Imaginaries of planetary inhabitance: Polar futurism and the labors of climate science

Abstract

An emergent polar futurism characterizes the contemporary built space of climate science in Antarctica, inaugurated in large part by the British Antarctic Survey's cutting-edge Halley VI research base. This article analyzes the spatial form, design, and use of Halley VI as well as the rhetoric surrounding it, seeing in Halley VI an expression of a particular “socio-technical imaginary” that implicitly gestures toward a tendential integration of climate science and global logistics. Alongside claims toward fostering a comfortable, communal life among its inhabitants, the imaginary embedded in Halley VI is one where climate research is subsumed within capital's broader aims to facilitate stable logistical movements and infrastructural durability amid chaotic, volatile conditions, a subsumption that bears in particular on the knowledge workers who inhabit the base. What a reading of the base's layout, interior, and lived-in uses exposes, the paper claims, is an implicit portending of a growing proletarianization of sensual experience and knowledge work among residents at the base, increasingly displaced as they are from the subjective core of the base's operations. This reading both extends and complicates recent calls in polar geographies to attend to speculative figurations of Antarctic futures, channeling Halley VI's polar futurism through structural determinants drawn out of literatures critically dealing with design, the history of systems sciences, and theorizations of ongoing restructurings of contemporary labor. The article suggests then that imaginaries of Anthropocenic futures such as those embedded in Halley VI's polar futurism might serve at once as speculative-projective tools and implicit sites for carrying out critiques of tensions and pernicious trends that underlie such Anthropocenic speculation.