrasing Sylvia Wynter here. Jennifer Gabrys, “Becoming Planetary,” accessed 23 October 2020 .
20. See for example Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (John Wiley & Sons, 2013). 21. See Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press 2007).
22. Likavčan, 35.
23. Patricia MacCormack, Posthuman Ethics: Embodiment and Cultural Theory (Ashgate Publishing, 2012).
24. J. E. Muñoz, “Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity” in: Helen Hester, Xenofeminism (Polity Press 2018) 22.
25. Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” accessed 21 October 2020.
26. MacCormack, 16.
27. MacCormack, 12.
28. MacCormack, 49.
29. MacCormack, 6.
30. Bernard Stiegler, Acting out (Stanford University Press, 2008) 4. Emphasis in the original.
31. Stiegler, 4.
32. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble (Duke University Press, 2016) 58.
33. Barad, 33.
34. Thomas, R.A., Parniak, M., Østfeldt, C. et al., “Entanglement between distant macroscopic mechanical and spin systems,” accessed 25 October 2020.
35. Max Born, The Born-Einstein-Letters (Macmillan, 1971) 158.
36. Patricia MacCormack, Posthuman Ethics: Embodiment and Cultural Theory, 139.
37. John Wheeler, “Quantum ideas. Quantum foam. Max Planck and Karl Popper,” accessed 25 October 2020 . Purkrábková & Sirůček 108
38. See Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble (Duke University Press, 2016) 55.
39. Teresa Castro, “The Mediated Plant,” accessed 25 October 2020.
40. Helen Hester, Xenofeminism (Polity Press, 2018) 13.
41. Hester, 28.
42. Donna Haraway, 162.
43. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble.
44. MacCormack, 140.
45. Hester, 62.
46. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Twilight of the Idols,” accessed 27 October 2020 .
47. Baruch Spinoza, “The Ethics,” accessed 25 October 2020 .
48. Hester, 33.
49. Hester, 67.
50. Hester, 63.
51. MacCormack, 7.
52. Hester, 33.
53. Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.”
54. Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity.”
55. Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity.”
56. Haraway, 2.
57. Dante Minazzoli, “Perchè gli extraterrestri non prendono contatto pubblicamente?: Come vede un marxista il fenomeno degli ufo,” in: A.M. Gittlitz, I Want to Believe: Posadism, UFOs and Apocalypse Communism, 171. 58. Daniele Gambetta Prendi la Terza Era SpazialeNot, accessed 3 November 2020.
59. Hester, 66.
60. Jennifer Gabrys, “Becoming Planetary.”
61. Mark Fisher, “Acid Communism,” in: Darren Ambrose, ed., Mark Fisher, K-punk 763.
62. Fisher, 757.
63. Hester, 1.
64. J. Posadas, “War Preparations and the Role of the Socialist Countries,” Posadist Fourth International, accessed 26 October 2020 .
Originally from TRANS*MIGRATIONS: CARTOGRAPHIES OF THE QUEER
edited by Vit Bohal
:: DIFFRACTIONS :: 