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

186 reMeMBerINg the SpaCe age
standing in relation to other very diferent locales elsewhere in the world, arrived
through a specifc process of historical agency. distilled, this humanities literature
makes two deep claims. First, that our regime of representation is ontological,
that semiotics perform and act—as discourse and signs, especially as instantiated
in commodities and the ever expanding presence of electronic media. they touch
nearly all geographic nooks of the globe and order our experience: there is, if you
will, a there there. Second, this literature claims that this semiotic-ness coincides
with a historic transformation of capitalism in the post-World War II period. 3
thus, it is an argument about historical basics: about the way the world is
structured, operates, and feels. It is, too, if semiotics may be taken to perform
and act, about fundamental sociological categories: of how individuals constitute
themselves and are constituted by ambient cultures, about identity and politics.
and it presents a rousing challenge: it places at the center of the historical
playing feld two conjoined and reinforcing vectors of agency—representation
and capitalism—that many historians of the Cold War and spacefight sort
might see as inferior or ancillary to two other organizing concepts, state
action and elite politics. the title of this paper comes from this literature—
Frederic Jameson, preeminent literary theorist and exponent of historicizing
the relations between capital and culture coined the phrase “second nature”
to describe this remapping of the human experience in the postwar years. 4
3. a range of authors have advanced these points, in varying combination and degree of
emphasis. Most important are the works of Jean Baudrillard, Francois Lyotard, and Frederic
Jameson, referenced in succeeding notes. also crucial is david harvey, The Condition of
Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (oxford, uK: Blackwell, 1989),
as well as various works by Zygmunt Baumann, e.g., Culture As Praxis (London: Sage
publications, 1999). a sampling of additional works includes arjun appadurai, Modernity
at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, MN: university of Minnesota
press, 1996); Marc augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London:
Verso, 1995); ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage publications,
1992); pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford, Ca: Stanford university press,
1990); Judith Butler, ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality:
Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000); Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in
Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, Ca: university of California press, 2005);
guy debord, Society of the Spectacle (detroit, MI: Black & red, 1983); Michael denning,
Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (London: Verso, 2004); terry eagleton, The Idea of Culture
(oxford, uK: Blackwell, 2000); paul N. edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics
of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, Ma: MIt press, 1996); Mike Featherstone,
Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (London: Sage, 1990); Scott Lash, The End of Organized
Capitalism (Cambridge, uK: polity, 1987); edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New
York, NY: Vintage Books, 1994); graham thompson, The Business of America: The Cultural
Production of a Post-War Nation (London: pluto press, 2004); anna Lowenhaupt tsing, Friction:
An Ethnography of Global Connection (princeton, NJ: princeton university press, 2005); and
reinhold Wagnleitner and elaine tyler May, eds., Here, There, and Everywhere: The Foreign
Politics of American Popular Culture (hanover, Nh: university press of New england, 2000).
4. Jameson is the focal point for the literature (loosely grouped under the rubric of critical theory)
making this claim. See variously: Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late