Arthur Kroker - Exits to the Posthuman Future

I'm in downtown San Diego, just about to board the trolley to Tijuana, on a day, unlike most days, that is clearly marked by the spectral signs of cosmology because in far-off galactic space, Venus prepares to transit the sun and, in that transit, for the briefest of periods makes itself visible to the shielded human eye. This astronomical event last occurred in 1882 and will only occur again in 2117. And, so, I'm on a trolley to Tijuana, bracketed by astronomy between the past and the unknown, and certainly unknowable, future of the twenty-second century, with the spectral sign of Venus in transit across the fires of the sun and the earthbound signs of that trolley ride to the borderland following its own low visibility, perhaps even minoritarian, transit across the bright sunshine of the California technological way.

Following the Spanish philosopher Jos Ortega y Gasset's fateful insight that I am I in the human circumstance and the human circumstance is I, I ask myself this question enigmatic about my present circumstance on this day of cosmology: What is the connection, if any, between the trolley to Tijuana and the transit of Venus?

Now, the trolley to Tijuana is a down-to-earth story, about migrant workers from Tijuana who begin lining up at 4 am each morning in order to catch the trolley to the houses and stores and construction camps of San Diego. There's a lot of humiliated necessity in those early-morning border crossings. All the immense wealth, restless energy, and sheer disciplined willpower of the California Way pushed to the border, and just stopped with walls of surveillance running into the sea and pitilessness running into the heart. Like everything else on the border, the trolley to Tijuana is a kind of strange fold in the space-time of two cultures, a site of possible cultural intersections that don't really happen, broken mediations, and bodies on the move, some perhaps upward bound, but most disappearing into the routines of daily labor.

And the transit of Venus? That's a different (astronomical) matter altogether. Not just its rarity, although the event dazzles with the fact that it won't happen again for another century. A heavenly messenger linking the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries. Nor even the fact that the transit of Venus cannot be viewed directly, but only with a heavy filter to shield your eyes. But use that filter and the occasion is one of wonderment, that vision of the planet Venus tracking across the face of the sun. In this, the most scientific of times, the event has been stripped of its mystery, reduced to the language of scientific precision or perhaps to celestial celebrity status pumped up by the mass media as another passing interest story for the day an astronomical punctuation, in this case, supposedly signifying nothing. But still, I am I in the human circumstance and the human circumstance is I and there's that irrepressible doubled sense of awe at being witness to the motion of the planets and the stars but also something else, an inexpressible, and certainly prohibited, feeling that what is really being witnessed is something less scientific than cosmological. The transit of Venus is an omen, but an omen of what?