Medium Earth:
Seismic Sensitivity as Planetary Prediction
—
Kodwo Eshun
March 5, 2013. The online issue of Nature, the inter
national weekly journal of science, reported that the
subaquatic earthquake that shook Tohoku in northeast
Japan on March 11, 2011, triggering a tsunami and a
partial nuclear meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi Power
Plant, was powerful enough to be “heard from space.”
Physicists in France and The Netherlands reported
that the sound waves of the magnitude-8.9 quake
reached as far as a European Space Agency satellite,
which was orbiting 260 kilometers above the Earth.
Seismic incidents of this intensity resound like a giant
subwoofer, generating waves that travel through the
surface of the Earth, producing infrasonic waves
that catapult through the ionosphere.
Working with the Gravity Field and Steady-State
Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE), which uses its six
accelerometers to monitor minute variations in gravity
over the Earth’s surface, physicist Raphael Garcia
and his colleagues at the University of Toulouse used
a computer-generated model to filter out atmospheric
dynamics, such as gravity waves, emanating from
the polar region unrelated to earthquake-borne infrasound.
The physicists concluded that GOCE had detected an
infrasonic frequency of 14 millihertz (mHz) occurring
approximately thirty minutes after the Great Tohoku
Earthquake of March 11, followed by another frequency
of 6 mHz, approximately an hour afterwards. GOCE
had become the world’s first orbiting seismometer, the
first in what might become, at some point in the near
future, a new generation of high-altitude seismometers
dedicated to monitoring earthquakes in remote locations. This generation of satellites modeled after the
GOCE would be sensitive enough to detect the seismic
waves of blind-thrust faults moving far below the ocean
floor and planetary surfaces. Could these satellites
sense the frequencies of active fault-strands before
they surface? Could it be that, in the near future, satellites will act as infrasonic prediction devices?
What perturbations might this technology of sonic prediction introduce into the vast machine of infrastructural geoscience? More precisely, how might this
new global data and the new models it would generate
shift the ongoing debate on the prediction of temblors?
Such a global question might be better posed within
a specific context such as California. As Mike Davis
argues in Ecology of Fear: The Imagination of Disaster
in Los Angeles,1 the science of seismology is divided into
opposing camps. There are scientists who claim that
the assumed regularity of fault behaviour makes earthquake prediction and forecasting possible within reasonably narrow time bands, and those who argue that
1
Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear:
The Imagination of Disaster (New York:
Metropolitan Books, 1998).
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great earthquakes are unique historical events whose
variable, rather than constant parameters cannot
be predicted by extrapolation from the recent history
of fault systems.
Beyond the global architecture of the earth sciences
lies the popular imagination of disaster, what modes
of audibility and visibility might become feasible if, and
when, infrasonic prediction leaks into the amateur
fascination with the calculation of disaster? What might
emerge when vernacular practices of conjuration
become entangled with media reports that summarize
GOCE’s previously unimaginable capacities of geo
acoustic detection, seismic apprehension, and remote
sensitivity? In a contemporary context in which the
ambient threat of seismic activity throughout California
combines with scientific disagreements on the predictability of future quakes and with televised broadcasts
by the United States Geological Survey that reconstruct the causality of tectonic upheaval, what emerges
is an ecology in which fear is inseparable from permission. Fear is the modality through which permission is
lived as a habitual, unconscious experience.
The conflicting temporalities of potentiality, predictability, variation, and retrospection each attempt to
manage the portentous time of imminent threat. Ecologically speaking, California’s psychological climate,
one of fluctuating spikes and troughs, is not just apprehensive. It is also, equally, a permissive environment
that licenses amateurs to embark on autodidactic
practices of prediction, premonition, prophecy, and
preemption. In The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes,
Prediction and the Fault Line between Reason and
Faith, David L. Ulin points to the ways in which its citizens enjoy “taking the random pandemonium of an
earthquake and reconfiguring it to make unexpected
sense.”2
The passionate pedagogy of earthquake sensitives
emerges from and participates within this milieu. Sensitives distinguish their practice from psychic pre
diction by emphasizing the material and scientifically
testable nature of their methods. It is precisely this
attachment to the scientific rather than the spiritual,
which indicates that sensitives practice a contemporary form of occult thinking denounced by Adorno in
1952 in his critique of the Los Angeles Times Astrology
column, while he was living in Pacific Palisades. What
informs the scientism of the sensitive is a mediumistic
conviction, which authorizes itself through bodily selfevidence. The fact that the sensitive is affected—indeed
attacked by involuntary sensations—provides its
own proof, which science can affirm but not deny. The
seismic sensitivity that American biological sensitives
experience resonates with Bruno Latour’s recent
call for the construction of a post-global aesthetic.
In “The Anthropocene and the Destruction of the Image
of the Globe,” Latour’s fourth Gifford Lecture delivered on February 25, 20133 he looks forward to a
prospective mode of sensitization that is released from
its latent state by acts that destroy the false belief in
the Whole: “It is our Globe, our ideal idea of the Globe
that should be destroyed for any work of art, any
aesthetic to emerge—if you agree to hear in the word
aesthetic its old meaning of being able to ‘perceive’
and to be ‘concerned,’ that is, a capacity to render
oneself sensitive, a capacity that precedes any distinction between the instruments of science, of art and
of politics.”
Without intending to, the earthquake sensitive embodies an anti-holistic consciousness. They embody, in
terms both hyperbolic and vulgar, Latour’s hope for an
indistinct and indivisible practice of life that is incapable
of being disciplined by forms of authorized knowledge.
2
David L. Ulin, The Myth of Solid
Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction and the
Fault Line between Reason and Faith
(New York: Viking, 2004), 21.
3
http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=4-l6FQN4P1c&list=ECEA946
7E8E8D991AE&index=3 [last accessed
March 27, 2013].
March 2, 2013. Evening. Sixty-five year-old earthquake
sensitive Charlotte King is talking with Eddie Middleton,
host of the Night Search radio program broadcasting
live from Memphis. When Middleton asks King to
identify “precursors” that might indicate that “some
major quake” is about to occur “in some place in the
world,” King responds by saying: “Well, we’re expec—,
we’re expecting, uh, Oregon’s stirring a little bit,
because the vision’s getting really bad, and Oregon is
always vision. And I’m not concerned. It’s just probably
an aftershock to the 5.1 we had a couple days ago. And,
um, left lower ribs and back are hurting again. That’s
Oceania, probably New Zealand, Australia, in that area,
because they’re due, they’re also due for an aftershock
that they, that … that’s the area that’s been real uncomfortable lately. And my right knee and … an—, and hip
and, um, leg has been hurting, and that’s Peru, Brazil,
and Colombia.”
In the body of the earthquake sensitive, seismic upheaval is a force that is experienced and endured. Seismicity
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expresses itself as sensations translatable into symp
tomology. The victim learns to read each localized pain
as a symptom that anticipates seismic activity. The
planet, according to Charlotte King, is an involuntary
condition that is part cartography and part acupuncture. How do the fragments of this physical geography
assemble themselves? In conversation with Middleton,
King hesitantly reconstructs the process through
which she came to recognize her “connection with the
earth.” Without warning, one day in 1979, she hears a
low frequency sound that is inaudible to everyone
around her. She suffers intense headaches. The onset
of seismic and volcanic activity in Mount St. Helen in
Washington, by a process of non-sensuous similarity,
leads her to the understanding that there is a relation
between the place and time of pain and the time and
place of the event. Planetary waves impress themselves
upon her body as low frequency sounds, back pains,
as “intestinal flu” and “seismic flu.”
These sounds, these aches, these agonies, happen in
the same place with the same intensity. Their regularity
teaches King to translate suffering into symptoma
tology. Their reliability and recognizability authorize
her to predict the location and the time of imminent
seismic activity. Tectonic forces teach King how to
correlate time and space with date and location. After
the quake, she begins to understand that these sensations are understandable as premonitions. Charlotte
King is a patient who behaves like a physician, diag
nosing each discomfort as an alert. She is the victim
of a syndrome whose dimensions are planetary and
whose reach is prospective.
What King calls “seismic flu” is only one symptom of
this syndrome that attacks without warning. Once, when
she was on stage in Lincoln City, Newport, Oregon,
she “was lecturing and was just about done with the
lecture. And all of a sudden, my lower back felt like some
body—like I’d been kicked by a mule. And I started
getting teeth-chattering chills, and I started a symptom
which I coined ‘seismic flu.’” The symptom arrives
ahead of her interpretation: “And they said, ‘what is it?’
And I says, I said, ‘I don’t know.’ I said that ‘something
is gonna happen within a few hours, and it’s gonna be
really felt.’ I said, I think, I said, ‘I think it’s along, um, the
Wasatch or New Madrid, but I don’t know, because,’
I said, ‘the low back is hurting so bad.’ And so I went
home, and a few hours later, they had that quake in, um,
I think it was Illinois. I’m not sure. I don’t remember. But
it was felt in sixteen states. I believe it was a, um, 5.7
or something like that. And it was felt in sixteen states.
And then I knew that’s exactly what it was.”
The distance between corporeal and geographical
place collapses even as the gap between bodily and
chronological time implodes. King calls her symptoms
“precursors.” She sees visible evidence in non-human
behavior. Only days after first hearing low frequencies
in 1979, forty-one sperm whales inexplicably beached
themselves in Oregon; three or four days after that,
King recalls, Big Bear in San Bernardino, California,
undergoes four moderate earthquakes. King connects
her prevision to the “subsonic sound level” that the
whales may have heard. She shares the sensitivity of
whales; she suffers from their death. Anomalous animal
behavior alerts King to the onset of geological activity.
Whales that beach. Cats that vomit fur balls. Ants
that leave the ground to climb walls. Earthworms that
leave the soil to inch their way across the driveway
outside her garage. More worms that squirm their
way up the three concrete steps to the entrance of
her office.
This activity provides the evidence she needs to authorize herself to announce the onset of a “timeline”—the
countdown to imminent seismic activity. A pulled muscle
or a headache prompts King to note its onset and index
its date to possible seismic activity. Precursor activity
moves the timeline forward. It shifts its threshold of
uncertain certainty forward by twelve, twenty-four,
forty-eight, or seventy-two hours. King announces this
traveling timeline through e-mails posted to 100 subscribers. Many of these people suffer from pains similar to those King describes. This remote resemblance
creates a distributed commonality that reinforces
the calculation of disaster. King extrapolates from her
group sensitives to imagine the existence of a trans
national assembly composed of “hundreds and thousands of people” that “feel the same symptom at
the same time in the same part of their body, no matter
where they live.”
Marching ants, earthworms, e-mails, vomiting cats,
voices communicating via the telephone, whales stranded: Charlotte translates these involuntary acts and
illnesses into a vocabulary of foresight that is unable to
prevent the event it envisions. Predicting fault activity
requires King to predict, in turn, how her community
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of sensitives might respond to possible seismic threat.
Her plea to call her at home any time of day or night
hints at the escalation produced by summoning a future
that multiplies ways of responding to those possible
futures. It indicates the ways in which popular practices
of prediction amplify the volatility of the present in its
state of becoming the future they seek to affect. Through
the peculiar quasi-causality of prediction, King and
her followers produce pockets of localized temporal
anomalies. But within these pockets of instability, it
is clear that forms of agency emerge, far from the
remote sensing arrays deployed by the United States
Geological Survey to translate the dynamic behavior
of plate tectonics. Situated within the thresholds of a
continually shifting timeline, the sensitives of California,
Oregon and beyond live four days in the future. They
send reports back to the present from which they have
partly absconded. Their bodies are partially inhabited
by the millennial time of seismicity. As Lorraine Daston
has argued,4 the advent of the era of the Anthropocene
can be characterized by the collapse of the distinctions
between the limits of human, technological, and geological time. Such a collapse implies the envisioning of
a post-human perspective that is capable of apprehending such a collapse. The community of earthquake
sensitives within America offer one possible version
of inhabitation of that collapse and embodiment of that
perspective.
4
Lorrain Daston, “Objects: A Rock and
a Floppy Disk,” lecture delivered at Haus
der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, January 10,
2013 on the occasion of The Anthropocene
Project: an Opening.
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