On June 1 of last year the 47th president of the United States hosted a conference call urging state governors to call in the National Guard and crush ongoing protests against the death-dealing police. Referring to the recent deployment of the National Guard in Minnesota, Trump said: “Those guys walked through that stuff like it was butter, and they haven’t had any problems since.” Defense Secretary Mark Esper chimed in: “We need to dominate the battle-space.”
The aim of domination is to encounter no one, except at the tip of a sword. To cut clear, leaving an empty space, a frictionless void.
A few weeks later Falcon Heavy, the most powerful rocket from the Space X Mars colonization effort was launched. According to Space X, the future is no longer on earth, it is in SPACE. Following the same logic as the intelligent toddler who forgoes a marshmallow now for the sake of two later on, Space X justifies every sacrifice, every extraction and every brutality here on earth, for the sake of Life on Mars. With the future deported, earth appears as ruin. The whole planet just another “shithole” country.
Through Esper, Trump and Space X, we sense something of the prevailing techniques for the domination of space, something of the general violence that undergirds the depthless, wide white space of the contemporary; what Christopher Page, in his essay for this micro-issue, calls “this new ‘transparency’ of the open-plan office, gallery and cultural centre.”
In the contributions that make up this micro-issue, space is not a surface, or a hole, or a void, or even a container. It appears as a matter of division; of edges separating one form from another, or separating figure from ground. Of doubles, inversions and distortion; resonances and resemblances that call out to one another. Space is visible because it situates objects in relation to one another. As a set of relative effects, space pulls certain figures close, while others are pushed to the periphery. The inside is marked off from the outside. With a focus on architecture and the built environment, this micro-issue considers the social and sensuous choreography of spatial effects.
Following in the footsteps of well known figures such as Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes, let us try an annihilation exercise of our own. That is, imagine the annihilation of all bodies, including your own, of all matter, however discrete. All that is left is mind. Your mind. In order to derive the general properties of space, this exercise images the complete annihilation of everything, except for the perceiving subject. When the vicissitudes of reality are gone, what remains? We may find, despite our efforts, that we are not alone. The traces, echoes, reverberations of those erased persist in the mind. And it is from these remnants that we begin to develop our sense of space.
Lakshmi Luthra
