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

a SeCoNd Nature rISINg:
SpaCeFLIght IN aN era oF repreSeNtatIoN
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Second, this essay grapples with the problem of the image and semiotics
identifed by Boorstin. Is the question “what is real” as transformative as he
suggests? does it stand as a fundamental change in the relation of citizens to
politics? of what politics means and makes possible when interest-driven actors
and cultural structures are taken as historical agents? these musings are not mere
abstractions; they flter down to the everyday—in what we take to be credible,
in what we trust, and in what we question rather than give assent. If they have
historical weight, they represent a reorientation of existential and value structures
in the postwar period. Is that not a historical problem of the frst rank, a deep
argument for placing spacefight in the broadest frames of analysis?
For spacefight itself, there is a perhaps surprising blowback in this cultural
condition. In exposing the contingency of the global, as a product with a
geography and history in the West, of universal values as a specifc cultural
creation not as given absolutes, one can fnd some empirical oomph behind
two of those tenets of the postmodern that some love to hate. one is Lyotard’s
claim about the “death of meta-narratives,” principally those enlightenment
universals. What Lyotard meant is not the disappearance of such narratives but
skepticism as to their truth and general applicability. they still run wild in
the semiotic transnational landscape. and with this skepticism, comes the
second tenet, the one from which Boorstin recoiled: the end of that abstract
enlightenment individual enacting enlightenment values.
and the blowback is this: spacefight as application helped make this world.
But spacefight as exploration, particularly human exploration, encountered and
encounters this condition somewhat diferently. granting human spacefight’s
grounding in Cold War real politik, that experience gained credibility because
exploration as a culture trope drew strength from Western meta-narratives
and explorers as universal human subjects. If human exploration is only a
narrative and not a meta-narrative in competition with other narratives, then
space exploration as an exemplifcation of enlightenment values fades. the
exploration narrative still resonates, but in a much diminished way. and this
ties back to Boorstin’s concern that image-ness threatened to change the very
nature of politics—from a feld of experience built on elite actions, metanarratives,
and enlightenment rationality to one in which these elements
are transformed and conjoined with the ontology of everywhere semiotics.
this insight ofers an analytic hint: traditional explanatory modes that rely on
interest groups and elite power to account for the history of human spacefight
in the last 40 years miss the changed foundations (as presented in critical theory
and other literatures) of politics and culture. the Moon journeys, it may be
argued, exemplify the modern temperament; the subsequent years of human
spacefight illustrates the intrusion of the postmodern into the modern, a marker
or the Indian diaspora. See as one important example dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe:
Postcolonial Thought and Historical Diference (princeton, NJ: princeton university press, 2000).