Camera obscura, telescope, satellite …
Sunspot, Corona, Prominences…
Throughout history, humans have developed various devices and principles to understand, monitor, and even regulate the sun. Sundials, employed for over two millennia, serve as a prime example of how humanity has harnessed the star's movements to manage time and calendars, embedding it into social constructs. The tolling bells of churches, the relentless ticking of clocks, and the timely delivery of weather forecasts are all infrastructural components of the vast system centred around the sun. As Michel Serres wrote, "The ultimate capital is the sun," revealing it as the capital par excellence in the form of energy, light, information, and knowledge. This highlights its status as a technical entity rooted within the Techno-Geographic Milieu shaped by the intricate interplay of knowledge production, information and material flux and the world-systems.
When scientific hypotheses solidify into matters of fact and images illude into false certainties, the sun and its offspring spawns as a novel virus, propelled by invisible magnetic waves, permeating through structural inequality and the pervasive grip of global capitalist colonialism.
Four hundred years ago, Galileo’s celestial discovery revealed that all planets are alike, elevating Earth from the sublunar to the supralunary realm, with the sun as its standing reserve and database. This transcendence brought the planet closer to the divine, gaining its dignity in proximity to God. The new astronomical narratives spread from a world that was constantly being homogeneously extended, res extensa. René Descartes’ Cartesian coordinates allowed humans to place themselves at a "point of view from nowhere," a mechanical counterpart to God's eye, replacing human vision with an ever-escalating focus on computation over the cosmos including the sun. This shift underpinned the modern alliance of science and politics, compelling a move towards technocracy.
The alliance drives the ambition to manipulate or even replace the solar body. The first atomic bomb named as Trinity which was successfully tested in the desert of New Mexico in 1945. A few years later scientists confirmed that the sun’s processes were essentially the same as those of the hydrogen bomb. The discovery fuels the recent scientific breakthroughs in nuclear fusion experiments herald the era of the artificial sun where solar geoengineering projects led by the U.S. government intending to reflect away and dim the real sun to slow down global warming. The quest for solar manipulation persists as a response to humanity's unease with the unpredictability of the world. According to Genesis, God created man in His own image. Today, however, Man has created the sun in the image of the bomb. As humans transcend themselves as supermen, their star, alongside them, completes its thorough transformation from divinity to humanity.
On April 8, 2024, the Great North American Eclipse from Mexico to Canada and crossing the contiguous United States remarked the earth to their 30th member of Solar Saros 139. Chaldean astronomers first discerned the periodicity of the sun and earth's relative positions, ushering in an era where the marriage between the earth and the sun has become a strictly monogamy marked by numbers. When the star depraves as the global blockage, the restriction, the blind spot that obscures the opening of the Earth onto a more general cosmic economics which produced it, and which will consume it, along with the sun. The death is inevitable. Only at the cost of a strict monism in death entails the possibility of pluralism in life.
The dying light of the star, transgressing the atmosphere of chemicals reaches the terrestrial, its blinding brilliance compelling human eyes to seek refuge in its shadow where lies the resurrected sun. Deleuze and Guattari envisioned life as a trajectory, what they called a "line of flight," pulled by external forces rather than driven by internal ones. Returning to the sublunary realm, where endogenesis gives way to exogenesis, we learn to trace, follow, and translate what has shaped us—and what we have shaped, including the sun.
The web which suspends us – temporarily – over the cosmic abyss, consists not just anthropocentrically framed milieu but of the knitting together of the emergence of cosmic contingencies; the earth, and the sun too, is a part of this temporary web. However, it is precisely those contingencies that have shaped our planet, its inhabitants, and us as humans, to be inseparable facets of the solar body within its active network. We are both suspended on and merged with the star, becoming a part of its essence. Time drifts as the Earth voyages away, delving deeply into the cosmos, bearing the sun within and without.