The Gravity of Words

The Gravity of Words The Origins of Futures October 10-11, Venice Edison, Fondation Feltrini Panel on Imagination and Trust (Talk) There is no mystery to the origins of futures: they arise out of reality and our engagement in it. Having a future is not complicated. What is difficult are desirable futures. In the Anthropocene, it is increasingly difficult to anticipate futures both plausible and desirable. Thus, our problem is not the origins of futures as such, but really the problem of trusting that we can imagine desirable futures, and once they are imagined, having trust in our imaginations sufficient to move from imagination to the solidity of what I trust can be called everyday existence. The way to desirable futures passes through imagination and trust. But this pair stand in a complicated relationship. Imagination can undermine trust, and trust imagination. To assess the balance between imagination and trust, I want to propose that we ponder the gravity of words. Perhaps I only mean that words have weight. When we trust in an imagination, we find it to possess a certain gravity, a force sufficient to orient our lives around it. But imaginations are often nothing more than words. They are castles of air, paper, or bits which lose our trust and come crashing down, leaving behind only the imaginary debris of lost futures. Thinking about the gravity of words may then be merely a heavy-handed metaphor for how we imagine words to function when we trust them. The attractiveness of words on gravity is informed both by the deep planetary history of our languages and by a long tradition dating back to Roman rhetoricians interested in thinking the ethics of gravitas. Hewing first to ordinary language, let us recall that when we think of words as weighty, we regard them as having seriousness, as being fitting and appropriate for the gravest of occasions, for matters of life and death, moments in which graves are in question. Careful speech involves weighing one’s words. In French, penser and peser have kindred roots. Wichtig and Schwergewicht recall that importance and gravity count auf Deutsch as well. We engrave in stone, that symbol of weight, those words in which we place highest trust, our commandments or laws. We imagine justice as a matter of gravity, symbolizing it with a balance. Thus, in evoking the gravity of words, I bear down on a whole network of associations bearing on how western cultures have imagined what makes words matter, even into methods, for example the weighing of coins, which were supposed to determine the difference between words which truly count, and those counterfeits which only appear to have weight. For it is also true that there is a whole tradition making fun of ponderous speech and of grave men, actors who take their words and preoccupations to have weight, but who are either misleading, or misled, beings who are, in sum, sellers of flights of fancy instead of the gravitational an sich. But gravity is not only interesting for the ways in which it seems to draw us towards an image for an ethical art of making trustworthy words. Speaking historically, the essence of gravity understood as an object of scientific study matters. If we study the pursuit of a theory of gravity from Galileo to Newton up until Einstein and the latest advances following the detection of gravitational waves, we can see science as a series of marvelous advances with respect to the art of making weighted words. Consider Galileo’s famous demonstration that Aristotle, until then regarded as the figure of utmost authority on the physical world, a figure so weighty in the collective imagination that he was merely called the philosopher, and whose words were judged golden merely because he was the authority who uttered them, had spoken lightly. Galileo dropped two weights of different masses but of the same material from a tower and showed that they landed at approximately the same time. This demonstrated to the naked eye the falsity of Aristotle’s account of gravity, which was then taken to imply that a heavier object ought to fall faster merely by virtue of its weight and its element’s possession of an essentially downward dynamics. Having thus (approximately) demonstrated Aristotle was wrong, Galileo paved the way for more spectacular ways of explaining the world with gravity such as the Copernican revolution. But more than this: he demonstrated that there were alternative approaches making weighty words from those pursued by Aristotle and previously associated with the exercise of rationality. Now it may seem as if this new practice of empirical truth-making relies on no imagination. But that is false—and is proven so by the pursuit of gravity. In the early 20th century, Einstein’s work on relativity yielded a new way of imagining gravity. This new theory predicted the existence of gravitational waves. Yet no waves were observed until 2015. When this observation came about thanks to LIGO, trust in Einstein’s imagination was validated, but also, given the new data made available thanks to the discovery of these waves, a new series of questions were raised: questions bearing on things as fundamental as the meaning and relevance of the categories of time and space, so perhaps also on the meaning of the origins of futures. But I am not a physicist, and my interest here is not to imagine the ways in which we can trust our intuitions regarding those waves to further advance physics. I only want to emphasize the narrow connection between the pursuit of science and the collective concern with using and trusting imagination to establish weighted words. Yet if physical science has been spectacularly successful, I also want to recall how little weight, in the greater scheme of things, a physicist’s talk about gravity possesses. A fine example of this is spaceflight, which has repeatedly been described, at least since the time of the Russian Cosmists, as the conquest of gravity, and which even now, via the figure of the “moonshot,” is taken as a paradigm for imagining a wildly successful innovation. From a purely scientific point of view, space travel involved mastering a certain number of gravitational equations. But space travel demands money and organization, it demands people who take dreams seriously, and dreams which convincing other people to take a project seriously. Thus, from a practical point of view, the books full of rocket equations published by the likes of Godard, Oberth, and Tsiolovsky did little to get humankind to the moon, or at least were of no more weight in the affair than imaginary tales such as Jules Vernes’ De la terre à la lune and Edgar Rice Bourrough’s Mars novels. Arguably, the weightiest books of all were those which were described as works of hard science fiction or scientifiction, novels written by trained engineers such as Arthur C. Clarke, but also by real rocket scientists such as Wernher von Braun, books in which gravitational calculations underwrote the action, and so physical gravity added anticipatory weight to reader’s receptions of the stories as prophesies. In any case, these weighty scientifictions, coupled with a whole mass of other cultural investments including matters of national prestige, got us to the Moon. But having done this, I would argue that they set off a collective crisis with respect to how we think about the weight of our words. Landing on the moon was a great deception. We had imagined that attaining outer space would birth a fantastic future, like the Earth only better, with the ameliorations depending on the prejudices of the imaginer. But the moon was at best a place of magnificent desolation. So being on it constituted a defeat of our imaginations. Our dreams were planetized, shown to have been weighted down with false expectations informed by terrestrial gravity. Those voyages into space also opened a horizon of uncertainty within our ways of using ordinary language. If I were to say to you today “everything is floating,” you might think that I am imagining things or I am on drugs, in short, that I am speaking lightly. But these were the words of Gagarin from space. He was not imagining but emitting well-pondered words. He was making a literal and objective report. Thus, the conquest of gravity brought about a new weighting of words, which introduced new challenges with respect to the adequacy of our mastery of what was weighty even within our own language. This was a phenomenon mostly manifest out of this world, but starting with the 1960’s, the out of this world has become our world. We are only now starting to feel the weight of this fact. As time has gone on, we have become less fascinated with sending humans out of this world. Yet our relationships to one another, our means of orienting ourselves in time and space, have gone out there. Stare at your watch, stare at mine, the time is the same, and it is set by being networked with a GPS satellite. The time of this planet is a time from out of this world. It depends on satellites which not only float in microgravity, but whose time keeping involves corrections necessitated because of the relativistic effects of gravity on spacetime. I say that to emphasize the ways in which we normally have weighed our words are inadequate for grasping the whole weight of the order of things in which we as humans are now precariously entangled. I say this, by the way, not to urge us to land on Earth, to come back to a world in which there is only the proper weight of words provided by terrestrial gravity, but to draw our attention to the fact that 26 out of 50 key climate datapoints can only be measured from space, and to likewise alert us to the gravity of the new rush to fill orbital space with commercial communications satellites, the vast mass of which may cause another novel gravitational effect, Kessler Syndrome, which if it occurred would not only block our access to the space data which we use to care for the habitability of planet Earth, but also would impinge on our ability to see that which many of us find most uplifting, namely the starry heavens above. My apologies, here, if all this a downer. I am tending towards a conclusion. But before floating away, I want to draw attention to another matter of gravity: the machinic weighting of words. This affects not outer space, but cyber space, if the two are, of course, entangled. Weighting bears on how we interact with data, and more specifically on how computing machines treat words. Weighting is how a search engine works, it is how artificial intelligence works. There is a kind of algorithmic gravity, and cyberspace is a kind of solar system, one in which the immense planets such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple exert an outsized gravitational weight on the activity of all the virtual bodies which orbit and land on them—and of course on us as well. With respect to the gravity of words, no doubt the most terrifying feature of our present encounter with the outside are LLMs like ChatGPT. With respect to these artificial planets, we as users encounter words which seem to exert a strong gravity, which seem in most cases to be weighty and reliable, precisely because they are statistically probable collections of tokens. Yet these coins can mislead us, can be of weight only with respect to already existing collective delusions. Which undermines, of course, our trust not only in the machine, but in each other, in the entire system. I have no magic uplift. But there are such things as gravitational waves. It may be well to think of the gravity of words as we discuss imagination and trust. It may be well to follow gravity’s waves towards a new imaginary of trust, and a new trust in imagination, working our way—so I hope—towards the origins of brighter futures.