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COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE (BCN)
During these days of confinement, I have spent some time reorganising my bookshelves. One of the books that I found was Cosmonauts of the Future, which is about the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia. Apart from the topic –interesting enough on its own to entice me to re-read it – what resonates in my mind are echoes of the title. With a quick search of the word ‘cosmonaut’, one suddenly arrives at cosmism, a philosophical and cultural movement in Russia during the late 19th and early 20th century, the ideas of which seem to be quite prescient and somehow dreadfully descriptive of the global Covid-19 pandemic. Following the thread of Russian cosmism, one ends up reading about the work of Nikolai Fedorov, a librarian who was one of the main proponents of the movement. His philosophy included radical ideas about immortality, the revival of the dead and the colonisation of both space and the oceans, among others. Anton Vidokle and Brian Kuan Wood explain that Fedorov’s Philosophy of the Common Task calls ‘for a total reorientation of social relations, productive forces, economy, and politics toward the singular goal of achieving physical immortality and material resurrection’. These words resonate widely and loudly within the present moment. Setting aside the search for immortality (which has in any case always been a part of human ambition), it seems that today, from domestic space to new pedagogical systems and scientific research, the whole world is screaming out for the kind of wholesale overhaul that Fedorov suggests. This time, however, the singular goal is to defeat a scary, minute yet expansive monster that still remains indecipherable in many ways. In that sense, I have the feeling that we are all ‘cosmonauts of the future’ at the present moment, in search of clues for that will lead us to a ‘total reorientation’ of everything. When a cosmonaut goes to outer space, she does so armed with a base of knowledge collected through years of data analysis and experimentation, and predictions about what she will find. At the same time, however, she is entering a landscape of uncertainty within
which nothing can be taken for granted, and is aware that the unexpected can always happen. Isn’t that the feeling we all have now, as we – or at least the majority of us – live through a global pandemic for the first time? We are all cosmonauts exploring the blurred limits between the known and the unknown. As such, in thinking about the questions that concern how we should live and work at home during this period of physical distancing, one concept that repeatedly comes to my mind is that of ‘scale’. Rooms and corridors don’t have a fixed scale anymore (if we think beyond just square metres); we feel adrift, floating in a kind of space that cannot be described by its physical dimensions alone, within which we feel alienation, fatigue, optimism, fear, energy, irritation and joy all at once. We are all cosmonauts in our own homes. Our domestic space can seem at times to be so small that we do not fit within it, while on other occasions the diminutive screens of our mobile devices appear to contain entire multiverses and black holes within which we can get lost. The planetary network to which we can all be connected at any time is not new. There is novelty, however, in the way in which it is currently affecting our workflows and our daily domestic lives, because a new challenge emerges when we are forced to analyse, understand and react all in real time. A few weeks of strong enthusiasm for online teaching and working were followed by a tiredness that resulted from being available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Everything is happening so fast that it is hard to find sufficient physical or temporal distance to really understand either the benefits or the downfalls of the current condition. I don’t feel like speculating about life today, because it changes from one moment to the next. I use the balcony to go out and clap at eight o’clock every evening, which makes me feel part of a community. But at other points, I feel trapped in that same space, unable to go out and only able to watch the street from above. I use the kitchen to cook with my two girls and have fun one day, but escape into it and shut the doors just so that I can be alone and have a space for myself the next. The computer that allows me the joy of writing is the same computer that merely an hour later, in a bout of ‘zoom fatigue’, I just want to shut off. Not a reflection about working and living at home, this is instead a reflection about a state of mind that makes me feel like a cosmonaut. I inhabit my home as a new kind of outer space, where there are no boundaries. I find myself exploring it anew without preconceptions, yet accept the impossibility of having to hand proper answers to the infinite questions that living in confinement raises. The metaphor of the cosmonaut of the future is powerful enough to make one shed the fear of facing uncertainty and thus discover new possible ways of understanding labour and care, otherness and belonging; new ways of living. Until our ship crash lands into that unshaped future, we will not have the luxury of looking back at the journey that brought us there. We can only hide in our kitchens, clap on our balconies and rearrange the books in our haphazard vessels until then.
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