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

a SeCoNd Nature rISINg:
SpaCeFLIght IN aN era oF repreSeNtatIoN
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the cultural condition that Boorstin described as diferent-than-modern
quickly became identifed with a name—postmodernity—that grew in usage
and application in the years to follow. In writing this passage he carefully
sidestepped a narrative common in american history, the people versus the
interests. this decades-old motif dominated immediate postwar critiques of
advertising and consumer culture, and included prominent instances such as
theodor adorno’s “the Culture Industry” and defned the early work of
McLuhan. 10 Yet Boorstin made clear that the condition he found so unsettling
was a consensual creation: of the masses and elites, of consumers and producers,
a feld of experience that all inhabited and in which all participated, a basic
reorganization of the perceptual and social order.
the stakes were high. the image or pseudo-event gave a new cast to a
problem as old as philosophy: how do we know what we know? the social
practices Boorstin detailed through rich example had a powerful consequence:
they undermined the idea of the real as an independent referent for human
thought and action and as a fundamental motivation for human engagement
with the world. 11 the former had a long contested history in epistemology; in
the context of post-enlightenment thought, the latter seemed a newly emerged
view and the heart of Boorstin’s concern: it was not merely the coexistence of
the real and pseudo, it was our avid preference for the pseudo. the image was
a challenge in collective ethics. he did not belabor these implications in his
main text, tucking his strongest concern in a concluding bibliographic note.
here he neatly combined the ethical and ontological implications: “the trivia
of our daily experience are evidence of the most important question in our
lives: namely, what we believe to be real.” 12 the rise of the image was not just
a lament but a foundational shock.
Why did Boorstin put the most concise, potent statement of his thesis in
the back-matter of his book? the simplest answer is that he was uncomfortable
with two broad issues raised by the real-to-image turn. one concerned politics.
For him, the question of the real was not a mere philosophical problem à la
10. adorno’s seminal essay “the Culture Industry” was published in 1947; around the same time,
McLuhan began a long run of media and advertising critiques. See: theodor W. adorno, The
Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (New York, NY: routledge, 2001) and, as one
example, Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (New York, NY:
Vanguard press, 1951).
11. the absence of any foundation (e.g., “reality”) or of access to a priori truths became a leitmotif
of the postmodern. the nearly contemporaneous work of thomas Kuhn on the role of nonscience
in establishing scientifc knowledge became an intellectual touchstone of this
position. See thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientifc Revolutions (Chicago, IL: university
of Chicago press, 1962). the most relevant discussion of issues of epistemology in relation to
the literatures covered here is Bruno Latour, We Have Never Modern (Cambridge, Ma:
harvard university press, 1993).
12. Boorstin, The Image, p. 265.