The Science of Letters

Anna-Sophie Springer, Etienne Turpin
Published 21 June 2016

The Apparency of Evidence

It cannot be said that the matters of science are uncertain just because they abound with quarrels and controversies.

— Spinoza, Ethics, 1677


This essay considers how the ethical and epistemological confusions apparent in the private reflections of European naturalists of the nineteenth century suggest an alternative history of colonial science and its long-presumed positivist trajectory. By attending to some lesser-known letters, exchanges, notebooks, and ephemera found among the well-ordered annals of natural history, our aim is to delineate a minor history of uncertainty. This attempt is not simply a matter of correcting the historical record, nor is it an effort to exonerate those responsible for developing or implementing typically violent programs of colonial expansion, whether by way of cartography, collections, or other means of empire and publicity. Instead, by mapping a minor history of uncertainty throughout the Indonesian archipelago, and by traversing the torrid zone alongside several figures in pursuit of new knowledge to bring back to Europe, our aim is to trouble an image of science which continues to obstruct environmental justice in the present.¹ Simply put, we believe that the enduring image of science as an enterprise committed to a positivist clarification of knowledge through the elimination of any ethical friction or moral doubt subverts contemporary climate change science and related inquiries into biodiversity loss, mass extinction, and planetary toxicity.  
        
Before we consider European expeditions in the Indonesian archipelago and the various expressions of the will to knowledge which these journeys reified in the history of science, it is necessary to recount three more recent events that further clarify the stakes of this history by exposing its pernicious if difficult-to-discern legacy.

17 November 2009. In anticipation of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (UNFCCC) set to be held in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December 2009, the servers of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, were attacked. Hackers copied thousands of files, documents, and emails, then leaked them to various internet sites for global distribution and commentary. The suggestion that the hack exposed evidence of falsified climate data—thus proving climate change was an orchestrated conspiracy—was thoroughly promoted by climate denialists, including James Delingpole, executive editor for the London branch of the Breitbart News Network, who first named the incident “Climategate.” That far-right extremist, white supremacist, and conspiratorial media outlets could so thoroughly leverage the incident to suggest that there was no scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change certainly requires further discussion; however, our concern in this essay are the latent assumptions about scientific consensus that the hack revealed.² If the publics who read about it online or in the mainstream press, or saw it televised on cable news networks, had a greater appreciation for the subjective uncertainties that constitute the real work of science, instead of the positivist image of decisive objectivity, would there have been a controversy at all? Even when we admit the role played by climate denialists in falsely extrapolating scientific conspiracy theories from the hacked data of the Climate Research Unit, it is evident that non-scientific communities could be better inoculated against such flagrant falsehoods if they shared a more sensitive and dynamic image of science. Which is to say: a post-positivist image of science wherein uncertainty on one stratum does not prevent consensus on another would be an essential component of the aesthetics of evidence in the Anthropocene.³

22 April 2017. From the March for Science homepage: “In more than 600 cities around the world, we marched as an unprecedented coalition of organizations and individuals. We marched because science is critical to our health, economies, food security, and safety. We marched to defend the role of science in policy and society.”⁴ It is essential to acknowledge that the need to “march for science” in 2017 might have seemed unnecessary were it not for the inauguration of the new President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, in January of the same year. That “science,” as a mode of inquiry, now requires public demonstrations in a manner that was until very recently the purview of social movements is a rather startling indicator of the apparency of evidence in the era of Trump.⁵ While the Trump White House promoted homegrown “alt-truths” on issues from U.S. health care and taxation to veterans affairs and missile launches, the disconcerting deletion of climate change information and related public data sources from government websites also helped to draw hundreds of thousands of marchers around the world into the streets. “What do we want? Evidence-based policies! When do we want them? After peer-review!” Amidst these unprecedented calls for the protection of a properly scientific evidentiary, what post-positivist image of science can we help co-produce? How can we help ensure that the various pro-science reactions to Trump-era attacks avoid simply reifying an image of science that undermines broader but no less urgent questions about epistemological diversity, knowledge co-production, and the social and environmental consequences of techno-scientific endeavors under capitalism?⁶

17 February 2017. As Scott Pruitt assumed his duties as the 14th Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of the United States of America, the fact that as Attorney General of Oklahoma he sued the EPA no fewer than fourteen times was not lost on America’s scientific community. The EPA was established in 1970 under an Executive Order from then-U.S. President Richard Nixon, who saw the agency as a necessary extension of the federal government that could help to protect human and environmental health. That Trump would appoint a known climate skeptic and long-time industry advocate to head the EPA signaled, in no uncertain terms, that the agency would be thoroughly dismantled both in terms of providing evidence-based policy, as well as upholding environmental legislation such as the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. How, when facing such a severe attack on the scientists and their ability to shape policy through research (not to mention research funding and global research collaborations), can a history of ethical uncertaintycontribute to the self-defense of human and nonhuman worlds?

Indeed, as climate change studies warn persistently of devastating trajectories for human and nonhuman worlds alike, the Trump administration’s disposition toward scientific research makes the current essay particularly untimely. In this moment of anti-science (as well as the industry-backed non-science, which has attempted to undermine the integrity of public debate at least since the end of WWII), alt-truths, and accelerating climate change, is it not more important than ever to rally behind an image of science as an objective, incontrovertible, collective human endeavor? While we acknowledge the increasing acrimony of thisapparent debate as well as ongoing disputes between scientists and industry-backed researchers who intentionally create doubts about valid scientific findings, we nevertheless believe that to be drawn uncritically into such a binary weakens the power of collectives and communities to respond effectively to attacks on their neighborhoods, their health, and their variously constituted worlds.⁷ Neither Trump, nor Pruitt, nor their climate change-denying supporters will be defeated by a neo-positivist image of science because their matters of concern are not scientific; instead, what is at stake is power.⁸ And, in the struggle against racist, populist State-capitalism, its environmental violence, and its life-threatening externalities which have been aggregating together in the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial revolution as planetary climate change, a more powerful science is definitely not one still tricked by a positivist promotional campaign. In his remarkable essay on the scientist and engineer S.V. Seshadri, historian Shiv Visvanathan emphasizes the need to transform the work of science itself, “to create a science that thought with its hands, a science that was more sexual and sensual, a science that was sensitive to suffering.”⁹This, in our estimation, is a science at once worth fighting for and worth fighting with; indeed, many examples of lithe, scientific practices are now proliferating as the pressures for communities to defend themselves from the ravages of capitalism become ever-more acute.¹⁰ In what follows, we develop a minor history of uncertainty as a way to help describe what is at stake in the suppression of non-positivist scientific sensitivities. To reanimate a sensitive science for the Anthropocene, the colonial image of science that still represents the will to knowledge as a triumphalist suppression of doubt must also be decolonized; again, this is no strategy of exoneration, but rather the necessary overcoming of a powerful image of science that not only weakens our sensitivities in the present, but that never really was.

In the intellectual shadow of scientific papers, which can only ever announce the confident findings of an objective mode of inquiry, we find so many other letters and notebooks that declare, sometimes emphatically and often in confused or ambiguous terms, an altogether different affect. When we pay closer attention to these uncertainties, it becomes clear that even the most confident figures in the pantheon of modern science flinched when considering the ethical implications of their work. As a man of social rank with deep connections to the Church of England, Charles Darwin hesitantly pondered the danger of his ideas about evolution; inevitably, he was aware of the potential accusations of heresy his work might solicit from his fellow Victorians, confident as they were about the unity of nature wherein every creature purposefully inhabited its position within God’s unchanging master plan. Fifteen years before he would agree to publishing On the Origin of Species (1859), Darwin admitted his bad conscience about “presumptuously” believing in species’ mutability to his colleague Joseph Hooker with the parenthetical remark: “(it is like confessing a murder).”¹¹ While Darwin’s concern over the consequences of his ideas were well-founded, the history of scientific letters suggests this concerned comportment is less of an aberration than it might appear in the textbook accounts of the Great Men of Science. In fact, nagging doubts about the ethics and implications of scientific research were a psychological condition familiar among the colonial explorers and naturalists of the nineteenth century. But, if Darwin’s concerns were keyed to the metaphysical structure of Victorian life, the will to scientific knowledge in the colonial tropics raised a different set of vexing questions about the environmental consequences of their inquiries.

Michel Foucault, a philosopher more attentive to systems of thought than perhaps any other in the twentieth century, once explained that the objective of philosophy “is to render visible precisely what is visible, that is, to make appear that which is so near, that which is so immediate, so immediately bound to ourselves that we for that very reason do not perceive it.”¹² In this estimation, “if the role of science is to make known that which we don’t see, the role of philosophy is to make us see what we see.”¹³ While these two objectives are present among the trajectories of the will to knowledge that Foucault describes in his inaugural lecture course at the Collège de France, it is another, more ambivalent mode of evidence that we discover in circulation among the letters of colonial naturalists in the Indonesian archipelago.¹⁴ If philosophy renders visible what had been too visible to see, and science brings to light what was previously beneath the “threshold of detectability,”¹⁵ hallucinations are a part of that curious brand of revelation which weaves together the seen and unseen by way of spectacular, networked patterns of incorporeal connectivity.¹⁶ Among the European dropouts who elected to find their fame and fortune on the shores of faraway colonies, we discover the precise inversion of this revelatory phenomenon. Instead of iridescent connections mending together the dimensions of apparent and latent reality, the perceptions of colonial scientists are blurred by the recurrence of “reverse hallucinations”—an expression borrowed from William Gibson by way of Ricardo Dominguez—which occasion events of not seeing what is manifestly present. Let us now turn to the torrid zone in the nineteenth century, where we will quickly discover how the colonial segregation of subjective, ethical life from the objectivity- oriented will to scientific knowledge both encouraged and relied upon reverse-hallucinatory discrepancies between the obvious and the obscure. 

Colonial Contours

You are free to conjure up an ecology, a demography, and a geography that would be most favorable to the state and its ruler. What, in those circumstances, would you design?

— James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed (2010)


Among its vast collection, the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (State Library of Berlin) contains an original map of the geology of the island of Java, published by Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn (1809–1864) in 1855. To view this, the first comprehensive map of the world’s most populated island, visitors can request an appointment online. After waiting several weeks, and upon arriving at the library’s Maps Collection, it is then possible to unfold a three-meter-long rendering of Java across several pristine library tables. The quality of the production is compelling, awesome even. In a world dominated by Google Earth and its military-grade resolution, the achievements of this mid-nineteenth-century map are still irreproachable. The Perpustakaan Nasional di Indonesia (National Library of Indonesia) in Jakarta also contains an original of Junghuhn’s map, albeit the section profile included in the first volume of his publication Java, seine Gestalt, Pflanzendecke und innere Bauart, published in 1852. Extending 153 centimeters, this foldout illustration depicts all of the Indonesian island’s peaks, arranged from west to east across its 1,000-kilometer length, at a ratio of 1:18.25.

In Berlin, in order to view the map visitors must leave behind their ink pens upon entering the research room. Inside, they must wear a pair of white flannel gloves to further protect this precious document of colonization––heralded among historians of cartography as a remarkable achievement––from any human damage. In Jakarta, the tome containing the section map is passed over the librarian’s counter; opening it to reveal the century-old lithograph, visitors are confronted with numerous moldy stains, perpetually conjured by the tropical humidity. The precarious state surely points to a lack of institutional funding that would be necessary to preserve this century-old paper stock; but, when the map begins to crumble as it is unfolded for viewing, its efficacy of a colonial tool of power comes into question. What does it mean to witness the decay of such a document in the place it once served to conquer? The history of Junghuhn’s map and its attendant socio-spatial consequences helps to trace the colonial contours that enabled the island of Java to become fully addressable by its European occupiers. Because any cartographic addressability ultimately expedites forms of violence typical of both historical and contemporary imperialism, such endeavors must be understood as part of the colonial will to science that renders legible and measurable the entangled territories of tropical life.¹⁷          
   
While various other cartographers attempted to capture Java’s contours before and during the six years in which Junghuhn produced his Javakaart, these efforts were typically based on an awkward assemblage of incomplete fragments. What distinguishes Junghuhn’s survey is the fact that he was the sole cartographer to chart the horizontal expanse of the island in its entirety. As a lover of the region’s high altitudes, he achieved this total and totalizing image by climbing nearly all of Java’s peaks in order to measure and triangulate the distances among the mountains in relation to two astronomically determined points on the northern coast of Java, in the cities of Batavia and Surabaya. He could then extrapolate their latitude and longitude in relation to Greenwich, England. In addition to using compasses and a sextant, he employed a barometer, which helped him to measure atmospheric pressure and thus altitudes with remarkable accuracy.¹⁸ 

The stunning precision of Junghuhn’s maps revolutionized geological and geographical knowledge of Java, then the most important island in the most important colony occupied by the Netherlands: more than a century would pass before these maps required any significant updating through modern cartographic means.¹⁹ According to historian Renate Sternagel, Junghuhn was ensnared in a contradictory position, pitting the ambitions of his colonial employers against his own, formidable Romantic ambition for personal freedom: “As a natural scientist Junghuhn loved untouched nature, the ‘wilderness,’ and hated ‘civilization.’”²⁰ At the same time, through his work as surveyor and collector, “he embodied [...] the ideal of the progressive-thinking colonial explorer, who played his part in taking measurements of the world, as a forerunner for soldiers and planters.”²¹ It is worth emphasizing that, at least in the context of scientific endeavor, the cartographic will to knowledge coincides almost exactly with the colonial will to power. As in many other cases, the map of Java served as an “imperialist weapon,” determining friends and enemies among those mapping and those being mapped.²²

To fulfill the orders of his employer, the Ministry of the Colonies, Junghuhn notably included in his exceptional representation depictions of the coal repositories recently discovered along the southern coast, as well as detailed information about the island’s other valuable mineral deposits. To fully dominate this island and its subsurface riches, however, it would first need to be more thoroughly addressed.

The ambition to control a territory for the purpose of extracting wealth from its human and nonhuman inhabitants has been realized according to several characteristic maneuvers, not least of which is the assignment of an address to those elements subject to control, particularly subjects necessary for processes of capital accumulation. Historian James C. Scott and theorist Benjamin H. Bratton have described the processes associated with coercive legibility and involuntary addressability, respectively, both of which help us understand more fully the role of island cartography within the insurrectionary landscape of the Dutch East Indies during the nineteenth century.

In his account of legibility and simplification as trajectories of governance, Scott describes the difference between a European medieval city or a Middle Eastern medina and a gridded city like Daniel Burnham’s Chicago or Georges-Eugène Hausmann’s Paris. While the former “enjoys at least a small measure of insularity from outside intrusion,” for the latter, “the knowledge of local citizens is not especially privileged vis-à-vis that of outsiders.”²³ For Scott, these settlement patterns suggest cognitive or epistemic islands. Describing medieval Bruges, he writes: “Illegibility, then, has been and remains a reliable resource for political autonomy.”²⁴ As authorities attempted to render territories governable, they aimed to make them and their populations legible through mechanisms including, but not limited to, surnames, cadastral maps, and traffic management. The question of how to address a subject of power is consistently answered through this visual economy of politics. Or, as Scott makes even more explicit, “modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization, often glossed, as it is in imperial rhetoric, as a ‘civilizing mission’.”²⁵

Bratton has recently updated this logic for the twenty-first century in his book The Stack.²⁶ For him, the long arc of legibility––from surnames to street addresses, postal codes to TCP/IP protocols––has helped produce an “accidental megastructure.” He contends that, instead of seeing all of these elements of planetary computation as “a hodgepodge of different species of computing, spinning out on their own at different scales and tempos, we should see them as forming a coherent and interdependent whole. These technologies align, layer by layer, into something like a vast, if also incomplete, pervasive if also irregular, software and hardware Stack.”²⁷ Comprised of six autonomous yet interdependent layers—Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, User—the Stack centrifugally spins out consequences in every direction and dimension. For our purpose, it is Bratton’s thinking about addressability that helps frame the stakes of Junghuhn’s colonial cartographic heroism, suggesting its relevance for a contemporary reconsideration of the concept of the island as such. Like Scott’s discussion of legibility and simplification, Bratton’s layer of address within the Stack identifies various means by which data (and their socio-spatial consequences) are measured and classified as a means for their governance. Contrary to the popular belief in a free and fluid internet, legibility-cum-addressability is even more consequential as the morphology of sovereignty increasingly exhibits kaleidoscopic dematerializations, virtualizations, physical reassertions, and material instantiations, that is, as politics are simultaneously rendered through a transformative logic of software. But, as Bratton argues, this transition is not only a matter of interfaces or parameters; the power of addressability as a modality of governance reaches back at least to the cartographic trajectory that subtends the colonial-scientific will to knowledge.²⁸

However, in order to understand the project of mapping Java, it is necessary to first recall the unstable landscape of the nineteenth-century Dutch East Indies, a site of struggle already punctuated by centuries of revolt against European occupation. The Javanese Prince Diponegoro is portrayed—famously or infamously, depending on one’s affinities for rebellion—as the arrested figurehead of the guerilla revolts that terrified Dutch rulers on Java in the 1820s.²⁹ As the colonial government repeatedly failed to prevent plague and famine across the island, which had allegedly been placed under European rule in order to improve the stifling human conditions suffered by native inhabitants, anticolonial sentiment became pervasive.

As historian Gerhardt Aust observes, the strategic importance of reliable maps for the Dutch military was given particular urgency by the events of the Java War (1825–1830), when due to insufficient geographical and topographical knowledge, the colonial army suffered significant losses against Diponegoro’s guerillas.³⁰ The rebellion was the largest organized uprising against the Dutch since they had first colonized the island in the early seventeenth century. Under the leadership of the guerilla-prince from Yogyakarta, thousands of rice farmers left their fields in Central Java to fight the Dutch. Local guerilla fighters had the upper hand for the first two years of the confrontation, but the uprising was eventually suppressed by tricking Diponegoro into a treacherous cease-fire, at which point Dutch authorities shamelessly arrested him. An estimated 200,000 combatants were dead by the end of the conflict, including more than eight thousand Dutch soldiers and tens of thousands of Javanese civilians. If the colony was to be maintained as a site of Dutch prosperity, a new approach to its governance would be necessary.

Created in the aftermath of the Java War, Junghuhn’s map dramatically diminished the island’s insularity. Scott asserts that, “Historically, the relative illegibility to outsiders of some urban neighborhoods (or of their rural analogues, such as hills, marshes, and forests) had provided a vital margin of political safety from control by outside elites.”³¹ In this context, Junghuhn’s island map provided both evidence of the colonized territory and an instrument for its further domination. It follows that, at the very moment Java becomes cartographically addressable, it loses its naturally insular existence within an ever-increasing imperial force field[AS1] . Sternagel describes how, with the end of the Java War, Dutch rule was re-stabilized and the island population was coerced into a system of highly taxed agricultural labor, which lasted the ensuing 100 years, until the beginning of the twentieth-century Independence movement.³² 

Junghuhn anxiously awaited news about how his masterpiece was received by those who commissioned it; he, like so many other Europeans scientists, aimed to please the masters who ruled at a distance with the delivery of impressive scientific findings. No less unexceptionally, Junghuhn also appears to have wandered from his original mission, to the point of escaping the truth of its purpose altogether. The commission of the Javakaart allowed Junghuhn to retreat from the confines of colonial service; instead, he was free to traverse Java’s majestic mountain peaks. Yet, he could not have failed to recognize the value of the map for the future military occupation of the island, even if it seems that he struggled to admit the gravity of his own role in environmental and cultural destruction caused by the colonial project. In some instances, he preferred to indict “the ‘indifference of the Javanese’ along with the increase in local population and the rising demand for rice fields and firewood”³³ as the main cause of deforestation. On rarer occasions, however, one does find in his writing explicit criticism of colonialist expansion:

Through increasing population, and cultivation of the soil the beauty of nature is destroyed. The magnificent flowering bushes, the grasslands alternating with forests and home to so many living creatures, so attractive, so entertaining to see—they are being crowded out by the land use systems predominant in central Europe, by ugly monotonous fields, which one cannot look at without wishing to get away as quickly as possible. This is the end of the song for which Nature sacrificed herself.³⁴

Still, as he surveyed the island, the pleasure of such a pursuit—the pure act of mapping—seems to have largely obscured the commitment to universal human freedom that occasionally appears in his writings, including several essays in which he explicitly decries the colonial occupation of the island and the violence of the Dutch authorities. While such ethical sentiments indicate a potential, underlying ambiguity, even an uncertainty on his part, they did not prevent Junghuhn from completing his task. Indeed, the map was of such exceptional quality that, following its arrival in Europe, he received a letter of praise from none other than Alexander von Humboldt. In a letter dated 20 April 1857, the renowned naturalist remarked emphatically, “How can I thank you enthusiastically enough for your beautiful, truly geological, richly designed map. Following a military dinner, the King, Prince Friedrich of the Netherlands, the Minister of War, as well as several other generals all long admired it as very excellent work.”³⁵ For decades to come, Junghuhn’s cartographic synthesis of Java would serve as a tool of colonial domination, guiding explicit military campaigns as well as resource extraction and plantation management. In his wide-ranging study of “immersive” colonial psychologies, philosopher Peter Sloterdijk summarizes the ethical paradox succinctly: “Whoever draws the map behaves as if he were culturally, historically, legally and politically in the right.”³⁶ Although Junghuhn simply could not have doubted the role his map would play in the project of colonial conquest and its attendant deforestation, his reverse hallucinations among the high peaks of Java allowed him to deny (at least, to himself) the inevitable outcome of his scientific study; of course, the map of the island is not an island.

The Climate of Deforestation

The advantage of thinking through plantations is that the patchy Anthropocene is immediately apparent.

— Anna Tsing, “Earth Stalked by Man” (2016)


In addition to subsequent cartographic surveys and a variety of measurements recorded at the request of other German scientists, Junghuhn’s research unfolded according to several additional governmental mandates he had received from the Dutch, both of which concerned trees. In 1856, he was asked to oversee the development of cinchona plantations, a South American tree species, which Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland had first described for Western medicinal science in the course of their expedition fifty years earlier (1799–1804). The healing value of cinchona bark as a fever treatment had been known to Amerindian peoples for centuries, but the cultivation of chinchona trees had since become a key aspect of colonial occupations in the Eastern hemisphere because the bark’s extractable substance quinine provided a much-needed treatment for malaria.³⁷ The second official assignment involved an investigation of the “degree, state, and extent” of deforestation on Java by comparing the state of the island to previously conducted surveys. This latter task is noteworthy as it led Junghuhn to study and then speculate on the relationship between deforestation, rainfall, and the water depth of creeks and rivers, ultimately leading to his hypothesis that climate change would be an inevitable consequence of deforestation.

Some of his more prescient observations are relayed in another letter to von Humboldt, dated 8 December 1856, in which Junghuhn describes woodlands that “have been notably cleared, even here in the well-wooded western highlands of the island.” The formerly overflowing riverbeds were now “found to be almost dry, leading to the non-irrigation of a large part of the Sawahs.” ³⁸ Junghuhn then explains his understanding of the relationship between forests, fluvial water levels, and the intensity of the winds, particularly the “West Monsoon” from the Indian Ocean and what he calls the “good and dry Monsoon” coming from Australia. Much in resonance the systemic correlations between deforestation and human-induced climate change Humboldt himself deduced from his observations in South America, Junghuhn’s hypothesis is that deforestation will not only cause additional droughts, but greater differences among the various types of wind, thereby transforming the regional climate. Anticipating the emergence of extreme weather conditions produced through deforestation, Junghuhn then speculates:

I believe that it won’t be easy to prove a decrease of rainfall during the West Monsoon […] as being caused by the deforestation of certain areas; as well as proving that the droughts during the so-called good and dry Monsoon […] will become intensified as a consequence of the deforestation of some areas, which will first lead to stronger contrasts between the monsoon weather conditions as well as produce extremes; one example being the good monsoon of 1855 where, in Batavia and many other areas on Java, not one raindrop fell for seven months.³⁹ 

While Junghuhn goes on to note that this claim requires a more “fully and carefully” conducted investigation of the entire island of Java, in his conclusion he nevertheless argues that new trees must be methodically planted to avoid this regional climate change; to insist on his point, he also provides a list of eligible species.⁴⁰ Junghuhn’s early admonishments regarding colonial land-use transformation can still be heard—if only as an echo that continues to be ignored—in contemporary reports about drought-stricken rice fields, drinking water shortages, landslides, and severe flooding occurring as a result of deforestation and attendant terrestrial transformations, especially the expansive new oil palm plantations in Borneo, Sumatra, and West Papua.⁴¹ Without forests, the heavy rainfalls of the monsoon season can no longer be absorbed into the ground; this excess water regularly inundates villages and cities, while also expediting the loss of topsoil as it is washed away into the sea.

Given his role in the cartographic subjugation of Java, it might strike the contemporary reader as especially contradictory when Junghuhn articulates deep frustrations over colonial projects that necessitate further deforestation. Importantly, his conception of the forest, and of nature itself, remains grounded in a Romantic vision that is at once sublime and spiritual: “The first impression mandated silence, similar to the kind one inevitably loses oneself in upon suddenly entering, from a brightly sun-lit street, into the sanctuary of a highly vaulted, gothic church.”⁴² At times, Junghuhn’s reveries come remarkably close to those of his fellow German, Friedrich Nietzsche, whose obsession with mountain peaks as an image for free thought would culminate, forty years later, with Zarathustra dancing in the clear air of these heights, far from the masses who could not undergo his call for a “transvaluation of values.”⁴³ Similarly, Junghuhn writes:


How satisfied, how light in spirit can one rest in these heights, while the wind sighs softly through the Casuarina pines and the stars twinkle through the light green vault of the      shelter. No heavy roof of tiles hides from us the friendly view of the heavens, no heavy ceiling presses down on us from above, no gloomy walls confine us, one breathes freely and lightly above the heavy atmosphere of the lowlands, where—in dark caves they    call houses—live people suspicious, small-minded, and confined.⁴⁴


In fact, Junghuhn’s tropical “paradise” exists exclusively among the high altitudes of Java, far away from the “suspicious, small-minded, and confined” aspects of colonial society that his cartography helped to develop. It is evident that the geographical distance separating the free, high mountains from the colonial enterprise on the plains below was, at the same time, a psychological schism that allowed Junghuhn to parse his conflicting, schizoscopicview of colonization.

The fragility of this geo-psychological division is exemplified by an episode that took place in 1839. In the spring of that year, Junghuhn explored the area around the Gunung Gedeh; at the peak, he discovered what he describes as a peaceful and fertile meadow with a freshwater creek, mushrooms, small flowers, and numerous traces of the wild rhinoceros of West Java. He was also delighted to encounter a primula which he had discovered a few weeks earlier—later named Primula imperialis Jungh.—when he climbed Mount Pangrango, a 3,000-meter-tall extinct volcano also located along the Sunda Arc. Reflecting on these experiences, Junghuhn compares the picturesque summit to a “castle built into the clouds.”⁴⁵ Towards the end of the year, he again ascended Gedeh to the summit, but the area had changed drastically. No longer a secluded haven, the area was now, so he notes, overrun by undernourished Javanese workers building colonial infrastructure. Shocked by this encounter, he begins to realize that it was his own report about the fertile land that led to its destruction. Full of nostalgia for the lost paradise (if not guilt), he remarks: “Wistfully I left this beautiful summit; wistful for seeing how many of its solitary blossoms had already been crushed, and how many a small, beautiful tree had to fall to the axe, since the short time that I had first made this place known in Buitenzorg.—A significant expanse of its lovely forest […] had already been hopelessly mowed down.”⁴⁶ While deforestation in Indonesia’s rain and peat forests continues unabated to this day, we are compelled to reflect on these statements from an earlier colonial period because they reveal a more general pattern that characterizes the will to knowledge.

Fig. 02. F.W. Junghuhn’s “Kaart van het Eiland Java.” Breda: A.J. Bogaerts, 1855. Scale 1:35,000; format 79 × 308 cm. Courtesy of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin —Preußischer Kulturbesitz.

Despite occasional lamentations, and even while predicting severe consequences such as climate change, it is evident that Junghuhn suppressed his ethical uncertainties in order to execute his colonial duties in the name of science. But was this science in name only?⁴⁷ Would Junghuhn’s practice have differed if his research was articulated in a non-positivist scientific context? This is an extremely difficult question, tending as it does toward a severe anachronism; fundamentally, we cannot answer it directly. Yet, what we want to stress through this question is that Junghuhn’s doubt, his recurring uncertainty about the colonial project, and his intuitive concerns about climate change, were all subsumed under an image of positivist technoscience that connected a colonial political economy, field observation, and scientific measurement in an inescapable loop of socioenvironmental violence. Even while reveling in the freedom he was afforded by the many high summits of the Javanese mountains, he ultimately refused to see how his observations would condemn the human and nonhuman inhabitants living below to brutal forms of colonization. But, even if it is obvious that his tropical paradise could not be sustained through the colonial observations which almost immediately mandated its eradication, could such a paradise at least be collected?

Collecting Paradise

There was no seeing everything at once: no certainty.

— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest (1972)


Between 1854 and 1862, the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace explored the Malay Archipelago, ardently documenting the region’s geography and biodiversity while amassing a enormous collection of specimens for museums in Europe. His fieldwork, findings, and personal experiences are chronicled in the book The Malay Archipelago: The land of the orang-utan, and the bird of paradise—A narrative of travel, with sketches of man and nature, published in 1869 following Wallace’s return to Europe. The complex relationship between the will to knowledge and the gathering of scientific data is illustrated in part by the unfathomable scale of Wallace’s collection of natural history specimens. As a young man in his early twenties, he had come across the controversial, anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which first ignited his fascination with the heretical idea that organisms might change their form over time; while the notion provoked in Wallace a plan for future research, the suggestion that species’ transmutationcould explain the natural efflorescence was rigorously opposed by Charles Lyell, Britain’s preeminent geologist.⁴⁸ Committed to understanding first-hand this complex problem of morphological development, together with his friend and fellow “beetle-hunter” Henry Bates, Wallace planned for a collecting expedition to the Amazon Basin, which would occupy him from 1848 to 1852. The South American tropics were fecund region for an extensive study of evolution; indeed, as Wallace noted in a pre-departure letter to Bates: “I should like to take some one family to study thoroughly––principally with a view to the theory of the origin of species.”⁴⁹ Yet, even after Wallace filled his notebooks with detailed reports, sketches of plants and animals, and maps—all of which produced a preliminary basis for understanding biogeographical distribution in the Amazon—his groundbreaking scientific revelation would have to be deferred.⁵⁰ While he was returning to Europe aboard the Helen, after twenty-six days at sea, the brig’s cargo caught fire and the vessel was abandoned; Wallace lost nearly everything he had painstakingly collected and recorded.

Two years later—still convinced that he would be able to solve the problems of natural selection, geographical distribution, and variations in plant and animal life only if he could gather an original collection that would be as varied and comprehensive as possible—Wallace would try again to solve the riddle of species transmutation, this time in Southeast Asia. During his eight years in the Malay Archipelago, he sent back to England an amazing 125,660 specimens of natural history, among them five thousand species hitherto unknown to science. While many of these were sold to private collections and museums, Wallace kept for himself approximately three thousand bird-skins (including roughly one thousand different species), as well as twenty thousand beetle and butterfly specimens.⁵¹ The sale of these specimens allowed Wallace to pay for his travels and, after his return to Europe, he was able to use his personal collection to continue thinking through various questions of evolutionary biology.⁵² The following passage from an essay published one year after the expedition, “On the Physical Geography of the Malay Archipelago,” explains Wallace’s rationale for pursuing a “perfect collection”:

[The naturalist] looks upon every species of animal and plant now living as the individual letters which go to make up one of the volumes of our earth’s history; and, as a few lost letters may make a sentence unintelligible, so the extinction of the numerous forms of life which the progress of cultivation inevitably entails will necessarily render obscure this invaluable record of the past. It is therefore, an important object,   which governments and scientific institutions should immediately take steps to secure, that in all tropical countries colonised by Europeans the most perfect collections possible in every branch of natural history should be made and deposited in national museums, where the may be available for study and interpretation.⁵³

As a “site” for scientific study, the awesome biodiversity of the archipelago is still evident in more contemporary estimations. According to Gavan Daws and Marty Fujita, “in almost all plant and animal taxa, Indonesia has levels of species diversity and endemism that rank within the highest in the world.” Absolute quantitative measures of the world’s biodiversity remain difficult to achieve, but it has been estimated that Wallace was exposed to “more than ten thousand species of trees, about a tenth of the world’s flowering plant species, about an eighth of all mammal species, nearly a sixth of all reptile and amphibian species, a sixth of all bird species, and about a third of all fish species.”⁵⁴ 

Until just a few decades ago, one could still encounter many of the lush forest landscapes in Southeast Asia that led to Wallace’s two most important publications. First, in 1855, he wrote “On the Law which has Regulated the Introduction of New Species,” which he published in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History in September of the same year. The conclusions of what came to be known as “The Sarawak Law” are a key in the development of a theory of evolution by natural selection: “Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a closely allied species.”⁵⁵ The second publication, which has a more complicated reception, also indicates the significance of Indonesian biodiversity in the development of the theory of evolution. Ternate > Wallace > Lyell > Darwin. On 1 July 1858, the so-called “Darwin-Wallace” paper was read at the Linnean Society in London after Wallace sent a letter to Darwin (via Charles Lyell) in which the former claimed to have discovered the mechanism of evolution in the process of “natural selection.”⁵⁶ The paper was officially published by the Society on 20 August 1858; Darwin’s monograph On the Origin of Species followed on 24 November 1859. Many prominent authors have developed careful and considered reflections on Wallace’s contribution to the theory of evolution by natural selection; our ambition is to advance a reading of the will to knowledge as it is instantiated in Wallace’s estimation of the natural world (and the consequences of its degradation) through the development practices at the core of the colonial project.⁵⁷    

As a result of logging, forest fires, agricultural clearing, open-pit mining, road construction, and oil palm plantations, many of the areas which afforded Wallace the living evidentiary of evolution have all but disappeared. In fact, it is now estimated that within a decade, ninety-eight percent of the Indonesian rainforest will be destroyed completely if developments remain on a business-as-usual trajectory.⁵⁸ When we asked evolutionary biologists whether or not they believed it would still be possible to develop the theory of evolution, or biogeographical distribution, based on a collection of specimens from the Malay Archipelago today, most answered in the negative. According to our interlocutors, animal and plant species have been radically displaced, and many are now present on islands where they would not have been found in Wallace’s time. Thus, as a result of various anthropogenic factors, the species’ scrambled and often precarious appearance in the devastated forests of the archipelago means that the story they tell today is of a very different “nature.”⁵⁹ 

   
Still, Wallace was not immune to the realities of land-use transformation in the region, even if these changes were much less destructive in his time than they are among contemporary plantation developments. In one appraisal, Wallace remarked:


Future ages will certainly look back upon us as a people so immersed in the pursuit of wealth as to be blind to higher considerations. They will charge us with having culpably allowed the destruction of some of those records of Creation which we had it in our power to preserve; and while professing to regard every living thing as the direct handiwork and best evidence of a Creator, yet, with a strange inconsistency, seeing many of them perish irrecoverably from the face of the earth, uncared for and unknown.⁶⁰


For Wallace, the blindness of the colonial project and its inevitable destruction of nature makes the entire scientific enterprise culpable because “we had it in our power to preserve” [authors’ emphasis] these so-called “records of Creation.” Such an ecclesiastical image of nature may seem odd, especially given that Wallace’s own writing helped to displace the belief that nature was the work of a divine creator. However, as anthropologist Anna Tsing has suggested in her book Friction, this idyllic image may still be of strategic importance: “The romance of nature gives grandeur and autonomy to the natural world; those who appreciate that grandeur are also able to feel the shock of nature’s desecration and destruction. Is it possible, I wondered, that, even in Indonesia, the romance of nature is one important route to an appreciation of nature’s fragility?”⁶¹ What, then, of Wallace’s ambition for a perfect collection, which seems to express simultaneously a deep  appreciation of nature and a resignation that, through the very act of this collection, the scientist participates in a process that will end in destruction?

Nowhere is this vexing, schizoscopicperspective on colonial collecting more pronounced than in Wallace’s description of the birds of paradise.⁶² While these remarkable birds were known in Europe at least since the Renaissance, they had arrived there in the form of lifeless skins; curiously, because these skins showed no osteological evidence of their hindlimbs, legend had it that they lived in the sky and never landed on earth except to die. Thus, Wallace was proud to proclaim himself the first Englishman to ever see birds of paradise alive in their terrestrial habitat. He even succeeded, against all odds, in transporting two living birds to London where he hoped the domestic aviaries of the Crystal Palace or Kew Gardens would allow them to survive in captivity. Paradoxically, it is the experience of beholding their natural beauty in the wild that inspired Wallace to deliver one of his most confounding statements on extinction, which he narrates near the end of The Malay Archipelago:

I thought of the long ages of the past, during which the successive generations of this little creature had run their course—year by year being born, and living and dying amid these dark and gloomy woods with no intelligent eye to gaze upon their loveliness; to all appearance such a wanton waste of beauty. Such ideas excite a feeling of melancholy. It seems sad that on the one hand such exquisite creatures should live out their lives and exhibit their charms only in these wild, inhospitable regions, doomed for ages yet to come to hopeless barbarism; while on the other hand, should civilized man ever reach these distant lands, and bring moral, intellectual and physical light into the recesses of these virgin forests, we may be sure that he will so disturb the nicely-balanced relations of organic and inorganic nature as to cause the disappearance, and finally the extinction, of these very beings whose wonderful structure and beauty he alone is fitted to appreciate and enjoy.⁶³

What to make of such a troubling, hallucinatory adumbration today? Is this not the very melancholy that natural history collections and their attendant museological presentations are meant to neutralize?

Traditionally referred to as manuk dewata (“God’s birds”), it is their second Malay appellation, burung mati (“dead birds”), which expresses the cruel irony of their fate as symbols of an expulsion from paradise. There is now no doubt that human activities, including the fanatical consumption of fossil fuels, industrialized agriculture, bioengineering, resource extraction, global waste management, and pollution have violently disturbed Wallace’s “nicely-balanced relations of organic and inorganic nature.” Direct forms of consumption also played their part in this irreversible bioturbation; only a few decades after Wallace left Southeast Asia, the trade in exotic avifauna saw export numbers reach annual highs of up to 80,000 bird of paradise skins, most of which arrived in Europe to adorn luxury items such as women’s hats. Such activities caused a far-reaching conflict among residents and colonial authorities that lasted for nearly forty years and resulted in a 1931 prohibition against killing the birds; the debates over the preservation of habitats for birds of paradise are thus said to mark the start of environmental politics in Indonesia.⁶⁴

Wallace’s narrative in the Anthropocene, as with Junghuhn’s, trouble any simple inheritance of the colonial will to knowledge. If the acquisition of knowledge by way of colonial collecting was, according to Wallace, indelibly connected to an inevitable process of extinction, how might we reconcile such scientific ambitions with the demand for an ethical disposition that could contest such violent eventualities? On this point, we concur with the philosopher of science Michel Serres when he writes, “We are embarked on an irreversible economic, scientific, and technological adventure; one can regret the fact, and even do so with skill and profundity, but that’s how it is, and it depends less on us than on what we have inherited from our history.”⁶⁵

Inheritance& Intrusion 

The instant of nature forming between them drained every drop from the walls of his life leaving behind just ghosts rustling like an old map.

— Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red (1998)


As Brazilian architect Paulo Tavares has presciently observed, “different regimes of power will produce different natures, for nature is not natural; it is the product of cultivation, and more frequently, of conflict.”⁶⁶ So it was at the close of the nineteenth century when another German naturalist, Ernst Haeckel, arrived in Southeast Asia; his personal impressions of the expedition are documented inAus Insulinde: Malayische Reisebriefe (1901) and the three-volume Wanderbilder (1904), all of which contain descriptive texts, photographs, and numerous watercolors. The main objective of Haeckel’s trip was to continue his research into various radiolaria, medusae, and siphonophorae, not to seek out the so-called “Java Man,” the discovery of which he had predicted in the 1860s, following the publication of Darwin’s Origin.⁶⁷ In his varied reflections on Java, Haeckel does indeed defend the idea of man and ape descending from a shared, extinct primate origin, and maintains that such a theory is already canonical. Although he is not in search of evidence for this “missing link,” he notes that the ability to study the remaining “anthropomorphs” is nevertheless extremely valuable, proceeding to then give an account of a walk he took with a baby orangutan in Singapore’s botanical garden. In this excruciating narrative of colonial racism, he also describes a friendship between the orangutan and a nine-year-old Malay boy, which, in his view, could be attributed to the fact that “the lower races” (i.e. Malayans) share a close evolutionary proximity to great apes. Later, he even suggests that Malays could best be understood as an “amphibian human race” because they enjoy fishing and living on boats.⁶⁸

The consequences of such racist ethnographic research are well known after the genocides of the twentieth century; it is our concern to examine the less explicit yet violent inheritance of colonial nature.⁶⁹ For such a review, a final story from Haeckel’s expedition will suffice. In the late fall of 1900, the naturalist visited Buitenzorg’s institute of botany, at the foot of Gunung Gedeh. Following his ascent, it is notable how the fertile plateau was still capable of stirring delight, as it once had done for Junghuhn sixty years before. But Haeckel’s encounter was no longer with wild, tropical nature; instead, the vegetation was supplanted by an image of neatly cultivated colonial plots. Haeckel found no trace of the once abundant rhinoceros, only emerald green, terraced rice fields. He noted, “It is especially through the numerously scattered villages (kampongsor dessas) surrounded by orchards and surmounted by the canopies of palm trees that the friendly impression obtains a highly painterly charm.”⁷⁰ The area was completely changed, which is to say, colonized. The imported fruit saplings from Europe that once traumatized Junghuhn—even if it was his own report that led to their planting—had now successfully taken root, giving the site a harmonious appearance of a cultivated, but no less abundant, tropical nature. How should we read this colonial inheritance? If Haeckel could so casually apprehend the colonization of the landscape as an objective fact of nature, or at least as an indication of the successful management of nature under the Dutch, how might we, in the Anthropocene, begin reassembling the various natures which are now entirely subsumed under a system of Integrated World Capitalism?⁷¹ 

One approach would involve a reconsideration of the act of scientific observation itself. In a startling footnote meant to summarize the consequences of the German forestry industry on tropical nature, historian James Scott makes an exceptional comment about the results of reverse hallucinations. Referencing Werner Karl Heisenberg, the theoretical physicist best known for his treatment of the problem of uncertainty in scientific observation, Scott notes that the colonial will to knowledge produces a stultifying transformation.

Fig. 03. European scientists holding a white sheet to provide contrast while photographing a coffee plant, Buitenzorg Botanical Garden, Bogor, Java, circa 1900. Image from the exhibition 125,660 Specimens of Natural History, Komunitas Salihara Gallery, Jakarta, 2015. Courtesy of the Indonesian Institute of Science.

“Instead of altering the phenomenon observed through the act of observation, so that the pre-observation state of the phenomenon is unknowable in principle,” Scott suggests that, “the effect of (uninterested) observation in this case is to alter the phenomenon in question over time so that it, in fact, more closely resembles the stripped down, abstract image the lens had revealed.”⁷² From this perspective, Haeckel’s view is a post-observationalsummary of colonization; that is, as the latest observer, he sees only the results of what his predecessors produced through their reverse hallucinations, culminating in an image of the colony as nature itself.

A second approach to reassembling the natural, which we would like to propose here, returns us to the claim with which we began—namely, that the enduring image of science as an enterprise committed to a positivist clarification of knowledge through the elimination of any ethical friction or moral doubt, subverts contemporary inquiries into climate change and related forms of environmental violence. How exactly does the history of the colonial will to knowledge in the tropics evince such a concern? As Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have noted, “Their cultivated individualism and voluntarism may seem diametrically opposed to self-effacing objectivity, but, in fact, subjectivity and objectivity defined poles of the same axis of the will: the will asserted (subjectivity) and the will restrained (objectivity)—the latter by a further assertion of will.”⁷³ The suppression of ethical concerns by way of these subjectivation processes required by positivist colonial scientific practices form the historical preface to the Anthropocene. How to best describe this suppression and its irruptive albeit minor history of uncertainty?

The inimitable philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers has recently reoriented the discussion of the Anthropocene with her claim that what is now being witnessed—whether under the flag of the Anthropocene, climate change, or the generalized anthropogenic disturbance of the world and its many worlds—might be best described as the intrusion of Gaia.⁷⁴ As Stengers writes, “Gaia is neither Earth ‘in the concrete’ and nor is it she who is named and invoked when it is a matter of affirming and of making our connection to this earth felt, of provoking a sense of belonging where separation has been predominant, and of drawing resources for living, struggling, feeling, and thinking from this belonging. It is a matter here of thinking intrusion, not belonging.”⁷⁵ She continues, “The intrusion of this type of transcendence, which I am calling Gaia, makes a major unknown, which is here to stay, exist at the heart of our lives. This is perhaps what is most difficult to conceptualize: no future can be foreseen in which she will give us back the liberty of ignoring her. […] We will have to go on answering for what we are undertaking in the face of an implacable being who is deaf to our justifications.”⁷⁶ Within this study of reverse hallucinations, the intrusion of Gaia requires one additional clarification.

Fig. 04. Watercolor by Ernst Haeckel of Gunung Salak near Buitenzorg, Java. Plate from his book Wanderbilder: Die Naturwunder der Tropenwelt Ceylon und Insulinde. Gera-Untermhaus: W. Koehlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1904.

Stenger’s intrusion “at the heart of our lives” cannot, we are sure, come solely from the outside; indeed, if there anything is to be taken away from this essay, it is that we, all of us—scientists, critics, and curators alike—are of Gaia and thus carry her “inside” of us as much as she (much more evidently) carries us. From this perspective, Gaia is at least as much an erratic, disruptive neuroecological force as she is an environmental, planetary-scaled macrophenomenon beyond our apprehension. ⁷⁷ To think the irrepressible force of ethical comportment among entities—in spite of and against the positivist technoscientific assemblage that helped fashion our colonial naturalist predecessors—we do not require an idealized moral universality, nor any subject-centric consciousness-raising. Instead, to think the intrusion of Gaia upon the “heart of our lives,” through each and every act of inquiry, would mean to rediscover, in this soiled and often repulsive legacy of the will to knowledge, a line of flight that is both ofand for Gaia.⁷⁸ Emboldened by this minor history, why would we continue to assign to a science worthy of the name a repressive function in relation to such constituent intrusions? As Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro have contended in their own reading of Stengers’ Gaia provocation, “the relation between humanity and the world can begin to be thought as the relation connecting the one side of a Möbius strip to itself: as a non-orientable figure in which the inseparability of thought and being, animate and inanimate, culture and nature is […] a complete and real consubstantiality or oneness, precisely like the surface of the Möbius strip.”⁷⁹ Emphatically, for Danowski and Viveiros de Castro, this is possible because, “Humanity and the world are literally on the same side; the distinction between the two terms is arbitrary and impalpable: if one starts from humanity (thought, culture, language, the “inside”) one necessarily arrives at the world (being, matter, nature, the “Great Outdoors”) without crossing any border and conversely.”⁸⁰ In the kaleidoscopic profusion of nature that characterizes the tropics, invasive moments of uncertainty could be mistaken for some fractured European morality, but such a reductive account would fail to articulate a politics of scientific inquiry. Instead, the irruption of Gaia as neuroecological dissonance (leading to the proliferation of reverse hallucinations as attempts to neutralize such psychoturbations) can be understood as a confrontation—at once psychological and ecological—between thinking-being inand of nature as such. What is required of non-positivist scientific practice inand for the Anthropocene is therefore the cultivation of an intimacy with the “section of chaos” under consideration, which is as “internal” to the process of subjectivation as it is disruptive to any long-feigned objectivity.⁸¹ 

The American artist Catherine Lord has also explored the effect of tropical light on white men and their attendant justifications for violent, hallucinatory programs in the torrid zone.⁸² Following Lord, there seems to be an equatorial effect that led European men of science to egregiously double-down on their epistemic efforts among the tropical islands under colonial possession during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We can use the neologism heliopsychosis to precisely name this effect, specifically in order to make an essential link between exposure to the tropical solar zenith—with its excessive clarity among the high peaks and shape-shifting edges of its watery archipelago—and the will to knowledge that blinded the colonial naturalists laboring under this potent star as they surveilled a transgressive and puzzling equatorial abundance. While we are certain this colonial disposition cannot (and should not) be reduced to any kind of meterological determinism, the frequency and consistency of reverse hallucinations in the tropics is indisputable. Thus, as the planet continues to warm, and as the tropics begin to spread perilously toward the temperate zones of the Earth, this phenomenon might be worth thinking—in our sciences as much as ourselves—because our neuroecological disposition to the new weather will have considerable bearing on the hospitality we might extend toward such intrusions.⁸³ Virginia Woolf was no stranger to this uncanny climatic inflection: “Whatever the sun touched took on a fanatical existence.⁸⁴ As the accelerating build-up of atmospheric greenhouse gases fervently amplifies sublunar fanaticisms, we might do well by attending more closely to the hallucinatory, positivist paroxysms that accompanied colonialists as they tried to apprehend the vexing multiplicity we call archipelago. 

1 On the philosophical consequences of such “images,” and the “image of thought” in particular, see Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 129–67.

2 On the dangers of disinformation strategies like those related to “Climategate,” see Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis, Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online (New York: Data & Society Research Institute, 2017).

3 On the “aesthetics of evidence,” see Eyal Weizman et al., eds., Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth (Berlin: Forensic Architecture and Sternberg Press, 2014) and Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability (New York: Zone Books, 2017). For a discussion of climate data friction, see Paul N. Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2010).

4 March for Science, https://satellites.marchforscience.com.

Fig. 05. Truckloads of oil palm fruits being delivered to a crude palm oil mill in the Bengkulu area, Sumatra, Indonesia. Photo by the authors, 2014.