How Outer Space Made America

Geography, Organization and the Cosmic Sublime

Daniel Sage

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781472423665
• eBook ISBN: 9781317120780
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Geopolitics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this innovatory book Daniel Sage analyses how and why American space exploration reproduced and transformed American cultural and political imaginations by appealing to, and to an extent organizing, the transcendence of spatial and temporal frontiers. In so doing, he traces the development of a seductive, and powerful, yet complex and unstable American geographical imagination: the 'transcendental state'. Historical and indeed contemporary space exploration is, despite some recent notable exceptions, worthy of more attention across the social sciences and humanities. While largely engaging with the historical development of space exploration, it shows how contemporary cultural and social, and indeed geographical, research themes, including national identity, critical geopolitics, gender, technocracy, trauma and memory, can be informed by the study of space exploration.

Chapter 1
America as Transcendental¹

A Land Set Apart and Beyond

In 1997, the historian Walter McDougall explained how American identity is orientated around the history of Puritan pilgrimage, whereby ‘a people dedicated to liberty based on faith, who had begun history over again in a New World, might confidently assume, a future free of limits imposed by man’ (p77; original emphasis). McDougall (1997) suggests a universal sense of freedom as being part and parcel of what it is to be American: a future without limits is the distinguishing trait of American identity. McDougall (1997) argues the voyage of Puritans to the New World was read as an interwoven material and spiritual journey. In the first instance, America offered, at least potentially, more land and resources than Europe; and spiritually, America offered a land of religious freedom, a story testified to by the many Pilgrim voyages from the seventeenth century avoiding religious discrimination in Europe (Agnew, 2005: 96; Dijkink, 2006: 202). So that, as Ricard (1999) puts it, for these Puritan colonizers the ‘unifying element was the cult of freedom …’ (p15). Contained throughout the early stories of the American colonies, especially those of the New England Puritans, was a notion of spatio-temporal difference written, rather paradoxically perhaps, through transcendence—between the restraints of England and the freedoms of the New World (Noble, 2002; Stephanson, 1995). The gradual elaboration and refinement of these embryonic notions of New World self-identity within American cultural identities is the subject of this chapter.

O’Tuathail (1996) suggests that appeals to the transcendental, somewhat counter-intuitively, often do not refer to the displacement of geographical difference by the universal, but rather offer a powerful means of universalizing a partial vision of spatio-temporal difference. The passion for transcendentalism inscribes, as much as it effaces, geographical differences, between different peoples and lands. The Puritan technique for the inscription of geographical difference through transcendence was not the God-like perspective of Enlightenment reason, favoured by Old World imperialists ‘objectively’ mapping, claiming, and dividing, colonial possessions (O’Tuathail, 1996: 81); rather it was a far less secular notion: the proclaimed spiritual and material freedoms of the New World confirm upon its population a unique messianic destiny to lead humanity towards salvation. In time this transcendentalism became articulated through various territorial mythologies, wherein America was described as the ‘Promised Land’ or the ‘New Israel’ (Noble, 2002: 4; Wallace, 2006). And so spiritually, spatially and temporally the New World appeared set apart—a place that for many would yet be ‘an exemplary state separate from the corrupt and fallen [Old] world’ (Stephenson, 1995: pxii) where history would appear to have ‘begun … over again’ (McDougall, 1997: 77). Ultimately this meant that, as Stephanson (1995) puts it, ‘the puritan break would then eventually serve to invest American nationality with a ‘symbology’ of exceptionalism or separateness that has survived remarkably intact’ (p4).

Given these historical antecedents, it is not surprising that a mythology of the exceptional difference of the space and time of the New World, or what Stephanson (1995) terms ‘chosenness,’ pervaded the political rhetoric surrounding the birth of the American nation-state. The founders of America independence repeatedly described America as a unique nation, wherein ‘America’ was the political manifestation of transcendentalism, contrasted over and against the old world (Stephanson, 1995). The Great Seal of America, chosen in 1776, reads, in Latin—‘God has blessed this undertaking a new order for the ages’ (p5). Similarly, the 1776 Declaration of Independence appealed to the transcendental to animate American exceptionalism—promising ‘unalienable Rights, that among them are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’ that are ‘endowed by their Creator.’ Against such transcendental motifs the Declaration of Independence positions the British Crown as the tyrant, whose mode of government stemmed not from the God-given ideals of respect for universal freedom and liberty but from the suggested desire for ‘absolute Despotism … [or] an absolute tyranny over these states.’

Thus, the legitimacy of the formation of the United States, found within the Declaration of Independence, hinges upon a moral distinction between the freedom of imperial governments to rule indiscriminately and the freedom of the individual. In so doing, it explicitly proposes that only the latter society might have an affinity with moral ideality and the divine. On the basis of such moralizing distinctions, the long catalogue of British tyranny, found in the middle section of the Declaration, affirms not simply a sense of political wrongs, but the moral origins of the American people, breaking with the past tyrannies of the Old World and starting out again to work towards moral ideality under God (Anderson, 1991: 193). The Declaration pronounced a nation-state that was founded upon the premise of individual perceptions of material and spiritual liberty being translated into proof of divine affinity with the American nation. This story, commonly referred to as Divine Providence, claimed to identify and instil upon a particular group of people, a path toward messianic salvation; and inserts the Declaration, and the government that followed, as a necessary part of that destiny (Noble, 2002: 4). As a result, the Declaration of Independence’s appropriation of Puritanical material and spiritual transcendentalism contributed to a well-established mythology of writing the American continent as not just morally, but spatially and temporally, exceptional in the world. The messianic tenor of the Declaration culminates in the final sentence: ‘And with the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.’

With similar transcendental hyperbole, the speeches of early American presidents evoked unspecified transcendental motifs to write a story of exceptional geopolitical difference. Tuan (1993: 204), for example, explains how political and spiritual transcendentalism entered into relation with spatial transcendentalism in precisely this way. Consider a speech given by George Washington in 1788 describing the westward expansion of the US:

Extent of territory and gradual settlement will enable them to maintain something like a war of posts against the invasion of luxury, dissipation, and corruption. For, after the large cities and old establishments on the borders of the Atlantic shall, in the progress of time, have fallen prey to those invaders, the western states will probably long retain their primeval simplicity in manners and incorruptible love of liberty. May we not reasonably expect that, by those manners and this patriotism, uncommon prosperity will be entailed on the civil institutions of the American world. (quoted in Tuan, 1993: 204).

Tuan (1993) thus observes how ‘open space and free land, [became] a source of spiritual and democratic values, including liberty, simplicity and equality’ (p204).

While this familiar messianic mythology is palpably evident across eighteenth and nineteenth century American political rhetoric, its political significance must not be over-stated: until at least the twentieth century it functioned, as McDougall (1997) explains, more as an expression of ‘what America was, at home’ (p37, original emphasis) rather than as a rationale for future foreign policy. In other words, exceptionalism operated more or less culturally, binding together a group of people around a purposefully ambiguous destiny, rather than informing specific political strategies. Although the Puritanical mantra of exceptionalism based on freedom from Earthly limits seemed to intuitively herald political unilateralism and imperialistic ambition, during most of the nineteenth century American politicians, such as President Andrew Jackson, were much more routinely concerned with forming strategic alliances to offset European imperial power, developing federal and state bureaucracies to guide economic activity to feed a burgeoning population, or else fighting the Civil War (McDougall, 1997). Indeed, as Stephanson (1995) puts it, drawing on Anderson’s (1991) terminology, the mythology of exceptionalism in eighteenth and nineteenth century America should properly be considered as a national ‘structure of feeling shared by an imagined community’ (p28; original emphasis).

Nevertheless, despite the way that this nationalistic appropriation of transcendental destiny appeared absurd alongside everyday political finitudes, complexities and contingencies, it became an increasingly popular self-identity narrative within American popular culture. Here, the ambiguity of a political identity based upon transcendentalism which spoke only of a divinely ordained, though highly ambiguous, destiny for a narrow group of people was easily appropriated as rhetorical justification for many political strategies. Perhaps the most notable instance occurred on 27th December 1845, when John O’Sullivan, founding writer for the popular American magazine Diplomatic Review, drew upon a mythology of exceptionalism to justify American expansionism, and in the process coined the now infamous phrase ‘manifest destiny’ in the New York Morning News newspaper. In so doing, O’Sullivan deployed an image of America as exceptional to retrospectively legitimize a divinely ordained destiny to govern the continent from coast to coast under the minimal governmental model typifying Jacksonian democracy. For O’Sullivan, it is American ‘manifest destiny to overspread and possess the whole continent which providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government’ (quoted in Stephanson, 1995: 42; emphasis added). His words were in fact a direct response to the imperial ambitions of Britain that had resisted America’s annexation of Texas (McDougall, 1997). As evidence to the popularity of O’Sullivan’s article, McDougall (1997) explains how for many years within historical and political discourse O’Sullivan became regarded as the ‘definitive interpreter of a foreign policy decision’ (p77).

An equally popular version of American exceptionalism is found in Frederick Jackson Turner’s over-determination of the role of the western frontier in American history, presented at Chicago’s World Fair in 1893. The ‘Frontier Thesis’, as it became commonly known, explains the vast wilderness and ‘free land’ (Turner does not discuss the territorial claims of Native Americans except as purchases for white farmers wishing to ‘civilize’ such ‘savage’ lands) of the Western frontier as territorial evidence of the professedly exceptional narratives of ‘democracy’, ‘progress’, and ‘freedom’, that define American history (Turner, 1893, reproduced in Taylor, 1972: 3-28):

That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom—these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier. Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them (Turner, 1983 reproduced in Taylor, 1972: 27)

At the core of the frontier thesis is the Puritanical narrative that the American people, and their vast land, possessed an exceptional destiny and identity: spatial transcendence served as an allegory for celestial transcendence. The popularity of the frontier thesis was pervasive both inside and outside academic institutions at the end of the nineteenth century and into the first few decades of the twentieth century (Taylor, 1972).

These nationalistic narratives of the West were complemented by a literary tradition that romanticized frontier landscapes, wilderness and ‘Virgin’ lands, as the most important expression of the exceptional destiny and identity of the American people. Motifs of exceptional national landscapes pervaded popular nineteenth-century American literature such as: James Fennimore Cooper’s The Pioneers (1823), Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature (1836) and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) (Nash, 1967; or for a geographical perspective: Casey, 2002). In these texts encounters with American wilderness and landscape were frequently read as evidence of affinity between moral ideality, the divine and the American people, precipitating a belief in the exceptional destiny, or what David Noble (2002) calls the ‘timeless space’ of American nationalism (p1). Roderick Nash’s (1967) study of wilderness in American literature concludes similarly that ‘by the middle decades of the nineteenth century wilderness was recognized as a cultural and moral resource and a basis for national self-esteem’ (p67). Over time, mythologies of American exceptionalism—promises of a transcendental basis for nationalism—found their way through state institutions into popular culture, for example through the American education system. Billig (1995) describes how since the 1880s American school children have been daily required to stand to attention before the national flag and pledge ‘allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all’ (p50). As Billig (1995) argues this ritualized practice of nationalism is often forgotten as such, so that in turn myths of American exceptionalism become cultural potent, yet unremarkable.

Political and popular disseminations of the mythologies of American exceptionalism across American practical and popular geopolitical practices and texts all promise an image of America as the transcendental state. This is not a fully intelligible representation of an absolute sovereign power, with a fixed, territorial border, but rather a somewhat paradoxical outline of a State, where both elements, the transcendental and the State, actively displace and distanciate conventional meanings of the other. On the one hand, this passion for the transcendental draws out the identity and purpose of the American state into the infinite cosmos (in Deleuze and Guattaris’ terms a ‘deterritorialization’). While on the other hand, concepts of spatio-temporal transcendence become associated with a seemingly fixed and recognizable set of spatio-political practices and institutions (‘reterritorialization’), so that the transcendental is no longer regarded as immanent to the omnipotence or omnipresence of God, as in Judeo-Christian theology, or the transcendental reason of the Enlightenment (O’Tuathail’s 1996), but rather as immanent to an ethno-politically exclusive ordering of peoples, religions, institutions, materials, ideologies and landscapes.² It is with these tensions in mind I deploy the concept of the ‘transcendental state’—not as an internally resolved and cohesive representation of an embryonic imperial power, but rather as a problematic, that produces and reproduces a rather ambiguous, yet highly potent, technique of writing geopolitical difference, and projecting American geopower.

This unstable image of the transcendental state can be further elaborated by reading it through Derrida’s (2002) deconstructive analysis of the Declaration of Independence. Derrida maintains how the enduring, though often overlooked, effect of the Declaration revolves around an undeciability as to whether the Declaration is stating (in Derrida’s parlance a ‘constative statement’) that a people are already ‘good’ and ‘independent’ (and we might also add ‘exceptional’) or whether they are being produced (as a ‘performative statement’) by the Declaration. Or, as Derrida (2002) explains: ‘This obscurity, this undeciability between, let us say, a performative structure and a constative structure is required to produce the sought-after effect’ (p49). For Derrida (2002), this undeciability pervades every signature of the Declaration. The ‘good’ and ‘independent’ people could only exist once their authorised representatives, who claimed they were simply signing on their behalf, had signed the Declaration, which guaranteed their authority to speak in the name of the ‘good people’ (Derrida, 2002: 49-50). In this circular manner the signing of the Declaration produced not just the possibility of speaking in the name of the ‘good,’ ‘independent,’ and exceptional people, but actually enacts the basis of representative government. What is important, in the context of this study, is the way in which the movement of this endless chain of undeciability was resolved. This was achieved through the countersignature of a final transcendental signing entity, in whose name they appeal to in the final sentence: God. As Derrida (2002) writes here of God, ‘He comes, in effect, to guarantee the rectitude of popular intentions, the unity and goodness of the people. He founds natural laws, and thus the whole game that tends to present performative utterances, as constative utterances’ (p51). And so, paralleling other deliberations thus far on the transcendental state, it is through faith in the immanence of the absolute transcendental (God) to the State, via notions of the ‘good’ and ‘independent’ people, that America as a project of what ought to be was legitimated as what already is. In this way faith in the transcendental—provided the final recourse through which American state power, national identity, citizenship, morality and representative government could appear united and eternal (Noble, 2002). Yet, as Derrida (2002) suggests, this celestial resolution of the Declaration is unfinished: what happens when we sign in someone else’s name; how can we own God’s signature?

The American Sublime

While Washington, O’Sullivan, Thoreau and Turner all used words to express a sense of America as the transcendental state, the nineteenth century also witnessed the reproduction, and refinement, of this mythology through paintings of American landscapes. Commonly referred to as the ‘American sublime,’ this artistic idiom of landscape painting dominated early visual arts movements in the United States throughout most of the nineteenth century. These paintings provided a visualized natural theology, affirming the principle that America was the Earthly vanguard of God’s plan, and so humanity’s destiny (Barringer and Wilton, 2002, Boime, 1991; Kinsey, 1992; Novak, 1995). This approach to painting American landscapes was practised by numerous artists, including Thomas Cole (1801-48), Edwin Church (1826-1900), Samuel Morse (1791-1872), Asher Durand (1796-1886), Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902), Sanford Gifford (1823-80) and Thomas Moran (1837-1926). The movement can be divided into two stylistically inter-connected groups of artists on the East Coast based around New York (Hudson River School³) and the West Coast based around San Francisco (Rocky Mountain School).

The American Sublime was influenced by the European notions of the sublime popularized by Romantic writers and artists, and Enlightenment philosophers, notably Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. Thomas Moran (1837-1926), of the Rocky Mountain School, and whom many regard as the prominent artist of the American Sublime tradition (Kinsey, 1992), referenced his work to the British aesthete John Ruskin and the renowned British romantic artist J.M.W. Turner. At the heart of the romantic approach to the sublime espoused by Ruskin, and employed by Moran and his contemporaries, lies a way of claiming affinity between the transcendental aggrandizement of landscape, a painter, or viewer’s, moral ideals and divine perfection. Ruskin referred to this emotionally elevating⁴ resonance as the ‘great impression’⁵ (Kinsey, 1992; see also Meslay, 2004; Shaw, 2006).

Moran’s emotionally uplifting evoc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introducing a Geography of Outer Space
• 1 America as Transcendental
• 2 Framing a World Beyond
• 3 Placing the Moon
• 4 Technocracy in the Space Age
• 5 Whose Body for Whose Future?
• 6 Was Revolution Ever in the Air?
• 7 Memorializing the Future
• 8 Traumatizing Spaceflight
• 9 Critical Cosmopolitics
• References
• Index