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Abstract
Using the concept of the Umwelt from biology, postcolonial interpretations of climate change, and Judith Butler's gender and ability theory, this article argues that the creation of new environments is always the creation of a subject, maybe even a corporate, nonhuman one. Examples are drawn from the twentieth-century history of the design and occupation of human habitats in space, from Earthbound corporate architecture, and speculative urban design.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Kate Drabinski and Jaimes Mayhew for directing my attention to Judith Butler's work. I also want to thank Lola Sheppard and Mason White for pointing me at the work of Jakob von Uexküll, and to my colleague Samia Kirchner for pointed questions about the nature of the colonized subject. Thanks to Felicity Scott, as well, for her work and research on O'Neill's project. Special thanks to editor Doug Jackson, and to the reviewers, whose comments shaped this piece.
Notes
1 Linda Herridge, “Meals Ready to Eat: Expedition 44 Crew Members Sample Leafy Greens Grown on Space Station,” NASA, August 7, 2015, https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/meals_ready_to_eat (accessed February 18, 2017).
2 “Here we may glimpse the worlds of the lowly dwellers of the meadow. To do so, we must first blow, in fancy, a soap bubble around each creature to represent its own world, filled with the perceptions which it alone knows,” Jakob von Uexküll, “A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men; A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds,” in Instinctive Behavior: The Development of a Modern Concept, trans. and ed. Claire H. Schiller (New York: International Universities Press, 1957), 5–80.
3 The International Commission on Stratigraphy is currently considering a formal proposal to recognize the Anthropocene as a new geological age. Accounts of the term's origin vary, but its contemporary usage was popularized by atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen, who, with coauthor Eugene F. Stormer, proposed a start date for it in the late eighteenth century. Crutzen and Stormer, “Have We Entered the ‘Anthropocene’?” in IGBP Global Change Newsletter 41 (2000), http://www.igbp.net/news/opinion/opinion/haveweenteredtheanthropocene.5.d8b4c3c12bf3be638a8000578.html (accessed February 18, 2017).
4 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (Winter 2009): 197–222.
5 “And then you can look at the politics of climate change as the process of trying to produce this global humanity … the moment we ask ‘what should we do?’ we discover that the ‘we’ needs to be constructed”; Dipesh Chakrabarty in conversation with James Graham, “The Universals and Particulars of Climate,” in Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary, ed. James Graham, (Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller, 2016), 22–32.
6 For more on the history of the idea of the space station, see Robert Zimmerman, Leaving Earth: Space Stations, Rival Superpowers, and the Quest for Interplanetary Travel (Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2003).
7 The results of this summer study design session were published in Gerard K. O'Neill, The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space (New York: William Morrow, 1977).
8 Further summer study outcomes, with more technical information, were published in NASA, Space Settlements, a Design Study (Washington, DC: Scientific and Technical Information Office, 1977).
9 Ibid., 36.
10 “Solipsism Syndrome in Artificial Environment,” in ibid., 29.
11 NASA, Space Settlements (note 8), 33.
12 Ibid., 98.
13 Ibid., 114.
14 Ibid., 24.
15 Ibid., 90.
16 These responses were compiled in a special book edition of material from CoEvolution Quarterly; see Stewart Brand, ed., Space Colonies (San Francisco: Waller, 1977).
17 Steve Baer, in ibid., 40.
18 Don Davis, http://www.donaldedavis.com/PARTS/SHORTBIO.html (accessed February 18, 2017).
19 Don Davis, in discussion with the author, June 2015.
20 Don Davis, Public Domain Works Done for NASA, http://www.donaldedavis.com/PARTS/allyours.html (accessed February 18, 2017).
21 For a more complete discussion of the design and visual culture influences in these paintings, see Fred Scharmen, “The High Frontier, the Megastructure, and the Big Dumb Object,” paper presented at the 101st ACSA Annual Meeting, San Francisco, 2013.
22 George B. Dantzig and Thomas L. Saaty, Compact City: A Plan for a Liveable Urban Environment (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1974).
23 Davis, Public Domain Works (note 20).
24 Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
25 Carl Sagan, in Brand, Space Colonies (note 16), 42.
26 “I mean, it seems to me that we're all supported in our movements by various kinds of things that are external to us. We all need certain kinds of surfaces, we need certain kinds of shoes, certain kinds of weather, and even internally we need to be ambulatory in certain ways that may or not be fully operative in all of us. … Let's talk about this: Which environments make it possible for you to take a walk? What does the environment have to be like in order to support your mobility?” from Judith Butler's discussion with Sunaura Taylor in Examined Life, directed by Astra Taylor (Zeitgeist Films, 2009).
27 Wendell Berry, in Brand, Space Colonies (note 16), 37.
28 See Nicholas de Monchaux, “Cyborg,” in Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 67–78.
29 Charles Dunlap Benson and William David Compton, Living and Working in Space: A History of Skylab (Washington, DC: NASA Scientific and Technical Information Office, 1983), 133–34.
30 “Now, I don't like being put in an incredible position where I'm taking somebody's expensive equipment and thrashing about wildly with it and trying to act like a one-armed paper hanger trying to get started in insufficient time!” as quoted in Marsha Freeman, Challenges of Human Space Exploration (Chichester, UK: Springer, Praxis Books, 2000), 8.
31 See “Skylab, a Glorious Forgotten Triumph,” in Zimmerman, Leaving Earth (note 6), 48–80.
32 ASHRAE, ANSI/ASHRAE Standard 55 Thermal Environmental Conditions for Human Occupancy, 2013.
33 Joost van Hoof, “Building Emissions: Female Thermal Demand,” in Nature Climate Change, 5 (August 2015).
34 O'Neill, The High Frontier (note 7), 201.
35 Carl Sagan, in Brand, Space Colonies (note 16), 42.
36 Rick Guidice, in discussion with the author, August 2015.
37 NASA, Space Settlements (note 8), 49–50.
38 See De Witt Douglas Kilgore, “The Domestication of Space: Gerard K. O'Neill's Suburban Diaspora,” in Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 150–85.
39 Stewart Brand in Brand, Space Colonies (note 16), 5.
40 See esp. the work of Gayatravi Chakravorty Spivak. One of the first methods of colonialism is to seek out those who would speak for the least among the colonized, re-forming and re-presenting them as subjects. Spivak places this in parallel with the more acknowledged path of “recognition through assimilation” of the colonized subject. Spivak traces the example of the British colonial authorities outlawing the practice of widow sacrifice in India, by first addressing themselves to local Indian social and textual authorities that represented the women as particular kinds of vicitmized subjects. The subject here is represented as if for the colonial authority, allowing them to step in and assert control. Alongside this discussion of the recontextualization of the subject, Spivak further complicates the narratives by building a different historical-textual context around the practice, as it would have existed within and for the precolonized culture itself. These other contexts don't offer answers but instead more refined questions about the subject's constitution: “Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the ‘third-world woman’ caught between tradition and modernization.” See Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313.
41 Gerard O'Neill in Brand, Space Colonies (note 16), 11.
42 “And of course, once you ask the right question, the right answer follows almost automatically. That's simply a question of working out the numbers”; Gerard O'Neill in conversation with Stewart Brand, “Is the surface of a planet the right place for an expanding technological civilization?” in Brand, Space Colonies (note 16), 22.
43 Stewart Brand, in Brand, Space Colonies (note 16), 6.
44 See Fred Turner, “Networking in the New Economy,” in Turner, Counterculture (note 24), 175–206.
45 See Amy Frearson, “BIG and Heatherwick Unveil ‘Vibrant New Neighborhood’ for Google's California HQ,” Dezeen, February 2015, https://www.dezeen.com/2015/02/27/big-and-heatherwick-unveil-vibrant-new-neighbourhood-for-googles-california-hq/ (accessed February 18, 2017).
46 Amy Frearson, “Apple 2 Campus by Foster + Partners,” Dezeen, August 2011, https://www.dezeen.com/2011/08/15/apple-campus-2-by-foster-partners/ (accessed February 18, 2017).
47 Sidewalk Labs, “Platform,” at https://www.sidewalklabs.com (accessed February 18, 2017).
48 Adora Cheung, New Cities, https://blog.ycombinator.com/new-cities/ (accessed February 18, 2017).
49 Ibid.
50 Judith Butler in Taylor, Examined Life (note 26).
51 Cheung, New Cities (note 48).
52 Chakrabarty in conversation with Graham, in Graham, Climates (note 5), 30.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Fred Scharmen
Fred Scharmen is an Assistant Professor in the graduate architecture program at Morgan State University, where he teaches architecture and urban design. He founded a collaborative practice, The Working-Group on Adaptive Systems, in 2008. Scharmen's architectural design practice mines the history of speculative utopian futures for leftover spatial propositions and found aesthetics. His design work has been shown at the pinkcomma gallery in Boston, and at the Beijing Biennale in 2006. His drawings and writing have been published in books and periodicals including the Journal of Architectural Education, Log, CRIT, DOMUS, Volume, Interactions Magazine, CHOБA (SNOB) Magazine, and Zoogram.