Читать книгу Solar Politics - Oxana Timofeeva - Страница 7

In 1979, when I was a year old, my family moved from Siberia to Kazakhstan, where my father found employment with a big construction project. On the shores of the great Balkhash Lake, in the grey steppe slipping into a desert, they had to build a city under the name of Solnechny, which translates from the Russian as Sunny, or the City of Sun. It was supposed to be part of a planned industrial construction – of the South Kazakh power station. The first stage of this massive project consisted in preparing the land for construction works – more specifically, they had to transform a hummocky topography into a plain surface. My father was hired as a shot-firer: his job was to blast the hills. We lodged in a very basic wooden barrack, in a small settlement built for construction workers, without basic food and other supplies, eating the meat of rare saiga antelopes that my father was hunting in the steppe, and fish and water taken from the lake. The scariest residents of the steppe were scorpion-sized solifuges, or sun spiders: it was mistakenly believed there that their bites were lethal. Eventually, the City of Sun was never built, and all the funds for this ambitious project literally went into the sand.

Besides the many localities in the vast spaces of the former Soviet Union and beyond that bear the name “sunny,” there are also a number of unbuilt Cities of Sun, for which we never stop to blast out the rocks. They are called utopias: in a long historical tradition, the idea of the possibility of organizing a settlement according to certain rational principles, with the infrastructures designed as perfectly as possible to satisfy human needs and desires and to make their collective life to the fullest extent bright and happy, is associated with the image of our central star. From Plato’s Republic, to the modern-day Solarpunk speculative fiction and the prospects for more ecological sustainable economies provided by renewed energy expansion, the spirit of solarity frames the most elevated political projects for the future.

The paramount importance of the sun for our utopian imaginations is accounted for by its radiation, which is the ultimate source of all life on Earth. That is why in antiquity it was worshipped as a demiurge, or one of the supreme gods: Ra in Egypt, Tonatiuh in Aztec culture, Surya in Hinduism, Sol Invictus in the Roman Empire are just a few names for this multifaced deity. All over the place, there were numerous gods of the sun, of both genders, corresponding to different seasons of the year and different times of the day. Just like Helios in Ancient Greece, the Slavic early deity of the sun rides the sky in a golden chariot carrying with him a bright fire shield. His name is Dazhbog, or giving-god. He gives everything: light, warmth, and wealth. In one version, he is getting old and dies every evening, but is reborn every morning; in the other, he dies in December, and then is reborn after the winter solstice. Our ancestors welcomed their sun gods returning from the darkness of the night. For them, the radiant circle observable in the sky was literally the body of god, whose rays enabled each new day.

Remaining in general faithful to the broad tradition of sun worship, Plato, the author of the reputedly first political utopia, introduces new content to this mythic worldview. In Book VI of the Republic, Socrates explains to his interlocutor, Glaucon, that there are actually two suns: the one that we see and the one that we don’t see. The sun that we see reigns in the world of visible objects. It is itself a visible object, which differs, however, from all other objects in that it also presents the source of their visibility. Why do we see objects? First, because we have eyes. Second, because there is light. Third, because there is sun, that dispenses light. Socrates addresses the sun as one “of the gods in heavens,” whose gift of light “enables our sight to see so excellently well, and makes visible objects appear.”¹ The same holds for the intellectual world: just as the faculty of sight comprises the dialectics of the sun, the light, and the eyes, the faculty of thought aggregates the highest good, truth, and knowledge. Moreover, just as the physical sun gives to the objects of the visible world “not only the faculty of being seen, but also their vitality, growth, and nutriment,” so the spiritual sun gives to the objects of knowledge “not only the gift of being known,” but also “a real and essential existence.”²

Book VII of the Republic famously begins with the primal scene of philosophy which can be traced back to the age of cave dwelling. A group of people is confined in a cavern that most notably resembles a cinema theater. They are shackled and can only sit still and look at the wall in front of them, where they see the shadows of what is going on above and behind their backs. There is a fire there, and a roadway nearby with some other people who carry with them figures of men, animals, and other items. Socrates suggests that the people in the cavern who take the shadows to be real things are we ourselves. The one who manages to unchain themself and leave the cavern will see the true sun “as it is in itself in its own territory,” as well as the true world exposed to its light. If this person returns to the cave and tries to describe what he saw on the outside, fellow prisoners, accustomed to the darkness of their chamber, will not believe him, and might even try to kill him. As if soothsaying his own death in Athens prison, Socrates invites us to compare the first, visible world, to the cavern, the light of the physical sun to the fire, the reflections of which we see on the screen of shadows, and the upper world outside to the intellectual region of the highest good discovered by the soul.³

Besides the dialectic of visible and invisible suns, there is another novelty introduced by Plato in these fragments, which I find extremely important. Namely, for Socrates, the sun is not an adorable thing out there in the sky. Instead of treating it as an external object, he suggests that there are solar elements within humans themselves – like the eye and sight for the physical sun, and knowledge and reason for the spiritual one. Without being identical to the sun, a human eye bears resemblance to it. We can look at this object and see it because in certain aspects we are akin to it. The sun and the eye communicate as if they are looking into each other through the layers of things encompassed by light, and the one reflects the other. A dark pupil in the center of the human eye is surrounded by a colored iris. If we try to look at the sun during the day, we can see that it, too, has a kind of pupil, which is dark, and a bright “iris” that glances from behind it. Just like the human eye, the eye of god has therefore a kind of blind spot at its very center. It is as if the sensual sun was that dark pupil that obscured from us the divine radiance of the iris of truth.

The doubling of the sun in Plato’s Republic is tricky: it turns out that we cannot see the true sun, which is the highest good, because it is shielded from us by its representative in the sensual world. We are therefore not only endowed with vision by the sun that we see, but coincidently blinded by it. The greatness of Socrates is that behind the visible sun he discerns the invisible, and praises both. As Marsilio Ficino comments in his Book of the Sun (1494):

When he was in military service Socrates often used to stand in amazement watching the rising Sun, motionless, his eyes fixed like a statue, to greet the return of the heavenly body. The Platonists, influenced by these and similar signs, would perhaps say that Socrates, inspired since boyhood by a Phoeboean daemon, was accustomed to venerate the Sun above all, and for the same reason was judged by the oracle of Apollo to be the wisest of all the Greeks. I will omit at present a discussion about whether the daemon of Socrates was particularly a genius or an angel – but I certainly would dare to affirm that Socrates in his state of ecstasy had admired not just the visible Sun, but its other, hidden aspect.⁴

In Ficino’s interpretation, the sun adored by Socrates not only duplicates, but triplicates: it embodies the idea of the Christian trinity fantastically interlaced with Neoplatonism, Hermetic tradition, astrology, and renaissance magic. Taking as a starting point Plato’s comparison of god and the sun, he makes subsequent parallels: on a downward spiral, god dispenses goodness and love, just as the sun dispenses light and warmth. Note that all these things can be understood as different kinds of energy, which both the god and the physical sun generously distribute around the world. Ficino insists on the hierarchical relation between the god and the physical sun: one shouldn’t worship the sun as the author of all things because it is in fact only a shadow of the God who is the fundamental creator. Yes, the sun shines brightly, but the light it spreads, according to Ficino, is not even fully its own. The sunlight as such, according to its basic settings, is obscure, as are other celestial bodies that emit their own natural light, which is not that bright. The excessive shine that radiates from the sun is, according to Ficino, a gift that it receives from god: “Indeed the Sun offers that innate light which is somewhat obscure, then immediately another light most evident to the eyes like a visible image of divine intelligence and infinite goodness.”⁵

A tendency to portray the two suns as God and his material substitute is further developed by another renaissance thinker and perhaps the most famous writer of the solar utopian tradition, Tommaso Campanella, who, in The City of the Sun (1602), describes the religion and the rites of the residents of the ideal state:

The sun and the stars they, so to speak, regard as the living representatives and signs of God, as the temples and holy living altars, and they honor but do not worship them. Beyond all other things they venerate the sun, but they consider no created thing worthy the adoration of worship … They contemplate and know God under the image of the Sun, and they call it the sign of God, His face and living image, by means of which light, heat, life, and the making of all things good and bad proceed. Therefore they have built an altar like to the sun in shape, and the priests praise God in the sun and in the stars, as it were His altars, and in the heavens, His temple as it were; and they pray to good angels, who are, so to speak, the intercessors living in the stars, their strong abodes. For God long since set signs of their beauty in heaven, and of His glory in the sun.⁶

By the end of the book Campanella goes as far as claiming that the sensual sun, whose light Ficino called “obscure,” is actually not even good, as God is, but malevolent, for it “strives to burn up the Earth,” whereas “God guides the battle to great issues.”⁷ This implies that the ultra-rational organization of the city (which today reads as overregulation and total control) must reckon with the brutality and explosiveness of the sun, rather than seeking inspiration from its goodness.

Now let me scroll up: in Nick Land’s book The Thirst for Annihilation (1992), dedicated to Georges Bataille, the two suns are not visible and invisible, or sensual and spiritual, but simply black and white:

A white sun is congealed from patches of light, floating ephemerally at the edge of blindness. This is the illuminating sun, giving what we can keep, the sun whose outpourings are acquired by the body as nutrition, and by the eye as (assimilable) sensation. Plato’s sun is of this kind; a distilled sun, a sun which is the very essence of purity, the metaphor of beauty, truth, and goodness. Throughout the cold months, when nature seems to wither and retreat, one awaits the return of this sun in its full radiance. The bounty of the autumn seems to pay homage to it, as the ancients also did.⁸

Against this tradition, the author points to another sun, “the deeper one, dark and contagious.”⁹ What Plato’s main character, Socrates, disregards, according to Land, is the accursed, destructive aspect of the black sun. This aspect was stressed by Bataille, who sketched his own theory of the two suns in the 1930s. Thus, in his short essay “Rotten Sun” (1930), he distinguishes between a sublime sun of mind, on the one hand, and a “rotten” sun of madness and unheard-of violence on the other. The first sun, “confused with the notion of the noon,” exists as an abstract object “from the human point of view,” whereas the second points to ancient bloody cults and rituals of sacrifice. Bataille recalls the myth of Icarus that “clearly splits the sun in two – the one that was shining at the moment of Icarus’s elevation, and the one that melted the wax, causing failure and a screaming fall when Icarus got too close.”¹⁰

Note that between the two suns of Plato, Ficino, and Campanella, on the one hand, and Bataille, on the other, there is a long tradition of praising the black sun in alchemic and occult doctrines. I daresay that this tradition is not so disconnected from Plato’s solar metaphysics, dismissed by Land, but rather historically derives from it – through Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, Hermeticism, and other esoteric influences from antiquity, Renaissance culture, and Romanticism. Bataille adopted the symbol of the black sun from Christian mystics before it was appropriated by neo-Nazism, modern paganism, and other contemporary esoteric movements.¹¹ While Land’s interpretation comes later, and his own philosophy of the Dark Enlightenment can be interpreted as part of these recent developments, the tendency of portraying Bataille as an oracle of reaction, dressed in black, is wrong, and must be opposed by another vision of Platonism, which does not coincide with Land’s caricatural image of praising exclusively the “distilled” white sun.

Taking off the table the modern desire to rebel against ancient philosophical authorities and the allergy to hierarchizing categories – like the highest good – I invite you to focus on the dialectical aspect of Plato’s thought, which might just happen to stay not that far from the dark side of the sun as addressed by Bataille. Think of a line from La Rochefoucauld: “The eye can outstare neither the sun, nor death”; Bataille quotes this in My Mother, where he also states that death is “no less divine than the sun.”¹² And yet we keep looking at it, and the divine eye of the sun keeps looking at us, although – as Bataille intimates particularly in “The Story of the Eye” – it is blind. If we assume that Bataille and Socrates praise the same sun, then what is really demonic in Socrates’ daemon is an insinuation that we always already connected to its darkness through the light, which is all around. We bear it in our eyes. Dialectically speaking, we do not really choose between black and white; in accepting the one, we get both together. The color shifts from black to white and back depending on the light refraction angle, when in the mirror of the sun we relate to the form and matter of sovereignty which suggests itself as the principle of political communities. It is this principle that Land attacks in the first place: “For there is still something Promethean about Socrates; an attempt to extract power from the sun.”¹³

What does this mean – to extract power from the sun? Through the lens of political theology, the sun represents the source of authority, and equates not only to god, but also to earthly sovereigns, like Louis XIV – le Roi Soleil – in France or Vladimir, the Fair Sun, in Russia. The solar circle thus becomes one of the signs of supremacy accredited by god to the one on the top of the social pyramid. Through the lens of economics, the sun is literally a fuel, a source of energy that can be extracted, converted, consumed and stored. The sun of theology is a master at whose brilliance everyone must look delightedly, whereas the sun of economics is instead exploited or even enslaved, as is every natural resource in what we call the age of Anthropocene, when planets and stars are no longer considered gods. Both perspectives, indeed, refer to the Promethean myth alluded to by Land, in which the figure of the sun is offered as an answer in two senses to the question “How to build an ideal city?” First, it presents the model of the good that gives the light of knowledge and allows selected people to govern a society, presumably in the best possible way. Second, it appears as the disposable resource of an infinite pure energy in which today’s proponents of green capitalism place their hopes.

Does this mean that we must simply abandon the Promethean tradition – which begins by venerating the sun, but gradually substitutes it with god, king, emperor, etc. – or replace it with some new metaphysics, deriving, for instance, from worshipping Gaia or chthonic cults? Although this trend is explicit in contemporary theoretical work, my idea is different. I imagine that solar tradition can overcome itself from within, by its own means. In other words, the principle of solarity – which does not separate from, but unites Bataille with Plato, Ficino, Campanella, and many other authors submitting their own proposals for the great project of City of the Sun – from the very beginning contains in itself the grain of politics that I would call solar, and which can develop into an antidote to such Promethean tendencies as extractivism and the abuse of power. Solar politics is a pathway between these Scylla and Charybdis. In what follows, I will try to approach it through the set of reflections inspired by my reading of Bataille in a virtual dialogue with other writers on solarity, politics, and violence in our times of political, ecological, and social mess, against the background of neoliberal capitalism, the COVID-19 pandemic, and anthropogenic climate change.

Bataille was an untimely thinker. Definitely not an academic philosopher, he developed conceptions that were too radical to be included in the official theoretical canon. In an age of rising fascist mobilization, he was trying to reappropriate notions of the sacred, violence, and sovereignty, and make them work against fascism. Militantly unsystematic, he did not respect disciplinary borders: in his writings, anthropology, political economy, philosophical ontology, psychoanalysis, literary and art criticism intertwine at maximum speed. One of the first to do so in Europe, Bataille began to articulate a connection between economy and ecology, and to reflect on planetary processes, which human beings cannot really estimate, and of which they are nevertheless a part. Bataille’s earlier conception of base materialism that considers heterogeneous matter as analogous to the Freudian unconscious and his later theories of nature and society throw fresh light on environmental issues that are extensively discussed today. Bataille’s theory of the general economy suggests new ways of creating a utopia based on the visions of the sun in its striking bifurcation.

In The Solar Anus (1931) the sun is listed together with coitus, cadavers, or obscurity, among the things that human eyes cannot tolerate. Here, Bataille’s cosmology is presented in a very condensed fashion: the essay draws a picture of a dynamic and decentered universe where each thing “is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form.”¹⁴ Each thing can be equally proclaimed as the principle of all things, and is dragged into the two primary motions that transform into each other – “rotation and sexual movement, whose combination is expressed by the locomotive’s wheels and pistons.”¹⁵ The circulation of planetary and cosmic energies finds its expression in a seemingly impossible, parodic unity of opposites.¹⁶ Parody is the principle of Bataille’s base materialism, which inscribes solar bifurcation at the junction of eroticism, ontology, politics, and epistemology. Stripped of its metaphysical mask of the supreme good, parodied by all kinds of erections (plants, trees, animal bodies) and involved in a constant movement of the “polymorphous and organic coitus”¹⁷ with the Earth, Bataille’s sun directs toward it its “luminous violence,” whose perfect image is a volcano.

Associating the image of the sun with violence features as a constant theme of Bataille’s writings. Sometimes he gives to it a sense that – with certain reservations – one can define as “positive,” for he sides with the violence of the sun which runs wild and identifies with the source of this violence – although the word “positive” does not really fit here, because Bataille is a philosopher of negativity, a radical Hegelian, as it were. So, to be more precise, he sides with the negative of the sun, which is, in his perspective, the site of violence. What kind of violence does he mean? How can the sun or any other nonhuman thing ever be violent? What is the place of violence within the framework of the discussion of a possible solar politics? Before touching upon these questions, I will introduce a way of conceptualizing violence beyond commonplace ideas that are more or less familiar to all of us from the contexts of contemporary life and theory.