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

a SeCoNd Nature rISINg:
SpaCeFLIght IN aN era oF repreSeNtatIoN
193
Spacefight mapped onto this tangle of production and culture in particular
and seemingly contradictory ways. earth-serving satellites (communications,
meteorological, remote sensing, science—civilian, commercial, military) served
as a prominent institutional and material element of this regime of production
and consumption, exemplifying in the postwar period the robust capabilities
of state-market collaborations. these arrangements enlarged and amplifed
the very condition of image-ness examined by Boorstin. Benjamin’s work
focused on the early 20th century urban experience; Boorstin’s on the u.S.; and
subsequent critical theory (using, say, Baudrillard’s 1968 The System of Objects as
a starting point) began to see semiotic immersion as a transnational condition. 21
as such, spacefight, mostly in tacit and un-remarked ways, became bound to
the politics of globalization and the myriad points of contestation that gave
new weight to terms such as local and identity. however, in u.S. culture in
particular, spacefight also operated as an explicit, widely circulating symbol
bearing important, transcendent connotations. as exploration, as frontier, as a
place apart from the corruptions of earth, spacefight suggested the possibility
of individuals and humanity collectively achieving enlightenment ideals
of universal values fulflled, either via travel beyond earth or drawing space
experience and knowledge back into worldly experience.
as a window onto this set of issues, consider any of the late 1960s or
early 1970s earth-as-seen-from-space images, such as apollo 8’s earthrise or
selected covers from the Stewart Brand-created Whole earth catalog. Such
images invigorated a romantic discourse in which humanity via spacefight
perspectives and machines might fnd harmonious balance with nature. this
discourse served as a powerful counter narrative to a century-plus series of
writings in european and american critical thought about the machine in the
garden—a critique that reached a crescendo in 1950s and 1960s in the work of
authors such as hannah arendt, herbert Marcuse, and Lewis Mumford. 22
But such space-based earth images, too, in other contexts, could
be consistent with notions of the machine run rampant, of bureaucratic or
corporate control on a planetary scale—a level of technological hubris that
Lewis Mumford railed against in his nearly contemporaneous The Myth of the
Machine. and such iconography helped make concrete a uniquely important
practical Cold War ambition: that the totality of earth could and should serve
as a stage of action. this ambition, made possible by numerous, discrete civilian
21. Jean Baudrillard, Le Systeme Des Objets (paris: gallimard, 1968).
22. See, for example, hannah arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL: university
of Chicago press, 1998) [originally published 1958]; herbert Marcuse, One-dimensional Man:
Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston, Ma: Beacon press, 1964); and
Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, 1st ed. (New York, NY: harcourt, Brace & World,
1967) and The Pentagon of Power (New York, NY: harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974) [Volume
2 of Myth of the Machine].