The Immanent Infinite

Is it possible to think an ecology beyond finitude? There might appear to be an opposition between the mathematical and rational concept of the infinite versus the fragile, interdependent, and single living system that is the Earth. Our current Anthropocenic predicament would seem to force us to recognize that there is only one—now transformed—ecology, with no outside, no exit, and no lifeboats. Despite postapocalyptic fantasies of planetary migration, it is our finitude and immobility that dreams of such an elsewhere betray. Our only strategy is a radical exit strategy because ultimately we are all bound to this finite Earth; the only future is elsewhere. If, however, there is no actual outside when we think ecologically, there is nevertheless an intense imperative for a virtual infinite that practically transforms how we think about ecology. One might argue that infinites are always virtual, but the sense of that virtuality changes when one thinks ecologically. Rather than an infinite that extends ever outward, beyond the earth toward the cosmos, one might think of an immanent infinite, opened up in the smallest spaces of this fragile life.How do dreams of a beyond of finitude transform, diminish, and intensify who “we” are? We might think, for example, of the ways in which Octavia Butler wrote beyond her own time precisely by intensifying the racial and ecological horrors of the late twentieth century. It was from a damaged and terminally violent planet that Butler created a point of view in which one might observe a certain inescapable attachment to who “we” are. By imagining that “we” might be offered an elsewhere and yet not be willing to abandon who “we” are, Butler's novels open to what one might think of as the infinitely small: There is more complexity, difference, potentiality, and futurity in the unlived forces of the present than in imagining the future extending indefinitely. Continuing Butler's legacy of unfolding the infinite from the intensification (but not extension) of the present, we might think of N. K. Jemisin's repeated descriptions of destruction, over and over again, as rupturing this enclosed and finite world. The infinite, in Jemisin, is located in the intricacies of the past, in inscriptions that might be opened to produce new lines of time. Her Broken Earth Trilogy opens with the deliberate destruction of the world, and then traces back a journey of the narrating character who begins life as an enslaved power because only her compliance will hold the world together (Jemisin 2015). Her journey through a “season” of destruction becomes a recognition that what inaugurates the world is a violence that knows no limit; she discovers a fragmented archive of “stonelore” that forges the order of things, and a counternarrative that discloses that “the world” is a fragment, generated from cutting the Earth off from its own order. Only by destroying the world is it possible to break with finitude. What the end of the world exposes is not the collapse of the infinite but the exposure of other lines of time that were crushed by holding on to who we are, as if “we” might last forever. We might think of the infinite not as radically futural and made possible by the undecidability of the present, but rather as the infinitely small made possible by ever further gradations of the past and the unlived. I will return to these two forms of speculative fiction in the conclusion—Butler's ambivalent embrace of the infinite potential of space travel, and Jemisin's affirmation of the ruptures made possible by the infinitely small. In both cases, questions of the infinite are as much ontological as they are physical and racial: To think of finitude, the given, the inescapable, and the limits of what is, is to ask how such demarcations are brought into being and unfolded.Ontological questions concerning the relation between the finite and the infinite might seem to be all too indulgent and cerebral in an era of climate chaos, yet there are (at least) three ways in which a sense of the infinite plays a role in composing the present and its possibilities. Science fiction has repeatedly depicted an unlimited capacity for “human” colonization, as if Earth were but one more resource to be used and discarded. Second, the ideology of capitalism has its own sense of infinite growth, endless expansion, and limitless horizons (often bound up with the sci-fi or geoengineering fantasies of space colonization). Third, there is a normative conception of “humanity” as defined by infinite potential, with the capacity to think of reason being essentially bound up with the negation of finitude. The infinite is cosmological, financial, and rational.At the level of both fantasy and corporate endeavor, the distinctly modern colonizing imperative of ever-expansive horizons maintains what might be thought of as a material or actual infinite. There will always be a space to colonize, and always a new world. If the Earth is destroyed there is always the cosmos, whether that be through pioneering space voyages or imaginary projections of human renewal on other planets. The most obvious example here would be the hyperhumanism of Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute, where securing “technological maturity” is one of the major goals. Transcending the temporal and cognitive finitude of the human body to achieve “superintelligence” would be the fulfillment of humanity's potentiality and ought not be limited by folk attachments to who we already are: Let us not lose track of what is globally significant. Through the fog of everyday trivialities, we can perceive—if but dimly—the essential task of our age. 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