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ABSTRACT
Recently, a private space race has emerged, helmed by some of the world’s wealthiest figures. These space entrepreneurs, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk most prominently, have framed the new space race as preparation for the permanent emancipation of humans from Earth. Brad Tabas terms this project the “post-planetary.” In this essay, I analyze postplanetary rhetoric through Todd McGowan’s theorization of fantasy, arguing that the discourse gains assent through operationalizing fantasies of abundance and relegating Earth to a lost cause. In charting the structure of this discourse, I seek to promote further disciplinary attention to fantasy for its capacity to illuminate how contemporary discourses of entrepreneurship and innovation perpetuate capitalism’s hegemony by cultivating consumers’ desires for plenty. I also seek to showcase how a rhetorical approach to fantasy both attends to capitalism’s abortive repression of its contradictions and reveals how the repressed Real of capitalist violence haunts the entrepreneurial scene.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Shatner subsequently complicated this statement in an article for Variety. Referencing what Frank White terms the “overview effect,” Shatner described his experience as an intimate confrontation with humanity’s destruction of the planet: “My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.”
2 While the mission was successful, a broken “toilet device” released urine into parts of the capsule and necessitated astronauts relieving themselves in their ”undergarments” (Roulette, par. 4 and par. 12).
3 The term is used in Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and in the subsequent film adaptation, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982).
4 While Blue Origin and SpaceX have secured extensive funding, the colonization plans of both Bezos and Musk have been challenged by leading science journalists and many in the scientific community (DeCiccio; Hamilton; Phillips “We Don’t Need Elon Musk”; Scharf). Isabel Asher Hamilton observes that Bezos’s proposed O’Neill spheres would need to develop solutions to the tendency of the human immune system and microbiome to wither in space. More significantly, the spheres would potentially need tens of millions of tons of shielding material to block cosmic radiation, material that would be “‘beyond economically feasible’” (Armstrong, qtd. in Hamilton, par. 22) to move into orbit. Leigh Phillips similarly argues that Musk’s plan of Martian colonization makes little mention of the effects of Martian gravity, a mere 38% of Earth’s, would likely have on the human body (“We Don’t Need Elon Musk”, sec. 7, par. 4). As Phillips elaborates, in zero gravity, “[m]uscles atrophy. Tendons and ligaments begin to fail. Facial and finger muscles, which cannot be worked out via onboard gyms or treadmills, weaken. … Bones demineralize, losing density at a rate of 1% per month” (sec. 7, par. 13). Phillips goes on to detail how kidney damage, anemia, and potentially permanent brain compression result from time spent in 0 g environments.
5 As Thomas Robert Malthus infamously postulated, population growth increases geometrically while “subsistence” (4) increases arithmetically, a condition that, as he predicts, will inevitably result in mass starvation.
6 Žižek diagnoses such a movement as a common feature of neoliberal fantasy. He specifically likens European neoliberalism’s positing of French President Macron as the solution to conservative Marine Le Pen, a figure whom Žižek argues emerged in response to neoliberal conditions, to a chocolate laxative, a disease presented as cure (“Don’t Believe the Liberals”).
7 As Christian Lundberg details, Lacan’s Schema L maps the relation between the subject (S), the other (a’), the Other (A), and the ego (a), assigning primacy to the A, the big Other or the Symbolic, “in a nod to the disproportionate effectivity of the Symbolic in shaping the contours of the derivative others” (62). See Lacan (Écrits 458–59).
8 Objet petit a, as philosopher Levi R. Bryant explains, is “a sort of remainder, excess, or irreducible fractional quantity marking that which cannot be integrated into the symbolic” (256) that, crucially, other objects or desires come to fill as “surrogates or stand-ins” (256).
9 In Freud’s construction, the fetish originates as “a substitute for the woman’s (mother’s) penis that the little boy believed in and … does not want to give up” (153). Fetish, accordingly, is the displacement of desire onto another object that “now inherits the interest formerly directed at its predecessor” (154).
10 Notably, the appeal to natural order is how Catherine Chaput characterizes Adam Smith’s invocation of the invisible hand: “[A]n external entity that naturally connects, categorizes, and connects individuals according to the greatest social good” (39).
11 L5 refers to a “Lagrange-point” (O’Neill 127) of gravitational stability between Earth and the moon in which an object could remain in orbit indefinitely.
12 In The Ultimate Resource, Julian L. Simon, business professor and senior fellow at the Cato Institute, defends expanding the human population on the grounds that it will “leave us with the bonus power of lower costs and less scarcity” (11) in addition to a better environment.
13 The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos (Denning).