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

190 reMeMBerINg the SpaCe age
plato’s allegory of the cave (an allusion he invokes with his “shadows of other
shadows”). It was a genuine problem of the everyday, a particular historical
condition of american life. If the real and unreal, the actual and simulations,
coursed through the polity without distinction and with equal status, then how
could citizens be rational actors, sorters, and evaluators of the world around them
and serve as the bedrock of political life? But Boorstin’s use of the word “trivia”
signaled the problem was not about politics in isolation but in its americanstyle
bred-in-the-bone connection with market capitalism. Image-ness posed a
conundrum for the culture in full. his american “dream” assumed individual
rational actors as an essential foundation, yet the robust pursuit of this ideal
over the 20th century created a condition—the turn to the pseudo-event—that
threatened the possibility of making and nurturing such actors, and thus the
dream itself. the ethics of the image mirrored the ethics of the system of which
it was a part. Still, Boorstin could not bring himself to a vigorous analysis of a
main engine of this change—market capitalism—and made the emergence of
image-ness seem only a causeless development or a collective shift in taste. 13
this set of issues led to a second—the intellectual basis of history and the
organization of knowledge in the academy. Boorstin held to a view of history
compatible with his notion of the ideal citizen—an instrumental view in
which nations, institutions, and individuals acting as purposive, rational agents
provided the best means for describing and accounting for historical change.
But the image and its semiotic kin, Boorstin concluded, stood as a new form
of agency, structural and difuse rather than localized, a tide of the trivial and
the serious that only loosely and imperfectly ft with an instrumental view of
the world. among his refections in the book’s back matter, Boorstin confded
it had been his personal, in-the-moment experience with everywhere-ness that
stimulated this insight. he sketched a day-in-the-life, from waking to sleep,
in which he found the semiotic ever-present—billboards, radio and television
programs, newspapers, magazines, movies, advertisements, commodities in
stores, sales pitches, street conversation and the “desires I sense all around me”—
and entering into the very constitution of the world. he saw the limitations of
his intellectual framework and the disciplinary organization of the academy,
which, he averred, when confronted with new phenomena “continues to
pour almost exclusively into old molds.” his epiphany-stimulated study, he
concluded, “might ofer a rough map of some too little known territories in the
13. this concern received fuller expression just over a decade later in daniel Bell, The Cultural
Contradictions of Capitalism, 20th anniversary ed./with a new afterword by the author (New York,
NY: Basic Books, 1996) [originally published 1976]. Boorstin’s notion of rationality should be
situated in the postwar environment; see S. M. amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy:The
Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (Chicago, IL: university of Chicago press, 2003).