[Reader-list] Re: thought about this article

[joy at www.sarai.net]

Oh Jesus, I asked for rice, not the recipe of Beriani. 

One more thing I could not understand is what masters without slaves doing 
for “workers’” councils? I hope the word worker represents only name not 
class! Or the essay is reflecting on animal farm kind of playground. Problem 
is not with the space neither the astronauts but the imagination of 
community. In spite of constructing such a tall argument the whole thing can 
collapse like the WTC building on the last line, then gates will come up at 
every corner of the streets.

Best
Joy
-------------------------

Jeebesh Bagchi <jeebesh at sarai.net> said:

> dear Joy and Sopan
> 
> Reading your postings i was strangely reminded of this old situationist 
text. 
> i am not  not sure how they are connected but it did resonate. best jeebesh
> 
> The Conquest of Space in the Time of Power
> By Eduardo RotheInternationale Situationniste #12, September 1969Translated 
> by Paul Sieveking and published in Omphalus 19721
> (http://www.notbored.org/conquest.html)
> 
> Science in the service of capital, commodities and the spectacle are 
nothing 
> other than capitalized knowledge, fetishism of idea and method, alienated 
> image of human thought. Pseudo-dimension of man, its passive knowledge of 
> mediocre reality is the magical justification for a race of slaves.
> 
> 2
> 
> It's been a long time since the power of knowledge has transformed itself 
> into the knowledge of power. Contemporary science, the experimental 
inheritor 
> of the religion of the Middle Ages, accomplished the same functions in 
> relation to class society: it balances the daily stupidity of men with the 
> eternal intelligence of the specialist. It sings in calculations of the 
> grandeur of the human race, when it is nothing more than the organized sum 
of 
> its own limitations and alienations.
> 
> 3
> 
> Just as industry, destined to free man from work by machinery, has done 
> nothing up to the present but alienate people from the work of the 
machines, 
> science -- destined to free man historically and rationally from nature -- 
> has done nothing but alienate them in an irrational and antihistorical 
> society. The mercenary of separate thought, science works for survival, and 
> therefore cannot conceive of life except as a mechanical or moral formula. 
In 
> practice, it does not conceive of man as subject, nor human thought as 
> action, and it is for this reason that it ignores history as premeditated 
> activity, and makes men "patients" in its hospitals.
> 
> 4
> 
> Founded on the essential fallacy of its function, science can do nothing 
but 
> lie to itself. And its pretentious mercenaries have inherited from their 
> ancestor priests the taste and necessity for mystery. A dynamic element in 
> the justification of the state, the scientific body jealously guards its 
> corporate laws and the secrets of Machina ex Deo, which makes it a 
despicable 
> sect. It is hardly astonishing, for example, that doctors -- handy-men of 
the 
> power of work -- have illegible handwriting: it is the police code of 
> monopolized survival.
> 
> 5
> 
> But if the historical and ideological identification of science with 
temporal 
> powers clearly shows that it is a servant of the state, and therefore 
wrongs 
> no one, it was necessary to wait until now to see the last separations 
> disappear between class society and a science that wished to remain neutral 
> and "at the service of Humanity." In practice, the actual impossibility of 
> scientific research and application without having access to enormous 
means, 
> has placed knowledge -- spectacularly concentrated -- into the hands of 
> power, and has directed it towards the objectives of the state. Today there 
> is no science that is not in the service of the economy, the military and 
> ideology; and the science of ideology reveals its other side, the ideology 
of 
> science.
> 
> 6
> 
> Power, which cannot tolerate a void, has never forgiven surreal territories 
> for being vague terrains left to the imagination. Since the origin of class 
> society, we have always placed the unreal source of separated power in the 
> skies. When the state justified itself in terms of religion, the sky was 
> included in the time of religion [ie, the After-life]; now that the state 
> wishes to justify itself scientifically, the sky is in the space of 
science. 
> >From Galileo to Werner von Braun, there is only one question concerning 
the 
> ideology of the state: religion wished to preserve its time, and therefore 
> has not been concerned with space. Faced with the impossibility of 
prolonging 
> its time, power must restore its unbounded space [ie, the space program].
> 
> 7
> 
> If the heart transplant is still a miserable artisan technique remaining 
> aware of the chemical and nuclear massacres of science, the "Conquest of 
the 
> Cosmos" is the greatest spectacular expression of scientific oppression. 
The 
> spatial scholar is to the small doctor what Interpol is to the policeman on 
> the beat.
> 
> 8
> 
> The sky promised once upon a time by the priests in black cassocks has now 
in 
> fact been seized by the white-uniformed astronauts. Sexless, neutral, 
> super-bureaucratized, the first men to escape through the atmosphere are 
the 
> stars of a spectacle that floats day and night over our heads, that can 
> master temperatures and distances, and that tramples us from above as the 
> cosmic dust of God. As an example of survival in its most elevated 
> manifestation, the astronauts make, without wishing to do so, a critique of 
> the earth: condemned to orbital flight -- under pain of dying from cold and 
> hunger -- they submissively accept ("technically") the boredom and misery 
of 
> being satellites. Inhabitants of an urbanism of necessity in their cabins, 
> prisons of scientific gadgets, they are the example -- in vitro -- of their 
> contemporaries who do not escape, in spite of distance, from the designs of 
> power. Publicity panel-men, the astronauts float in space or leap about on 
> the moon to make men march to the time of work.
> 
> 9
> 
> And if the Christian astronauts of the Occident and the cosmonaut 
bureaucrats 
> of the East amuse themselves with metaphysics and secular morals -- 
Gargarin 
> "did not see God" and Borman prayed for the small Earth -- it is because 
they 
> workship their special "command service" that must be at the core of their 
> religion. Remember Exupery, the "saint," who spoke profundities from a 
great 
> altitude, but whose truth lay in his three-fold role of militarist, patriot 
> and idiot.
> 
> 10
> 
> The conquest of space is part of the planetary hope of an economic system 
> that, saturated with commodities, power and spectacle, ejaculates in space 
> when it arrives, drooling with its terrestrial contradictions, at the 
> celestial cunt. A new America, space must serve the state in place of its 
> wars and colonies: employing the producer-consumers who will in this way 
make 
> possible the supersession of the planet's limitations. Province of 
> accumulation, space is destined to become an accumulation of provinces, for 
> which laws, treaties and international tribunals already exist. A new 
Yalta, 
> the apportionment of space shows the incapacity of the capitalists and 
> bureaucrats to resolve, here on earth, their antagonisms and their 
struggles.
> 
> 11
> 
> But the old revolutionary mole, which today gnaws at the bases of the 
system, 
> will destroy the barriers that separate science from the generalized 
> knowledge of historical man. The more ideas of separated power, the more 
> power of separated ideas. Generalized self-management of the permanent 
> transformation of the world by the masses will make science a fundamental 
> banality, and no longer a truth of the state.
> 
> 12
> 
> Men [sic] will enter into space to make the universe the playground of the 
> last revolt: that which will go against the limitations that nature 
imposes. 
> And, smashing the walls that separate men from science today, the conquest 
of 
> space will no longer be economic or military "promotion," but the 
blossoming 
> of human liberties and realizations, attained by a race of gods. We will 
> enter into space, not as employees of an astronautic administration, nor as 
> "volunteers" of a state project, but as masters without slaves who review 
> their domains: the entire universe put in a bag for the Workers' Councils.
> 



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