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

a SeCoNd Nature rISINg:
SpaCeFLIght IN aN era oF repreSeNtatIoN
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new american wilderness. It might suggest how little we still know, and how
slowly we are learning of the inward cataclysms of our age.” 14
Yet Boorstin’s refections on the “inward cataclysms of our age” were not
original, and perhaps provided an unwitting commentary on the limitations
of the consensus school of history then dominant in the academy. the “too
little known territories” long had been part of Marxist critique (centered on
Marx’s notion of the fetish of the commodity). Boorstin’s emphasis on the
everyday phenomenology of the semiotic was a decades-later echo of german
critical theorist Walter Benjamin’s arcades project, begun in the 1920s,
which examined the efects of early 20th century urban commercial-media
environments on the Western experience. 15 Benjamin argued that this new
condition, distinguished by a kinetic and overlapping environment of signs,
reoriented vision and perception, diminishing the ability of individuals to
separate out and contemplate the constituents of experience—whether, to
use Boorstin’s terminology, such constituents were real or pseudo events or
objects. 16 Benjamin’s analytic made clearer the intellectual task of analyzing
underlying cultural structures as embodied in and expressed through dayto-day
immersion in things and images associated with industrialization,
new forms of consumption, and modernity. 17 Benjamin and later critical
theorists argued that these felds of experience, new and fundamental, shaped
the behavior of individuals and groups in ways that were bound yet distinct
from the purposive ideologies and actions connected to elite politics or the
institutions of capitalism.
Boorstin’s hybrid fascination-worry about an image-culture was a descriptive
statement overlaid with misgivings—not a theory. the Marxist tradition, which
Benjamin exemplifed, advanced in the 1960s new ways of looking at this post-
World War II phenomenon—by linking it to (not surprisingly) a transformation
in the basis of capitalism. daniel Bell’s 1973 The Coming of Post-Industrial Society:
A Venture in Social Forecasting helped make the case that, as Cold War modes of
14. Ibid., p. 264.
15. on the history of the semiotic and the importance of Benjamin, see two valuable works
by Jonathan Crary: Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the
Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass: MIt press, 1990) and Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of
Perception:Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, Ma: MIt press, 1999).
16. See Crary, Techniques of the Observer, pp. 19-20.
17. this analytic line became an academic growth industry in the 1960s, leading to new felds of
study such as material culture. as a partial measure of these developments, see pierre Bourdieu,
The Logic of Practice (Stanford, Ca: Stanford university press, 1990); daniel Miller, ed., Materiality
(durham, NC: duke university press, 2005); and Mark poster, Information Please: Culture and
Politics in the Age of Digital Machines (durham, NC: duke university press, 2006), especially
chapter 10. For the post-World War II period, a particularly useful treatment of the theoretical
issues is patricia ticineto Clough, Autoafection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology
(Minneapolis, MN: university of Minnesota press, 2000).