Recognizing Stagnation

If you recognize something, maybe it's not new?

A few years back, just pre-pandemic, I was asked to participate in a space development workshop in Boston. I was put with an astronaut and several aerospace engineers for one of our breakout sessions. Our topic was Martian colonization. There was a lot of talk about pressure vessels and interior configurations.

The conversation turned to construction materials. I put my hand up and said, “Are we designing to a preconceived notion of what space stations and habitats are supposed to look like? It seems like we’re taking science fiction movies as our template and trying to build to that aesthetic.” I then suggested that the interiors of these pressure vessels should be kitted out using bamboo and Empress tree wood, because these can be quickly grown in an on-site greenhouse. These materials would need some kind of non-toxic fireproofing, but their use eliminated a whole set of industrial processes that would otherwise drain colony resources. Plus, people like wood. They like to live in it; they like to touch it.

Boy, did this group not like that idea. I wasn’t given any rational or technical reason why not. I just got shut down as the unicorn who’d wandered into the wrong room.

For them, this is what a homestead on Mars is supposed to look like:

The above image is the first thing I got when I asked Midjourney to show me a Martian home. It does perfectly represent our common notions of what such a place would be like. I’m sure it’s what my fellow breakout brainstormers had in mind that day in Boston.

But when I look at this image, I don’t see a place, I see what philosopher of science Paul Fereyabend called a paratactic list. Parataxis is “description by addition” and is usually only talked about in relation to Homeric poetry, where “swift-footed Achilles” is name-as-list. In such early poetry, things and people were often described by simply putting together a list of their features, and they are conceived of as being just that list. It’s weird—but in any case, looking at this picture I see a list of requirements that have been ticked off in Midjourney’s head to fulfill the archetype of Martian apartment:

• Hyper-modernist design

• Sterility (no plants or other living things present)

• Artificiality (similarly, everything internal to the home is manufactured

• Mass-produced or anonymous components

• Containment: there is no visible exit or means of interacting with the outside world

This looks like a space habitat because, in our imagination, a space habitat is nothing but this list of features. It has become fully reified, an assemblage whose component pieces might be shuffled into different configurations, but only insofar as they keep the list intact.

When I asked Midjourney to draw me a “a spaceship” it produced this:

Need I write out the list of features that go into this identity? They’re all pretty obvious. “Fast+cockpit+engine nacelles+machine surfaces+metal” etc.

My point is not that Midjourney builds its images out of paratactic lists; that would not be surprising. What’s surprising (and a bit disturbing) is that when human beings look at these pictures, we instantly recognize what they are. “Oh, that’s a spaceship!” This tells us that at least much of the time, when we think about spaceships (and, adding in the Martian example, space in general) we are not doing so creatively. Rather, we are thinking paratactically: adding lists of features together in our heads. Ticking off attributes on a preconceived checklist of what ‘space things’ are like.

Since these lists are received from the science fiction literature and films of the 1900s, they all share a certain sameness—as well as a homey kind of familiarity. They are reassuring, nostalgic, even. But how is it possible to feel nostalgia for things that do not yet exist?

The answer is that this is no longer a new future. It’s an old future, one we grew up with and we don’t question any more than we question the other conventional beliefs and cultural practices of our lives. Yet it is profoundly dangerous to do this with the future(s). I can guarantee you that real interplanetary spacecraft will not look like the above image, and that living on Mars is going to be nothing like that image at the top, unless designers and engineers impose that aesthetic and that list of attributes. —Presupposed, baked into the process of interplanetary settlement so thoroughly that no one ever questions why they are consigned to a plastic and metal cell, rather than luxuriating in a carpeted, wood-walled terrarium.

So let me propose a diagnostic for recognizing stagnation in our views of the future:

When, in thinking about something, we automatically tick off the boxes of a paratactic checklist, we are in a state of conceptual stagnation.

And, let me propose the cure for that stagnation:

List the items of the parataxis, and then systematically swap out each for something new.

Let’s say, bamboo for plastic. Greenery instead of displays and monitors. Spaciousness rather than cramped quarters.

New futures for old.

—K

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