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The Conquest of Space
in the Time of Power
1
Science in the service of capital, the commodity and the spectacle is nothing other
than capitalized knowledge, fetishism of idea and method, alienated image of human
thought. Pseudogreatness of man, its passive knowledge of a mediocre reality is the
magical justification of a race of slaves.
2
It has been a long time since the power of knowledge has been transformed into
power’s knowledge. Contemporary science, experimental heir of the religion of the
Middle Ages, fulfills the same functions in relation to the present class society: it
compensates for people’s everyday stupidity with its eternal specialist intelligence.
Science sings in numerals of the grandeur of the human race, but is in fact nothing other
than the organized sum of man’s limitations and alienations.
3
Just as industry, which was intended to free people from work through machinery, has so
far done nothing but alienate them in the work of the machines, so science, which was
intended to free people historically and rationally from nature, has done nothing but
alienate them in an irrational and antihistorical society. Mercenary of separate thought,
science works for survival and therefore cannot conceive of life except as a mechanical or
moral formula. It does not conceive of man as subject, nor of human thought as action, and
it is for this reason that it does not comprehend history as deliberate activity and makes
people “patient(s)” in its hospitals.
4
Founded on the essential deceptiveness of its function, science can only lie to itself.
Its pretentious mercenaries have preserved from their ancestor priests the taste and need
for mystery. A dynamic element in the justification of states, the scientific profession
jealously guards the laws of its guild and the “Machina ex Deo” secrets that
make it a despicable sect. It is hardly surprising, for example, that doctors — those
repairmen of labor-power — have illegible handwriting: it is part of the police code
of monopolized survival.
5
But if the historical and ideological identification of science with
temporal powers clearly reveals that it is a servant of states, and therefore fools no
one, it was not until our own time that the last separations disappeared between class
society and a science that had professed to be neutral and “at the service of
humanity.” The present impossibility of scientific research and application without
enormous means has effectively placed the spectacularly concentrated knowledge in the
hands of the ruling powers and has steered it toward statist objectives. There is no
longer any 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 vacuum, has never forgiven the celestial regions for
being terrains left open to the imagination. Since the origin of class society the unreal
source of separate power has always been placed in the skies. When the state justified
itself religiously, heaven was included in the time of religion; now that the
state wishes to justify itself scientifically, the sky is in the space of
science. From Galileo to Werner von Braun, it is nothing but a question of state ideology:
religion wished to preserve its time, therefore no one was allowed to tamper with its
space. Faced with the impossibility of prolonging its time, power must make its space
boundless.
7
If the heart transplant is still a crude artisan technique that does not make people
forget science’s chemical and nuclear massacres, the “Conquest of the
Cosmos” is the greatest spectacular expression of scientific oppression. The space
scientist is to the smalltime doctor what Interpol is to the policeman on the beat.
8
The heaven formerly promised by priests in black cassocks is now really being seized by
white-uniformed astronauts. Sexless and superbureaucratized neuters, the first men to go
beyond the atmosphere are the stars of a spectacle that hangs over our heads day and
night, that can conquer temperature and distance, and that oppresses us from above like
the cosmic dust of God. As an example of survival in its highest manifestation, the
astronauts make an unintentional critique of the Earth: condemned to an orbital trajectory
— in order to avoid dying from cold and hunger — they submissively (“for
technical reasons”) accept the boredom and poverty of being satellites. Inhabitants
of an urbanism of necessity in their cabins, prisoners of scientific gadgetry, they
exemplify in vitro the plight of their contemporaries: in spite of their distance
they do not escape the designs of power. Flying billboards, the astronauts float in space
or leap about on the moon in order to make people march to the time of work.
9
And if the Christian astronauts of the West and the bureaucratic cosmonauts of the East
amuse themselves with metaphysics and secular morals (Gagarin “did not see God”;
Borman prayed for the little Earth), it is in obedience to their spatial
“assignment,” which must be the essence of their religion; as with
Saint-Exupéry, who spoke the lowest imbecilities from high altitudes, but whose essence
lay in his threefold role of militarist, patriot and idiot.
10
The conquest of space is part of the planetary hope of an economic system which,
saturated with commodities, spectacles and power, ejaculates into space when it arrives at
the end of the noose of its terrestrial contradictions. Functioning as a new
“America,” space must serve the states as a new territory for wars and colonies
— a new territory to which to send producer-consumers and thus enable the system to
break out 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 dividing up of space shows the inability of the
capitalists and bureaucrats to resolve their antagonisms and struggles here on Earth.
11
But the revolutionary old mole, which is now gnawing at the foundations of the system,
will destroy the barriers that separate science from the general knowledge that will be
accessible to everyone when people finally begin making their own history. No more ideas
of separate power, no more power of separate ideas. Generalized self-management of the
permanent transformation of the world by the masses will make science a basic banality,
and no longer a truth of state.
12
Humanity will enter into space to make the universe the playground of the last revolt:
that which will go against the limitations imposed by nature. Once the walls have been
smashed that now separate people from science, the conquest of space will no longer be an
economic or military “promotional” gimmick, but the blossoming of human freedoms
and fulfillments, attained by a race of gods. We will not enter into space as employees of
an astronautic administration or as “volunteers” of a state project, but as
masters without slaves reviewing their domains: the entire universe pillaged for the
workers councils.
EDUARDO ROTHE
1969
Translated by Ken Knabb (slightly modified from the version in the Situationist
International Anthology).
No copyright.
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