Horizons of Sustainability and Individual Ethics: The Case of the International Space Station

Abstract

Sustainability is a hot topic in contemporary politics both nationally and internationally. While the current framing of sustainability promoted at the international level favours social policies, doubts about their possible success are growing. If social aspirations are not realised, technological solutions to ecological problems might appear to be the only options. This study contributes to the field of sociology of the future. It explores and problematizes the technologically-oriented approach to sustainability. I consider a radical case of sustainable living – a spacecraft – looking at the emerging challenges to individual human ethics and the general order of sociality. More specifically, the largest contemporary manned space project, the International Space Station (ISS), is taken into analytical focus. With the help of the Foucauldian notion of governmentality, I examine routines and discourses related to the utilization of the life support system at the ISS in regard to human conduct, both terrestrial and extra-terrestrial. Mass-media materials comprise a large part of the dataset for this research. As demonstrated, techno-functionalism characterizes sustainability as governmental rationality. It imposes a subordination of individual human actors to the general order driven by systemic objectives frequently framed in pragmatic and technical terms. Specific practices, including ethically controversial ones, might be requested from individual humans in the name of the system’s stability and efficiency. Those practices are naturalized and normalized within a truth regime constituted by scientific discourse, the authority of experts, media events and the related public discussions.