Untitled

The Age of Touristic Reproduction
is capable of seeing is other tourists. Incidentally, Kazimir Malevich took
Khlebnikov’s project one step further when he suggested placing every single
person inside an individual cosmic vessel to keep him constantly floating in
space and to allow him to fly from one planet to the next. His proposal would
irrevocably turn the human subject into an eternal tourist on a never-ending
journey whereby—insulated within his very own, yet always identical cell—he
would become a monument in himself. We encounter an analogous vision
in the popular TV series Star Trek, where the spaceship Enterprise has become
a constantly moving, utopian, monumental space that never alters throughout
all this series’ countless episodes, even though—or precisely because—it is
always moving at the speed of light. In this instance, utopia pursues the
strategy of transcending the antagonism between immobility and traveling;
between sedentary and nomadic life, between comfort and danger, between
the city and the countryside—as the creation of a total space in which the
topography of the Earth’s surface becomes identical with the ou-topos of the
eternal city.
In a striking fashion, such a utopian transcendence of nature was already
being considered in the period of German Romanticism. Evidence of this can
be found in a passage in Ästetik des Hässlichen (The aesthetics of the ugly)
(1853) written by the Hegel disciple, Karl Rosenkranz:
Take, for example, our Earth which, in order to be beautiful as a body, would need
to be a perfect sphere. But it is not. It is flattened at both poles and swollen
around the equator, besides which the elevations of its surface are extremely
uneven. From a purely stereometric point of view, the profile of the Earth’s crust
reveals to us the most haphazard confusion of elevations and depressions with all
manner of incalculable contours. Hence, where the surface of the Moon with its
disarray of heights and depths is concerned, we are equally unable to state
whether it is beautiful, etc. 4
At the time this was written humankind was technologically still far removed
from the possibility of space travel. Here, altogether in the spirit of an avantgarde
utopia or a sci-fi movie, the agent of global aesthetic contemplation is
nonetheless depicted as an alien that has just arrived from outer space and
then, observing from a comfortable distance, formed an aesthetic judgment
108 109