“

The Object Lessons series achieves something

very close to magic: the books take ordinary—
even banal—objects and animate them with
a rich history of invention, political struggle,
science, and popular mythology. Filled with
fascinating details and conveyed in sharp,
accessible prose, the books make the everyday
world come to life. Be warned: once you’ve read
a few of these, you’ll start walking around your
house, picking up random objects, and musing
aloud: ‘I wonder what the story is behind this
thing?’”
Steven Johnson, author of Where Good
Ideas Come From and How We Got to Now

“
Object Lessons describes themselves as ‘short,
beautiful books,’ and to that, I’ll say, amen. . . .
If you read enough Object Lessons books, you’ll
fill your head with plenty of trivia to amaze and
annoy your friends and loved ones—caution
recommended on pontificating on the objects
surrounding you. More importantly, though . . .
they inspire us to take a second look at parts
of the everyday that we’ve taken for granted.
These are not so much lessons about the objects
themselves, but opportunities for self-reflection
and storytelling. They remind us that we are
surrounded by a wondrous world, as long as we
care to look.”
John Warner, The Chicago Tribune
“
For my money, Object Lessons is the most
consistently interesting nonfiction book series
in America.”
Megan Volpert, PopMatters

“
Besides being beautiful little hand-sized objects
themselves, showcasing exceptional writing,
the wonder of these books is that they exist at
all. . . . Uniformly excellent, engaging, thought-
provoking, and informative.”
Jennifer Bort Yacovissi, Washington
Independent Review of Books

“
. . . edifying and entertaining . . . perfect for
slipping in a pocket and pulling out when life is
on hold.”
Sarah Murdoch, Toronto Star

“
[W]itty, thought-provoking, and poetic . . .
These little books are a page-flipper’s dream.”
John Timpane, The Philadelphia Inquirer

“
Though short, at roughly 25,000 words apiece,
these books are anything but slight.”
Marina Benjamin, New Statesman
“
The joy of the series, of reading Remote Control,
Golf Ball, Driver’s License, Drone, Silence, Glass,
Refrigerator, Hotel, and Waste . . . in quick
succession, lies in encountering the various
turns through which each of their authors has
been put by his or her object. . . . The object
predominates, sits squarely center stage, directs
the action. The object decides the genre,
the chronology, and the limits of the study.
Accordingly, the author has to take her cue
from the thing she chose or that chose her. The
result is a wonderfully uneven series of books,
each one a thing unto itself.”
Julian Yates, Los Angeles Review of Books

“
The Object Lessons series has a beautifully
simple premise. Each book or essay centers
on a specific object. This can be mundane or
unexpected, humorous or politically timely.
Whatever the subject, these descriptions reveal
the rich worlds hidden under the surface of
things.”
Christine Ro, Book Riot

“
. . . a sensibility somewhere between Roland
Barthes and Wes Anderson.”
Simon Reynolds, author of Retromania:
Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past
 A book series about the hidden lives of ordinary
things.

Series Editors:
Ian Bogost and Christopher Schaberg

Advisory Board:
Sara Ahmed, Jane Bennett, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen,
Johanna Drucker, Raiford Guins, Graham Harman,
renée hoogland, Pam Houston, Eileen Joy, Douglas
Kahn, Daniel Miller, Esther Milne, Timothy
Morton, Kathleen Stewart, Nigel Thrift, Rob Walker,
Michele White

In association with
 BOOKS IN THE SERIES
Bird by Erik Anderson Questionnaire by Evan Kindley
Blackface by Ayanna Thompson Refrigerator by Jonathan Rees
Blanket by Kara Thompson Remote Control by Caetlin ­
Bookshelf by Lydia Pyne Benson-Allott
Bread by Scott Cutler Shershow Rust by Jean-Michel Rabaté
Bulletproof Vest by Kenneth R. Rosen Shipping Container by Craig Martin
Burger by Carol J. Adams Shopping Mall by Matthew Newton
Cell Tower by Steven E. Jones Signature by Hunter Dukes
Cigarette Lighter by Jack Pendarvis Silence by John Biguenet
Coffee by Dinah Lenney Sock by Kim Adrian
Compact Disc by Robert Barry Souvenir by Rolf Potts
Doctor by Andrew Bomback Snake by Erica Wright
Drone by Adam Rothstein Spacecraft by Timothy Morton
Driver’s License by Meredith Castile Traffic by Paul Josephson
Dust by Michael Marder Tree by Matthew Battles
Earth by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Tumor by Anna Leahy
Linda T. Elkins-Tanton TV by Susan Bordo
Egg by Nicole Walker Veil by Rafia Zakaria
Email by Randy Malamud Waste by Brian Thill
Environment by Rolf Halden Whale Song by Margret Grebowicz
Exit by Laura Waddell Air Conditioning by Hsuan L. Hsu
Eye Chart by William Germano (forthcoming)
Fake by Kati Stevens Bicycle by Jonathan Maskit
Fat by Hanne Blank (forthcoming)
Gin by Shonna Milliken Humphrey Doll Maria Teresa Hart (forthcoming)
Glass by John Garrison Fist by nelle mills (forthcoming)
Golf Ball by Harry Brown Fog by Stephen Sparks (forthcoming)
Hair by Scott Lowe Football by Mark Yakich (forthcoming)
Hashtag by Elizabeth Losh Glitter by Nicole Seymour
High Heel by Summer Brennan (forthcoming)
Hood by Alison Kinney OK by Michelle McSweeney
Hotel by Joanna Walsh (forthcoming)
Hyphen by Pardis Mahdavi Perfume by Megan Volpert
Jet Lag by Christopher J. Lee (forthcoming)
Luggage by Susan Harlan Pixel by Ian Epstein (forthcoming)
Magnet by Eva Barbarossa Pregnancy Test by Karen Weingarten
Ocean by Steve Mentz Recipe by Lynn Z. Bloom (forthcoming)
Office by Sheila Liming Skateboard by Jonathan Russell Clark
Password by Martin Paul Eve (forthcoming)
Personal Stereo by Rebecca Tuhus- Sticker by Henry Hoke (forthcoming)
Dubrow Sewer by Jessica Leigh Hester
Phone Booth by Ariana Kelly (forthcoming)
Pill by Robert Bennett Train by A. N. Devers (forthcoming)
Political Sign by Tobias Carroll Trench Coat by Jane Tynan
Potato by Rebecca Earle (forthcoming)
 spacecraft
TIMOTHY MORTON
 BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA
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29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland
BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published in the United States of America 2022
Copyright © Timothy Morton, 2022
Cover design: Alice Marwick
For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xii constitute an extension of this copyright page.
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press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Morton, Timothy, 1968- author.
Title: Spacecraft / Timothy Morton.
Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. | Series: Object lessons | Includes bibliographical refer-
ences and index. | Summary: “Science fiction is filled with spacecraft. And in the real world, eager industrialists
race to develop new vehicles to travel beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Space travel can seem like a waste of
resources or like human destiny. But what are spacecraft, and just what can they teach us about imagination,
ecology, democracy, and the nature of objects? Furthermore, why do certain spacecraft stand out in popular
culture? If ever there were a spacecraft that could be detached from its context, sold as toys, modeled, turned
into Disney rides, parodied, and flit around in everyone’s head-the Millennium Falcon would be it. Based primar-
ily around this infamous Star Wars vehicle, Spacecraft takes readers on an intergalactic journey through science
fiction and speculative philosophy, and revealing real-world political and ecological lessons along the way.
Philosopher Timothy Morton shows how the Millennium Falcon is a spacecraft par excellence, offering readers
not just flights of fancy, but new ground to stand on”— Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021013852 (print) | LCCN 2021013853 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501375804 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781501375811 (epub) | ISBN 9781501375828 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501375835
Subjects: LCSH: Space vehicles--Philosophy. | Ontology. | Object (Philosophy)
Classification: LCC TL795 .M67 (print) | LCC TL795 (ebook) | DDC 629.4701—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021013852
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ISBN: PB: 978-1-5013-7580-4

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Series: Object Lessons

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For Claire and Simon



Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer
—W. B. YEATS
CONTENTS

Acknowledgments xii

Introduction: Ships and Craft 1

1 Garbage 29

2 Winnings 39

3 Hyperspace 53

4 Anyone 93

Notes 113
List of Films and Other Media 123
Index 125
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T
hanks so much to Ian Bogost and Christopher
Schaberg. Thank you Bloomsbury. Thank you
Haaris Naqvi. Thank you Alice. Thank you
Antonina Szram. Thank you Taylin Nelson. Thank
you Nicholas Royle. Thank you Maya Kóvskaya. Thank
you Harriet Harriss. Thank you Philippe Parreno. Thank
you Laurie Anderson. Thank you Elizabeth Freeman.
Thanks to the Coronavirus for disrupting life so much
I finally got back into the swing of writing weird stuff.
Also thank you to the virus for not killing me when I got
it, that was polite. Thanks to Ben Rivers and to Gareth
Evans for being amazing pals, and similarly Kathelin
Gray and Leslie Roberts. You’ve all kept me on the level
during the most difficult two years of my life. Thanks
Henry Warwick, fellow Yes fan and underminer of the
labor theory of property. My life’s work is committed
to blurring the boundaries between active and passive,
medieval Neoplatonic Christian constructs that inhibit
genuinely revolutionary thought and action. Thank
you to everyone who this last year or so has helped me
to know that much more deeply than I ever thought
possible—the discovery that I am non-binary gender.
INTRODUCTION
SHIPS AND CRAFT

When I was eleven years old, I used to walk to school.

It was about a mile and a half from Hammersmith
Station, through the Tubeway made famous by Gary
Numan’s Tubeway Army (Gary Numan of “Cars”
fame). My eleven-year-old boy’s head found comfort
in all sorts of obsessive behaviors as I traveled through
an alien, alienating land of flyovers and concrete and
loud train sounds, toward the other alienating land of
a very posh private school. I was growing up on bare
floorboards, the dusty, broken kind, not the cool chic
kind. But my schoolmates had chauffeurs, and in one
instance, a helicopter.
One of my obsessive comforts was making up
spacecraft. I would inhabit them in the cockpit of
my mind, describing their specifications to myself,
under my breath. When someone found out, I was
unmercifully bullied for doing so, but it didn’t stop
me. Spacecraft were safe. They could protect me and
whisk me away from the alienation I was feeling. At
home, I was obsessively reading my collector’s edition
magazines: there was one about Star Wars, which I
had seen on its first release on December 27, 1977, at
the Dominion Theater in Leicester Square, in London;
and there was a magazine about Close Encounters
of the Third Kind, which I had also seen very soon
after its release. I can’t count the number of models of
spacecraft, real and fictional, that I owned. And books
about UFOs. I still have those collector’s editions. I’m
looking at them now. Unlike a lot of things in my life
from that time, they were and are almost pristine.
I was using spacecraft as protection and as escape
vehicles in my head. And so, to this day, I’ve wanted
to explore what that was all about. In particular that’s
because I’m sure I’m not the only one.
This is a book about the space vessels of our
imaginations. This doesn’t mean that I’m not interested
in Apollo or the Space Shuttle or Soyuz or Sputnik.
Far from it. The whole point about those vehicles
is, they also originated in some dream of a human
being. The Space Shuttle bears a vivid resemblance
to the shuttle as imagined by Stanley Kubrick in the
film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). And to design
real spacecraft, you need a big imagination. In 2016 I

2 SPACECRAFT
was lucky enough to join Pharrell Williams in New
York City, in a conversation with NASA about what
messages the next Voyager spacecraft would convey
to extraterrestrial lifeforms. It always struck me that
writing is like sending a message in a bottle into
space, and that this is why writing is also a kind of
listening, like the giant radio telescopes that listen for
signals of alien life. Voyagers 1 and 2 are ears just as
much as they are probes.
And that’s not the only reason to write about these
fictional space vehicles. Imaginary “objects” are also
objects. Objects don’t have to be palpable and capable
of being burned or shot around a particle accelerator
to be real. The vessels of our imagination are real
insofar as we can all think about them, as differently
as we do. We can buy toys of them. We can watch
movies containing them. They can hop from one
mind to another.
This isn’t such a strange thing at all. In fact, it would
be very weird if thoughts were only “symptoms” of
the mind that had them. How on earth could we
communicate at all? Consider an idea. It’s not a naked
thing. It always comes clothed in some medium or
other. An idea is very like a tweet or a meme. It has a
certain flavor, a certain size and shape, a certain speed
and intensity, and a certain kind of format. Ideas don’t
just float around in the void. Nothing floats around in

INTRODUCTION 3
the void. Spacecraft of the imagination are just as real
as Soviet spacecraft.
This is true for many things, but especially true
for spacecraft. They are never simply “in” the mind
(is anything ever “in” a mind?). Spacecraft are LEGO
models, theme park simulators, replicas, things we
make out of unembellished bricks and sticks at the
age of seven.
Even pictures “in” the mind are independent of
those minds, which is why I can say Millennium Falcon
and you can know what I mean. At the beginning
of the twentieth century, the philosopher Edmund
Husserl had a striking idea. He was trying to prove
that there was something fishy about nineteenth-
century theories of logic. There was a theory called
psychologism. It proved, so it thought, that logical
thoughts, propositions or what have you, are true
because they are symptoms of healthy brains. It was
a very popular idea.
And what, I hear you ask, is a healthy brain? Well,
it’s a thing you can determine using science. And
what is science? Well, it’s a series of statements about
patterns in data that can be shown to be true using
logic. And what is logic? Why, it’s a symptom of a
healthy brain. And what is a healthy brain? Well, it’s
a thing you can determine using science. And what
is science? Let me explain—it’s a series of statements

4 SPACECRAFT
about patterns in data that can be shown to be true
using logic. And what, pray, is logic? Why . . .
Houston, we have a problem.
Husserl concluded that logical propositions are
independent of the mind.1 They are their own things,
like spoons or spacecraft or slugs. They are “objects”!
(I’m putting object in quotation marks because I don’t
want to get started with all kinds of fancy notions
about objects versus subjects.) It doesn’t matter who
is thinking them. You can be deranged and retweet
something quite sensible. The tweet won’t be affected
by your derangement.
Then Husserl went on to say something truly
amazing. He decided that if logical propositions
could have an independent, object-like format, so
could other “mental” phenomena such as hoping,
loving, wishing, fantasizing, promising. Thus was
born the philosophy of phenomenology. The basic
idea is that things—ideas and wishes but also spoons
and daffodils—come with ways of “having” them or
accessing them, like memes or tweets. Nothing is
naked in the void. So, things such as spacecraft are
as real as things such as baseballs or cricket bats.
Whether they’re images in our mind, or models made
of LEGO, spacecraft are independent of the minds or
brains that are imagining them, or the LEGO bricks
that are modeling them (and so on). If I say the word

INTRODUCTION 5
“spacecraft,” you will visualize something that won’t
just be a symptom of your particular mind.
I love the word phenomenology. When in the
mid-1980s I arrived in Oxford for my undergraduate
degree, I had just discovered it and I said it a lot,
quite possibly under my breath in a highly eccentric
way, and people noticed and made fun of me for it.
Phenomenology had a rather hard time of it for a
few decades, but it’s now enjoying a big comeback. I
think it’s because of two factors: a misinterpretation
of Jacques Derrida, who was himself a devoted
phenomenologist; and because of a resurgence of
scientistic reductionism.2
Derrida developed deconstruction after a careful
critique of Heidegger (who coined the term).
Heidegger had himself launched a thorough critique
of Husserl. What people tend to forget when they
think about this is that both Derrida and Heidegger
are doing “critique” in the way Kant means it.
Critique, as in Critique of Judgment, doesn’t mean
“snarky criticism of.” Critique means “loving, deep
assessment of.” Derrida is critiquing Heidegger
because he likes his work. Heidegger is critiquing
Husserl for the same reason. Derrida’s critique of
Heidegger is Heideggerian, wandering around inside
a topic and eating it out from the inside. Heidegger’s
approach in his Being and Time is a phenomenological

6 SPACECRAFT
one, exploring the fact that how something arises tells
you about what it is. Phenomenology isn’t wrong—
in a way, it’s more right than we might suppose.
“Deconstruction” is not destruction. It is, to use the
coinage of one translator of Heidegger, a destructuring.3
Then there’s scientistic reductionism. Scientism is a
religion; despite the first two syllables, it’s almost the
opposite of science. Scientism forgets that a scientific
fact is an interpretation of data, and supposes that this
fact points to a reality that is more real than others. If
science says we are made of atoms, scientism says that
atoms are more real than human beings and rabbits.
That’s not true and it’s not scientific. Scientists aren’t
really allowed to say what’s more real than what. From
their point of view, that would be like living in the
middle ages, a time of religious authoritarianism.
Scientism reduces “phenomenology” to just
one kind of phenomenology—a fancy word for
“subjective experience of . . .” And we all know what
subjective and experience mean (I’m being sarcastic).
They mean superficial, unscientific impressions. The
trouble with scientism is that some science is afflicted
with it: it worsens the closer one gets to looking at
human beings in a scientific way, in fact. Psychology
is much more reductionist than physics—the really
hardcore materialists these days are psychologists.
It’s psychology that has turned “phenomenology”

INTRODUCTION 7
into “subjective experience of . . .” Psychology gives
phenomenology an even worse reputation than
Derrida. We’ve gone from “the study of how things
arise as a clue to what they are” (which is pretty
much science) to “a series of superficial subjective
impressions.” There’s no effort to explain what is
meant by “subjective” or “impression” and no idea
that “subjective” implies a whole lot of medieval
thinking that psychologists should be embarrassed to
have chittering around in their heads.
This book uses the insight that “ideas” and
“images” are objects in their own right. Spacecraft
aren’t just symptoms of our brains, figments of our
imaginations. They are autonomous beings. They
have something to tell us. I’m also going to argue that
the very concept of phenomenology has ever so much
in common with the idea of spacetime, which Einstein
discovered roughly around the same time, the very
early twentieth century. One of the main goals of
Spacecraft is to allow access to a felt experience of
spacetime—not the empty void that we still too often
assume space to be, but a liquid, luminous swirl.
The medium spacecraft travel within, the
scintillating ocean we call hyperspace, is good old outer
space, but imagined as a substance, a thing, an object!
It’s a peculiar and dangerous habit of western thought
to picture a solid when we hear that word, “object.”

8 SPACECRAFT
For me, objects are all kinds of liquid. If hyperspace
has any cultural roots, it’s in African philosophy and
spirituality, as the liquid that acts as a door or portal:
the Kalunga of the Kongo Cosmogram, the ocean
between the worlds.4 I don’t know whether or not
the concept was directly appropriated by the major
hyperspace shows (Star Wars, 2001, Doctor Who), but
the similarities are quite extraordinary.
Spacecraft and hyperspace go together like the
proverbial horse and carriage. Spacecraft are the
things that “get us” there. If things all have a form—
if ideas are meme-like or tweet-like beings that
have size, shape, vector, point of view, tone, color. . .
then why shouldn’t space itself be like this? This is a
very politically progressive image, as I will explain,
as well as a very cool thing to think about in itself.
Hyperspace is utopian in both senses—we can’t reach
it technically yet, because we can’t travel faster than
light, so it’s a no-place (Greek ou meaning “non”);
and it’s a door between worlds, not exactly a “place”
as western thought imagines such things—Kalunga
is KiKongo for threshold between worlds. But it’s also
a good place (Greek eu meaning “good”), a quiet,
delicious, sparkling cream. I fell in love as soon as
I saw the TARDIS rushing through the spacetime
tunnel of shiny silver in Doctor Who, like the nacre
of a gigantically elongated shell in the shape of a

INTRODUCTION 9
tubeworm.5 (The cosmic portal of the Kalunga is
imagined as the inside of a spiral shell.) Then I saw
Star Wars: A New Hope (1977) at the age of nine,
which confirmed and amplified the love.
In 1977 I was obsessed with aliens. Steven
Spielberg’s Close Encounters and eventually the Royal
Institution lectures of Carl Sagan (and the subsequent
book and TV series Cosmos) convinced me that aliens
existed.6 I still see 1977 weirdly as the future. Jimmy
Carter had put solar panels on the roof of the White
House. Andy Warhol’s “worm” NASA design from
that time kicks the ass of the “hamburger” of the
Reagan years and later. Like hyperspace the “worm” is
a smooth continuum, like a hip hop tag, which you are
supposed to make without stopping the spray of paint
from the spray can. Where did 1977 go, and is there
any way to get it back? It’s still the future. The UK was
interesting then, too. Labour was still in charge. Punk
and Pink Floyd’s Animals (one of my favorite albums)
dominated the airwaves.7
This book is a homage to a way of thinking and
imagining that has nothing to do with mechanical
nuts and bolts and know-it-all performances of
masculinity. It has everything to do with spiritual,
sensual liquids. That’s what spacecraft are really all
about. This is a feminist book about spacecraft and
hyperspace. One of my favorite philosophers, Luce

10 SPACECRAFT
Irigaray, has written on the connection between
feminism and mysticism.8 That’s why a strong impulse
behind this book is feminist. There is a long and rich
legacy of feminist science fiction.9 Moreover, there
is one dominant way to understand the aesthetics of
hyperspace: a feminist one.
Irigaray is central to the way I like to think about the
things that the philosophical school of object-oriented
ontology (OOO) calls “objects”: humans, hedgehogs,
and in particular in this book, hyperspace. I’m going
to be discussing OOO throughout this book, so here
I will just briefly mention a couple of things. First,
ontology doesn’t tell you what exists: we can leave that
to science and history and so on. Ontology tells you
how things exist. If a thing exists, how does it exist?
That’s the question ontology is answering. OOO tells
you that if a thing exists, it exists in such a way that
nothing, not even that thing itself, can fully grasp,
access, affect or otherwise influence it. Nothing.
Think about it. If I bite a banana, I have a banana
bite. If I lick a banana, I have a banana lick. If I peel a
banana, I have a banana peel. If I write a poem about
a banana, I have a banana poem. If I use a banana
in an example of how OOO works, I have a banana
example. If for some reason the banana develops the
ability to speak and goes on a chat show, what it will
say about itself won’t be the banana either—it will

INTRODUCTION 11
be a banana interview. Or say the banana ends up in
therapy: “I first realized I was a banana when I was
being used as an example of OOO in this book about
spacecraft by this crazy philosopher guy. It was very
traumatic.” That’s banana autobiography. Even the
banana can’t access the banana banana!
Irigaray’s idea of the non-patriarchal body as a
multiple entity that doesn’t have any way of being put
into a monist or dualist box, doesn’t have an inside
distinct from an outside, has multiple entry and exit
ports, cannot be grasped by patriarchal philosophy
. . . all these concepts are directly what hyperspace
is all about, I argue. The chapter “The ‘Mechanics’ of
Fluids” in her book This Sex Which Is Not One, cruelly
and unfairly mocked by Alain Sokal, is in fact highly
congruent with how to think hyperspace.10
One of the first titles suggested for this book was
Spaceship. I argued early on that we shouldn’t call it
Spaceship—we should call it Spacecraft. A spaceship
is large. A spacecraft is small—if it’s a boat it’s not an
Atlantic steamship or an aircraft carrier. A spaceship
has a consistent crew. In Star Wars, the Empire’s
vessels are quite obviously ships. They are part of
an official fleet. There is a large and meticulous class
hierarchy on a ship. There’s a captain and a crew—
if you’re on a ship, the captain is at least the master,
or lord, lady, duke, duchess, of the ship, in charge of

12 SPACECRAFT
punishment and marriage and burial. In space, you
see Captains Picard and Kirk officiating at weddings.
You hear a whistle that announces that the captain is
on deck. A spacecraft is some kind of speedy yacht or
catamaran. The work in a spacecraft isn’t a job. It’s a
passion.
You just climb in and fly the Millennium Falcon,
preferably as fast as possible. We can say the same of
the Heart of Gold, the ridiculously fast spacecraft that
is at the center of Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s
Guide to the Galaxy. There’s that sense of “craft” as
skill, in the sense of a technique that you learn, and in
the sense of being “crafty” like Odysseus—his stories
are a little bit like those of the pilots of the Falcon.
Scylla and Charybdis features in the prequel Solo: A
Star Wars Story (2018) in the form of a space monster
and a black hole.
Consider a scene in Close Encounters, which was
released shortly after the first Star Wars film. Roy
Neary is sitting at a train junction. A car seems to pull
up behind him. It speeds off and the driver swears at
Roy, who is stationary, waiting. Then another seeming
car pulls up. The lights rise slowly above Roy’s truck.
It’s an alien spacecraft. Then the Mothership arrives—
now that is a ship. It’s not a “mother-craft.” Roy’s truck
is a craft, and so are the cars and spacecraft that pass
him, horizontally and vertically. The train somewhere

INTRODUCTION 13
on those tracks and the Mothership aren’t craft. They
are ships. Consider the seriousness with which Elon
Musk has named his vessel the Starship. It’s quite
serious. Then contrast that with David Bowie’s rickety
spacecraft in The Man Who Fell to Earth.11 They’re
quite different.
The difference between ships and craft is about
parts and wholes. I am very interested in holism,
because I’m an ecologist. You need to believe in
wholes to be one, wholes such as meadows, oceans,
habitats and cities, ships and craft. But what kind of
wholes are they? There is a ship set theory and a craft
set theory. Ships imply a kind of holism where the
whole swallows all the parts like Pac-Man or like how
water dissolves salt crystals to make salt solution. This
is surely why we talk about the ship of state. We don’t
talk about the craft of state.
Craft set theory is a whole new kind of holism.
Crafts contain things but not entirely. You can hop on
and off. You’re not a uniform-wearing crew member.
In a craft, and I know this is going to sound weird,
the whole is always less than the sum of its parts. We
usually think that wholes are always greater. But this
is just ideology. I believe that for something to exist, it
means that it exists in the exact same way as something
else. This is the basic tenet of OOO, which I’ve already
started laying out by talking about how ideas and

14 SPACECRAFT
images are things in their own right. If there are
football teams, then they exist in the exact same way
as football players. One is not “greater” than the other.
There is one team. There are eleven players. Therefore
the whole is literally less than the sum of its parts!12 This
is such a simple concept. Why does it sound so weird?
It’s because we’re indoctrinated by an idea that wholes
are greater than the sum of their parts. But that leads
in the end to fascism—where one’s identity is totally
defined by the bunch, bundle (Latin, fasces), gang,
squad into which one is incorporated.
We often assume that cars and craft are
expressions of individualism. That indicates a failure
of imagination. We can’t imagine wholes as anything
other than these fascist “solutions” (in every sinister
sense). Cars are seen as “expressions of personal
freedom” as the lead character says in David Lynch’s
Wild at Heart, a phrase imitated by one of UK Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher’s ministers in defending
cars against trains.13 But now we can imagine craft as
wholes, as expressions of holism. Part of the fun of this
book is stealing the Falcon back from the Reaganite
idea of individualism versus the “evil empire” of
Soviet Communism. Alluding to Star Wars, President
Ronald Reagan called the USSR the “evil empire.”14
The Falcon doesn’t fit into neat, clean, official forms of
commodity circulation. It’s a craft whose lot in life is to be

INTRODUCTION 15
stolen, borrowed, rented, won, lost, discarded . . . You don’t
buy it or sell it. You chance upon it. Then you get inside
it, learn how to cooperate with it, and escape somewhere.
Doesn’t this mean that the Falcon departs from the
individualism that bankrolls the form of capitalism
during which Star Wars was created? Doesn’t that mean
that the Falcon might be from the future, indicating ways
of organizing how we enjoy stuff that are different from
neoliberal capitalism?
“How we enjoy stuff ” is a pretty good translation
of the word “economics.” If I give you two dollars,
you can buy this pint of milk (it’s an expensive
supermarket, I’m afraid). Economics isn’t really about
dollars and business cycles. That’s the “alienated”
version of it. It’s really the “house customs” (Greek,
oikos, house; Greek, nomos, customs). Economics
depends on ecology. Ecology is the logic of the
house (Greek, oikos, house; Greek, logos, logic). The
house could be the biosphere, your neighborhood, a
habitat . . . or all three of those, overlapping. If you
have ten bucks, you can fill up your tank with this
much gasoline. The gasoline involves extracting stuff
and hurting lifeforms and building refineries next to
where nonwhite people live. It’s all about who gets
to enjoy (and who gets not to enjoy) the world. The
reason why you can exploit people and drill for oil is

16 SPACECRAFT
that there were fossils that got compressed into oil in
the substrata of Earth’s crust, because evolution . . .
and so on.
We always necessarily find the Falcon somewhere.
It’s never just floating about in a void. It’s always
located. It implies a world—an economics and an
ecology. Someone won it, thinks they own it, parked
it, put clamps on it, some gigantic worm swallowed
it . . .
Ships are docked, in convenient places that
enable them to leave efficiently—they are part of
very specific and unified ways of organizing things:
“Rule Britannia, Britannia rule the waves . . .”15 It’s as
if ships are part of a world so integrated that it has
disappeared. It’s everywhere. It’s the evil empire.
Crafts however are parked. You have to find a place
to perch. Crafts are symptoms of wholes that are
ragged, fuzzy, vague, porous. You can come and go.
You can slip out from underneath.
If we want to think about global economics
and ecology, we need to think in wholes. We need
to think the opposite of Prime Minister Thatcher
who said, “There is no such thing as society.”16 But
we need to think of wholes as “less,” as fragile and
contingent. Ecological beings such as lifeforms and
ecosystems and the biosphere are also wholes whose
parts outnumber them and are disparate, not “greater.”

INTRODUCTION 17
Humans are made of all kinds of nonhuman bits and
pieces—it’s called evolution. Meadows are also made
of all kinds of bits and pieces that they share with other
ecosystems next door to them, such as clouds, streams
and small vole-like creatures scuttling about. In a way
then, ecological beings are crafts, rather than ships.
Ecological beings are Millennium Falcons.
The Falcon provides a way to think about
ecological science, politics, ethics and art . . . and
pleasure. Ecological thinking is usually stuck in shock
mode, and usually comes in the form of oppressive
information dumps and jeremiads about how evil you
are. Wouldn’t it be more fun to think about Chewbacca
and Han Solo and Leia and Rey and Lando and Luke
and so on? This book is predominantly about the
elephant in the room: the most popular, corniest,
well-known series of movies.
There is a naïve, sincere way of talking that is a
part of OOO talk. It’s quite like Star Wars or Sesame
Street or The Muppet Show, which are all related, to
the extent that Star Wars has always been Muppet
Star Wars. Actual Muppets from Jim Henson’s studio,
actual Muppet voices (such as Frank Oz who plays
Yoda) demonstrate this link (first in The Empire
Strikes Back, 1980). But there’s something deeper:
both projects are about using seemingly naïve,
simple, sincere things to make profound social and

18 SPACECRAFT
philosophical points. Both are about democracy,
the idea that anyone can have access to these points,
that anyone can make them. They are also about
expanding democracy to include more than humans.
The Muppet parodies of space movies and television
feature ships rather than craft. Muppets from Space is
the movie, and “Pigs in Space” was The Muppet Show
series.17 Once they show up in Star Wars, they often
pilot craft. Yoda’s craft is a good example of what I
am going to be calling a coracle, a specialized survival
or pilgrimage craft for one. Consider a Falcon-related
scene: Greedo talking to Han Solo in the cantina.
There is no explanation, no mediation. You are just
there, overhearing a conversation between two
lifeforms, and it’s clear that Han could understand
Greedo’s language, a sign of some kind of cultural
understanding and acceptance and a sign that there
isn’t a universal language that everyone has to speak.
Calling Greedo or any other being in Star Wars an
alien would be a big mistake; so would be calling a
Muppet a puppet. Sure, technically they are operated
by humans. But they have such a life of their own.
The point of looking at the Muppets is not to gasp at
the skills of a puppeteer. It’s to find out what Animal
is going to do in Muppets from Space.18 There are no
puppets or aliens in Star Wars and The Muppet Show.
Neither are about human mastery. In lots of ways,

INTRODUCTION 19
they are both about how the human idea that humans
are the masters is mistaken and dangerous.
For quite a while the dominant way for people
like me to be “right” has been called cynical reason.19
One sees through the other person’s point of view
rather than exploring it. It has a bad side-effect. For
example, I can call you out for not being as left-wing
as me, because you don’t realize just how all-pervasive
ideology is. If I can convince you how paralyzed
you really are, I must be very intelligent. It’s like a
game of Pac-Man where my job is to munch down
as many other arguments as possible. This can be a
disaster if both of us are trying to change the world
for the better. Since when did disempowering people
become a great tactic? Writing in a deliberately naïve
way is a very interesting experiment in countering
this.
The other side-effect is that one’s argument sounds
like it is coming from outer space. I am sitting in
judgment on how other arguments are hypocritical,
how hopelessly compromised and flawed they are.
But there I am, saying that—while my own argument
is flawed and compromised because I’m pretending to
be on the outside. If words, thoughts, and ideas come
in the form of pixels, tweets, memes, pencil drawings,
jottings on a notepad or newspaper articles (and so

20 SPACECRAFT
on), there is no way to have a totally naked idea that
isn’t physically embodied in some sense.
Well, let’s take this idea out for a spin. Let’s think
about those spacecraft that show up in our heads and
in magazines and books and movies. I reckon there
must be several spaceships and spacecraft in the
human cultural imaginary. This isn’t an exhaustive
list at all:

The ark
The juggernaut
The frigate
The fighter
The explorer
The yacht
The machina cum dea
The coracle

Yet none of them are exactly the Millennium Falcon.

That is why I’m going to make that spacecraft the
centerpiece of this book. The Falcon can become
any of these types of vessel—it can even be a pirate-
ship version of the frigate, or a miniature juggernaut,
ploughing through towns and rock faces. And each of
these vessels can become other ones. But none of them

INTRODUCTION 21
can be the Falcon. That’s because the Falcon stands for
the irreducible uniqueness of how things are.
Let’s consider these vessels one by one:
The ark. The strongest examples would be the
ark-ship carrying all remaining life forms in Silent
Running; the bone-shaped Jupiter ship in 2001;
and the Endurance containing human embryos in
Interstellar (2014). There is also a powerful episode of
Doctor Who entitled The Ark in Space.20 The Falcon
can become an ark for surviving members of the
Resistance.
The juggernaut. The destructive chariot of Hindu
mythology provides the name for this vessel. The
Death Star and the Imperial Cruisers are juggernauts,
as is the militarized version of the Starship Enterprise
in the second reboot, Into Darkness. As it shaves
bits of building and rock, the Falcon is a miniature
juggernaut.
The frigate. Frigates are warships, such as the
Starship Enterprise. To serve its initial purpose as a
suspect trading vessel, the Falcon is a frigate, equipped
with weapons to prevent its cargo from being stolen
or damaged.
The fighter. The small craft that Obi Wan flies in
the Star Wars prequels comes to mind, along with the
X-Wings and Tie Fighters of the earlier and later films.
They’re only big enough for one or two passengers.

22 SPACECRAFT
 The explorer. They are often shaped like wheels,
such as the space station that orbits the planet Solaris
in Tarkovsky’s film (1972). In the film Interstellar, the
Endurance and its companion craft, the Rangers and
Landers, comprise an explorer (versions of which
are being built for real by NASA). Or consider the
Event Horizon, whose gyroscope-like hyperdrive
folds space and unfortunately summons hell beings
into the bargain.21 The wheel-like space station in
2001 counts as an explorer, insofar as it has been built
to house people who are going to visit the monolith
on the Moon.
The yacht is a lower-key explorer, a more mundane
one such as a touring vessel, like the space-going
Titanic in an episode of Doctor Who featuring Kylie
Minogue.22
The machina cum dea. I’m inverting the phrase
deus ex machina, “god from the machine,” a term
from Greek drama. Consider the motherships of UFO
fame, for example the ship full of Gonzo-like beings
in Muppets from Space or the aliens who temporarily
whisk away the crucified Brian in Monty Python’s Life
of Brian.23 Aristotle warned against employing a deus
ex machina in a drama—which is why the alien rescue
of Brian turns out to be an illusion.
In Aristotle’s day, the machina was a platform on
wheels on which would stand a god or goddess doling

INTRODUCTION 23
out judgments, like a cosmic referee. Aristotle thought
that they violated the “unities”—the fact that a play
that is more integrated in terms of time, place and
“action” is more intense. This is true, I think, because
at its most basic, a play is a dance: dances are in the
moment. Unity of time means you never leave the
present moment; there are no cuts or jumps. Unity of
place means you never leave the moment in another
way—there are no scene changes. Unity of action is
like how dancers can only do what human bodies can
do. Jealous characters should behave jealously and
mountains and trees should not violate the laws of
physics.
The Doctor’s TARDIS is everywhere all at once,
violating unity of time. It is notoriously “bigger on
the inside”—infinite in fact—violating unity of place
(then there’s all the different worlds the Doctor visits in
each episode). The TARDIS looks on the outside like
a police telephone call box from the 1960s, because
its “chameleon circuit” cloaking device got stuck. The
TARDIS is a living breathing violation of unity of
time and place. Surely the Doctor is a dea ex machina?
No. As the lead character, she isn’t the headmistress
who grades everyone at the end. The Doctor always
gets caught in the action. Since the Doctor is just a
regular person, albeit an alien of great intelligence,
she gets angry, confused, makes mistakes, gets too

24 SPACECRAFT
involved or too little involved. Likewise, the Falcon
often functions as something like a dea ex machina.
It swoops in to the rescue at a crucial moment. Only
it doesn’t seem to distribute justice in an absolute
way. It seems, rather, to open up the space for things
to happen. Its version of justice doesn’t come from
outside the universe, but from within it.
The coracle. Some spacecraft are spiritual. The
craft could resemble the coracle of old, in which
hermits sailed to holy lands. A coracle is nowhere
near big enough for a hierarchy, which literally means
“rule of the priests.” Coracles are vessels of mystical
experience, the kind that doesn’t depend on priestly
mediation. One appears toward the end of Samuel
Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
(1797). It rescues the Mariner from his “ship,” on its
last legs from its journey through a netherworld. And
what a netherworld—it sometimes feels very like the
rich disturbing beautiful flickering of hyperspace:

And soon I heard a roaring wind:

It did not come anear;
But with its sound it shook the sails,
That were so thin and sere.

The upper air burst into life!

And a hundred fire-flags sheen,

INTRODUCTION 25
 To and fro they were hurried about!
And to and fro, and in and out,
The wan stars danced between.24

You could only really return from such a disturbingly

magical place via a coracle. A ship is way too clumsy
and liable to invasion and corruption. Likewise, the
EVA pod of 2001, the little spherical vessel in which
Dave is hurtled through hyperspace is very much
a coracle. Coracles are famously round. Coracles
voyage through spiritual liquid. The small sphere
in which Jodi Foster passes through a wormhole in
the movie version of Carl Sagan’s Contact would be
a good example of a coracle, along with the spherical
EVA that Dave flies into the monolith’s hyperspace in
2001.25
As the craft carrying Carl Sagan’s curated humanity
data into the cosmos, The Voyager 1 space probe is a
coracle. What Sagan was able to with its photograph
of Earth, the “pale blue dot,” speaks to this.26 Just as it
left the solar system Sagan had the probe turn around
and take the last possible picture of Earth—the last
because it’s just one pixel large. Then he improvises
extempore on the tininess and pettiness of human
aggression amidst the cosmic wonder, what Percy
Shelley aptly called “a wilderness of harmony.”27
Voyager I becomes a spacecraft in Star Trek: The

26 SPACECRAFT
Motion Picture. A gigantic one, a coracle gone insane,
blown up to contain virtual visions of everything it
has encountered. “V-Ger” has surrounded itself with
a strange spiritual realm, all its data turned into a
curvilinear cloud with no exit that looks very like
the hyperspace on the cover of this book. It wants to
know what it is. It is on a deeply spiritual journey.
As I said above, that unique spacecraft, the
Millennium Falcon, can become all of these vessels. I
have organized this book in terms of how we encounter
it. So it’s logical that our first chapter should deal with
the fact that it’s mostly a “hunk of junk” as Lando
Calrissian puts it—or, more succinctly, garbage.

INTRODUCTION 27
28
1 GARBAGE

“That one’s garbage,” shouts Rey. She’s running with

Finn, an imperial Stormtrooper with PTSD, toward
a craft, a Quad Jumper that will help them elude a
swarm of attacking imperial Tie fighters. Right as she
says it, the fighters blow up the Quad Jumper (Star
Wars: The Force Awakens, 2015). “The garbage will
do,” yells Rey, and the camera turns to the garbage—
lo and behold, it’s the Millennium Falcon.
The Falcon is the ultimate found object in the
world of Star Wars. Indeed, the Falcon stands for the
found-ness of all objects whatsoever, the fact that they
resist total appropriation.
If you could salvage just one thing from the Star
Wars franchise, what would it be? I vote for the
Millennium Falcon. That seems to be how the makers
of the reboots feel about it—let’s not forget they were
part of the audience at one point. The most potent form
of fandom would be—in fact, is—actually creating
another episode of the story. Drama has always been
about the Chorus. We think of the Chorus only as a
group of commentators. But the Chorus are really the
audience, reflected onstage. In the rave-like rituals
from which drama arose, that would be literally true:
we would all be onstage. Modern drama and cinema
with their curtains and screens often feel like an
objectified “thing” we are merely witnessing. But Star
Wars wouldn’t exist unless Lucas thought that you
might want to see something like it. To that extent,
the director is also a member of the audience, just like
how I feel like the first reader of these sentences while
I’m writing.
The director and the writer are like pilots of the
Falcon, who always have to figure out how to do
it on the fly. Free will is overrated. We think that
active means definitely not passive. But this is just a
patriarchal tweet from medieval Christianity, which
parceled up the world into souls versus bodies,
active versus passive. Because the Falcon “tells you”
how to fly it, Han Solo doesn’t have a monopoly on
how to fly the thing. We (including the makers of
the franchise) gradually learn that he wasn’t the
first owner of the spacecraft. Because he isn’t totally
in charge of it, Rey is able to modify it: “I bypassed
the compressor!” she tells him proudly. You have
to read or direct the Falcon—you can’t author it or
master it.

30 SPACECRAFT
 Pilot in Greek is kubernetes—from which we get
the words cybernetics and governor. But governing
in this case doesn’t mean you are the ruler. It means
that you are going along with the sails and the ocean,
steering and veering. When you are veering, are you
doing it or is the ocean doing it to you?1 The tractor
beam moment in the first Star Wars film is a vivid
example of what always happens anyway. We are
always caught in a number of different tractor beams.
Try to drive totally consciously or “actively.” You
will die in a horrible accident. You need to be in a
mild state of hypnosis, as if you were being sucked
forwards by the road and the other cars.
You can’t be in charge of knowing what will come
next. The future can’t be totally predicted. Han Solo
says something really, really remarkable and deep
about this in episode 7. He’s about to launch into
hyperspace from inside a ship. Rey says “Is that
possible?” and Han replies, “I never ask myself that
question until after I’ve done it.” After you’ve “done
it” you might ask that question: how on earth did I
manage to do that? It’s as if the action is also a thing
you can’t quite grasp or know totally. You’re sort of
looking at it as if you were turning a present around
in your hands, wondering what’s inside the wrapping.
It’s moving when Rey says “the garbage will do”
and we realize, as the camera pans left, that she is

GARBAGE 31
talking about the Falcon. Rey and Finn and George
Lucas and J. J. Abrams and we audience members
all want to “pilot” the film. The garbage turns out
to be a wonderful gift. The ultimate present would
be something you already had but didn’t realize,
something that you had thrown away as garbage,
but it was still there because you forgot to empty
the bin.
This is also ecologically true. There is no “away” in
the space of art, just like there’s no “away” at planet
scale. Away just means that your waste just became
someone else’s problem. The Falcon is a kind of shit
that is actually gold. “Away” is just a word for the stuff
that’s to the right of the camera angle. It’s not away
at all, you just have to orient your face and . . . lo
and behold, wonder of wonders, it’s the Millennium
Falcon. You go “Is that even possible?” and realize the
truth of what Han says—before he says it.
Rey knows about craft. She doesn’t have any
money or family. She scavenges for a living. She’s
like a crow—or maybe she’s like a quintessential
human. Humans are scavengers, carrion animals.
You can imagine humans feasting on bits and pieces
left behind by lions. We’ve already seen Rey piloting
something like the Falcon. It’s when she sits on a thin
rectangle of metal and slides down a gigantic sandy
slope. So we know she’s going to be adept at it. We

32 SPACECRAFT
already know that the Falcon is perhaps a surfboard,
or maybe it’s a frisbee.
There is something very significant about all the
vehicles in Star Wars—all the good ones anyway. I
noticed it at once when I saw the first film in 1977.
They are dirty. This was certainly not a feature of
the spacecraft I had seen previously, such as the
Starship Enterprise, the pristine vessels of 2001 or
the space ark of Silent Running. The space station in
Tarkovsky’s Solaris is also quite spick and span by
comparison. What did these dirty spaceships mean?
It meant they had been around, before I looked at
them. They were marked with encounters of which I
had no clue, the residue of other interactions. They
were definitely physical, not just figments of my
imagination.
We often imagine the future and “outer space” as
places without dirt. Dirt is indeed a sign of the past—
something’s happened to your bath and you haven’t
wiped it off yet. So perhaps very simply we assume
that the future must be the opposite—totally clean.
We then add to this all kinds of prejudices about
modern life. Before “now,” things were a lot dirtier.
So after now, they ought to be a lot cleaner. This is just
building our expectations—which are themselves the
past—out into a predictable possibility space that we
call the future. It’s not really the future, not in terms

GARBAGE 33
of something genuinely new, something that we can’t
predict.
The dirty spaceship isn’t just an indicator that it
came from a past we can’t access, quite thrilling above
and beyond the realist aesthetic, the “gritty” realism
as we like to say. The dirty spaceship lets you know
that there could be an unpredictable future. The dirt
is utopian! It’s not a mark of failure at all. Or rather, it
shows you how failure can be a gateway to something
different. The things you don’t expect or predict, the
contingencies of life—the “dirt” or “noise” in the
cybernetic sense, the stuff that seems to get in the
way—have a magical quality.
Think about listening to an LP record, if you can.
You get to a track that you don’t like, but the record is
too far away to change and anyway, you might damage
the stylus if you lift it up and plonk it down clumsily.
So you listen to the tune. This isn’t Spotify or iTunes
where you can determine in advance what you’re
going to hear, or skip over what you don’t like to get to
the tune you do like. After repeated listening, the tune
grows on you. Something new has happened. What
you endured has turned out to be something rich and
creative for you. The garbage you tried to ignore, on
closer inspection, turns out to be a treasure trove.
Life and contingency are like that. You don’t
actively program everything in advance. You can’t.

34 SPACECRAFT
You can never tell in advance whether your program
will really work or not, or whether it will succeed
where others might fail. If you program too much,
you shut down the possibility of improvising, which
also has to do with being “passive” rather than being
“active.” Or perhaps it’s better to say that the binary is
suspicious. Acting is based on attuning or attending
to a situation. Playing music with others is based on
listening. Writing this book means me “listening”
for what you might like to be reading right now. I’m
reading this sentence, just as much or more than I’m
typing it. Moreover, the concept of free will often sets
up a dualism between the being with free will—who
can do anything to anything—and the “anything” side
of the equation. And fundamentally, this relationship
is one between master and slave. The work of Denise
Ferreira da Silva demonstrates this powerfully.2 So
it’s about time we took a serious look at the active–
passive binary.
An old but useful definition of dirt is “matter in
the wrong place” (Mary Douglas).3 That means that
you programmed your world a certain way, and that
the boundaries have to do with property, propriety,
appropriation, the proper. But matter in the wrong
place is just a track on a record that you endure and
might end up growing on you. Matter in the wrong
place is the dirty Falcon covered with a gigantic

GARBAGE 35
sheet that you think you should run past because it’s
“garbage.” But it turns out the garbage will do.
What does in the wrong place really mean? Well,
the matter must be in the wrong place for someone. I
rent a house that was built in 1929. The kitchen floor
is made of wooden slats, painted grey. It’s very easy
for dirt get in those slats, meaning stuff that I don’t
want in those slats. I like cleaning, laundry, tidying,
doing the dishes. Most of my day is spent doing those
things, and that’s also how I have my ideas. So quite
often you’ll find me on my hands and knees cleaning
in between those slats in the kitchen (and the laundry
room) with a sponge.
Garbage is stuff that isn’t for someone anymore.
The dirty slat isn’t how I want the kitchen. I want the
kitchen to look good for me and for my human guests,
and probably even my cat Oliver appreciates some
clean kitchen slats near his bowl. Garbage therefore
tells you something deep about what it means to be a
thing. Oscar the Grouch of Sesame Street, or Diogenes
the cynic in his barrel, or Hamm’s parents in dustbins
in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, are all symbolic of what
the downed spacecraft also symbolizes. Objects don’t
just exist “for” some other being such as a human or
a cat. They don’t just exist in the eye of, or under the
sponge of, the beholder. They do what OOO calls
withdraw, which doesn’t mean they shrink back in

36 SPACECRAFT
space, but that they exceed our ways of handling
them—or any way of handling them.4 Thinking about
them, eating them, licking them, won’t get at the thing
in itself.
But that doesn’t mean that there’s some magical
floor underneath all this that keeps going and going,
like the cartoon character who stays alive no matter
what you do to it. That’s a sadistic and also a racist
(and misogynist) idea of matter that is the default in
white patriarchy. Think about it. To be a thing is to
be fragile. Things can be destroyed. They can die. We
care about the Falcon because it could fall apart—it
certainly acts like it might. That’s why we’re happy
when Rey and Finn make off in it. Its corrupt and
seedy previous owner Unkar Plutt runs out, shakes
his fists and yells “That’s mine!” But it clearly isn’t.
This default “substance ontology” implies that
there is something “standing under” appearances
(sub-stance contains the words for under and stand).
The OOO vision is much more radical. What a thing
is can be found nowhere else than in its appearances.
They are inseparable from it. But the thing is not
reducible to its appearances! A spacecraft is not a
bucket. However, whenever we look for the spacecraft
in itself, we find spacecraft data tailored to our specific
being, our needs, goals, expectations, ideas of what
“true” means and so on.

GARBAGE 37
 What to do with the stuff we call junk or garbage
is exactly our ecological problem today. From plastics
to carbon emissions, humans have accumulated
a lot of garbage, a lot of matter in the wrong place.
Knowing that things are not deeply defined by
what they are “for” seems essential to forming a less
violent, manipulative, and polluting relationship
with the other beings on this planet. To go deeper
with this thought, we need to consider the Falcon as
pure contingency, as something that just happens to
you, garbage or not. We need to think of its status as
something you win.

38 SPACECRAFT
2 WINNINGS

If you can lose a thing or throw it away, you can also

win it or happen across it. This is another dynamic of
the spacecraft in general, and of the Millennium Falcon
in particular. It’s also true of The Heart of Gold, the
craft stolen by Zaphod Beeblebrox in The Hitchhiker’s
Guide to the Galaxy. Some lucky, charismatic person
just comes upon this kind of spacecraft. The Falcon’s
original owner is the very pinnacle of charisma, and
also appears to have won it, in a card game: Lando
Calrissian.
The Millennium Falcon refuses to be a commodity
with an objective price, something determined in
advance relative to the other commodities that people
use. We have seen how it is garbage, a thing that has
fallen out of the commodity exchange system. Now
let’s dwell on the fact that it is also winnings. The
Falcon is something you win in a card game, or not.
You don’t work to win a card game—you play the
hand you are dealt, so there is a whole bunch of your
supposed free will that the card game has suspended.
 No matter how good you are at reading the player
across from you—the real trick of playing a card
game like poker—you are always at the mercy of the
randomly-dealt cards. This can work against you but
it can also work for you. Say you possess nothing in
particular, but you happen to be a good card player,
like the young Han Solo. You enter a seedy bar. You
sit down opposite Lando Calrissian. You’ve seen him
before. He cheated at cards that time. This time you
have a good hand, and you win. You didn’t have the
wealth to buy the Falcon. But now you own it, because
the Falcon was placed into a gift economy, rather than
one of commodity exchange.
From the point of view of strict buying and selling
and making a profit, there is something excessive
and risky about the gift economy. Often they are
indigenous. Gift economies rely on ceremonies
such as the potlatch, a competitive giving-away of
possessions. Whoever can give away the most is the
winner.1
There are several examples of spacecraft that are
won or stolen. The Doctor steals the TARDIS and flees
from Gallifrey, his fraught home planet. The dissident
Blake steals the Liberator in the brilliant Terry
Nation series, Blake’s 7.2 Each spacecraft is a getaway
vehicle—but in each case the real crime scene that is
being fled is perpetrated by the state. The Liberator

40 SPACECRAFT
and the TARDIS are outfitted with very special
powers. The TARDIS is technically everywhere, its
interior infinite, and it’s capable of traveling anywhere
in space and time. The Liberator is equipped with a
very powerful computer, Zen, whose giant octagonal
screen pulses with orange light as the voice of a wise
and pompous old man.
Spaceships are made by the state, and you have
to earn the right to fly them. Spacecraft are stolen
or won and you have to learn to fly them, on the
fly. Because the state does not exhaust the things it
controls, they can slip out from under its shadow. As a
lowly, though beautiful, freighter, the Falcon is able to
leave the remote, flea-bitten spaceport of Mos Eisley
because the state—in this case the Galactic Empire—
can’t control everything.
Spacecraft as winnings demonstrate that the state
is fundamentally weak. The state requires spaceships,
laser canons and planet-destroying tech not because
the state is all-powerful, but because it isn’t. Spacecraft
thus tell us something about how wholes are always
less than the sum of their parts (see the Introduction).
What links the previous chapter and this one is
luck. “I can do this. I can do this”: starting up the
Falcon, Rey is also trusting her luck with the audience
that she can be a good, functioning character in Star
Wars. Coming across garbage or winning something

WINNINGS 41
are all about contingency. Luck is either in the eye
of the beholder, or it’s not. In a truly mechanical,
Newtonian universe, there is no such thing as luck.
But in a universe where quantum theory explains
practically everything, luck is baked into the structure
of reality itself. The Heart of Gold runs on an “infinite
improbability drive” that depends on generating
the greatest amount of improbability possible
and thus occupying every point in the universe at
once, “without all that tedious mucking about in
hyperspace.”3 It arrives at its destination by rapidly
narrowing down the probabilities until, as Trillian
puts it, “We have normality.”
I sometimes think that the word deserve should
be banned. When something nice happens to you,
your friends are liable to go “Congrats! You deserve
it!” Why they can’t spell congratulations in an age
of light-speed internet, I have no idea. I had always
thought that the internet, being so fast, was a great
excuse to make like a character in a Jane Austen novel
and write really polite, formal messages to people.
But people seem to have gotten caught in the speed.
Speedy aggression aside, the trouble with “Congrats!
You deserve it!” is that it’s theistic. It assumes some
kind of mechanical determinism operating behind
the scenes. The problem is that, if you deserve the
great thing, then you also deserve the terrible thing

42 SPACECRAFT
that happens tomorrow. For example, there is no
particular reason why I rather than someone else is
a little bit successful. Conversely, there’s no particular
reason why I am a survivor of various kinds of abuse.
It just happened.
Let’s consider the opposite of luck. In Western
philosophy, this opposite was born right around the
time of Newton, in the thinking of John Locke. For
Locke, luck has nothing to do with owning a thing.
You have to work on it to own it.
“That’s mine!” yells Unkar Plutt, the supposed
owner of the Falcon. He’s been oppressing Rey
forever, giving inadequate portions of nasty food
in exchange for parts she plunders from a crashed
Imperial Cruiser. He’s yelling because Rey and
Finn are flying away in something he considers his
own. He shakes his fist impotently because working
on something or appropriating something doesn’t
mean you fully own it. Someone can always steal it.
The anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was right to
observe that all property is theft.4 America, the Moon,
Australia, Ireland—Anglos in particular have had a
knack of poaching large amounts of real estate. And
as Proudhon observes, the very concept of a slave
implies appropriation and murder.
Another theory of property has to do with labor.
It comes from John Locke. If you work on something,

WINNINGS 43
it’s yours. The trouble is, there’s a limit to working on
something. It’s called destruction. You own something
insofar as you can destroy it. Locke tries to dress the
idea in a smart costume, but ultimately we land in the
same place as Proudhon and Unkar Plutt. Treating
things as property means you have a right to destroy
them. The old patriarchal saying I gave you life so I
can take it away is a very disturbing version of this:
the father has a right to kill their own child because
they “worked on” giving them life. Sadism underlies
this theory of value. “Object” all too often means
something a “subject” can destroy. The Marquis de
Sade is all about who has the right to destroy whom,
to reduce them to the status of a thing that can be
destroyed.
But Unkar Plutt doesn’t own the Falcon exactly
like this. He just acquired it from someone, who
acquired it from someone and so on. It can be stolen.
So the Falcon is a symbol of something that shouldn’t
be destroyed just because you own it. Someone else
could make off with it. It’s not like an “object” in that
sense. Unlike the downed Imperial Cruiser, it’s not
just stuff to be plundered, eventually resulting in no
Cruiser at all.
Unfortunately, both capitalism and Marxism rely
on the labor theory of value. This concept of property
also affects the very idea of who we are as human

44 SPACECRAFT
beings. The idea of an object versus a subject is also
the idea of a slave versus a master. As soon as you have
that dualism, you have a slavery situation, as Da Silva
has argued. The Falcon is saying something about
things that is quite different than normal subject
versus object, master versus slave dualism.
Throughout the Star Wars series, the Falcon
persists, no matter who is flying it. The Falcon is very
definitely not property. Perhaps the best you can say
about it concerning yourself is that it’s home, like when
Han Solo and Chewbacca re-enter the Falcon, having
scooped it up as Rey and Finn fly from the planet Jakku.
“Chewie—we’re home,” says Han, poignantly. “Home”
is a strongly ecological concept. It also underlies the
idea that property is something you appropriate, by
taking it or working on it in some more sophisticated
way. You pick a piece of fruit because you live near
the fruit tree. So really the idea of property depends
upon an idea of living somewhere—and living always
implies a “somewhere.”
The Falcon seems to have an almost magical
ability not to be destroyed. It seems to be made of
substances that graze and break other things, but
that don’t break when they touch them. The hint
that you can’t destroy it even if you try is part of the
scenes where Rey bounces it along and over rocks,
buildings, other ships. And the whole idea that if you

WINNINGS 45
work on something, it’s yours, is clearly troubled by
the Falcon. No matter who flies it, they don’t really
own it. You can encounter it. You can win it. You
can find yourself suddenly running into it to escape
from Stormtroopers firing at you. when you do, it’s
not really yours. It’s like one of those bikes you can
borrow from the city council. The difference is there’s
no city council. There’s no ultimate owner of the
Falcon. So what is the Falcon telling us about how you
can “own” things?
As garbage, the Falcon is stuff you don’t (want to)
think about. It’s the not-(wanting to)-think-about-
ness of stuff. Since its inception, civilization had
garbage places, places where corpses were buried,
toilets that took your waste to a magical place
called away. Now we know, because of planet-scale
ecological awareness that there’s no such thing as
away. Away is just another place that you’re trying
not to think about too hard. Star Wars gave us planet-
scale awareness in the later 1970s.
This ecological lack of an away is about the shocking
ways in which remainders and excessive parts of our
world now come back up into the toilet bowl of our
imagination to haunt us. But the idea of away points
to a deeper kind of hiddenness. Wherever you go,
there’s always something around the corner. Then you
get around the corner and there’s something around

46 SPACECRAFT
that corner. The more you see of the whole planet, the
more this deeper kind of away actually manifests! You
can see maps and schematics and photographs from
space and accounts of Space Shuttle pilots looking at
the aurora encircling the Earth. All these things aren’t
the actual Earth as such. They’re pieces of it, or reports
about it, or photographs or maps of it. The more you
know, the more mysterious a thing becomes.
This is another example of what OOO calls
withdrawal. You can’t see where the manifest aspect
of a thing stops and the withdrawal aspect begins. It’s
like looking at a Moebius strip. Where is the twist in
the strip that makes your walking fingers suddenly
flip over onto the “other” side? The correct answer is
that the twist is everywhere. There is no “other” side—
like there’s no “away” at planet scale—because the
twist in the strip occupies the entire strip. You can see
the whole thing, you can hold it in your hand, and
that’s why it’s so weird. It’s not like there is a hidden
trick. The trick is right there in your face—and that’s
why it’s so magical.
The more we see the Falcon, the more Star Wars
films there are that feature it, the less we can grasp it,
own it, appropriate it, know what it’s all about. Now,
the labor theory of value is saying that the more you
know something, the more you are working on it—
in this case with your knowledge. So you “own” the

WINNINGS 47
thing you know a lot about—hence the slang “own”
meaning “to put down.” You’ve “got it down”—the
hint of subjugation in this phrase is accurate. But it
turns out that no matter how much you know about
the Falcon, you are never ready for who’s going to fly
it next. In one of the “Star Wars stories” prequels, you
find out that a feminist robot keen to liberate other
robots from being the property of lifeforms can fly the
Falcon. She’s not interested in owning it. When she
is “killed” (maybe she really is killed), the remaining
crew incorporate her brain into the Falcon’s navigation
system. The Falcon is then really a “she” insofar as the
Falcon is a feminist robot keen to liberate other robots
from their status as slaves—as property that can be
destroyed.
The Falcon has a feminist, revolutionary navigation
system, a system that doesn’t regard machines such
as droids as inanimate objects that can be exploited.
The slavery theme in Star Wars is very often coded
through droids. “We don’t serve your kind here” is
something a bartender will often tell a droid: it’s all
about slavery and segregation. Aristotle said that
a slave is “a tool with a soul” (organon empsychon
in Greek). But in the logic of Star Wars, a slave is a
soul that has been enslaved, reduced to the status of
a tool, for someone—but whose basic nature exceeds
their functionality and purpose for the master. An

48 SPACECRAFT
OOO object—“before” (logically before) it is “for”
something or someone—is totally real and happy all
by itself. That’s because there is an aspect of it that
is radically impossible to grasp. Slavery is violent
because the world really isn’t like that. The world
isn’t a bunch of tools, some happening to have souls,
waiting to be used by someone; it is not a bunch of
semi-destroyed beings waiting to be taken up in the
service of destroying and appropriating other stuff as
the property of the master.
This ungraspable quality of things is exactly what
the Falcon stands for. The Falcon appears as the third
nonhuman Important Being in the first Star Wars
film, the one that became A New Hope. First we meet
C-3PO and R2D2. Then we encounter the Falcon.
We’ve become used to machines being people by
encountering all the droids. We’ve become aware of
how things can be recycled and repurposed thanks
to the droids’ adventures being sold by the Jawas
on Tatooine. The Falcon shares this recycled quality,
and the sense of being lost and found, rented out
to passengers who want to escape from “Imperial
entanglements.” The Falcon isn’t as animate as the
droids and it’s nowhere near as anthropomorphic. It’s
truly nonhuman. But it’s the first seemingly inanimate
thing with a name, and a personality. The Falcon is
definitely female. Patriarchal discourse refers to craft

WINNINGS 49
and ships as she. Specifically, the Falcon is called she
plenty of times in the first few Star Wars films. By
the time the Falcon is piloted by the robots-rights
quasi-feminist droid L3 and by the woman Rey, this
radical potential has become clearer. Solo and the
third trilogy of Star Wars films revises the patriarchal
gender tensions of the original films.
The irreducibly hidden, occult aspects of things
lead to a consideration of how gender works with the
binaries of subject versus object, master versus slave,
tool-user versus tool. In OOO, anything could be a
tool: a leaf is a tool for an ant. But nothing is just a tool.
When so-called tools malfunction we see this clearly.
Star Wars V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980) is all about
a malfunctioning Falcon. From the first moment we
see it being repaired by a frustrated Chewbacca, to all
those moments when the hyperdrive fails, the Falcon
doesn’t do what its pilots require of it.
For OOO, there is no subject versus object. It’s
all “objects”—which if you prefer could be called
entities, because “object” might make you wince and
immediately think of something plastic that someone
can manipulate. OOO is definitely saying that there
are no beings that are “for” being slaves or tools, no
beings that intrinsically “look like” they are in slave or
tool format. Beings have to be made that way by social
relations, power dynamics. There’s a lot more to so-

50 SPACECRAFT
called objects than their objectification—their being
caught in human systems of meaning and value,
very often at their peril. Some of these entities are
without doubt human—so it’s very important again
to realize that “object” as I’m using it doesn’t imply
a (male) (white) (master) “subject” at all. That’s the
trouble. When we hear the word “object” we see as if
in a mirror the very worst thing that could happen to
us. We should’ve called it de-objectification oriented
ontology, but I guess we ran out of ink.
And talking of objectification and how to resist it,
we are about to explore the most luminously popular
image of a de-objectified world, an image that has
powerfully feminist and anti-racist resonances.
Let’s make the jump to hyperspace.

WINNINGS 51
52
3 HYPERSPACE

“You wanna make that move. You wanna make that

move.” So says Tobias Beckett in Solo. He’s teaching
Chewbacca how to play chess on the holographic
board in the circular lounge at the core of the Falcon.
But the Falcon just is a lounge, a lounge that can
fly. No wonder Mel Brooks recast the Falcon as a
flying Winnebago caravan in the spoof Spaceballs.1
One American fantasy about cars is that they secretly
enable you to remain a couch potato while flying
across the deserts of the Western USA at a hundred
miles per hour. The SUV speaks directly to this
fantasy—consider almost any advert for one. Sedan
cars built around the time of the first Star Wars film
were gigantic sofas on wheels, often outfitted in a
certain light shade of brown leatherette. Sports cars
too, as far as the leatherette went, and in particular
the body-hugging seats of the Corvette, are nicely
positioned between the feeling of being in an aircraft
and the feel of a La-Z-Boy armchair, the schlocky
version of the much more stylish Eames armchair.
The chair has all kinds of controls that enable you
to feel in charge of your letting-go, as you make fine
adjustments to its footrest and tilt.
Arriving in the Falcon is all about learning how to
sit in a leatherette swivel chair. Once you’ve figured
out how to sit in that kind of chair, you might need to
go below and swivel about in a much more radically
swivel-y chair, the ones from which you fire the rear-
facing laser canons. I associate those swivel chairs
strongly with 1977, because it’s when my grandfather
returned from a trip to the USA with a couple of
them. My brothers and cousins used to love to spin
each other around in them, wondering whether if we
span fast enough, the occupant would enter another
dimension.
“That’s no moon. That’s a space station.” Obi
Wan Kenobi interrupts the quickfire banter with an
observation that jolts everyone out of their we’re-
on-a-cruise-in-a-living-room stance. It’s the first
Star Wars film and the Falcon is caught in the tractor
beam of the Death Star. The trouble with the Death
Star is that, like the Enterprise, it’s an open-plan
office, a place were you work under surveillance and
your every reaction is monitored. If you’re not sure
whether or not the Death Star is an open-plan office,
watch British comedian Eddie Izzard’s sketch about

54 SPACECRAFT
Darth Vader in the Death Star canteen. It’s very funny
because, like all comedy, it’s based on an insight we
aren’t directly aware of.2
Lounges are quite different. Lounges allow you
to conceal stuff. You aren’t automatically under
surveillance. The emphasis is leisure rather than
labor. Moreover, the Falcon is a lounge in which you
can travel to another kind of lounge. Sounds cozy,
doesn’t it? But, in a strange way, this lounge is to be
found inside the Falcon. Despite this living room’s
size—it is the size of the universe—you can’t get there
any other way than by climbing aboard. No wonder
when you find it, you sit down in the Falcon’s lounge
and play chess. Its name may surprise you: this lounge
is called hyperspace.
In general, we think of space as an empty container,
like a three-dimensional map with invisible lines on
it. For example, the distance between your face and
this page is, you probably imagine, an empty space
that is “filled” with things such as dust particles and
light rays. But this isn’t true. The relativity equations
of Albert Einstein tell us that it’s a rippling ocean of
spacetime. The empty container idea comes from
Isaac Newton and it’s several hundred years out of
date. It’s not surprising that this idea has persisted.
For one thing, it doesn’t seem to matter very much
at human scales that we move around in a sort of

HYPERSPACE 55
liquid emanated by physical objects. But there’s a
deeper reason. In the background is the way humans
have confused space and time with the measurement
of space and time, for thousands of years. One of
the foundational moments of “civilization” (the
agricultural sort that started about 10,000 BCE) is
exactly this confusion of space and time with their
measurement.
We think of time as minutes and seconds and
years, but those are just measuring categories. We
think of space as meters and miles, but those are also
just measuring points. This is exactly the same thing
as confusing logic with logistics. To get stuff done, you
need an underlying logic about why and how stuff
gets done. We don’t confuse heat and temperature.
We know heat is a kind of radiance: we can feel it
when we hold a hot cup of coffee. We don’t confuse
that feeling with what we see on a thermometer we
dip in the coffee. We don’t seem to know emotionally
that space and time are actually feelings or feels.
When spacecraft travel faster than light, they
enter a realm we often call hyperspace. Fascinatingly
hyperspace is definitely not an empty box. You would
have thought that the hyper in the word meant that
whatever space is, hyperspace is a lot more of it, just
a bigger or grander empty box. But it turns out that
hyperspace has a feel. Hyperspace is “space-feel” just

56 SPACECRAFT
like potato chips have “mouthfeel” in the PR business.
(The word mouthfeel has really bad mouthfeel.) But
there is a much simpler way of putting this:
Hyperspace is a place.
Not only that, it’s a really nice place. It should
really be called hyperplace. This is a truly remarkable
phenomenon. It means human beings are capable of
rising above (hyper means “above” in Greek) the idea
that space is a blank neutral container. Humans can
come into sync with the developments in philosophy
and physics that rocked the world around 1900.
These developments are the discovery of spacetime
by Einstein, and the discovery of phenomenology by
Husserl. What do I mean? Ordinary people realize, in
a visceral and experiential way, that we are not living
in the Middle Ages anymore.
It’s not just about science, it’s about culture in
general. Spacetime (general relativity theory) and
phenomenology might be very much the same kinds
of development, and turn-of-the-century art is an
indication. Only consider Claude Monet’s water lily
paintings, most vividly and accurately displayed in
the Orangerie in Paris. The Orangerie is a pair of oval-
shaped rooms in the Jardin des Tuileries. An oval is
a circle that’s been squeezed, just like spacetime isn’t
totally regular but is squeezed and stretched by gravity.
An oval is also an egg, a vessel that is both a container

HYPERSPACE 57
and a living habitat for an embryo. The visitors are
the embryos in the egg of the Orangerie, and Monet’s
paintings are the yolk, a gorgeous, mauve-blue-green
yolk. Floating in the yolk are little blobs, the water
lilies. They appear not as objects in empty space,
but as an intrinsic part of their habitat, the slowly
rippling, smooth, transparent liquid of Monet’s pond
at Giverny. The pond contains so much else—water
weeds, shadows, the sky. The way Monet paints them,
it is as if the lilies emerge out of this medium. They
don’t just sit in it or on it, it is as if they are symptoms
of the water itself, growing out of the mauve or blue
or green liquid.
This is just like how Einstein imagines spacetime.
It’s also just like how some experimental novelists
imagined prose. When I teach my how-to-read-
literature classes, I start with the idea that prose is
really poetry with really, really long lines that have to
be right-justified and called paragraphs (nowadays
anyway). It seems easy and helpful to do so. But at
some stage there’s a flip, when I determine the students
are ready for it, and instead of teaching prose as really
long poetry, I teach prose as the overall medium which
sometimes can become “hotter” or more “lumpy”
or “reified” as poems. On this view, poems are little
islands like planets or water lilies in a more general
liquid like a pond or spacetime. “Prose” is the basic

58 SPACECRAFT
stuff. Water is the basic stuff. Spacetime is the basic
stuff. Hyperspace is the basic stuff—hyper no longer in
the sense of beyond, but in the sense of concentrated
or condensed, like condensed milk or consommé.
There was a special kind of prose that arose in
English literature around 1900, the kind we call
stream of consciousness. We associate it most with
the work of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Of the
two of them, Woolf is the most radical. Her streams
of consciousness appear wide enough to contain
more than one person’s mind, as if everyone were
capable of flowing into everyone else through some
kind of telepathy. Woolf ’s genius was to push a logical
consequence of narrative realism to its limit. Realism,
as she herself argued, isn’t about detailed descriptions
of things. It’s about a feeling of reality. Through
a brilliant narrative technology that Jane Austen
developed (it’s called untagged indirect speech and it
would sadly be a digression to describe it in detail),
the reader can have something like a telepathic-
seeming experience with a totally unreal person, a
fictional character. In this way, all realist stories are
ghost stories. But if you can get inside one character’s
head, why not several, all at once? And since “mind”
or “soul” isn’t really a kind of smoke trapped in a bottle
(the soul or mind versus body dualism of Medieval
patriarchy), why not?

HYPERSPACE 59
 The point is, stream of consciousness shows you
something very interesting. It shows you that along
with thoughts, there’s an entity that is having the
thoughts, in which the thoughts are appearing. It’s not
so much what you’re thinking, but the fact that you’re
thinking it. The fact that your thoughts are taking
place “within” a liquid-like consciousness.
Hyperspace is in a way regular old space, but
imagined as a phenomenon along the lines of
Husserl—as a thing with specific characteristics,
not just a blank slate. Space is supposed to be what
contains all other phenomena. Space itself isn’t
different from other phenomena such as planets
and people reading a book called Spacecraft. That
means it’s not omnipresent, and that omniscience
and omnipotence are therefore impossible. Space isn’t
evenly always the same. It has contours. It is creamy.
The way hyperspace is visualized as kind of roaring
blue and white pearlescent ocean is a wonderful sign
of real political, intellectual and artistic progress. The
creamy phenomenology of hyperspace means that
space is palpable, not different from galaxies and
gnus. It means that the “whole” of the universe is one
thing, the same as its parts (black holes and boots),
so that the whole is amazingly “less” than the sum of
its parts. It’s not a scary infinite mouth at all. It’s not
swallowing everything and being ontologically bigger

60 SPACECRAFT
than everything. It’s a swirl with blobs called quasars
and cockatoos.
Hyperspace is the ecological niche of spacecraft—
their habitat. Hyperspace independent of them.
Hyperspace is there whether or not you manage to
attain it. A spacecraft enters hyperspace very suddenly,
like a marble plopped into a perfectly marble-shaped
hole. If the spacecraft is the baby, then hyperspace is
the milky bathwater. They go together like a terrapin
and mangrove forest. And just like that mangrove
forest, hyperspace isn’t empty and dark and cold. It’s
warm and luminous.
The term hyperspace was first coined in 1867.3
Thirty years later, the term had evolved to suggest
the two essential ingredients of the geometry of the
luminous ambient realm I am discussing here. First,
hyperspace can refer to any space of more than three
dimensions. Spacetime is four-dimensional since
time is treated as a fourth dimension. Secondly,
hyperspace can refer to non-Euclidean space. The
mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss had figured out
how to create an entirely new geometry, based on
curved surfaces. If you draw two parallel lines on a
piece of paper, they will never meet—they will “meet
at infinity” as the Euclidean saying goes. If, however,
you take a felt tip pen and draw two parallel lines on
an orange, they will eventually meet—at the navel.

HYPERSPACE 61
This is Gaussian geometry. It was pivotal in Einstein’s
description of spacetime. To get the notion of squishy,
rounded spacetime across, his text charmingly refers
to “reference mollusks,” as if spacetime were made
of mussels and oysters.4 The aliveness and wetness
of these images is what hyperspace is all about.
Spacetime isn’t like Newtonian space at all, frigid
and dry. Spacetime is damp, and hyperspace is also
luminous and glistening.
“Traveling in hyperspace ain’t like dusting crops,
boy.” Han Solo says to Luke Skywalker in A New
Hope before the first time the Falcon disappears
into it. At other moments it is said that the Falcon
“makes” the jump to hyperspace. “Making” sounds
a little like how the verb is used in “making love”—
achievement mixed with creation, nicely poised in
the middle of the patriarchal binary of active and
passive. Making hyperspace is thus far, far different
from “dusting” a flat Euclidean and Cartesian surface
with killer chemicals. In that case, there is a subject
and an object, an active and a passive, a master and a
slave. There is contingency involved: you might get it
wrong. Han is giving Luke a valuable lesson that we
could extend to how to grow up from the oppressive
medieval Neoplatonic programming.
Han’s line shows that the Jedi are not the fount of
all wisdom in Star Wars. Far from it. Their original

62 SPACECRAFT
sin seems precisely to be all about trying to establish
a medieval, patriarchal hierarchy (the “rule of the
priesthood”). This doesn’t mean Han is saying
something perfect. All kinds of heteronormative
anxieties are tangled up in what Han is saying: he is
an older man displaying his prowess. But he shouldn’t
worry. In Solo, we see that Lando Calrissian has buried
the memory of L3-37, his feminist robot girlfriend,
deep in the guidance system of the Falcon. The males
tinkering with the knobs in the cockpit shouldn’t be
so concerned—females are in charge.
When the Falcon finally “makes” hyperspace, it
is as if swallowed in the vagina—or for that matter
the anal sphincter—of its substance. The baleen of
the black-and-white lines of stars and space seems to
engulf the Falcon and to twist slightly like a sphincter
opening and closing (think of an iris or a camera
shutter). The Falcon is often about to get swallowed by
other beings—a “gravity well” or black hole, a gigantic
space monster rather like a sea-monster, a huge worm
that bites as the ship escapes its stomach. The only
tube it wants to be swallowed by is hyperspace, thank
you very much. This is the tube of staying alive, rather
than of dying.
Star Wars is all about the Force. In short, Star
Wars is all about telekinesis, or as Rey puts it,
“lifting rocks” (without touching them). One of the

HYPERSPACE 63
primordial features of the Falcon is its effortless
ability to defy gravity. People push gurneys around
corridors. Land speeders float across the surface of a
desert planet. But the Falcon is the first vessel we see
taking off from a planet and exiting its gravitational
field. The Falcon weaves together the mundane world
of weirdly snouted aliens in bars and the spacious
voids of the far-away galaxy, haunted by the ships
of the empire, which tend to lumber, or just sit
there (The Death Star), or appear with a sudden
horrifying jolt and come to a full stop. The Falcon
weaves. The language of anti-gravity and hyperspace
travel has very much to do with cloth. We talk about
how wormholes, if they exist, fold space in an extra
dimension, enabling travel between unimaginable
distances. In Star Wars, the Falcon is the craft that
introduces us to hyperspace.
We never really see warp space in Star Trek—we
see ships zooming into warp drive and there are some
scenes where we witness hyperspatial stuff outside a
window. There is the infamous scene in the first Star
Trek movie (Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a scene
that took weeks to shoot), in which the Enterprise
creates an artificial wormhole. And there’s a scene in
the second reboot (Star Trek: Into Darkness) in which
a heavily weaponized star ship pursues the Enterprise,
and we see the “tunnel.”

64 SPACECRAFT
 In Star Trek there are degrees of warp (factors one
to ten), whereas in Star Wars there’s just hyperspace
or not hyperspace. The idea that you can control how
much warp you have is deeply technocratic and even
imperialist. If you can have degrees of warp, then you
can measure it. Whoever has the most accurate way of
measuring warp has the most power in the Star Trek
universe. But you can’t measure hyperspace; it’s not a
thing to be measured. It’s the whole idea of measuring
anything at all—what the Kantian sublime evokes.5
The Empire can therefore never have a monopoly
on it. They can’t parcel it out. They can’t own it.
Hyperspace is a thing, a thing in its own right. The
seemingly democratic Star Trek loses to the seemingly
reactionary Star Wars.
This difference between warp and hyperspace is
a bit like the political and philosophical difference
between Hegel and Kant. For Hegel, there are
amounts of realization, which ends with him saying
that white western people have more of it than others.
In Kant, there’s just freedom and not freedom. It’s
like hyperspace. Either you can make it, or you can’t.
It’s not like dusting crops because it doesn’t imply an
agricultural hierarchy in which there are landlords
and peasants and slaves and plants. There’s no
gradation. So “making” it always involves a kind of
luck or serendipity. You can’t make it a little bit, then

HYPERSPACE 65
get better at it. You just set the controls and zoom. You
can’t have more of it, once you’ve made it. It’s not a
thing you can parcel out. Its thingliness is incarnated
on the screen as a luscious black- or blue-and-silver
fluid, as if the wonder of the early silver screen were
invading the mundane glitziness of technicolor.
Hyperspace settles down from the initial whoosh
to a whirl or indeed a whorl. The curves of a spiral
shell; the patterns of fingerprints; the radiation of
leaves and flowers from a stem; a convolution or
wreath suggesting movement—whorl captures very
well that quality of moving while standing still, and
a quality of mathematical beauty, and a quality of
being a physical, substantial thing. A whorl on a
spinning wheel is a small fly-wheel that regulates
the wheel’s speed.6 A sense of containment, of order,
of beauty . . . hyperspace is not just the sublime
freedom rush of the whoosh. My idea of hyperobjects
comes in handy here. A hyperobject is something
so vast in space and time that you can only “see”
bits of it at once, and yet it’s not infinite. It’s just
really really large—our biosphere would be a good
example.7 Hyperspace, as a hyperobject, has a kind
of finitude—it’s this way, it’s not that way, it has this
kind of movement, not that kind. In lots of ways
actual hyperspace is a gigantically beautiful entity,
not a sublime infinity.

66 SPACECRAFT
 Hyperspace or warp space has been a tunnel since
2001 and Doctor Who. Stanley Kubrick lived in the
UK and must have seen the way the opening credits
evolved to pay homage to his 2001 Stargate. What is
the basic phenomenology of traveling down a tunnel?
It is moving while being still. The end of the tunnel may
grow larger, but doesn’t arrive; the “end” of hyperspace
never seems to grow larger. At a distance, it might
grow very slowly from what appears to be a small
point—the light at the end of it. (Many people who
have had near death experiences (NDEs), or who have
taken DMT, or studied the Tibetan Book of the Dead,
report about this tunnel.) And the tunnel has its own
reality—it’s not just a dark empty tunnel. It is luminous
and flowing, and in the case of the mid-1970s Doctor
Who tunnel, it appears to be infinitesimally ribbed.
I’m talking here about sex not merely to titillate,
but to make a political point. Hyperspace is
pleasurable, blissful. There’s a reason for all those
disco references to hyperspace.8 After watching Star
Wars, the meditation students of Chögyam Trungpa
would refer to the states of meditation bliss as
“hyperbliss.”9 Hyperspace is about what Blake called
“an improvement in sensual enjoyment.”10 Spacecraft
“making hyperspace” has to do with achieving a
utopian energy, perhaps an energy not based on the
deadly burning of fossil fuels, a more benevolent form

HYPERSPACE 67
of human coexistence with one another and with
other lifeforms.
The “howlaround” effect in the opening credits of
the early series of Doctor Who also conveyed feelings
of a rippling, flowing movement-while-still. It’s quite
an easy special effect to achieve.11 Significantly, the
use of the word “howl” captures, as if synesthetically,
the “sound” of rushing through a tunnel rendered as
a visual effect. NDEs often include very loud sounds,
like the churning of the Doctor Who TARDIS or the
sound of hyperspace in Star Wars, or indeed the
rushing sounds in Kubrick’s Stargate sequence. Or, as
one Tibetan teacher says of the “in between” tunnel
of the bardo between lives, “the roaring sound of the
immeasurable void.”12
The hyperspace of Star Wars is a fully, sensually
realized time liquid, a liquid that influenced the
opening credits of the Doctor Who reboots since 2005.
It has nothing to do with the after-death bardo space
that 2001 evokes. It’s trippy, but that doesn’t mean it’s
mental or conceptual or psychological. It has a physical
feel to it. You enter suddenly when you push forward
a certain throttle on the control panel. The stars ahead
begin to stream light as if points are turning into lines.
Then all of a sudden, zoom, there you are.
What happens is well described by the feminist
word circlusion.13 We often think of spacecraft, for

68 SPACECRAFT
obvious patriarchal reasons, as phallic symbols
penetrating the hyperspace tunnel. But it is more
accurate, and less violent, to think of it the other way
around. Bini Adamczak developed the very helpful
verb circlude and the noun circlusion to describe any
process of enveloping—a hand around a sex toy, or an
anus around a finger, for example, or a mouth around
a nipple. Here’s a salient paragraph:

Think of the moment when you were taught in

school how to prevent the spread of sexually
transmitted infections. No one would ever think
of trying to push the banana into the freshly
unwrapped condom, would they? But the task
of correctly applying a condom is easy when you
think of it as unrolling the tube onto the banana.
Indeed, circlusion is an extremely common
experience of everyday life. Think of how a net
catches fish, how gums envelop their food, how a
nutcracker crunches nuts, or how a hand encircles
a joystick, a bottle of beer . . .

Adamczak coaxes us out of the habit of associating

penetration with certain parts of the body and with
a certain kind of violence. Hyperspace circludes
the spacecraft. The roaring, wheezing sound of the
TARDIS as the Doctor enters hyperspace is something

HYPERSPACE 69
like the grinding churn of air or fluid surrounding the
craft and entering into some kind of friction with it.
(It was created in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop
by dragging some keys across some piano strings.)
Indeed, at one point the Doctor is told that he is
basically leaving the parking brake on and that the
ride through hyperspace could be much more silent
and well lubricated. The way the Falcon appears to
spiral or swivel into this circluding liquid reminds me
of the leatherette swivel chairs in the various Falcon
cockpits, and that one of the original senses of swivel
is fuck.14
Hyperspace circludes the craft because, at light
speed or faster, that craft isn’t really traveling at all.
This Einsteinian factoid is suggested by the engineer,
Scotty, in the first Star Trek reboot, when a very old Mr.
Spock types out his equation for trans-warp beaming,
teleportation at speeds faster than light. “Imagine
that—it never occurred to me to think of space as the
thing that was moving!” It’s why I very much like this
book’s cover design. Hyperspace on the cover of this
book is its own “thing,” a place that seems in fact to
be approaching the ship, rather than the other way
around. There is a tension between the supposed
reality of the Cartesian and patriarchal space that the
ship is traveling through, and the hyperspace that is
about to envelop it.

70 SPACECRAFT
 We are moving from a regime of penetration to
one of circlusion. In the Star Trek reboots, the spring-
like recoil is definitely as if space itself were sucking
the ships into it—circluding them in its warp, a word
that suggests the feminized activity of weaving and its
soft, winding, twisting fabrics, rather than the straight
and narrow grids of Cartesian space. In the Star
Wars series, when a vessel enters hyperspace, they
disappear, exactly as if they had been enveloped by
a thick medium that makes them invisible. Warping,
the thing that the Norns do, the Norse female beings
entwining us in the web of fate.
The word weird is derived from the old Norse
urthr, which means twisted into a loop.15 Weirdness,
“fate,” and the deja-vu-like feeling that it’s happening,
is the twisting of twine into a loop—the thing western
civilization has been trying to straighten out into “fate”
as a matter of fact. Fate is set in stone and mechanical,
you can’t stop it. Weirdness is twisted and strange
and knowing. Warp drive, metaphorically speaking,
requires weirdness.
The Falcon is many things—a Frisbee, a super
flat sports car, probably a Corvette, the sort of one
that an American working-class person might be
able to afford, just about, if it was second-hand. It’s
a sand dollar. And it’s also a vulva—a vulva rushing
through the vulva-like realm of hyperspace. It’s what

HYPERSPACE 71
in heraldry and in deconstruction is called a mise-en-
abyme, where in a shield design there is a little version
of the shield design in the middle. Who or what is
“making” whom or what? The vulva of hyperspace
circludes the vulva of the Falcon which circludes
the passenger pilots . . . I think that the reason the
political right appropriated Star Wars is because it
doesn’t really fit their agenda.
The evocation is of something beyond speed, a speed
beyond speed itself, as if we were experiencing velocity
as such, rather than a specific one. It’s like what Kant
says about the sublime. The sublime gives you a feel of
magnitude, beyond any specific number or amount.
Try counting up to infinity. You never get there . . .
then you suddenly realize, whoa, that is infinity—a
number I can’t reach. It’s not a series of nines going
on forever. It’s uncountable . . . it’s a kind of number,
but you don’t know what.16 Infinity is the withdrawal
aspect of an OOO object. You can literally hold it in
the palm of your hand, as in the Blake poem—it is
the palm of your hand.17 Infinity means there might
be three of whatever it is, but you can’t know yet. This
not-yet quality, this futural, open quality is exactly
what we are experiencing in the sublime, and if
OOO is correct, it is a basic feature of every entity
in the universe, from spoons to Grand Moff Tarkin.
Everything is a TARDIS—everything is “bigger on

72 SPACECRAFT
the inside”—infinitely bigger. That’s a thing I said in
my book Hyperobjects, and as I observed just now,
the hyperspace of Star Wars is a wonderful example
of a hyperobject: something so massively distributed
in time and space—it sort of just is time and space,
everywhere and everywhen all at once—that you can’t
point to it. It’s invisible because it’s everywhere.18
That’s like the future. The future is everywhere,
you can reach it any time—the real future or as I like
to say sometimes, the future future. Futurality is the
possibility that things could be different. It’s like what
Blake says, again, about seeing eternity in a flower, or
how Walter Benjamin talks about how each moment
could be a gate into utopia. It’s not visible, but you
can feel it. The hyperspace of Star Wars is the closest
a regular cinema-goer gets to realizing that film isn’t
just about the visible, but about the invisible, and in
particular, the feel of motion, all that liquid celluloid
spooling through a projector (Star Wars was shot in
luxurious 70mm). It’s a lovely gift that George Lucas
gave to ordinary people—something utopian to keep
them going.
I dislike the popular left-wing cynicism and despair
that ideology is everywhere and that my telling you
how paralyzed and trapped we are indicates how
much more intelligent than you I am. I believe that
the “ideology is everywhere” ideology is wrong for

HYPERSPACE 73
the right reasons. It’s true, but it misses something
crucial. Ideology may be everywhere, but it’s not
everything. Another way of saying this is that the past
is everywhere—just look at the wreckage around you
we call “the present moment.” Everything is a story
about how something happened to that thing. My
face is a map of all the acne I had when I was nineteen
years old. But who is this Tim Morton anyway?
What exactly is a face? What does this poem—which
consists of hundreds of deliberate and non-deliberate
decisions made to put a rhyme here, an image there—
mean? What is this building? We can see how it was
made by looking at it and walking around it. But what
is it, really? This window isn’t just “for” someone to
look through. It’s also a landing strip for dust and
flies. So, what is it?
The past may be everywhere, but it’s not everything.
Things could always be different. Everything has
a “hyperspace” quality. To this extent, it really is
perfectly possible to “see” the future. In Star Wars,
this seeing is more of a feeling—a recoil.
Everything has a secret passage, a hidden corner,
because of time. When I round the corner in this
hotel in Brooklyn I’ve just arrived at, searching in
vain for my room, the corridor I was just walking
down becomes the strange, hidden corridor. The
secret quality of things is the future. So it’s not totally

74 SPACECRAFT
hidden: you can feel it. We can actually “hear” a secret.
Try it. Say to yourself, “Some things are impossible to
speak about.” You just did speak about them. It’s like
leaving Plato’s cave, which is a great proto-cinema.
When you leave, you’re so blinded by the light that
you can’t see it. Then you go back down into the
cinema-cave and try to explain, but no one else has
“seen” this blinding light, so you can’t say it. It’s like
you can taste sugar but you can’t speak, which is the
analogy Buddhists use to describe the elusive but real
(to them) “nature of mind.” The future isn’t visible,
not visible in an “ocularcentric” objectified way, there
before you look, but you can feel it in a sensual rush,
a physical movement of orientation. That’s what the
“whoosh” of making hyperspace is.
Something crucial occurs before you can leave
Plato’s cave and see the truth. You must twist or turn
around in your seat. That’s exactly what making
hyperspace is. It’s a twist or turn like that, profoundly
kinesthetic. This kind of turn was noted by Martin
Heidegger in his wonderful and spooky reading
of Plato’s cave.19 When we talk about a “linguistic
turn” or a “nonhuman turn” and so on, we are using
Heidegger’s language. To see, you first have to orient.
That’s what we’re seeing when we enter hyperspace.
We’re “seeing” withdrawal. We’re seeing the outside of
Plato’s cinema cave, or rather feeling it in the basic

HYPERSPACE 75
twisting turn, like trying to see something out of
the corner of your eye—when you look directly, it’s
gone. It’s not like the private experience of Dave in
2001. We see something through Dave’s eyes, but we
don’t see the blinding flash of the future itself. We see
a bunch of trippy colors and patterns. It’s more like
the “room” in Tarkovsky’s Stalker.20 We “see” a room
in which all our wishes could come true. Trouble is,
that idea is paralyzing. Yes, I’m saying that Star Wars
is more sophisticated than a Kubrick film, more
philosophically sophisticated, and more politically
sophisticated, and readily available to anyone who
cares to watch a YouTube clip. And I might even be
saying that it’s more politically sophisticated than a
Tarkovsky film, sacrilegious horror of horrors. That’s
because hyperspace isn’t paralyzing, like the room
in the Zone in Stalker. It’s not like the alien idea of
god (Tarkovsky plays with Christian themes a lot).
Hyperspace doesn’t freeze you in the headlights. It’s
the very possibility of moving at all, anywhere. And
anyone can achieve it. It’s not for an elite selected
by the military like in 2001 or people who pay for
an exclusive tour like in Stalker. You can “make”
hyperspace even if you’re a gun-slinging low-life from
a seedy bar in a dirty desert town.
In Star Wars, we are not alienated from the
possibility that things could be different. We are not

76 SPACECRAFT
alienated from the future. Fascism believes we have
been alienated from a “great” past that we could
somehow find underneath the scraps and fragments
of the present. I think that socialism or communism
believes we have been alienated from the future.
We don’t say it much. We often say that the idea of
alienation implies some kind of authentic state “from”
which we have been excluded (the past). But this is
just religion. It’s right for the wrong reasons—we are
alienated, but not from the past. Once you get used to
it, the idea that we have been alienated from the future
is much easier than thinking about some kind of fall.
Exactly how could a fall have happened if everything
was perfect? And just look around you—if you can
see stuff that isn’t quite right, it means that the past
sucked. It couldn’t have been perfect. The past is just
all the crumbs of all the cookies that crumbled so far.
But all the mountains of cookie crumbs in all world
don’t imply that there isn’t cookie dough ice cream.
The sophisticated “ideology is everywhere”
theory—the thing someone like me is supposed to
teach you in theory class is, as I just said, wrong for
the right reasons. The crude “we are alienated from
a natural state” theory is right for the wrong reasons.
We are alienated from the future, which is strictly
invisible and unspeakable, if you try to point to it
with a spotlight, but not “un-feelable.” That’s the

HYPERSPACE 77
other thing about Star Wars hyperspace, talking of
spotlights. It’s as if there’s nothing to focus on. It’s just
a flood of light. We are illuminated by the cinema
screen, which has become a floodlight.
It’s like the end of a rock concert when the lights
turn on the audience. It means “You’ve got the controls,
you’re part of this, everything you see on the screen,
all the characters and the action, is the holographic
R2D2 projection of you, the audience.” We often forget
that the audience is part of the drama because of the
conventional fourth wall that turns the theater into a
shop window display or fishbowl that we are peering
into. But drama comes out of dancing—that’s what
“chorus” means: singing, dancing, “raving” people.
Sometimes someone steps out and does some moves,
and then this gets formalized as “the protagonist.”
Then someone else steps out (the antagonist, the
supporting characters) and so on. Eventually the
chorus just evolves into the commentator or the laugh
track and we forget that they are the whole thing, and
that we are part of the chorus.
That’s also how to understand a pop song. A
lyric is always about the chorus. The verses are just
“examples” of what the chorus is talking about. It’s not
that the chorus is a commentary on the verses. It’s the
other way around. This is Nietzsche’s theory of how
tragedy arose in ancient Greece.21 It is now speculated

78 SPACECRAFT
that language itself, as in words and phrases (loads of
beings “have” language in other ways), emerged out
of rituals that were like humanoid primates raving
and going “make some noise!” as one might do in a
nightclub.22 Language came out of applauding.
No wonder there was a round of applause when
the Falcon first “made” hyperspace. It’s not just
because it’s a dazzling effect. It’s because it’s a fourth-
wall-collapsing, deeply empowering, you’ve-got-the-
controls moment. We all become pilots of the Falcon
at that moment. The Falcon making hyperspace is
a moment of un-alienation. It’s realizing, halfway
through a very immersive drama, that there is an
outside of the cinema, that the reason this is all
happening is because you paid for a ticket, and
because George Lucas made a film with the idea of
you wanting to see it very much in mind. It’s a moment
of release from the pesky Imperial cruisers around
Tatooine and it’s just a stunning visual effect, in which
the cinema screen is flooded with bright lines, as if
it had turned into a Bridget Riley painting, rather
like how the sounds of hyperspace and the TARDIS
resemble the found sound and musique concrète. A
representational, cinematically realist film gives way
to something by Stan Brakhage, just for a second.
Hyperspace shows the cinema viewers that they are
looking at a screen. It’s a dazzling effect of being un-

HYPERSPACE 79
dazzled by all the characters and stories. It’s like that
Situationist adage, “Beneath the street, the beach.” It’s
a deeply anti-imperialist moment. The statues and the
concrete may be all around you, oppressing you. But
really there’s nothing stopping you from tearing them
up and chucking them in the river. Hyperspace is that
river.
This is where we need to talk about the dominant
visual effect for producing hyperspace: slit-scan.23
John Whitney pioneered it for Vertigo, and Douglas
Trumbull saw the sequence that first uses it. Trumbull
subsequently made the effects for To the Moon and
Beyond.24 Stanley Kubrick saw this film and employed
Trumbull to make the Stargate sequence of 2001. The
effect was also pioneered by Bernard Lodge for Doctor
Who. Slit-scan was still used in some way to create
the hyperspatial tesseract scene inside the black hole
toward the end of Interstellar.
Slit-scan involves time, adding an extra sliding
or gliding through time to produce the image. The
medium through which the film is shot—the slit,
is the thing that moves: “It never occurred to me to
consider space as the thing that was moving.” Slit-scan
also implies immersive, palpable space. Panoramic
photography was the first technology to employ slit-
scan. Before they were photographs, panoramas were
environments, huge cylinders that one could walk

80 SPACECRAFT
through, descending a spiral staircase. You move and
the immersive painting moves with you. You, in a
sense, are the moving slit. There were panoramas in
Leicester Square in the Romantic period, and William
Wordsworth visited them. It’s quite possible that this
deliciously popular experience is what enabled him
to invent a whole new poetics that destroyed the
objectification and fixity of the “landscape” art of the
picturesque.
Picturesque art is still with us—it’s called the selfie.
Back in Wordsworth’s time, the selfie was an inverted
one—a charming image of a landscape (a word
that itself means an image of land) that displays the
good taste of the viewer of painter. Before cameras
showed up—before smartphones with their fish-
eye lenses reinvented all this for us—people used
the Claude Glass. It was a hemispherical lozenge of
sepia-colored glass that would turn the view into an
aestheticized image, albeit upside down, sepia-tinted
like a tasteful ink painting. To achieve the best effect,
users of the Claude Glass would get into a position
called repoussoir, down and to the side of the view.
This is the exact inverse of the up-and-to-the-side
view popular for selfies today. And that’s because it’s
really the exact same thing: it’s just a selfie made of
nonhuman beings. That’s the trouble with landscapes,
including landscape architecture, which does it

HYPERSPACE 81
for real: they’re selfies made of nonhumans, like
Archimboldo paintings.
Not so the panorama. And this counter-tradition
of immersive, disorienting popular art continued
into the twentieth century. To the Moon and Beyond
was projected onto a domed screen, which must
have made Trumbull’s slit-scan effects particularly
immersive for Stanley Kubrick, who was sitting in
the audience as the film played at the World’s Fair
in 1964. John Whitney’s experiments had to do with
spiraling—a moving and opening while standing still.
His spiral opening out of the eye in Vertigo’s opening
sequence is the classic instance. The technique has
some resemblances with the pullfocus or “dolly
zoom” which Trumbull also used for the Stargate
sequence. In a pull focus, a camera zooms in on an
image while being pulled away from that image. The
effect is uncanny, as if a thing we might experience
as static is somehow moving while not moving, as if
breathing with a life of its own.
This is precisely the living space of hyperspace, a
breathing, palpable thing. Organic, yet not necessarily
“alive” versus “dead,” and so uncanny. That kind of
“alive” is overrated anyway—it’s what we call survival
mode, living as resisting death at all costs, which
Freud brilliantly called the death drive.25 Life as such
is more like a quivering between two different types of

82 SPACECRAFT
death, a slit of flesh moving between not existing at all
(decay) and doing the same thing over and over again
(burning out). Life is the sound and texture and look
and feel of rippling flesh.
The best way to think of an OOO object is to think
of it as a liquid. Quick, think of an “object”—you
visualized something solid didn’t you, like a ping pong
ball or a LEGO brick. In particular, hyperspace has a
body-fluid-like liquidity, so it seems vital to rethink
what we mean by “object” to come to terms with it.
Hyperspace moves and slips around itself, all by itself.
The first female Doctor Who—the latest incarnation,
played by Jodi Whittaker—pilots her TARDIS
through a kaleidoscopic, substantially viscous version
of this time liquid. Spacetime as a liquid appears in
the dimensional portals in the beautiful Afrofuturist
short film Until the Quiet Comes, by Khalil Joseph.26
They are utopian portals that allow time to flow
backwards, reanimating the body of a murdered Black
man, whose beautiful, uncanny backwards-seeming
dance evokes a feeling of time being capable of
redemption. The Kalunga, the Kongo portal between
the worlds, is the watery liquid that we see swirling at
the beginning, middle and end of the film, and this
Kalunga is exactly hyperspace.
When we enter or “make” hyperspace, it’s also like
having an orgasm. The fourth wall collapse I discussed

HYPERSPACE 83
a moment ago is a kind of orgasm of the film stock, a
sudden shudder or “petit mort” as the French say about
coming: la mort, l’amour. There is a sudden spring or
ripple that demonstrates how not in control of our
bodies we really are. We move from extreme pleasure
into bliss. In the esoteric “tantric” parts of Hinduism
and Buddhism, bliss is a pathway beyond the ego—
into the hyperspace of enlightenment. Remember that
Buddha became enlightened because he ate something
creamy and delicious and sweet, like hyperspace—a
bowl of rice pudding. Hyperspace is an erotic version of
space rather than a scary or blank one. In Interstellar, the
voyage of the Endurance through the wormhole seems
scary, a rushing darkness full of the clattering sounds
of malfunctioning ship mechanisms. But after Cooper
discovers how to work with gravity inside the tesseract
in the black hole, he finds himself in the hyperspace
mother-of-pearl. It’s a special five-dimensional cream,
all silvers and blacks, in which he can swim and reach
into the ship carrying him and his colleagues through
a wormhole in the past, to shake hands with his
prospective girlfriend, Doctor Emilia Brand.
The return of Cooper through the wormhole to
Saturn is through a region that we no longer see as
a scary darkness, but is inverted as a white sparkling
brilliance, a sort of ice cream sauce, liquid and oozing
with honey-colored and dark caramelized lumps.

84 SPACECRAFT
Cooper’s dissolution into the hyperspace sauce, while
the geometrical tesseract in which he figures out how
to tell his daughter how to discover quantum gravity
is collapsing, is remarkably like a religious experience
or death or orgasm: “What happens now?” he gasps
as he dissolves into light. What happens now—it’s an
orientation toward the future as truly unknown and
unknowable, rather than just mechanically repeating
the past. What happens now is the feeling of falling in
love, having a spontaneous twinge such as an orgasm
. . . or entering hyperspace.
The encounters of the Falcon are deeply physical.
In Solo, the Falcon avoids the Scylla of a gigantic
space monster and the Charybdis of a black hole
by making hyperspace just in time. It’s making
the “Kessel run” for “spice,” whatever that is. (One
perhaps assumes after James Herbert that it’s a kind
of drug. It’s expensive enough.) It’s working hard.
After a particularly supreme effort, the crew can relax.
Or consider the moment in The Empire Strikes Back
when the characters realize that what they took to
be a cave is in fact the esophagus of a gigantic space
worm. In The Force Awakens, Han makes hyperspace
while the Falcon is stuck to a giant murderous slimy
sphere called a Rathtar.
To the outside world, you disappear when you
enter hyperspace. But for you, it’s as if you’ve stepped

HYPERSPACE 85
out of the street into the lounge. Star Wars sensualizes
hyperspace in this way—hyperspace is not a place of
cosmic speed and massive realizations, but rather a
quiet lounge. There’s an achieved privacy. It’s soft
and comfy. You can play chess. You can flirt. You can
talk about boyfriends. Suddenly you arrive at your
destination and your spacecraft floats a little. It’s as if
you have been in a traveling lounge that can relocate
anywhere. Then you have to get to work and do stuff
like fighting or landing.
This is a distinct improvement on how hyperspace
happens in 2001. There, hyperspace is a luxury palace
not unlike Versailles, and it has a grid on the floor
that disappointingly turns it into an empty box.
Dave voyages through the spatiotemporal liquid in
a coracle-like EVA. We see glimpses of his freaked-
out face rushing through the trippy tunnel, and
this plus his helmet plus the spherical EVA are not
unlike like Scottie’s head traveling down the tunnel
of misogynistic paranoia in Vertigo.27 Dave voyages
through the mystical liquid, complete with sperm and
eggs and melting lava, only to find himself in a luxury
version of Newtonian physics. Just as comfort is more
progressive than luxury, the hyperspace of Star Wars
is more progressive than that of 2001. It’s not about
becoming some kind of monarch—the cosmic baby
at the end of 2001 is surely a super-powerful being. It’s

86 SPACECRAFT
actually more like what Nietzsche was genuinely after
in his idea of the superman—not someone with six-
pack abs, but someone who can play, like Chewbacca
at the holographic chessboard. That’s ironic, and scary,
because 2001 deploys Richard Strauss’ infamous Thus
Spake Zarathustra opening, in exactly the same way
in which the Nazi Party confused the superman with
what Nietzsche calls the “ultimate man.” But Star
Wars doesn’t celebrate ultimate men plotting world
domination in palaces—those are the bad guys, the
Sith. Star Wars is about all kinds of lifeforms fumbling
about in a rickety but comfy freighter. Like a nice
lounge stocked with board games, hyperspace isn’t
about marking a difference between classes. Anyone
can sit on your sofa, at least hypothetically. “Make
yourself comfortable” isn’t something you can say
about a hard, golden chair.
The lounge is where you sit when you’re not at
work. So, hyperspace is also about leisure time. It’s
about the time we think of as in between work shifts.
That’s because our economic setup is about “working
to live.” But as one meditation instructor said, when
his bored students asked when the break would be,
“this is the break.”28 Simply push a throttle, and you
can arrive at the weekend. Inside of every weekday is a
Saturday. It’s definitely not a day of worship. It’s a nice
demotic Saturday where you can kiss Princess Leia

HYPERSPACE 87
and argue about holographic chess and pontificate
about The Force. This “moving while standing still”
(and vice versa) sensation is the feeling of being in the
middle of a story. It’s as if you can access the middle
from anywhere in the story. The middle of a story isn’t
the mathematical middle. It’s a feeling. This fact that
time is in fact a “feel”—that time is temporality, the
“ality” part of that word being the tail that wags the
dog—is what hyperspace makes palpable.
It’s also the feeling of being in a disco. Black and
gay people felt a lot safer when they made it off the
streets in the 1980s into a club where they could
dance to house music. It’s why it’s called that. So it’s
not surprising that hyperspace (and starship troopers,
motherships and UFOs) are common features of disco
and techno music. This isn’t about speed, as a matter
of fact. It’s about a luxurious, utopian sigh of relief,
made of movement, a house made of dancing. All
houses are kind of dances anyway and house music
just makes that obvious. One almost wants “We Are
Family” to be playing as Rey and Finn and Poe and
the others get together in Star Wars 8: The Last Jedi.
Beneath the street, the beach. Beneath the seeming
linear flow of time, which is always some imperialist
or colonialist imposition, is the timeless bath of
hyperspace. Let’s think again about that verb “make.”
It’s halfway between active and passive—building or

88 SPACECRAFT
constructing something, and catching or hopping on:
“I made the bus in seconds flat” (Paul McCartney,
“A Day in the Life”).29 When you make something in
this more passive sense, it’s about arriving somewhere
and experiencing relief. It’s not about mastery. It’s
about being able to drop the tool, to take your foot
off the gas. It’s about peace. To this extent, making
hyperspace is all about dissolving the metaphysical
difference between active and passive, male and
female, work and leisure, outside and inside, Monday
and Saturday, work and life . . . Making hyperspace is
about making peace.
Peace is better than being right or being saved.
Peace might be the ultimate image of utopia, as
Theodor Adorno once said.30 Let’s go back to how Star
Wars hyperspace is better than the room in Stalker’s
Zone because it’s not alienating. The hyperspace of
Star Wars is un-alienation itself, cheaply available in
a movie full of cheap thrills. The fact that Han Solo,
the first Falcon pilot we see, makes hyperspace, is
connected to how Luke and Obi Wan can use The
Force. This seems rather extraordinary given Han’s
cynical reluctance to acknowledge the existence
of The Force. But in a way, he’s right—Han Solo is
questioning the religious hierarchy that has grown
up around The Force. It’s in the tone of his remark,
rather like how someone might scoff in a cathedral

HYPERSPACE 89
about the stained glass: all those colors doesn’t mean
you guys invented color. That’s a hard-won insight.
The whole point of cathedrals is to make you think
that the church has a monopoly on beautiful colors
and powerful sounds. (The first hyperspace shot
resembles a black-and-white version of one of the
rose windows in Notre Dame.)
Star Wars is a truly pagan, non-theistic work of art
insofar as there is no religion, in the sense of good
versus evil. Anakin could not have become Vader if
that was the case. Anakin is able to “cross to the dark
side” because The Force is just one thing. The so-called
dark side is simply a higher amplitude version of the
good old Force, an amplitude that the humanoids
in the galaxy far away can’t handle. What is wrong
with the Jedi is their religious approach to this basic
energy, which blinds them and makes them proud
and exclusive and hierarchical (Greek, hierarchy, rule
by the priestly caste).
That’s the deep reason why Han Solo can make
hyperspace. It’s a truly classless galaxy at its core,
despite how people have messed it up, because there’s
no hierarchy in The Force. It’s a continuum. It’s just
that the humanoids can’t turn it all the way up to
11 without getting burned. Even the Jedi are getting it
wrong, as Luke himself realizes. Rey can shoot Force
lightning like a Sith because the Jedi–Sith binary is

90 SPACECRAFT
a problematic illusion. So Han’s cynical remark—
which, remember, he makes in the lounge part of the
Falcon while they are in the lounge on the endless
Saturday afternoon of hyperspace—is the first truly
spiritual thing in the film!
Telekinesis, a powerful feature of the force,
implies how things can travel faster than light. I can
move this glass over there without walking over and
grabbing it. I can move it as soon as I want. In other
words, I can move it faster than light. The Falcon
making hyperspace is the truly utopian version of the
energy-substance that the religiosity of the Jedi hides
and turns into an invaluable commodity, creating
class division like how Tibetan society recognizes
reincarnated lamas in the ordinary folk. The Falcon
isn’t a human. The Falcon isn’t really a person—it’s
not even a droid. No wonder that for everyone, the
Falcon just is Star Wars and that it can be detached
from the Star Wars film so readily, that it has its own
reality, that anyone can access it. You don’t need to be
a sacred lama to make hyperspace. You just need to
know how to flip some controls. Which brings us to
our next and final topic: democracy.

HYPERSPACE 91
92
4 ANYONE

Hyperspace is radically democratic. One of the

most potent things about how hyperspace circludes
a spacecraft is that this can happen anywhere.
Hyperspace is everywhere, but not in the Newtonian
omnipresent way. Hyperspace doesn’t have an entry
or an exit point. Hyperspace corresponds to the
utopian feminist image of the “body” as a being that
doesn’t have a rigidly defined inside or outside, and
that has (as I put it in the introduction) multiple entry
and exit ports. The philosopher Luce Irigaray has
written extensively about this body.1
Hyperspace is “anywhere” in this radical way.
Likewise, spacecraft are also radically democratic in
that they can be piloted by anyone. The philosopher
Levi Bryant wrote a book on OOO, about how all
beings exist in the same way, that none of them are
more real or more special than others. It is called The
Democracy of Objects.2 It would be right to say that
spacecraft are the objects of democracy.
 “I can do this. I can do this.” So says Finn, in the
gun cockpit in The Force Awakens. “I can do this, I
can do this,” echoes Rey, in the flight cockpit. They
are metaphorically saying that they can be characters
in Star Wars, and that Star Wars itself can also “do
this”—keep being Star Wars. And indirectly Finn
and Rey are telling the audience that they can also
refresh its ability to “do this”—be part of the action.
We audience members are after all the R2D2 that
projects the whole thing from our desires. It’s a
pivotal moment. (Conversely, the whole plot of The
Empire Strikes Back pivots on whether or not the
Falcon will function properly. As soon as it does, the
film is emotionally “over” and we can await the future,
the sequel.)
The repetition—doubled repetition even—is very
significant. It means uncertainty. It means that you
might not be able to “do this.” You are reassuring
yourself. You are acknowledging that things slip and
slide about. Because time is an intrinsic part of things,
things aren’t really directly present for inspection and
mastery. You are coaxing yourself—you are “piloting”
yourself through a difficult moment. The first
repetition, by Finn, is uncertainty, naked and raw. So
is Rey’s, but for the audience it’s funny, because in a
way it’s now a kind of reassuring uncertainty. We’ve
just heard that line. We can do this. Objects withdraw

94 SPACECRAFT
but that doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily dark
and menacing. It’s how they could be friendly or
loving or pleasantly familiar.
The Falcon was made by a corporation, then
it was heavily modified by Lando Calrissian. It’s
a wonderfully inconsistent being. Small as it is
compared with the Enterprise, it’s full of entry and
exit holes, crawl spaces, curving corridors, smuggling
compartments, little “O” shaped portholes . . . I
note with some gratification that in several shots
there are often three of these O-shapes, spelling out
“OOO.” There’s a wide variety of sliders and knobs
and wheels and aircraft-like tools. There’s a World
War II Lancaster Bomber window from The Dam
Busters (a film about my great uncle Barnes Wallis,
incidentally, which Lucas alludes to in several places
including this)—or is it the mullioned window from
the shop in Alice Through the Looking Glass?3 There’s
a multispecies holographic chessboard. There’s a
bedroom. There’s a walk-in closet. There’s a fuse box
on fire. Inconsistent, that’s what the Falcon is. It’s
asymmetrical. It’s modified with all kinds of kluges
and upgrades. You can fix the engine while you’re
flying—“I bypassed the compressor.”
The Falcon has a front and a back, a top and a
bottom (beautifully close together as those are). It’s
also asymmetrical. The cockpit sticks out on the right-

ANYONE 95
hand side. There’s something on the Falcon like the
traditional nipple-like control center, the kind that
you find as the bridge of the Enterprise, or the bulb
at the top of a fictional flying saucer. But this nipple
is situated underneath the craft, where you would
find a nipple on a four-legged mammal. And it’s the
place from where you fire the rear-facing guns. This
isn’t a command-and-control place. It’s where you go
if you’re not so good at flying, because you need to
make yourself useful. You’re not looking down and
across from above. You’re swiveling about below.
In addition to the objects I was saying it resembled
in the previous chapter, the Falcon is a surfboard,
a horseshoe (good luck), or a giant key with two
prongs, or perhaps it’s a flattened spork. The Falcon
is something you can tinker with. You can craft it—
it’s like Forky (a modded-out Spork) from Toy Story
4.4 It’s a craft in that sense too. In the later 1700s,
in European and American culture, a distinction
arose between artist and artisan.5 This was a class
distinction. The artist was higher class than the artisan.
The artist made their own stuff, the artisan worked
on other people’s stuff, like William Blake making
engravings for a living. In the English class system of
those days, an artisan was upper working class: they
weren’t as low as an agricultural worker (“peasant”) or
what was considered even lower, an industrial worker.

96 SPACECRAFT
But they weren’t as “high” as the imaginary class of
the “artist”—imaginary because of course, real actual
artists might be very poor, extremely so if they didn’t
do any crafting for anyone else.
When you see the interior of the Enterprise or
the Death Star, you see people who resemble office
workers. They are working in a gigantic open-plan
office, often sitting at a desk (a console). They are
coded as “middle class”—another kind of imaginary
class. There are other workers around—janitors,
soldiers, security. Some of them are droids. Droids
are definitely the lowest class in Star Wars. C-3PO is
a butler, who in the late 1700s was considered higher
than an artisan. They were upper-class servants.
Doctors (also droids in Star Wars) and lawyers
and scholars were also upper-class servants. The
banter between C-3PO on the one hand and Han
and Chewbacca on the other reflects some of this
distinction.
Han and Chewie are ragamuffin scoundrel
criminals from what Marx would have called the
lumpenproletariat. It’s their greatest break ever to
have gotten their hands on the Falcon. Now they
can rise to the level of artisan. How Chewbacca,
who comes from the noble wise Wookiee species,
ended up in this predicament is hard to figure out,
until we realize in Solo that he was captured and

ANYONE 97
tortured by the Empire. There is something magical
about how the Falcon transforms these figures into
artisans. When Han and Chewie tinker with the
knobs and controls on the Falcon, it’s very different
from the paper pushers in the Death Star—or even
the more progressive-seeming “office workers” on the
Enterprise. They aren’t following rules. They are in a
way “playing” the instrument panel like . . . well, an
instrument. A musician is another kind of artisan,
or artiste, a derogatory, feminized term. In a concert
hall, the entrance for the musicians is called the
“artiste’s entrance” and is hidden away somewhere
in the parking lot. Han, Chewie, L3 and other Falcon
pilots smack the controls, fiddle with buttons and
levers, they do things one would do to a broken car or
to an instrument in a band, they know how to “play”
it. They are artisans working with an instrument,
not artists making things up out of nothing. As with
musicians, their instrument is a really a sort of person,
a co-conspirator. We can find another strong example
in the back-and-forth musical play between the aliens
on the Mother Ship in Close Encounters and the Arp
synthesizer, played by one of the human welcoming
party. While watching and reading about this film
obsessively, I was also learning all I could about
the radio telescopes at Jodrell Bank in Cambridge.
Listening and acting are deeply intertwined.

98 SPACECRAFT
 One must attend to the Falcon just as one must listen
to one’s instrument. Acting in a revolutionary way is
not necessarily about artistry, creating something like
the patriarchal God in a void. It might be like being
in a band. And it’s a band anyone can join. Just like
a rock band, you can start with nothing and end up
becoming world famous—Rey is already a big fan of
Han Solo and “fangirls” on him when he boards the
Falcon. Again, Star Wars is about being the audience-
chorus, joining in and making fan art, crafting and
re-crafting. America (the good parts anyway) is about
making strange new things out of the broken bits of
Europe lying around. Black Lives Matter is made out
of brokenness and so is the blues. It’s why America
can talk to the world. It’s about salvaging junk—in
the case of BLM it’s about directly confronting the
ongoing legacy of slavery, not accepting social space
as an office whose furniture (statues of slave-owners,
for example) you should respect. You shouldn’t
respect that furniture. You should tear it up and throw
it in the river.
Let’s take what we’ve got—how can we use anything
other than the broken, malfunctioning bits of the past
lying around?—and make something wonderful out
of it. The Falcon is an instrument for improvising a
revolution. No wonder the libertarians, starting with
Reagan, appropriated Star Wars. Libertarianism isn’t

ANYONE 99
about being truly free. Libertarianism is about being
“free” from having to pay taxes to support poor
suffering oppressed people, a huge number of them
Black, about being “free” to think white supremacist
thoughts. Star Wars is not a libertarian film. Anyone
can fly the Falcon, no matter what species, even if
they are seemingly not “alive,” like L3. (Why? Because
she’s made of metal and plastic?) Speciesism—the
supremacy of the human species—is created out of
racism and patriarchy. (This is a rather long argument,
so I’m going to have to ask you to believe me, or read
a book I wrote called Humankind.)6 If anyone can fly
the Falcon, it means that the Falcon is a place where,
in our imaginations at least, racism and patriarchy
have been destroyed.
What is particularly intriguing about the Falcon
is its clownish, comedic quality. Official American
uprightness, like Sam the American Eagle in the
Muppet Show, has to do with resisting the obscene
clownish qualities of America, while of course
putting them on display. This is very much like how
the Enlightenment ideas of “freedom” and “man,” as
in “We hold these truths to be self-evident . . . ” (The
Declaration of Independence) are made up of bits of
white supremacy and patriarchy. Reaganism was able
to steal the Falcon, because it looked like it was on
their side—the obscene underbelly of America. But

100 SPACECRAFT
it isn’t. How do you defeat fascism? By becoming
indignant like Sam the American Eagle? But Sam’s
indignation is made up of obscenity! So, the way to
subvert the fascist tendencies in American culture
and economics is to steal the Falcon back. Stealing the
Falcon and playing it like an instrument is a nonverbal
image of revolution, like those in Sergei Eisenstein’s
film about the Russian Revolution, October.7
But unlike in the Russian Revolution, it’s not about
some artist-like hero seizing the moment (Lenin).
It’s about people from the criminal class whom Marx
sometimes calls the enemy! And they’re seizing
an instrument and playing it, listening to it, not
imposing their will. America is a country that isn’t
really one, because of slavery. America is (from) the
future. If it’s something from the past, it can only be a
hotbed of fascism. If America is a weird, junky model
of future worlds in which there is planet-scale human
collective awareness and action, then . . . well the
Falcon is the utopian quality of America itself. Hint:
it’s a bird of prey, but it’s not fierce and official like an
eagle; it’s a falcon.
That’s why I wrote this book, the noise in the
background which I hope is becoming more audible as
you read. The whole idea is that American “culture”—
which seems to be saying something very compelling
and attractive and deeply unconscious to the whole

ANYONE 101
world (it’s not just our fault, dear non-American
readers, slavery is a worldwide phenomenon . . .)—
has some kind of junk in it that we need to stick our
hands into, steal and appropriate to create a different
world. The official advert for this world is the money-
less Star Trek and its warp drive, which as I have
argued resembles what Blake says about how the
future we require is reached through “an increase in
sensual enjoyment” in The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell:

The ancient tradition that the world will be

consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years
is true, as I have heard from Hell.
For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby
commanded to leave his guard at [the] tree of
life, and when he does, the whole creation will be
consumed and appear infinite and holy, whereas it
now appears finite and corrupt.
This will come to pass by an improvement of
sensual enjoyment.
But first the notion that man has a body distinct
from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do by
printing in the infernal method by corrosives,
which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting
apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite
which was hid.

102 SPACECRAFT
 If the doors of perception were cleansed
everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all
things through narrow chinks of his cavern.8

The “consuming” fire looks like Blake’s own way of

imagining hyperspace. We imagine it as liquid and
bluish, but what’s not to like about how Blake figures
the “end of the world” as movement, as a flickering
fire? Blake’s carnivalesque writing turns the idea of
hell as punishment for enjoyment into enjoyment
itself: it’s only hell when a priest tells you not to enjoy
yourself. He turns infinity from continuing forever
(omnipresence) into an image of dissolving the
philosophical and religious binary of soul and body.
This binary, which is also in the subject versus object
binary, is always about masters and slaves.9 Blake’s
future has to do with an end to slavery.
But Star Trek is ultimately very sincere and Sam-
the-American-Eagle-like. How it feels, how to do
it, how to achieve the improvement in enjoyment,
how to “make hyperspace”—that’s what Star Wars is
all about. The Jedi are an irritating sideshow to all
this—they are how it all goes wrong, by becoming
religious. Sam the American Eagle wrote Star Trek.
Gene Roddenberry’s heart was in the right place—the
basic rule of Star Trek is that any race, class or gender

ANYONE 103
should be on the show. The first televised interracial
kiss (between Uhura and Kirk) was on that show.10
One of the ways in which enjoyment must increase
in the future is an ecological one. Humans must
get used to appreciating, enhancing, and defending
the pleasures of nonhumans—that’s a pretty good
definition of a more ecologically attuned coexistence.
One of the nonhumans that space pilots interact with
are their spacecraft.
Doctor Who’s TARDIS is definitely a person with
whom one must collaborate rather than a tool to
be pushed around. In one episode, written by Neil
Gaiman, the TARDIS becomes a woman who asks
whether all people are like how she feels, bigger on the
inside?11 The “anyone” quality of the Falcon makes it
into an interesting version of the TARDIS. Spacecraft
are nonhuman beings with whom humans readily
interact. But there is one actual, terrestrial nonhuman
being that features regularly in science fiction as a
spacecraft: the whale. Perhaps this derives from the
story of Jonah and the Whale, and more immediately,
from the huge outpouring of ecological affection and
political action to stop whaling from the 1970s on.
Whales as terrestrial aliens, spacecraft-like in size.
Whales fly in space in Doctor Who, Star Wars Rebels
and Star Trek: The Voyage Home.12 Dolphins escape
from Earth before it is destroyed in The Hitchhiker’s

104 SPACECRAFT
Guide to the Galaxy, having tried unsuccessfully to
communicate Earth’s imminent destruction by doing
tricks at aquariums.13 A nuclear missile is turned
into a sperm whale by the Heart of Gold’s infinite
improbability drive, and we hear its poignant internal
monologue as it hurtles toward the ground (“Who
am I? What’s my purpose in life?”). The melancholy
of this example reflects how in general, sci-fi codes
whales as beings with whom humanoids ought to
cooperate, as fellow “subjects” often cruelly feared,
or treated as “objects.” In Star Wars Rebels the whales
can travel through hyperspace and communicate
telepathically.
The environments in which we discover the
Falcon are also radically democratic, on the margins
of acceptable society, the Galaxy’s garbage patches.
Washed-up has-beens, gamblers, criminals, spies
. . . perhaps the most Falcon-ready space is the holy
city on the planet Jedha in Rogue One (2016). But we
might detect an echo of the Falcon here as the main
characters’ U-Wing makes another improbable jump
to hyperspace—this time from within the circluding
curl of a wave of rocks. In the subsequent scene the
proto-rebels steal an imperial cargo vessel, which
creates a strange resonance between it and the shuttle
that is the Falcon, and the vessel of the Emperor in the
prequels and The Return of the Jedi (1983). The stolen

ANYONE 105
imperial vessel becomes the primordial model for the
kind of craft that the Falcon is.
Often the primordial thing turns up afterwards, in
the chronology. Think about a virus. There couldn’t be
viruses before there were single celled organisms such
as bacteria. But viruses say something true about life.
DNA and RNA can slip out of a necessarily permeable
cell wall. Life involves permeable things accidentally
swallowing things, happening upon them like Rey and
Finn happening upon the Falcon. Is it garbage or is it
good for you? That’s the whole issue with symbiosis.
You can’t know in advance. There you are, blobbing
through the ocean. Plop! Something goes in. Did
you just swallow poison? Is this romantic partner the
one who is going to ruin your life? You can’t know in
advance. If you think you can, then you end up with
walls and you can’t have life. Life implies dirt, disgust,
uncertainty. Beauty depends on these things—it’s not
the opposite of them.
Perhaps this is why the Falcon is a radically, even
subversively, democratic spacecraft. Anyone can fly it.
(Now that there is a Falcon Disney ride, this is quite
literally true.) All the right decisions are made in
advance in the Star Trek franchise, as if the current
states of play regarding race and gender in the 1960s,
1970s, 1980s, and 1990s were incorporated in the flight
manifests of the 2300s. There is already a paradox

106 SPACECRAFT
here, created by the good intention of the impulse.
By 2300, these protocols will be outdated. With any
luck, human society, may have become much, much
more progressive than we can now imagine. So, from
a strict point of view, the Starship Enterprise has an
atavistic crew selection protocol, as if the airliners of
today were staffed according to the race and gender
rules of the 1600s. (And not coincidentally, modern
airliners can feel like this, from time to time.)
As I mentioned in the Introduction, Star Wars
has always been Muppet Star Wars, which is why
the actual Muppets got involved in the second film.
It was as if the Muppets had already been involved,
in all the extraordinary creatures we find at Mos
Eisley spaceport. The Muppets are in some sense
the posthuman beings we have been waiting for. The
planetary anthem of the future I want to live in should
be “The Rainbow Connection,” and surely the planet-
scale “America the Beautiful” or “Land of Hope and
Glory” should be “We Are All Earthlings.”14
The true resolution of the Star Wars tension would
be if one of the characters realized they were actually
in an episode of The Muppet Show. They are after all
almost constantly surrounded by Muppets. It is as if
each character in Star Wars is a “confused” version of
the Buddhas that are the Muppets. For example, Yoda,
that perfectly competent green mini-being voiced by

ANYONE 107
Frank Oz, is surely secretly Gonzo, that wonderfully
incompetent miniature blue failure voiced by Dave
Goelz. Is Darth Vader, with his dog-like muzzle,
actually Rowlf the pianist? Wouldn’t it be great if he
suddenly realized that? Aren’t the Sith just Stadler and
Waldorf—grey wizened beings who are constantly
being negative and drawing attention to failure? The
Sith are like cynical movie critics: look at this screen
and witness the failure of your plan, say the Sith, just
like how Stadler and Waldorf say “boo” to almost
everything on The Muppet Show. The Sith are the
audience, not realizing they’re the audience. They stand
apart. As soon as they realize they’re on The Muppet
Show, all their sins will evaporate. As I’ve argued, the
“sins” of Star Wars are all about introducing hierarchy
and religiosity and class division and differences
between audiences and characters.
I will now 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? Who is Leia? Surely not Miss Piggy.
I’m not sure yet. Who is Luke? I’m thinking Kermit,
and I’m thinking that the child Anakin is Robin,
Kermit’s nephew. Who is Rey? One of the human
guests on the Muppet Show?
The Falcon really is a millennium falcon, a
nonhuman being that announces the possibility of a

108 SPACECRAFT
new age; a tool that isn’t ever always just something to
manipulate or be manipulated by; a vessel that’s also
a way of life; a well-equipped weaponized craft that is
also a luxurious lounge, dirty and noisy as it can be; a
synecdoche for a film about a truly non-hierarchical,
spiritual but not religious, pagan way of life that is all
about non-mechanical, telekinetic movement and
causality. In short, magic.
The whorl of hyperspace features in an Afrofuturist
video for “All the Stars” by Kendrick Lamar.15 Part of
the chorus, “All the stars are closer,” is very much in
the vein of the intimacy with which the lounge of the
Falcon’s hyperspace radiates. It’s about intimacy and
it’s also about un-alienation.
Space is such a readily available figure for alienation.
Stuck on hold with a terrible phone company? You’re
floating in space near the moons of Jupiter trying to
get a paranoid computer to open the pod bay doors (I
refer to the memorable scene in 2001). “All the stars
are closer” has to do with humans rediscovering their
cosmic superpowers, powers that they often hand
over to a divine being or to the state or what have
you. As the female singer crescendos into the chorus,
the hyperspace whoosh occurs and we suddenly find
ourselves in the space of un-alienation—Kalunga, the
transdimensional gate between worlds in the Kongo
philosophy.

ANYONE 109
 I can’t help wanting to end as I started with an
image of hyperspace imagined as a habitat—a pond,
no less, like Monet’s pond at Giverny. The pond in
question is the one toward which we descend in the
opening shot of The Muppet Movie. We find a lily pad,
and on this lily pad we see Kermit, singing what I take
to be a highly utopian song about a good place that is
also no place, just like hyperspace. Someday we’ll find
it, the rainbow connection.

Why are there so many songs about rainbows

And what’s on the other side?
…
Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection
The lovers, the dreamers, and me.16

Rainbows, the Bifrost Bridge of Norse mythology, the

shimmering, transient rainbow bridge between this
world and Asgard, the realm of the gods, hyperspace.
The relentlessly gentle quietness of this song is louder
than a number of stiffly martial national anthems.
And notice how it talks about stargazing, and about
sailors, the siren song of utopia, of hyperspace, the
stuff that spacecraft launch us into.
The millennium (as in falcon) is hyperspace, that
post-apocalyptic moment at which a more just world
is established. Can the work ever be complete? The

110 SPACECRAFT
future of the future is what the word millennium is
sheltering. Isaiah, the vegetarian atheist poet Percy
Shelley who borrowed Isaiah, and many others,
visualize in this sci-fi future the lion lying down with
the lamb as a consequence of better relations among
humans. We get to better interspecies relations
through better intraspecies ones. It’s what I have been
arguing about anti-racism and ending patriarchy. It’s
something to think about now that we are literally
“after the end of the world”: after the end of the idea
of world as a solid bounded horizon for “us” to the
exclusion of “them”; and after the end of the idea of
the end of the world, knowing that things will carry
on, in whatever state we help to make them. America
never was a country, never did achieve escape velocity
from slavery and property. But America could still
be a junkyard with a few hyperdrives lying around,
looking like garbage. America never was an eagle. It
might however be a falcon. I’m glad, Yeats, that the
falcon can’t hear the falconer as it turns and turns in
the widening gyre. Good riddance.

ANYONE 111
112
NOTES

Introduction
1 Edmund Husserl, “Prolegomena to Pure Logic,”
Logical Investigations Volume I, J. N. Findlay,
translator (London: Routledge, 2001).
2 Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: And
Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs (Studies in
Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy) (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1973).
3 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. Joan
Stambaugh (Albany, NY: State University of New York
Press, 1996), 17–23.
4 Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African
and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York:
Vintage, 1984), 109, 189.
5 Numerous directors, Doctor Who (BBC, 1963– ).
6 Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Carl Sagan,
Ann Druyan, and Steven Soter, Cosmos: A Personal
Voyage (PBS, 1980); Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York:
Random House, 1980).
 7 Pink Floyd, Animals (EMI, 1977).
8 Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual
Difference, and the Demands of History (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2002).
9 Lisa Yaszek, “Feminism,” The Oxford Handbook of
Science Fiction, ed. Rob Latham (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2014).
10 Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, tr. Catherine
Porter and Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1985), 106–18.
11 Nicholas Roeg, director, The Man Who Fell to Earth
(British Lion Films, 1976).
12 This is a concept called subscendence that I develop at
length in my Humankind (Verso, 2017), 101–20.
13 David Lynch, director, Wild at Heart (The Samuel
Goldwyn Company, PolyGram Filmed Entertainment,
Propaganda Films, 1990).
14 Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at the Annual Convention
of the National Association of Evangelicals,” speech
(Orlando, Florida: March 8, 1983).
15 James Thomson (lyrics) and Thomas Arne (music),
“Rule Britannia.” James Thomson, Complete Poetical
Works of James Thomson, ed. Robertson, J. L. (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1908).
16 Margaret Thatcher, interview, Women’s Own
(September 23, 1987), https​:/​/ww​​w​.mar​​garet​​thatc​​her​
.o​​rg​/do​​cumen​​​t​/106​​689, accessed November 24, 2020.

114 NOTES
17 Numerous directors, “Pigs in Space,” The Muppet
Show (Associated Television, Henson Associates, ITC,
ITC Entertainment, 1977–81).
18 Timothy Hill, director, Muppets from Space
(Columbia Pictures, 1999).
19 Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
20 Rodney Bennett, director, Doctor Who: The Ark in
Space (BBC, 1975).
21 Paul W. S. Anderson, director, Event Horizon
(Paramount, 1997).
22 James Strong, director, Doctor Who: Voyage of the
Damned (BBC, 2007).
23 Terry Jones, director, Monty Python’s Life of Brian
(Cinema International Corporation, 1979).
24 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner, in Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Nicholas
Halmi, Paul Magnuson and Raimonda Modiano (New
York: Norton, 2004), 5.18–26.
25 Robert Zemeckis, director, Contact (Warner Brothers,
1997).
26 Carl Sagan, “Pale Blue Dot” (1989), https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​
tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=wup​​Toqz1​​​e2g​&t​​=47s,​ accessed
November 24, 2020; Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the
Human Future in Space (New York: Random House,
1994).
27 Percy Shelley, Queen Mab 2.429. Shelley: Poetical
Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London and New
York: Oxford University Press, 1970).

NOTES 115
Chapter 1
1 Nicholas Royle’s book Veering: A Theory of Literature
(Edinburgh; Edinburgh University Press, 2011) says
more about this in a more powerful and subtle way
than I can possibly imagine.
2 Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
3 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of
Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London and Boston:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980).
4 Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New
Theory of Everything (London: Penguin, 2018).

Chapter 2
1 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason
for Exchange in Archaic Societies, tr. Halls, W. D.
(New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1990); Scott
Shershow, The Work and the Gift (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 2005).
2 Terry Nation, Blake’s 7 (BBC, 1978–81).
3 Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
(BBC Radio 4, 1978–2018).
4 In chapter one of What Is Property? An Inquiry into the
Principle of Right and of Government (1840), “http​​s:/​/w​​
ww​.ma​​rxist​​s​.org​​/refe​​rence​​/subj​​ect​/e​​conom​​ics​/p​​roudh​​
on​/pr​​​opert​​y​/ch0​​1​.htm​,” accessed November 27, 2020.

116 NOTES
Chapter 3
1 Mel Brooks, director, Spaceballs (MGM, 1987).
2 Eddie Izzard, “Death Star Canteen,” Circle (Vision
Video, 2000). Copyright restricts viewing in the USA,
so here is a most amusing LEGO version: “http​​s:/​/w​​
ww​.yo​​utube​​.com/​​watch​​?v​=Sv​​​5iEK-​​IEzw,”​ accessed
November 23, 2020.
3 Oxford English Dictionary, “hyper-,” prefix. oed​.co​m,
accessed October 10, 2020.
4 Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General
Theory (London: Penguin, 2006).
5 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment: Including the
First Introduction, tr. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1987), 519–25.
6 Oxford English Dictionary, “whorl,” n., oed​.co​m,
accessed April 4, 2021.
7 Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and
Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
8 Sarah Brightman and Hot Gossip, “I Lost My Heart to
a Starship Trooper,” single (Ariola Hansa, 1978).
9 Alan Rabold, private communication.
10 William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,
plates 25–27, in David Erdman, ed., The Complete
Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V.
Erdman (New York: Doubleday, 1988).

NOTES 117
11 Bernard Newnham, “Norman Taylor’s story of Dr
Who,” The Tech-ops History Site, November 28, 2010.
12 Chögyam Trungpa, The Sadhana of Mahamudra, The
Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa, ed. Carolyn
Rose Gimian (Boston: Shambhala, 2003).
13 Bini Adamcszak, “On Circlusion,” Mask, July 2016.
“http​:/​/ww​​w​.mas​​kmaga​​zine.​​com​/t​​he​-mo​​mmy​-i​​ssue/​​
se​x​/c​​irclu​​sion,” accessed November 11, 2020.
14 Oxford English Dictionary, “swivel,” v., “swive,” v.,
“https://www​.oed​.com,” accessed November 27, 2020.
15 Oxford English Dictionary, “weird,” n. 1.a., 1.b., 2.a.
“https://www​.oed​.com,” accessed November 27, 2020.
16 Kant, Judgment, 519–25.
17 William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence,” The Complete
Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V.
Erdman (New York: Doubleday, 1988).
18 Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and
Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 79.
19 Plato, Republic 7.514a–517a. The Republic, tr.
P. Shorey, P , 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1956).
20 Andrei Tarkovsky, director, Stalker (Mosfilm, 1979).
21 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy: Out of
the Spirit of Music, tr. Shaun Whiteside, ed. Michael
Tanner (London, Penguin, 1994).

118 NOTES
22 Robert Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From
the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge: Belknap,
2011).
23 TIFF Originals, “Douglas Trumbull Master Class:
Higher Learning,” YouTube video, 1:37:42, December
13, 2012.
24 Con Pederson, director, To the Moon and Beyond,
short (Graphic Films, 1964).
25 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings,
tr. John Reddick, intro. Mark Edmundson (London:
Penguin, 2003), 43–102.
26 Khalil Joseph, director, Until the Quiet Comes, film for
Flying Lotus (What Matter Most, Warp Films, 2013).
27 Alfred Hitchcock, director, Vertigo (Paramount,
1958).
28 Chögyam Trungpa said this at Tail of the Tiger,
Vermont, early 1970s (attribution unknown).
29 The Beatles, “A Day in the Life,” Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely
Hearts Club Band (Parlophone, 1967).
30 Theodor Adorno, “Sur l’Eau,” Minima Moralia:
Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott
(New York: Verso, 1978), 155–7 (157).

NOTES 119
Chapter 4
1 Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, tr. Catherine
Porter and Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1985).
2 Levi Bryant, The Democracy of Objects (Ann Arbor:
Open Humanities Press, 2011).
3 Michael Anderson, director, The Dam Busters
(Associated British Pathé, 1955). Lewis Carroll, Alice
Through the Looking Glass in The Annotated Alice: The
Definitive Edition, ed. Martin Gardner (New York:
Norton, 2000).
4 Josh Cooley, director, Toy Story 4 (Walt Disney
Pictures, Pixar Animation Studios, 2019).
5 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: Coleridge to
Orwell (London: The Hogarth Press, 1987); Keywords:
A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana
Press, 1988).
6 Timothy Morton, Humankind: Solidarity with
Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017).
7 Sergei Eisenstein, October (Sovkino, 1928).
8 William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,
plates 25–7, in The Complete Poetry and Prose of
William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (New York:
Doubleday, 1988).
9 Denise Ferreira Da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
10 David Alexander, director, “Plato’s Stepchildren,” Star
Trek 3:10 (Paramount, 1968).

120 NOTES
11 Neil Gaiman, “The Doctor’s Wife,” Doctor Who series
6, episode 4 (BBC, 2011).
12 Leonard Nimoy, director, Star Trek IV: The Voyage
Home (Paramount Pictures, 1986). Mel Zwyer,
director, Star Wars Rebels: The Call (Disney, 2016).
Andrew Gunn, director, Doctor Who: The Beast Below
(BBC, 2010).
13 Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
(BBC Radio 4, 1978–2018).
14 Kermit the Frog and Jim Hensen, “Rainbow
Connection,” single (A&M Studios, 1979, LP); A
Boy and the Anything Muppet Animals, “We Are
All Earthlings,” Track #1 on We Are All Earthlings
(Golden Music, 1993, cassette).
15 Kendrick Lamar, “All the Stars” (Top Dawg, 2018).
16 Kermit the Frog, “The Rainbow Connection,” in
James Frawley, director, The Muppet Movie (Henson
Associates, ITC Films, 1979), 1–8.

NOTES 121
122
LIST OF FILMS AND
OTHER MEDIA

Abrams, J. J., director, Star Trek (Paramount Pictures,

Skydance Media, Bad Robot, 2009).
Abrams, J. J., director, Star Trek: Into Darkness (Paramount
Pictures, Skydance Media, Bad Robot, 2013).
Abrams, J. J., director, Star Wars: The Force Awakens
(Twentieth-Century Fox, 2015).
Edwards, Gareth, director, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
(Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, Lucasfilm Ltd.,
2016).
Frawley, James, director, The Muppet Movie (Henson
Associates, ITC Films, 1979).
Howard, Ron, director, Solo: A Star Wars Story (Lucasfilm,
2018).
Kershner, Irvin, director, Star Wars V: The Empire Strikes
Back (Twentieth-Century Fox, 1980).
Kubrick, Stanley, director, 2001: A Space Odyssey (MGM,
1968).
Lucas, George, Director, Star Wars IV: A New Hope
(Twentieth-Century Fox, 1977).
Marquand, Richard, director, Return of the Jedi (20th
Century Fox, 1983).
Nolan, Christopher, director, Interstellar (Paramount,
2014).
Spielberg, Steven, director, Close Encounters of the Third
Kind (Columbia Pictures, EMI Films, 1977).
Tarkovsky, Andrei, director, Solaris (Mosfilm, 1972).
Trumbull, Douglas, director, Silent Running (Universal
Pictures, 1972).
Wise, Robert, director, Star Trek: The Motion Picture
(Paramount Pictures, 1979).

124 LIST OF FILMS AND OTHER MEDIA

INDEX

Abrams, J. J. 32 bliss 67, 84

Adamczack, Bini 69 Bowie, David 14
Adorno, Theodor 89 Brakhage, Stan 74
Alice Through the Looking Bryant, Levi 93
Glass (Carroll) 95
alienation 1–2, 16, 76–9, Calrissian, Lando 27,
89, 109 39–40, 63, 95
anal sphincter 63 capitalism 16, 44
Animals (Pink Floyd) 10 Chewbacca 18, 45, 50,
anti-imperialism 49, 80 53, 87, 97
anti-racism 51, 111 Christianity 12, 30, 76
Austen, Jane 42, 59 circlusion 68–9, 71
Close Encounters of
Being and Time the Third Kind
(Heidegger) 6 (Speilberg) 2, 10,
Benjamin, Walter 73 13, 98
binary 35, 50, 62, 90, 103 Contact (Zemeckis) 26
Black Lives Matter coracles 19, 21, 25–7,86
(BLM) 99 C-3PO 49, 97
Blake, William 67, 72–3,
96, 102–3, Dam Busters, The
Blake’s 7 (Nation) 40 (Anderson) 95
da Silva, Denise Gauss, Carl
Ferreira 35, 45 Freidrich 61–2
Death Star, The 22, 54–5, genitalia 63, 71–2
64, 97–8 geometry 61–2, 84–5
Derrida, Jacques 6, 8
dirtiness 33–6, 76, 106, Heidegger, Martin 6–7,
109 75
disco music 67, 88 Henson, Jim 18
Disney 106 Hitchhiker’s Guide to
Doctor Who (numerous the Galaxy, The
directors) 9, 22–3, (Adams) 13, 39,
67–8, 80, 83 104
Douglas, Mary 35 house music 88
droids 48–50, 90, 97 humanoids 79, 90, 105
Husserl, Edmund 4–6,
ecology 16–18, 32, 38, 57, 60
45–6, 61, 104
Einstein, Albert 8, 55, ideology 14, 20, 73–4, 77
57–8, 62, 70 imperialism (see also anti-
Endgame (Beckett) 36 imperialism) 65,
enlightenment 84 88
Imperial Cruisers 22,
fandom 29 43–4, 79
fascism 15, 77, 101 individualism 15–16
feminism 10–11, 48–50, Interstellar (Nolan) 22–3,
63, 68, 93 80, 84
finitude 66 Irigaray, Luce 10–12, 93
Finn or FN-2187 29, 32,
37, 43, 45, 88, 94, Jedi 62, 90–1, 103
106 Joyce, James 59

126 Index
Kant, Emmanuel 6, 65, as lounge 53–5, 91,
72 109
Kubrick, Stanley 2, 67–8, ownership 39–40,
76, 80, 82 43–6, 95–7, 104,
106
labor theory of value 44, phenomenology
47 of 22, 45, 47–8
Lamar, Kendrick 109 Monet, Claude 57–8, 110
LEGO 4–5, 83 Morton, Timothy 74, 95
Libertarianism 99–100 Muppet Show, The
Locke, John 43–4 (Henson) 18–19,
L3 50, 63, 98, 100 100, 107–8
lounges 53–5, 86–8, 91, 109 Muppets from Space
Lucas, George 30, 32, 73, (Hill) 19, 23
79, 95
luck 3, 39, 41–3, 65, 96, NASA 3, 10, 23
107 near death experiences
(NDEs) 67–8
Marriage of Heaven Newton, Isaac 42–3, 55,
and Hell, The 62, 86, 93
(Blake) 102 Nietzsche, Freidrich 78,
Marxism 44, 97, 101 87
Millennium Falcon nipples 69, 96
ecology 18, 32 Numan, Gary 1
feminism 48–50, 100
flying 13, 32–3, 41, object-oriented ontology
45–8, 100, 106 (OOO) 11–12, 14,
garbage 29–38, 46, 18, 36–7, 47, 48, 50,
106 72, 93, 95
in hyperspace 63–4, October (Eisentein) 101
70–2, 79, 91 Organa, Leia 18, 87, 108

Index  127
Oz, Frank 18, 108 Skywalker, Rey 18, 30–2,
37, 41, 43, 45, 63,
patriarchy 37, 59, 100, 88, 90, 94  
111 slavery 35, 43–5, 48–50,
phenomenology 5–8, 62, 65, 99, 101–3,
57, 60, 67 111
Plato 75 slit-scan
Plutt, Unkar 37, 43–4 photography 80–2
Proudhon, Pierre– Solo, Han 18–19, 30–1,
Joseph 43–4 40, 45, 62, 89–90,
99
Reagan, Ronald 10, 15, spaceships 12, 21, 33–4,
99–100 41
realism 32, 59, Stalker (Tarkovsky) 76,
religion 7, 77, 90 89
Riley, Bridget 79 Star Trek: Into Darkness
R2D2 49, 78, 94 (Abrams) 64, 71
Star Trek: The Motion
Sagan, Carl 10, 26 Picture (Wise) 26,
scientism 7 64
selfies 81–2 Star Trek: IV The
Sesame Street Voyage Home
(Cooney) 18, 36 (Nimoy) 104
sex 62, 67–8 Star Wars Rebels (Filoni,
Shelley, Percy 26, 111 Kinberg, and
Silent Running Beck) 104–5
(Trumbull) 22, 33 Stormtroopers 29, 46
Sith 87, 90, 108 stream of consciousness
Skywalker, Luke 18, 62, writing 59–60
89–90 sublime 65–6, 72

128 Index
Tatooine 49, 79 utopia 9, 34, 67, 73, 83,
TARDIS 9, 24, 40–1, 88–9, 91, 93, 101, 110
68–9, 72, 79, 83, 104 U-Wing 105
Tarkovsky, Andrei 23,
33, 76 Vader, Darth 55, 108
telekinesis 63, 91 Vertigo (Hitchcock) 80–
Thatcher, Margaret 15, 2, 86
17
This Sex Which Is Not One weirdness 3, 14–15, 47,
(Irigaray) 12 71, 101
Thus Spake Zarathustra whales 104–5
(Strauss) 87 whorls 66, 109
Tie fighters 22, 29 Wild at Heart (Lynch) 15
To the Moon and Beyond withdrawal 36, 47, 72 ,
(Pederson) 80, 82 75, 94
Toy Story 4 (Cooley) 96 Woolf, Virginia 59
Trungpa, Ch-gyam 67 Wordsworth, William 81

UFOs 2, 88 X-Wings 22
Until the Quiet Comes
(Joseph) 83 Yeats, W. B. 111
Yoda 18–19, 107

Index  129