The SQ is made up of multiple, distinct space projects. Totalizing critique makes inequality a fait accompli by leaving no space for resistance

(Martin, Cosmic Society. Towards a Sociology of the Universe Peter Dickens and James Ormrod, London, Routledge, 2007, £75.00, 221pp. The Sociological Review, 56:4 (2008))

I have long thought it odd that sociology, and cognate areas, spends so little time looking up at the stars, and it seems to have been one of the few areas of enquiry that was largely unmoved by the vainglory of the Apollo programme. But then perhaps ours is a subject of the earth, of the human scales of the city, the factory and the home. The very idea of ‘cosmic society’ cradles this tension, as the intimate warmth of the socius is dwarfed and frozen before the inhuman scale of cosmos. But what Dickens and Ormrod have done in this remarkable book is to argue that what we understand as ‘space’ is always already a projection of the social, and bears the imprints of the patterns of power and legitimacy that shape the earth. For a long time, humans have worshipped the sun, and organized the constellations, but now satellites and Mars rovers are extending the human into places where it has never been. Fifty years after Sputnik, it is time that sociology looked up. So what might a ‘cosmic sociology’ look like? For Dickens and Ormrod one key aspect of this is the ‘humanization of the universe’, a term that might be understood in many different ways.Their understanding of the term is primarily dialectical, in the Marxian sense of cosmos being a human work on the very ground from which the human emerges. However, since (again following Marx) the societies of earth are unequal, they will reflect the sky unequally. No wonder that a ‘cosmic elite’ dominates space policy and projects its militaryindustrial interests across the stars. But no wonder either that this dominance should be contested by various pro-space libertarian groups, and antimilitarization activists. Using some ideas from David Harvey, Dickens and Ormrod argue that what is at stake here is an ‘outer spatial fix’ to periodic crises of capitalism in which this new frontier is being used ‘to promote imperialism and capital accumulation’ (12). At the same time, they use psychoanalytic ideas to suggest that much of the ideology of space advocates is narcissistic, in the sense that it involves projecting fantasies of individual heroism onto the figure of the space explorer. This psychic economy echoes ideas about market freedoms, and leaves little room for collectivist views of humankind. In a mere 190 pages, Dickens and Ormrod move from pre-industrial cosmologies to industry and empire in outer space. It is a dizzying ride, and those who prefer detail to generality will find that the view gives them vertigo, but I felt that empirical and theoretical materials of considerable intricacy were handled with a deftness of touch that would make this an admirable textbook for an undergraduate ‘Sociology in Space’ module, should one exist. (And yes, one should exist. The imagined place of humans in the universe has been deemed to be crucial for anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians, so why not us ‘moderns’?) Backing up their claims is evidence from a 2004/5 UK mass observation survey on attitudes towards space, alien life, horoscopes, science fiction and so on; interviews with various pro-space activists; and general data on the political economy of the space industries. This latter covers military applications, satellite communications and observation, elite space tourism of theVirgin Galactic variety and proposals for various forms of off-earth manufacturing, extraction and energy production. Not that any of these are easily separable, simply because (for example) NASA is effectively joined at the hip to Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrop-Grumman. Just as satellite surveillance is inseparable from smart weapons, the global positioning systems that enable tagging, the global dominance of a few media companies, and the global dominance of a few states. But there is an odd thing about the sort of Marxist Freudian telescope that Dickens and Ormrod use here. After recounting various more collectivist cosmologies, they suggest that contemporary capitalism has produced a sovereign individual who only sees their own restless narcissism reflected in the stars.The ‘humanization’ of space then involves the universalization of a selfish and insecure character, and a set of social relations that support an unequal status quo. Fair enough, but can space travel and exploration provoke other forms of thought too?What Dickens and Ormrod label as childish narcissism might be articulated by radicals of a less materialist (or realist) bent as ‘revolutionary romanticism’. Risking glibness, this is perhaps what distinguished young Hegelians from historical materialist Marxists.No wonder that Dickens and Ormrod tend to see popular science, utopianism and science fiction as a distraction, precisely because they look to them like escapism. These authors are more attentive to structural constraint than imaginative possibility. Now there is no particular reason to argue that (for example) all science fiction is radical, any more than we might suggest all utopias are good places. However, many radicals (and liberals too, such as Durkheim and Mannheim) have suggested that imaginings of other times and spaces have been central to the possibility of change, and hence a contributor to cracks in whatever hegemony reigns. To put this another way, I suppose that one of the other senses of the ‘humanization’ of space might be that there is no space left for the sublime, for the sense of the insignificance of the human standing on the moon, blotting all of earth out with his gloved thumb. In other words, that a sociology of space of the kind that Dickens and Ormrod propose might end up leaving no space left to think about, because it is now already filled by humans, and the machinery of the actually existing. Nonetheless, this is an extraordinarily interesting book, and it deserves a cheaper paperback edition in order that the ideas can be more widely read. Though my temper may be more speculative than theirs, I (and Kurt Vonnegut, I think) agree entirely when they conclude that ‘the ultimate aim of this must be a relationship with the universe that does not empower the already powerful.’ (190)Where we might disagree is the role of ‘fantasy’ in shaping a future that might achieve such an aim. (691-3)