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California and
the Disappearance
of the Outside
Alex Slade
Nextera SEGS VI-IX/Harper Lake Wildlife Viewing Area, Lockhart, CA
Calenergy Geothermal Generating Plants/Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge, Calipatria, CA
Cogentrix SEGS II/Yarrow Ravine Rattlesnake Habitat Area, Daggett, CA
2013 | Photographs | each 122 × 153 cm | Courtesy the artist
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Eleanor Antin
Going Home from Roman Allegories
2004 | Chromogenic print | 124 × 260 cm
Courtesy Anonymous Collection
Image Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York and Anonymous Collection
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword Navigating in and
Bernd M. Scherer with the System
6 Sabeth Buchmann
60
The Whole Earth
Diedrich Diederichsen Visual Essay
Anselm Franke Frontier:
8 At the Pacific Wall
72
Earthrise and the
Disappearance of the Outside Plan the Planet
Anselm Franke John Palmesino and
12 Ann-Sofi Rönnskog /
Territorial Agency
Pop Music and the 82
Counterculture
Diedrich Diederichsen From Here to California
20 Laurence A. Rickels
91
Visual Essay
Universalism Visual Essay
36 Whole Systems
100
The Politics of the Whole
Fred Turner A Thousand Ecologies
43 Erich Hörl
121
Whole Earths, 1968–1980
Norman M. Klein
54
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
The Limit of The Power of Information
Limitlessness Mercedes Bunz
Eva Meyer 172
132
Visual Essay
Visual Essay Self Incorporated /
Boundless Interior Networks and the Long Boom
137 177
“After we knew that the Visual Essay
Earth was a sphere” The Earth is Not Whole
Flora Lysen 187
150
Musical Stations
Medium Earth of the Counterculture
Kodwo Eshun 189
159
Installation Views
Visual Essay Biographies
Apocalypse, Babylon, Simulation Acknowledgments
163 Colophon
192
On the Californian
Utopia / Ideology
Maurizio Lazzarato
166
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Foreword
—
In the mid-1960s, several years into America’s space came the point of reference for Brand’s project. In the
program, a certain Stewart Brand observed that no summer of 1968, he published his first Whole Earth
image had yet emerged showing our planet in its en- Catalog, which served as a kind of material platform
tirety. Brand began printing badges bearing the ques- for the philosophy of a new age. Rather than expound-
tion “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole ing this philosophy in theoretical language, Brand
Earth yet?” Then, in 1968, such a picture appeared. assembled a collection of things that represented the
The Earth could be viewed as a whole for the first time, new planetary thinking. This world of things ranged
it looked fragile, vulnerable, and, above all, beautiful. from everyday objects that were useful for life in the
From today’s perspective, we also see that in revealing communes, to advanced technologies, to the books of
the Earth in this state, the image gave rise to a con- Buckminster Fuller. The alliance of the Whole Earth
sciousness of the age of the Anthropocene. First pro- Catalog project with communal life and thinking result-
claimed at the start of the new millennium by the climate ed in strategies that proved essential for the mutual
scientist Paul Crutzen, the Anthropocene thesis as- integration of technologies and lifestyles. However, an
serts that since the Industrial Revolution, and especially examination of this part of the “archive of the Anthro-
since the “great acceleration” of the mid-twentieth pocene” also sheds light on a danger inherent in holis -
century, humans have altered the environment so tic approaches: their exclusionary character, which
extensively as to create a new form of nature. Ex- their integrative terminology veils. The rhetoric of the
pressed geologically, humankind has produced its own harmonistic connection between the technological
sediment layer, which has spread over the globe. We movement and the holistic philosophy of the communes
humans are inscribing ourselves into geological time. masked over the social and political conflicts of the
Our activity encompasses the entire Earth, in both its time: racial and economic struggles at home and the
temporal and spatial dimensions. Vietnam War abroad. It is perhaps not surprising, then,
The Anthropocene thesis draws from two traditions that within months of their founding, most communes
that have often regarded one another from a critical fell victim to internal power struggles and clashes of
distance. On the one hand, it centers on a develop - interest for which they had no language.
ment that arises out of the interplay between the natu- I wish to express my thanks to the curators Anselm
ral sciences, technology, and economic forces. These Franke and Diedrich Diederichsen, who have developed
provide the modes of thought and the energies that this project for the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and
propel the fundamental changes of the Anthropocene. to the Hauptstadtkulturfonds, which has so generously
On the other, the notion of a human-made nature leads supported it.
to a new holistic conception of the world in which the
nature–culture distinction is erased. This articulation Bernd M. Scherer
of a harmonious, unified vision of the world is firmly Director, Haus der Kulturen der Welt
rooted in Romanticism.
These two traditions celebrated a first great symbiosis
in California during the late 1960s and early ’70s, Translated from the German by Michael Dills
when a generation of young Americans broke with the
urban-based societal model and official United States
politics and moved into rural communes. In groups
organized on egalitarian principles and inspired by
Asian religions, they sought to restore a lost unity of
man, nature, and the cosmos. These communes be-
6
Jack Goldstein
Untitled
1988 | Acrylic on canvas | 215.3 × 243.8 × 16.5 cm
Vanmoerkerke Collection, Belgium | Image © We Document Art
7
The Whole Earth.
California and the Disappearance of the Outside
—
Diedrich Diederichsen
Anselm Franke
Space travel produced an image that replaced the The exhibition is also composed of artworks that either
mushroom cloud as the icon of our worldview. That deal with the discursive complex of the counterculture
image appeared in late 1968 on the cover of the first and the ideological culture that emerged from it or else
Whole Earth Catalog; it was the photograph of the Blue were born of that culture themselves in some signifi-
Planet. This Catalog was something like the very first cant way. These artistic positions, nearly all of which
search engine, that is, a collection of objects, tools, are reproduced in this publication, have their counter-
and ideas. It is regarded as the central document and part here in a varied set of essays that pursue historical
archive of the Californian counterculture. By studying lines of development, recount pre- and post-histories,
the Catalog, one can also observe how the culture offer critical assessments, and take a comparative look
of revolt gradually distanced itself from its political at the artistic and intellectual repertoire of the Califor-
objectives, while the other central conceptual models nian, countercultural, cybernetic, and ecological ap-
of the Catalog—such as cybernetics, ecology, man- proaches and related phenomena presented here.
agement, and psychology—helped to develop the Along the way, we repeatedly encounter many figures
standards of the neoliberal era, which took hold in who are, as it were, the “stars” of the exhibition; but we
the environmental movement, computer culture, and also meet a number of unusual and unexpected charac-
post-Fordist corporate management, and also in pop ters. One of these is the lover of California desert land-
culture and lifestyle. scapes Jean Baudrillard, who appears in Sabeth
The exhibition The Whole Earth draws on the environ- Buchmann’s “Navigating in and with the System” as the
ment and archive of the Catalog and on the counter- leader of a “French Group” critical of universalism at
culture that produced it. And it situates the upheavals the International Design Conference in Aspen in 1970,
of the late 1960s within the long history of modernity’s an episode found in the work by Martin Beck discussed
colonial and technological expansion, which, after glo- by Buchmann, Panel 2, which quotes a sentence from
balization, now led to the “Anthropocene,” the geo- Baudrillard’s manifesto in its subtitle: “Nothing better
logical era marked by human influence, whose concept than a touch of ecology and catastrophe to unite the
provides the framework for the series of projects to social classes … .” By contrast, Erich Hörl, in his essay
which this exhibition belongs. We organize the themes subtitled “The Process of Cyberneticization and Gen-
of this development into seven narrative threads, each eral Ecology,” shows how a notion of ecology which
of which yields, in the exhibition, a coherent collection he traces back to Heidegger’s observation of the end
of images, texts, musical expressions, and documents of philosophy “by the technological fulfillment of meta-
of all kinds. In this catalog, these seven narratives physics as cybernetics” has become extremely univer-
are represented by visual essays geared toward the sal, so that it can only be addressed by emu lating Félix
narratives on the walls of the exhibition. Guattari, among others, and recognizing the existence
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