SOAS Research Online

Abstract

In this article, I seek to develop the argument that the law of outer space, as it was to be developed during the 1960s and 1970s, configured outer space as a ‘commons’ in order to displace two prevailing ‘dystopic’ socio-technical imaginaries that were to be associated with the Cold War. One of these was that outer space might become a place of warfare – and, more specifically, a warfare of annihilatory proportions between the two main protagonists of the Cold War; the other, that it might be the object of ‘primitive accumulation’. Drawing upon the work of Herbert Marcuse, I argue that, whilst the nascent code of outer space visibly sought to repress both of these possibilities, it did so by bringing into play a particular ‘technological rationality’, in which each of these aversions were to reappear as sustaining configurations – as what might be called the rational irrationalities of a Cold War commons.