Imagining Everyday Life in Extraterrestrial Architectures Possibility, Praxis, and the Production of (Outer) Space Logan A. Kirkland anthromni@gmail.com | Anthropology Collective (ANTCO) | Twitter: @LericDax In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation. —Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle Here was the moment...the Paris Commune…laughing…burnt the guillotine…Working people had risen…reinvented …set themselves free. Work, joy, pleasure…achievement of needs—and communitas—would never have to be separated. In the commune, for just a few weeks…utopia was actualized. —Edith Turner, Communitas: the Anthropology of Collective Joy Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991), in The Production of Space (1974) provides the formula, “(Social) space is a (social) product” (26). Lefebvre was a Marxist philosopher and sociologist, a theoretician of the social, of dialectics, political-economy, modernity, history, geography, urbanism, architecture, everyday life, and the (social) metaphysics of space, time, energy, and revolution. For Lefebvre space was not a frame, container, nor an empty medium. Instead, it was a dimension of general ontological process actively manufactured by the relationality between the elements and agency of (and in) the world, constantly (re)constructed and (re)oriented. Lefebvre provides a trialectic spatial model: synthesized in tension, unified, yet simultaneously apart: perceived (‘spatial practice’)— conceived (‘representations of space’)—lived (‘representational space’). First—second—third. Physical—mental—social. Entangled, overlapping, co-evocative. But production? In Lefebvre’s theory a social formation secretes a space based on its ‘mode of production’—the political-economic organization of labour, production, consumption, distribution, and exchange. The combination of [human labour + means of production + relations of production] = [mode of production]. ‘Feudalism,’ ‘capitalism,’ ‘socialism’— each generalized signifiers of mode in landscapes societal. Example: ‘capitalism’ privatizes the ‘means of production’ (materials, resources, facilities, factories, infrastructure, tools, technologies, et cetera). Owners accumulate wealth by extracting surplus value from labour, regulated by wages, where commodity-exchange is market-based, ruled (and rigged) by the princes of the merchant-class under the House of the State (and the house always wins). This space presupposes and reproduces certain social relations: owner—worker, wealth—poverty, et cetera. It structures the space(time) of everyday-life: rhythms of work, flows of workers through the city, borders of the public, the allocation of leisure, morphology of private and public, the space of the city and the home. Lefebvre speaks of three spatial ‘moments,’ subverting, like Marx, Hegel’s concepts—for Lefebvre moments are, “The attempt to achieve the total realization of a possibility” (1962, 348). Edward Soja calls the triad firstspace—secondspace—thirdspace (1996, 66-70). 1) Moment of ‘spatial practice’: the perceived physical space, the space of materialism, surfaces, the visual. Natural and built environments. The space of the principal of structure and structuring principals; (re)production, the ground of banal reality: practical space. 2) Moment of ‘representations of space’: space bent through the prism of the conceived. Mental space, space imagined, ideal space and the space of idealism; of philosophers, scientists, urbanists, architects, planners, engineers, mathematicians, attorneys, designers, politicians and the occasionally novelist. Space contorted under the principal of meaning and meaningful principals. Logical, epistemological, ordered theoretical space. Space-sanshumans, organ-ized, designed under sociopolitical power practices. The figure, mise-en-scène, engineered to control. 3) Moment of the ‘spaces of representation’: space lived, synthesized betwixt the relational tensions of the perceived and conceived spaces, through communicative systems, disciplinary regimes, and semiotic codes, experienced in and as everyday life. Where social relations happen. The Gestalt world of life, figure-and-ground-united. Social space under the principal of context and contextual principals. Living space. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (1974; 33, 34-423) The ‘mode of production’ of any social formation order (and orient) these vectors, producing the space of society proper whose topology is the (social) horizon of the possible and the (cultural) texture of the actual. Marx: “The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness” (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy 1859, “Preface”). Everyday life in outer space? Is it the techno-pinnacle of social space’s production? The architect Fred Scharmen, in Space Settlements (2019) cautions us against imperialistic visions of “space colonies,” tracing the history of the discourse conceptualizing space habitats, from Gerard O’Neill’s “colony” and Carl Sagan’s “space cities” (each several kilometers in size), to megastructures the size of numerous planets, like the spheres Freeman Dyson, and Larry Niven’s ringworlds (139-177; 278-317). Ascendant arcologies, some have imagined them as dense urban structures (Sagan, Babylon 5) while others imagine a landscapes proper, geography imitative of earthly terrain, and of the rural—town relationship (O’Neill). In either case these are (social) spaces totally engineered: bubbles floating in the abyss, artificial islands anchored against the tides of the star-ocean. Here firstspace (spatial practice) begins as cosmic vacuum, absolute concrete space—a most challenging “landscape.” O’Neill, in The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space (1976), conceived (representational space) of cylindrical habitats kilometers long with alternating windows (with mirrors) and terrain (in lengthwise bands), allowing sunlight, each enormous enough for weather system, and hung like ornaments on Lagrange points. Constructed from asteroids, enveloped by biogeochemic-energeticspatiotemporal eco-circuit flows (water, carbon, nitrogenic, oxygenic, et cetera), and enhanced with cybernetic regulation. Towns, farmland, forests, lakes, rivers—all present (1976, 64-113). Terrain, crafted in scientific-utopian secondspace, and set down in firstspatial void. Cosmic lived space, stellar spaces of representation, social space hung upon the firmament—a celestial home for humankind—and whole associated ecosystems of Terran life. Yet, like water in vacuum this dream evaporates under the contemporary mode of production. Capitalism demands: heavenly places be palaces of salvation for the hyper-bourgeoisie alone, astral fortresses of power, floatation devices withstanding the ecocidal deluge to which the word “Anthropocene” is merely prelude. Capital accumulated to the point of becoming interplanetary. Privately owned means of production, goals of endless extraction and accumulation—these factors dictate such massive structures could only be built at extraordinary cost financed by preternaturally wealthy super-billionaires like Jeffery P. Bezos (who already advocates for them, google ‘Bezos O’Neill’!) and the diabolical whims of megacorporatiosn. The recent videogame The Outer Worlds (2019), imagines this future precisely. Space settlement is the privilege of megacorporations, the human majority enslaved in totalitarian corporative social spaces (think company towns3)—used as cogs in the machine(s) of production. Supreme alienation. The capitalist mode of production necessitates such configurations: outer (social) space is a (social) product, thus this mode of production (re)produces such reified social relations. Star Trek (1966—) conceives of a different {outer} {social} space. Never explicitly claiming ‘socialism,’ yet imagining a post-scarcity future where the economic system (production, consumption, distribution, exchange) exists in common service to humanity instead of humanity serving the economy. Enabled by technoscientific knowledge and infrastructure, alongside the quasi-limitless resources beyond Earth, humans are freed from capitalism to live as they see fit, contributing personally and collectively as desired. Stellar outposts like Deep Space Nine (1993) are imagined as places of cultural and material exchange for a wide variety of species, free-ports literally cosmo-politan—that is to say: space-cities. Mark Fisher called “capitalist realism” the psycho-cultural nightmare-regime which makes imagining other possibilities to capitalism increasingly impossible (2009). True to this, many argue without wage slavery “people” will “be lazy.” They will “sit on their asses” and “do nothing.” This unfortunate thesis is born of eating fermented rot from deep in what we, after Slavoj Žižek, call the “trashcan of ideology” (the dumpster the ideologies from the “dustbin of history” empty into). As in They Live (1988), this ideologic mirage serve only the interests of the dominators of society. Max Weber argued in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904) that historico-sociologically a Calvinist (work) ethic enabled the development and growth of capitalism in Europe, and remained its ideological core. “Hard work” as self-sufficient virtue, hatred of “frivolous” leisure, predestination suspending morality concerning inequality, charity as denial of God’s will whilst riches became signifier of being God’s chosen. Wealth as salvation. Greed no longer sin but ceaseless pursuit of efficacious grace. Mammon-become-archangelic! Finally, the doctrine of total depravity: humanity totally enslaved by original sin, selfish, always rejecting God (thus goodness), alongside unconditional election, the doctrine that God selects from genesis his favourites alone for salvation. Glory and damnation risen to the magnificence of industrial manufacturing, rigged casinos, and reality-television! This self-righteous revenant haunts the space of the earth, originating notions that humans ought to be wage-enslaved by the rich, “otherwise they would just sit around and do nothing.” Capitalism has a body count: suicided fathers, cancer-devoured healthcare-less mothers, daughters starved, sons ripped apart by industrial machines, whole societies drained of blood by colonialism and Empire and slavery—countless graves for hundreds of years. This situation serves only the vampire-kings who need a fresh supply of bodies daily. Together might we finally cast out this devil? We have dreamed of other possible worlds, other spaces, other modes of production! A civilization with the technicalepistemological capacity to build castles in the sky—enriched by supercomputation, cybernetics, industrial automation, robotics, interstellar-informatic infrastructures, and mega-structural architectural engineering—for such a civilization ‘economy’ is just another technology, a space to be engineered, a machine to serve collective life. An apparatus of justice, not a factory for exploitation! In her technoscientific ethnography of planetary scientists and astronomers, Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds (2016), anthropologist Lisa Messeri draws on Martin Heidegger and Gaston Bachelard, theorizing another trialectical relation, “between home…world… cosmos” (186). Heidegger: home/dwelling as “essential form of inhabiting…of being-in-theworld” (186). Bachelard: image-of-home as primal psychic topology of self, of the internal universe (186), the cosmos of childhood we return to in dreams and reveries (Bachelard 1958). For Bachelard all spaces we inhabit bear an ontological trace of this original “notion of home” (2016, 186). Lefebvre says images (and all signs) are themselves fragments of space (1974, 97). The imageof-home is a fragment which pervades (un)consciousness and structures it, a trellis for affect and imagination, central to human culture and subjectivity—in dreams we often find ourselves wandering labyrinthine reflections of previous abodes. Yet home and hearth are multiple: that original architecture is stitched together and compiled with other houses, worlds, cosmos. Inhabitation can be invested in new topologies, new psychic structures can emerge, and new dreams may proliferate. Messeri: “The planetary imagination…is never about a singular world but is about the potential for all planets to be worlds” (187). Planetary or orbital, any space settlement represents a new home—world—cosmos! Lysergic revolutionary-psychologist Timothy Leary also embraced an exopolitics of space migration. In Changing my mind, among others (1982), he recounts how he read O’Neil’s whilst in federal prison embracing, (as told by Timothy Leary) that, “planets are swamplike gravitational wells, unwieldy sphere to which we cling like barnacles. The real eventual habitat for human beings is a luxurious, landscaped, gardened mini-Earth…” (230). Leary saw in space migration both a rupture in the dialectic of exploration—exploitation which characterized the history of colonialism, and a frontier for the multiplicity of the possible psychic, sociopolitical, bio-genetic, and cybernetic experiments which future humans might embrace (232). O’Neill was never comfortable with Leary, tending to distance himself from the counterculture (Scharmen 2019, 27-31). Yet on stranger tides of telos they reunited: Celestis Memorial Spaceflights, upon their first funerary voyage, would send Leary and O’Neill’s cremains into orbit alongside Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and Operation Paperclip alumnus rocket-propulsion engineer Krafft Ehricke. Carl Sagan said we are stardustbecome-aware, and to the stardust-river we all eventually return. In life, each of these humans sought another world for humankind, a new society, cosmic and fantastic—we must go even further! We must go! The astrophysicists have only imagined the Cosmos—the point, however, is to change it! Another (social) space is possible! Another world is possible! Perceived space remains an apparently infinite three-dimensional vacuum, filled with material resources (asteroids, lifeless planets), ordered by titanic natural nuclear fusion reactors radiating essentially limitless energy (stars). To this oceanicempyrean, humanity, trapped no longer in an eldritch Calvinist night-terror, but instead inspired by the glorious hope at the heart of every utopian dream from Star Trek to Socialism, might finally set sail aided by technologies which exist in infancy even today! Let us suspend for now talk of reality-bending warp drives: we shall need extraterrestrial apartment buildings (and vast armies of robotic gravel collectors) long before we need worry with heavenly Hindenburgs. In this ouranic eschatology we see a delirious psychedelic vision of a new mode of production, a new space cultural and technical. A new society: spaces perceived and conceived. This is a social space which exists virtually, submerged, a possibility which can become actual, emergent, bridging into actuality a lived space. We dream, like the Hermeticists and the Alchemists, of a Great Work— human salvation via transmutation—and like the posthumanist cyborg-feminists, of the distant future shores of difference. Like Alexander Bogdanov (1908), like Ursula K. LeGuin (1974), like Edward Bellamy (1888): our imagination demands we consider the utopian possibility worth the danger of the experiment. We pray for xenoanthropology! Another videogame which simulates the edges of the possible: Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth (2014), in which the Cosmonaut of the People, Vadim Kozlov, councils us, "Instruct the children not to dream of toys or sweets. Instruct them to dream of infrastructure!" Lefebvre, echoing a Situationist slogan painted upon the walls of the City of Light in May ’68: “’Change Life! Change Society!’” (1974, 59). Today Australia is a funeral pyre, the coral reefs boil alive, the insectoid multitudes vanish. Eden burns, and the angels of extinction are knocking at the gate. Will all life here perish? Of course not—but it will be slaughter unbound by cascading collapse. The star-ocean is up there. Shall Bezos and his golfing buddies alone fill the rafts, HMS Titanic set in the void? Or shall we choose a better destiny together? We alone among Gaia’s children can understand the magnitude of what is happening and it is by virtue of this eco-consciousness we collectively bear the weight of responsibility—it is us, humanity alone, who hold the power to chop down the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and from that ancient lumber build the myriad arks which might preserve seed and sapling born from the Tree of Life. We absolutely should not allow the hyperbourgeoisie—who have devoured the proletariat and the planet in equal measure since industrialization—to simply walk away. Imagination is both a space and a moment of consciousness. Long has humankind imagined possible homes, worlds, cosmos! We must still imagine a cosmic future despite the crushing mass of history! We all have a choice, and that choice is one of praxis—we must put theory into practice within the landscape of everyday life! Combat in the discourse is not unimportant, but we think more should embrace too the direction action found in the streets. Things look like Hell: Atlantean eternal return, the sticky muck of hyperreality drowns, neofascism risen everywhere like patchwork flotsam, neoliberalism intensified into globalized cacophony (every channel, every commercial, every song: Mike Bloomberg), the totality of electrical devices embodying a cybernetic panopticon, all embedded in a noosphere haunted like Luigi’s Mansion. We live in a society!—the society of control (Deleuze 1992). Fatal terrain, but geography nonetheless! Kierkegaard: “…To aspire to the highest good…there must be uncertainty and…I must have space to move” (1864, 426). All battles are fought in space, all spaces have certain properties, dynamics, internal realities—analyzable and mutable, material and semiotic, sociocultural and energetic. The work of Lefebvre, Soja, and others who have followed in the spatial tradition reveal a variety of tactical stratagems, if one looks. Organizers, activists, revolutionaries—always we ask, “How do we fight?” “What is to be done?” By understanding the way space is produced and operationalized, by understanding spatial theory and applying it in spatial practice, entire new horizons for intervening in the long war of modernity clarify. It makes the battlefields of late-capitalism far more thinkable. We must use space unpredictably, we must deterritorialize and reterritorialize spaces which exist, and we must engineer new spaces—direct attacks on the underlying dominating mode of production along spatio-systematic and onto-syntactical lines. Want to see examples? Grab your device. Virtual spaces which are triumphs of liberation: those several hidden vaults where any book may be liberated, elsewhere where any software or piece of media may be appropriated, and then Wikipedia, a general knowledge depositary exceeding the collective totality of encyclopedias throughout history, free and open. In the open field? Go find your local Food Not Bombs, meet your local anarchists and Marxists, see a Free Store, visit a public library. Twitter is remarkable after a fashion too— brilliant, talented, good people fill some parts of twitter and the discursive and affective space which exists in such fellowship is enough to make one hopeful. These are all simple examples, but they effectively illustrate the profound power of the production of space. Other more profound spaces are possible. We should consider being more mindful and intentional in relation to the (social) production of space. We should try to participate, to be kind, welcoming, and come back, to find places and be parts of things, even make cookies. Yes, I am suggesting people both try making more friends, and allow themselves to be more vulnerable towards others befriending you—acquaintances can become friends, and friends can become comrades (or accomplices). Build more complex communities. This is how lived spaces are born and remain alive, and through those spaces a much greater complexity can come into being. Build groups, alliances, circles, coalitions, collaborators, undergrounds, orders. Just don’t make organ-ize-ations—make yourself a body-without-organs, crisscrossed by singularities and becomings: more fun, less fascist. Bullshit hierarchies suck, linearity is a drag. Assemblages! Work on weird projects, co-author bizarre babies, intensify communitas, spatialize alter(n)ity, and engineer ontology! Transform the practice of everyday life! As for Capital? Like Michael, Archangel of Fire, we must cast out this serpent in time. Space(s) can be produced, altered, and destroyed. Thus, the space authored by the capitalist mode of production can be ended. Maybe not today, but if we keep making new (social) spaces under the sign of antithesis, we will eventually make a dent. Brian Massumi: “A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window” (Translator’s Preface to “A Thousand Plateaus,” 1980). Critical Theory’s destiny was always to be a sublime weapon, a seraphim’s flaming sword, pulled from the stone by the people to aid in their liberation (—some assemblage required—)! Whatever did anyone ever think “praxis” was? If we keep laying some bricks here, and throwing some bricks there, eventually we will have a building, and the courthouse will not have windows. Win-win. Freeman Dyson died yesterday. He was 96. Growing up I found his ideas for space settlement enrapturing. The idea of putting a shell around a star to draw off such an infinitude of energy—now that’s what I call a “mode of production.” His favoured schema was more of a cloud of smaller habitats surrounding the star, providing unlimited energy and enough living space to house the totality of the human family forever, with more than enough room for visitors. He at one point had done a bunch of calculations where he figured space settlement should cost roughly $40,000 a person—cheaper than most houses. He thought the idea that it was such an incredible expense that only governments could afford it was absurd, and so he went and came up with a model that told a different story, “No law of physics or biology forbids cheap travel and settlement all over the solar system and beyond.” Here we’ve discussed the (trialectic) production of (outer) space: as above, so below. We’ve discussed how they are connected, the spatialization of political economy, and the political economy of spatialization. We’ve made short cases for embracing them both alongside embracing spatial theory itself. We have analyzed why the capitalist mode of production is useless for a vision of a posthuman future embracing the general ascendance of humankind to outer space. We have encouraged a wide variety of praxis—we hope! We aspire to enrich the fabric of left radicalism with more star-seekers as well as more Lefebvre-readers. In closure, I’d like to share one more of Dyson’s visions. It is a beautiful idea. It’s known as a “Dyson tree.” It would be a highly genetically engineered plant or assemblage of plants (or, one imagines, fungi)—the typical image is an actual tree. One would plant it on an asteroid, and its roots would tunnel down through the rock and lodge themselves in, and dig out an inner space which would be a bubble—then it would cover the surface of the asteroid as well, absorbing sunlight, internally generating oxygen and heat, and sustaining the inner habitat. It would have thick “skin” to insulate it to the cold of space. Eventually the whole outside would be covered in greenery while the inside is an easily available, self-regulating, living (bio)space, potentially covered in soft inviting fuzz, and it would be accessible to almost anyone on account of it only requiring a single seed. It might even grow edible nuts or fruits, making a sustaining habitat for anyone. People would then live in these, scattered across the solar system, happily protected by their massive spheroid treebioships A beautiful image, isn’t it? All sorts of strange and beautiful things might one day be our (post)human homes, worlds, and cosmos. Like Foucault, we dream of boats, and as Haraway, of a cyborg society—as Lenin once said: “What is to Be Done?” (1902). Deleuze answers: “There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons” (1992). In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates. —Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”