Epilogue: An Ecological Approach to Media Studies

It is precisely this kind of argument that fuels criticism of phenomenology and post-Kantian philosophy by object-oriented ontologists like Graham Harman and, similarly, by the speculative realism of Quentin Meillassoux. In Guerrilla Metaphysics, Harman uses the nebula argument as a means to dismiss Merleau-Ponty’s human-centered view of the world, which limits the scope of the cosmos by reducing the “carpentry of things” to the body—the “flesh” as the ultimate sensorial medium. Harman instead posits nonrelational things unmediated by humans and inanimate substances—a “global ether” that is the larger medium, “that makes the entire network of entities possible.”³ Similarly, Meillassoux argues in After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency that the post-Kantian “correlationism” of phenomenology—by which all meaning depends on the human mind and can never be independent of it—makes engaging with “ancestrality,” with the deep temporality of the earth, impossible. Post-Kantian philosophy is not useful, Meillassoux argues, for supporting scientific research that seeks to understand the earth beyond the human senses, and thus to widen the scope of scientific knowledge. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is too narrow because it insists on maintaining human perception as the central epistemological frame.⁴

What does deep time mean in the context of the Anthropocene? And what does it mean for an ecological approach to media studies? As noted earlier in this book, Catherine Malabou rejects the idea of separating subject and object, biology and geology, at this time when there is a need, more than ever before, for what Guattari called “the articulation of a nascent subjectivity; a constantly mutating socius; and an environment in the process of being reinvented.”⁵ She points out that deep time need not be separated from media (McLuhan) or from a theory of transversal subjectivity (Guattari). I would argue that media technology, especially in the second half of the twentieth century, has been central to imaging the world beyond the individual sensorium, and that this has long been the case with media such as telescopes and microscopes, and especially with the invention of mechanical reproduction. The projects examined in this book all concern our sensorial experiences of the world, aiming to reinvent/expand/augment shared environments through media that are able to access spaces beyond the human sensorium in order to create new kinds of collectivity that are inclusive of a multiplicity of singularities, including the nonhuman. From Cousteau’s underwater cameras, television, and sonar, meteorites on film (Jennings), Geddes’s camera obscura, 3D cinema (Telekinema), and expanded screens and mobile media experiences (Expo 67), to inflatable interfaces that make air into a medium, mobile video units, seacraft and transspecies communication interfaces (Ant Farm), and Fuller’s geoscope—all offer examples of how media augment the human sensorium, combining immersive and interactive forms of spectatorship that are “extensions” (as McLuhan describes media) of the human sensorium: more-than-human environments that break away from their anthropocentric origins to become “things” not reducible to humans.

But neither should human agency and labor be left out of the equation. Looking at how Merleau-Ponty developed this argument, especially his reading of Whitehead, Ted Toadvine and others have countered the criticisms of object-oriented ontologists to endorse the Merleau-Ponty/Bataille/Ambrosino position in the old debate: “the sun exists only within a world, and a world emerges only at the confluence of a perceiver and the perceived. But this does not deny the insistence of a time before the world, a primordial prehistory that haunts the world from within, which is the truth of the naturalist’s conviction about a time prior to humanity. Yet only the resources of phenomenology can clarify this encounter with an elemental past that has never been for anyone a present.”⁶

Several recent books have sought to develop an expanded framework for media studies and media ecology, proposing the critical tools of pragmatism, phenomenology, and actor-network theory, as well as combinations thereof, to theorize the centrality of media in the twenty-first century.⁷ In particular, John Durham Peters’s “thought experiment,” The Marvelous Clouds: Toward A Philosophy of Elemental Media (2015), in suggesting an expanded approach to media that includes the elements (earth, sky, wind, and weather), complements the arguments I have been developing in Ecstatic Worlds. Peters writes: “The black of night gives us our most exact science, astronomy; clouds that vanish yield some of our most beautiful paintings, and clouds that obscure give us some of our most precious meteorological knowledge. Above all, media capture and fail to capture time whose fleetingness is the most beautiful and difficult of all natural facts.”⁸ Here, the elemental and nonhuman animals serve to broaden the field of media studies in the age of the Anthropocene.

Peters argues that the ocean is both “a medium free zone” because it is invisible to its inhabitants, and “the medium of all media” because it is the origin of life on the planet.⁹ Famously, McLuhan proclaimed that all environments are invisible. He used the example of fish not being able to understand what water is because they live inside it. In order to understand environments, he maintained, we need antienvironments such as those created by artworks to materialize their effects.¹⁰ Drawing upon an array of media theories, but most pointedly the writings of communications historian Harold Innis on infrastructures and McLuhan on media forms, Peters grounds his theory of elemental media more concretely in his discussion of the ocean and films like Cousteau and Malle’s The Silent World. He posits the necessity of the ship for humans to make sense of the ocean—the media are environments and they allow us to access environments. They are specific to habitats and to inhabitants: “Cetaceans are born in the ocean medium, but humans cannot live there without a craft. The two live in worlds with very different kinds of materiality.” Peters focuses on various nonhuman animals to compare the intelligence embedded in media. It is different media interfaces in different umwelts that Peters entertains, the human-nonhuman communication through media that he seeks to study as spatial interactions. The key to Ecstatic Worlds, and to an ecological approach to media studies, is precisely such a comparative methodology—to expand our understanding of how media broadly defined, whether elemental, informatic, handmade, or otherwise, function to create ecologies that constitute worlds both human and more-than-human.

I began this book with a question: Do we live in one world or many? My answer is found in the structure of the book—earth, worlds, planet. The more pressing question now is: How do we reconcile them? As Isabelle Stengers asks, how do we create dialogic structures or forms of translation and semantic bridges to lay the ground for a planetary ecology that includes and is constructed through different umwelts?¹¹ This challenge has provided the source of much speculation for philosophers, as we can see in concepts such as the “singular plural” (Nancy), “universal singularity” (though interpreted differently by Badiou, Deleuze, and Guattari), the “multitudes” (Virilio, Hardt and Negri), political ecology (Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour), and “spheres” (Sloterdijk, inspired, like Deleuze and Guattari, by Uexküll’s umwelt theory). However distinct these approaches may be, relationships, ecologies, complexity, and the outside are fundamental to thinking the planet as an aggregate or as a web of connections independent from humans, yet integrally tied to our existence. This book has sought to consider some of the efforts and projects that media artists, architects, and filmmakers have made to imagine and create an expanded ecological thinking, forms of ecstatic wonder, and utopian narratives over the second half of the twentieth century. I have also sought to foreground the importance of media as a central component in the creation of semantic bridges to support and connect ecologies. The projects in this book are precursors to, and therefore help us to comprehend, the collaborative and active forms of spectatorship, media production, and design enabled through the cultures of the Internet and the myriad dynamic, temporary, and ephemeral cultural festivals, art exhibitions, performances, and multimedia participatory platforms that support interdisciplinary research. There is no doubt that our mediated worlds are expanding. They are also becoming more fragmented, more virtual, more insular, more entrenched; and the more utopian projections are focused on compensation rather than on change.

Speaking in Halifax, Canada, in 2002, Mary Louise Pratt made an impassioned case to the Learned Societies, an interdisciplinary body of humanities and social science researchers, for the need to rethink global—not universal—humanism. Such a rethinking must not return to modernity, whose “structures of otherness” have supported the inequalities and exclusions, privileges, and hierarchies that have infected and constricted the term for over two centuries. Instead, following Caribbean thinker Sylvia Wynter, Pratt argued for a new “semantic register” to define the “global human” grounded in the histories of different cultures around the world, cultures that have relied upon notions of the planetary to define a totality of humans.¹² What might this semantic charter look like in media terms? By way of a conclusion, let me turn to the artwork of French artist Tania Mouraud, and the cinematic essay Nostalgia de la luz / Nostalgia for the Light (2010) by Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán. Both Mouraud’s installations and Guzmán’s film will help us to think about expanded mentalities and the global human within a twenty-first-century context.

Mouraud’s Ecological Approach

Since the late 1960s, Mouraud has been creating environments. Her early meditation spaces, Initiation Room (1969–1979) and Initiation Space no. 2 (1971), consist of rooms lacquered a pure white. These formless spaces are made of unfathomable dimensions. The walls and floors are curved and smooth. The refracted light makes it impossible to determine where the horizon begins and ends. Mouraud’s spaces produce absolute immersion, a space where a relation between self and other, visible and invisible, inside and outside can be experienced yet not appropriated. What is gauged are the room itself, the shiny white coating, and the curved surfaces with no edges. What is experienced in these rooms is the work of art itself as Heidegger described it, which “holds open the Open of the world.”¹³ Even in Mouraud’s early work, these “initiation rooms” especially, the material origin of the work of art, which includes the art world in which the room is given meaning, are presented as open spaces. In this way, Mouraud’s art from these early years onward is defined by an ecological approach.

Over thirty years later, her ecological approach is clearly articulated in La fabrique (2006), a video portrait of handloom weavers in Kerala, India, where they have a long history. Their workshops are often located in rural areas and form an integral part of everyday life and culture in the community. Mouraud spent many years in the area and understands the weavers’ cultural worth, skill, and working conditions. She offers phenomenological portraits of 104 weavers at work—women and men of different ages. Each video portrait lasts between five and sixteen minutes and brackets one act of weaving—a process of making. The 104 videos are displayed on twenty-five television screens (four per television), along with four wall projections and twenty-nine speakers. Though the portraits were created in separate workshops in Kerala, when displayed they are brought together and assembled in one room. Seen together, the screens form a sculptural interlace of images to create a multiplicity of singular acts of weaving, human expressions, tools, and materials.

Two things hold this spatial environment together. The first is a soundscape filled with the resounding reverberations of the looms that overwhelm the visitor. Mouraud has subtly shaped the sound to emphasize the repetitive rhythms of the equipment, the acoustic patterns, and noises of the work environment. The second element that grips our attention is attention itself. The weavers look into the camera to meet our gaze. What does this looking mean? Derrida explains it: “The right to look. The invention of the Other.”¹⁴ Nicholas Mirzoeff builds on Derrida’s insight, explaining: “[i]t begins at a personal level with the look into someone else’s eyes to express friendship, trust, solidarity, or love. That look must be mutual, each inventing the other, or it fails. As such, it is unrepresentable. The right to look claims autonomy, not individualism or voyeurism, but the claim to a political subjectivity and collectivity.”¹⁵

In this instance, the right to look is the right to look back—to return the gaze, to look into the camera. The look in this instance is not autonomous or simply mutual because it is contained by the representation. Yet it also shatters the videographic gaze and the cohesion of the video’s diegetic space, creating complicity between the artist and the weaver. La fabrique incorporates the artist’s different relation to power by incorporating the act of looking back, thus foregrounding her positionality outside the frame. Indeed, Mouraud mirrors the work of each weaver on a formal level by staging a clear relation between the work of weaving and the work of art, not as equal but as connected. This relation between inside and outside is what defines the artist’s ecological approach.

In order to understand Mouraud’s approach more fully, let me turn to Heidegger’s interpretation of the origin of the work of art, which begins in the historically grounded relationship between matter and form. Mouraud’s materialist methodology grounds her representation of human labor in the making rather than the creation of things, in a dialectic between earth and world. Heidegger’s essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” begins with the insight that the origin needs to be situated through this relationship, one we have forgotten but which art might help us to rediscover. Art might help us to rediscover the earthly origins of the world.¹⁶ His critique of traditional aesthetics is tied to the manner in which “thing,” “equipment,” and “work” are defined as simply “self evident.”¹⁷ Heidegger would argue that art theory operates with a preconceived reflection on the work of art that interrupts “the way toward the thingly character of the thing as well as toward the equipmental character of the equipment and the workly character of the work.”¹⁸ The origin of the work of art needs to be understood in terms of these three integrally connected aspects if we are to apprehend its essential truth.

Heidegger suggests that we look to the work of art not only to understand art but also to get to the essence of things. Thus, in order to understand Mouraud’s ecological tactics, we must begin with her initiation rooms, which exist for no other reason than to be things themselves. “In the course of the history of truth about beings,” Heidegger identifies three ways that things have been defined: as designations attached to the property of things, which keep things far away from us;¹⁹ as a “manifold” collection of sensations, which keep things “pressed too physically upon us”; and as “formed matter.” In these first two interpretations, the “thing vanishes.”²⁰ In the third interpretation, however, “the thing solicits us by its outward appearance.” While this third approach is as problematic as the first two, it does contain the most productive possibility for an interpretation of the thing. Both Mouraud’s initiation rooms and La fabrique create spaces that we live inside, which mediate our experience of the artwork. With La fabrique, Mouraud foregrounds the human figure in the act of making, and what Heidegger would call the “equipmental.” Heidegger adds this notion as an intermediary quality through which thing and work are mediated. The “equipmental being of the equipment consists indeed in its usefulness” and its “reliability,” which allow the essence of the thing to emerge.²¹ Using the example of a well-known painting of a peasant woman’s shoes by Vincent van Gogh, Heidegger asks us to pay attention to the truth of the artwork. He tells us, “The Art work lets us know what shoes are in truth.” He is interested in how the shoes as equipment “belong to the earth and [the way in which] it is protected in the world of the peasant woman.” The relationship between earth and world encompasses the matter-form relationship that lies at the origin of the work of art. The nature of art is “the truth of beings setting itself to work.”²²

The work of art must include forms of labor, political economies, and social relations that are inherent to its truth; it must be situated “within the realm that is opened up by itself.”²³ This is quite precisely what Mouraud has done with La fabrique, bringing into her installation the craft of textiles that has a long history and a central place in the ecology and economy of Kerala. Thus, she connects the two worlds of weaving and art, of Kerala and the art world, of India and Canada, where I first saw the installation, and all the countries where the installation has been exhibited. She asks us to think about the connections that might exist between these worlds. And in between these connected worlds is the earth—the matter that is formed by the making (craft) and by creation (art).

The artwork is distinguished from craft through the process of creating as opposed to making. Though the Greeks did not distinguish between craft and artworks, Heidegger looks to the Greek term technê, which defines a way of knowing that brings forth that which is hidden.²⁴ Therefore, art as technê brings forth unconcealed and concealed nature, which he defines through the dialectics of earth and world. Heidegger states, “beauty is the one way in which truth occurs as unconcealedness.”²⁵ Art “belongs to the disclosure of appropriation by way of which the ‘meaning of Being’ can alone be defined.”²⁶

The installation raises questions about the textile industries and the sweatshops (almost all located in the Asia-Pacific region) that feed the insatiable and unsustainable capitalist desires for fashion in the West. It asks about the difference between the handloom that preserves the craft of weaving in a sustainable way, and the power loom that enables mass production. It asks about the working conditions of the weavers we see, and it asks about the textiles that are being woven, their connection to and destructive impact on the earth. This material reality, the process of making textiles, is mostly concealed from view in the Western world, which consumes such products without asking where they come from. The ontology of Mouraud’s installation points toward origins by connecting worlds; the installation maintains a dialectical tension between work and earth in the sense that it provides a deeply humanistic reflection upon a reality constructed through a multiplicity of looks and sounds.

La fabrique lays the ground for a political solidarity that is so vitally needed today. It is such forms of imagined solidarity that Edward Steichen had in mind in “The Family of Man” or Humphrey Jennings brought forward in his polyvocal films representing a plurality of experiences during the Second World War, that Ant Farm imagined in their Dolphin Embassy designed for transspecies communication, or that A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting invites in asking for submissions from around the world. These expanded perspectives, as Hannah Arendt would declare in “Truth and Politics,” enable forms of “representative thinking” so essential to democracy:

Political thought is representative. I form an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent, that is, I represent them … this is a question … of being and thinking in my identity where actually I am not. The more people’s standpoints I have present in my mind while pondering a given issue and the better I can imagine how I would feel and think if I were in their place, the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking and the more valid my final conclusions, my opinion. (It is this capacity for an “enlarged mentality” that enables men to judge; as such, it was discovered by Kant—in the first part of his Critique of Judgment …).²⁷

In another work, her installation Ad Infinitum, Mouraud conveys this desire to expand representative thinking through a profound and melancholic solicitation to the nonhuman sphere. In 2007, Mouraud took her video camera to Mexico to document the gray whales that for thousands of years have migrated to bear their young in the warm waters off Baja California. The video is striking. A montage of close-up and medium shots of whales with their calves shows them playfully rolling on the surface of the water and diving down into the black stream of the gulf. The saturated black-and-white images are peppered by shards of sunlight glistening on their slick bodies, concealing and revealing them. The soundtrack is made up of electronically modified field recordings of whale and dolphin songs, birds, water, and a motorboat. The resulting mesmerizing liquid cadence elicits our desire to touch these giant ancient mammals that were nearly extinct just ten years ago. If the video inspires our desire for proximity, the installation suspends it in a sacred moment of sensuous reflection. Staged in Nantes, France, at the heart of the Chapelle de l’Oratoire, the video installation is projected in large format along a wall as a kind of religious mural. Not far from the video projection lies a small wooden boat that is obviously adrift. Could this be Rimbaud’s “drunken boat,” whose inception was inspired by Jules Verne’s extraordinary vessels of exploration? For Mouraud, this installation might represent a new possible interface, a connection to that “primal continuity linking us with everything that is.”²⁸

In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty responds to Heidegger’s invocation of truth by bringing human perception into our understanding of appearance. He describes a space that is created out of the experience of the interiority of the external world of nature. As noted earlier, this space between inside and outside he calls a “chiasm,” which is an “intertwining” of interior and exterior, a space between one’s flesh and the flesh of the world. Merleau-Ponty describes an experience of spatial depth that envelops one’s flesh as part of the process of perception and visibility: “Between the massive sentiment I have of the sack in which I am enclosed, and the control from without that my hand exercises over my hand, there is as much difference as between the movements of my eyes and the changes they produce in the visible.” He continues, “[H]e who sees cannot possess the visible unless he is possessed by it, unless he is of it, unless … he is one of the visibles, capable by a singular reversal, of seeing them—he who is one of them.”²⁹ His own body is “surrounded by the visible. This does not place it on a plane of which it would be an inlay, it is really surrounded, circumvented. … Thus the body stands before the world and the world upright before it, and between them there is a relation that is one of embrace.”³⁰ For Merleau-Ponty, nature is an active, dynamic interrelation “enveloping” and “surrounding” the body in the world. He posits a relationship between organism and environment in such a way that he surpasses, as do William James and Whitehead, the subject-object distinction, and instead posits a uniting of all life in the flesh of the world: “Flesh of the World—Flesh of the Body—Being.”³¹ It is by creating such fundamental connections to the world, both visible and invisible, that Mouraud opens us up to it.

Seeing Ad Infinitum comes close to being an ecstatic experience. Ecstasy “sensitizes us to the contingency of identity and the in-dependence of the Other,” Costas M. Constantinou writes. “It is a recognition that one’s state, however personal or collective, is never an authentic or stable condition but a product of strange, contradictory or ever-changing forces. From this perspective ekstasis liquidates the ‘positivist’ boundaries of meaning, brings forth ‘the experience of an extra dimension, an expansion of the human condition’ that entices the logos of the Other.”³² The location of the installation in a church redirects an earlier religious spirituality to another altogether different task, that of creating a unity with animals and, at the same time, a “non-identification with them.”³³ With the small boat left unmoored and abandoned to one side of the installation, Mouraud points toward a certain dark and silent ecology—leaving a space open for thinking the more-than-human.

Desert (Atacama)

Nostalgia for the Light transforms the Atacama Desert into a palimpsest where diverse histories—the indigenous cultures of the Americas, pre-Columbian shepherds, nineteenth-century explorers, and enslaved saltpeter miners, as well as Pinochet’s political prisoners and concentration camps, coexist in nature. As Merleau-Ponty argued, nature is the “Memory of the World”;³⁵ the distinction between the natural and the cultural is merely “abstract: everything is cultural in us … (our perception is cultural-historical) and everything is natural in us (even the cultural rests on the polymorphism of the wild Being).”³⁶ The desert in Guzmán’s film functions as a polymorphous memory of the world, and as such contains numerous heterotopias (especially in its sprawling cemeteries from previous work camps and towns) and, arguably, is one large heterotopia—as one archaeologist reflects, the desert, permeated with salt, is a “condemned land where human remains are mummified for 10,000 years and objects are frozen in time.” Certain parts of the desert have been compared to Mars in terms of soil and the absolute absence of life. The Atacama is un/other worldly, used not only to simulate Mars in popular television serials (such as the BBC’s Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets) but also by NASA as a test ground for future missions. When we meet two women who are searching for loved ones in the desert, we are shown tiny shards of bone picked up randomly from the ground that could have been swept by winds from an unknown mass grave or dispersed by Pinochet’s soldiers, instructed to dispose of the bodies in the desert either by removing them and dropping them into the sea or by breaking them up into pieces. The official count of the murdered and tortured in Chile has recently been revised to 40,000; Guzmán tells us it is probably double that number. Essentially, what the film communicates is that the desert is a one large grave.

The women of Calama, a town in the center of the Atacama Desert, formed a secret group to search for the remains of their loved ones not long after the military coup of September 11, 1973, which inaugurated a reign of torture that lasted seventeen years. The women searched together in Arica, Iquique, Pisagua, La Serena, Colina, Paine, Lonquén, Concepción, Temuco, and Punta Arenas. In 1985, with the help of human rights organizations in Santiago, they formalized their group as the Agrupación de Familiares de Ejecutados Políticos and went public. They began to march through the streets of Calama demanding justice and answers about the whereabouts of family and friends who had disappeared. The women searched for twenty-eight years until 2002. Some of them persist in their searching as bodies continue to be found in the desert (including one discovered during the making of Nostalgia). We meet two of the women in the film—Vicky Saavedra and Violeta Berrios—whose stories are heart-wrenching. But every time they go into the desert, each woman is filled with hope at the thought of being reunited with her loved ones. While only six women now remain in the group, they are still forcefully determined as they face the expansive desert landscape.

Cosmos (Constellations)

In contrast to the women searching for tiny pieces of bone in the desert and the mass graves they believe Pinochet left behind, 5,000 meters above them on the Chajnantor plateau lies ALMA, the world’s largest ground-based facility for celestial observations. ALMA, a collaboration of numerous countries, consists of sixty antennae that listen to the stars whose light does not reach earth, with the aim of tracing the universe backward to its origins in the big bang. While Guzmán sets up what seems like an irreconcilable opposition—human bodies and celestial bodies, desertscapes and the beautiful and ecstatic “fly-throughs” of data galaxies—this impossible contiguity nevertheless coalesces.

The Pinochet coup d’état is one of the most written about in the history of Latin America. This is so, according to Alan Angell, because it unfolded in a country that had a long history of democracy, and “because it brought to an end an unusual attempt to create socialism through parliamentary and constitutional means.”³⁷ The Pinochet coup was a violent and traumatic intervention into what was for many, Guzmán included, the manifestation of a utopian experiment. Nostalgia opens with Guzmán’s childhood memory of the old German telescope in the Santiago Observatory, opening out to the sky above, through which we see the hollowed surface of the Moon (or it could be Mercury). Guzmán recalls the time before the coup d’état, a slower time in the countryside when he read science fiction, learned about lunar eclipses, memorized maps of the stars, and watched the sun through a piece of smoky glass. His nostalgia here is for a past before politics, before his forced exile to France. The materiality and rhythms of the things in the filmed house, which closely resembles his own childhood home—the radio and sewing machine, tablecloths and knitted cushions, kettle and old stove—all form part of the matter of memory, the fabric of nostalgia, which is not only sentimental but also scientific.³⁸

The film, it should be emphasized, is an essay film, one of the most elastic, process-oriented, and multimodal cinematic forms ever invented.³⁹ From the very beginning, we are presented with a dark gateway, a threshold into the two spaces of desert and cosmos that occasionally dematerialize into dust, shimmering particles that resemble celestial vistas and/or desert salt crystals. Nostalgia was inspired by astrophysicist Michel Cassé’s book Nostalgie de la lumière (2010), and the title sentiment is given a scientific, post-Bergsonian explanation by ALMA astronomer Gaspar Galaz, who explains that we never get to experience the present because of the time it takes for light to reach a viewer and for the viewer’s senses to process the information. We live in the past, he tells us, and the film explores how the past lives in our bodies and in things, human and nonhuman. We feel the complex intermingling of past, present, and future in the film. Guzmán asks Galaz if his cosmic search into the past is comparable to the work of the women of Calama that takes place in stark contrast to the work of the astrological observatory, on hands and knees, nose to the ground, far below. “Yes” and “no,” he responds. “Yes,” because both are looking to reconstruct the past, to bring it into the present. And “no,” because the women do not sleep at night after a day’s work. He also adds that the women of Calama should be recognized for their efforts to not let the past fade away into oblivion, for their work in keeping human memory, for toiling to write history.

In another scene, Luis Hernández recounts his experience as a prisoner in Chacabuco, the largest concentration camp created in the desert under Pinochet. The prisoners formed an astronomy group and used to identify constellations at night until their guards cut off this activity, believing that they were plotting an escape using the stars as their guide. Hernández memorized the constellations, a mental map that allowed him to feel free, even inside the camp. He also memorized the exact dimensions of the camp, using his footsteps as a measure. After he was released, he was able to draw detailed architectural renderings of the camp. This capacity to memorize, to “learn by heart”—embodied memory—is a powerful tool that Guzmán returns to often, although, as several of his films explore, Pinochet and his army were never held accountable for their crimes.

Throughout the film, Guzmán also moves between an archaeologist working to find traces of the first peoples in the desert and the astronomers working in the same place to find the origins of the “whole system.” The film cuts between images of pre-Columbian engravings on the sides of rock formations and breathtaking fly-throughs of multicolored galaxies and datasets of star clusters obtained through the Hubble Telescope. Geology and astronomy, the desert and the cosmos, are increasingly interwoven, their shapes confused. In one of the film’s pivotal scenes, American cosmologist George Preston, while looking at spectrometer graphs of the calcium in a star, explains that “some of the calcium in my bones was made from atoms dating back to shortly after the big bang … we live among the trees. We also live among the stars. We live among the galaxies. We are part of the Universe. And the calcium in my bones was there from the beginning.” Powerful juxtapositions reinforce this statement—bones and asteroids, skulls and planets, and the image of dust particles that works to dismantle the oppositions between them. This scene conveys a sense of the film that Guzmán had wanted to make, an impossible film about archaeology, astronomy, memory, and human rights—to show the connections between all the elements that together form our history.

George Preston’s observation is fundamental, and from this perspective answers Ayer’s proposition as to whether there was a sun before humankind existed. We are connected to the past and to the future, as the astronomers in the film argue. There is no before or after, there is only process.

In recent work on Merleau-Ponty’s later phenomenology, which incorporated Whitehead’s process philosophy and Bergson’s notions of time and matter, scholars have argued that his concept of the “chiasm” and the “flesh” offers up fertile insights into our understanding of time and perception. Merleau-Ponty writes that time is replaced “with a cosmology of the visible in the sense that, considering endotime and endospace, for [him] it is no longer a question of origins, nor limits, nor of a series of events going to a first cause, but one sole explosion of Being which is forever.” He reminds himself in his notes published posthumously: “Describe … ‘rays of the world.’”⁴⁰ Could Merleau-Ponty be referencing Whitehead’s “radiant sunset” discussed in chapter 1?

Ted Toadvine describes an aspect of the elemental continuity in Merleau-Ponty’s later thinking that might help us make sense of it:

If the geological scale of time means anything more to us than numbers on a line, this is because our experience—our levels, our perceptual norms, our earth—opens us to a past, and even to an incomprehensibly ancient prehistory. It does so because, as Merleau-Ponty emphasizes in his reading of Whitehead, we are ourselves embedded, mind and body, within the temporal passage of nature; its pulsation runs across us. … And this pulsation transcends the past-present distinction in such a way that past and present are enveloping-enveloped, Ineinander, each moment entering into relations of exchange and identification, interference and confusion, with all the others.⁴¹

In Nostalgia, this cosmic connection is always located dialectically, and does not obviate the powerful effect that the traumatic past exerts on the bodies of Pinochet’s victims. For this reason, the film cannot be accused of romanticism.

One of these victims, Valentina Rodríguez, an astronomer whose parents were murdered by the junta, describes herself as a “product with a manufacturing defect.” Her grandfather introduced her to astronomy at a young age and she has always found comfort in the celestial expanse of the universe, which reminds her that nothing comes to an end—the stars connect her life to the continuity of the cosmos. The very next scene in the film reflects upon this continuity as the camera pans over a public memorial made of photographs of hundreds of disappeared people. Passport photos lie next to casual family portraits, some so faded they are no long discernible. The photocards look like ill-fitting, decaying tiles whose multiple temporalities and contexts have been pulled as if by gravity into this public space of loss and memorialization.⁴² Guzmán later comments that memory has its own distinct gravitation, like that of the planets. The memorial is massive and suspends the photographs in a world apart, making a place for embodied collective reflection that links a past rupture to the future, when it can never be fully apprehended. Like the beautiful galaxies we return to gaze upon throughout the film, the faces of the disappeared, though lost and without home, are anchored in history through the act of remembering that is never finished, never completed.

In one of the last scenes in the film, Guzmán brings the two Calama women, Vicky and Violeta, into the observatory to meet with astronomer Gaspar Galaz and to look through one of the large telescopes at the stars. The scene is short and seemingly uncomfortable for everyone, as Guzmán later recounted in an interview. The scene concludes with dust particles—that is, with the “rays of the world” that will bring the parts of the picture that don’t add up to a totality to land firmly on the ground. It is a scene that is a part of Guzmán’s utopian script, which imagines an expanded consciousness that includes various scientific and political registers of memory, history, and human rights activism; that brings together, as Stengers notes, different umwelts under the rubric of a shared ecology.

The very last scene in Nostalgia for the Light is not the multifaceted, variegated, ecstatic images of celestial bodies that we might expect from the film. Rather, what we get is a wide-angle view of the city of Santiago at night, sirens blaring, lights shimmering like the stars in the sky. It is precisely with the image of the sprawling cosmopolitan city that was once Guzmán’s home, in all its plurality and borderless cacophony, that this project of expanded memory must begin.⁴³