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

188 reMeMBerINg the SpaCe age
that “in the electric age, we wear all mankind as our skin.” 6 By the 1970s,
changes in capitalism and technology intensifed these developments and made
representation a (perhaps the) central problem of the human condition—an
analytic perspective one might trace through seminal authors Jean Baudrillard,
Francois Lyotard, and Jameson. 7
Let’s venture into this postwar circumstance, though, by considering a
scholar frmly in the center of the historical profession, daniel Boorstin. 8 In
1961, Boorstin published The Image, or What Happened to the American Dream, a
book-length disquisition on the ascendance of the image and its consequences
for the american experience. after presenting the reader with a broad inventory
of the image’s ubiquity and modes of use in contemporary life, he ofered a
frst-pass assessment:
In nineteenth-century america the most extreme modernism
held that man was made by his environment. In twentieth-century
america, without abandoning the belief that
we are made by our environment, we also believe our environment
be made almost wholly by us. this is the appealing
contradiction at the heart of our passion for pseudo events:
for made news, synthetic heroes, prefabricated tourist attractions,
homogenized forms of art and literature (there are no
“originals,” but only the shadows we make of other shadows).
We believe we can fll our experience with new-fangled
content. everything we see and hear and do persuades
us that this power is ours. 9
6. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media; the Extensions of Man (New York, NY: Mcgrawhill,
1964), p. 56.
7. on Jameson’s work,see prior note.on Baudrillard,see Jean Baudrillard,Selected Writings (Stanford,
Ca: Stanford university press, 2001).the introduction by Mark poster provides useful insight
on the arc of Baudrillard’s thinking. he began publishing on these issues in 1968 and continued
through his death in 2007. Lyotard’s writings have been equally seminal; see, as his best known
example, Jean François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis,
MN: university of Minnesota press, 1984).
8. on Boorstin and the u.S. historical profession in the frst decades after World War II, see
peter Novick, That Noble Dream:The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession
(Cambridge, uK: Cambridge university press, 1988).
9. daniel J Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America (New York, NY: atheneum,
1971), pp. 182-183. It must be noted that Boorstin changed the subtitle of the book within the
frst years after publication. originally published in great Britain as The Image, or,What Happened
to the American Dream (London:Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1961), the book was reissued with the
revised title The Image:A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, harper Colophon Books (New York,
NY: harper & row, 1964). the change is indicative of the tensions in Boorstin’s thought on
how to integrate the problem of the image into his notions of political economy.also, note that
Boorstin’s analysis was roughly contemporaneous with Marshall McLuhan’s frst articulations of
the notions of the global village and the medium as message in the late 1950s and early 1960s.