Reading Spacecraft 5: The Millenium Falcon is a mirror ball in your front room

Here, I believe, is my first public remark about Spacecraft:

Reading SPACECRAFT by @the_eco_thought. Could be subtitled: 'Operators manual for spaceship earth.' Stylistically, foreign & familiar, informal & quasi-technical. Like Shakespeare's English, it's just beyond the edge. Not quite our language but who knows? @LeanneOgasawara

— Bill Benzon, aka The Danish Space Laser (@bbenzon) August 10, 2021

I still believe it, more or less. While Morton makes many and various assertions about spacecraft, and closely related matters (e.g. hyperspace), they don’t take the form of an argument. They delineate a world, the world of spacecraft. How Morton goes about that is as important as what he says, if not more so.

Here and there Morton makes explicit philosophical statements – references to philosophers, Husserl for example, and uses philosophical terms of art, phenomenology, circlude, and so forth. They serve two purposes, to indicate intellectual sources, and to motivate certain assertions. I wonder whether or not he needs them? Could those assertions stand on their own simply by affordances of his language? Perhaps not. Still, it would be interesting to see whether or not the marionette can dance without any one manipulating the strings.

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When the fourth and last chapter, “Anyone,” is well under way, Morton brings back a conceit he used in the introduction, a comparison between the Muppets and Star Wars. As you may recall, The Muppet Show, had a running segment featuring Miss Piggy, “Pigs in Space.” That’s one source of motivation for the conceit. Another comes from the fact that, as actors, Muppets are hybrid creatures (electromechanical devices with human operators) like R2D2, and many of the aliens, including Jabba the Hutt, and can serve as weird mediators between fictional objects and real objects – in a domain, of course, where all objects are equally real so that the distinction between fiction and real is a secondary one. And then we have Frank Oz, operator and voice of Muppets and of Yoda. All of that AND... the conceit serves Morton’s sense of whimsy.

Anyhow, he’s brought it back in the final chapter, worked with it a bit and then says (p. 108): “I will cease this line of thought because, really it’s way too far out, even for me. But it’s an interesting game, isn’t it? Can you match characters in Star Wars with Muppets?” He continues on doing so. But that’s beside the point, what’s interesting is Morton’s assertion that this “interesting game” has gone “way to far out, even for me.”

Is that his mode through the whole book, game mode? Start with the Millennium Falcon and see where it leads, by association, generalization, abstraction, conflation and whatever else. With the Falcon at the center of the web, how far can you extend it through spacecraft to matters of social and political organization and action, of work and play. Is the game a meditation on the Millennium Falcon?

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You think ecologically tuned life means being all efficient and pure. Wrong. It means you can have a disco in every room of your house.

— Timothy Morton (@the_eco_thought) March 29, 2016

Is THAT what Spacecraft is about? Is the Millennium Falcon the mirror ball that transforms a room into a disco?  Is ecological tuning the way one enters hyperspace? 

 

Enquiring minds want to know.

 

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