Remembering the Space Age. - Black Vault Radio Network (BVRN)

Chapter 11
a Second Nature rising: Spaceflight in an
era of representation
Martin Collins
INtroduCtIoN
recently novelist and essayist Barbara Kingsolver began a refection on
the virtues of the local food movement with the following sentence: “In
my neighborhood of Southwest Virginia, backyard gardens are as common
as satellite dishes.” 1 She casually invokes then subverts the cultural notion—
vestigial and romantic—that the garden, backyard or otherwise, stands as the
“natural” against which ubiquitous communications and its machines might be
defned and measured. She makes clear our contemporary tendency to grant
priority to the human made in creating our sense of what the world is. 2 even
in rural southwest Virginia, it is the garden that is the surprising presence, one
that needs to be placed in relation to an alternate ontology represented by the
satellite dish. Media and machines, she implies, have become the embodiment
of a new natural, the tip of a vast, globe-connecting system of technology,
of capital, of frst world and other world cultural transactions, of a condition
of semiotic super-abundance as “in your face” and compelling existentially
as beans, corn, and garden dirt. Indeed, the new natural is more so. In this
cultural condition, the semiotic realm enabled by globally connected satellite
dishes frames the very way in which we think about intimate rituals of local
food cultivation and consumption.
her matter-of-factness in this regard ofers incidental proof of a thesis initiated
in the humanities in the late 1960s and regnant in sociology, anthropology,
geography, and literary theory since the late 1970s: that representation—the
signs of things, rather than things themselves—had over-spilled its pre-World
War II channels of circulation, spread luxuriantly, and established a new order of
experience. to put this in the passive voice, of course, is deceptive. Kingsolver’s
satellite dish, as thing, media conduit, and symbol situated in one locale and
1. Barbara Kingsolver,“the Blessings of dirty Work,” Washington Post, September 30, 2007.
2. of course, to be accurate the “backyard garden” also is human made, a particular construct of
what counts as nature, a symbol of a romantic notion of nature that is apart from the human.