NYU Space Talks: History, Politics, Astroculture (Spring 2021 season)

NASA News & Notes, 2008

An overview of the topic since its emergence with a discussion of its definition and implications 1. GENERAL DATA Organization: Polish Academy of Sciences (Warsaw) in association with the Centro Interuniversitário de História das Ciências e da Tecnologia (Lisbon) and the University of Wales Trinity Saint David (Swansea), intended for postgraduate students, university faculty, researchers, and independent scholars. Sponsored by PERIPHERIES-Minority Cultures on the Periphery of Science: The Jews and the Circulation of Scientific Goods (funded by the European Union Horizon 2020 under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 847639).

Alexander C.T. Geppert (ed.): Imagining Outer Space: European Astroculture in the Twentieth Century, 2012

Ubiquitous, limitless and ever-expanding as it may be, outer space has a history too. Although it is virtually impossible to experience outer space in a direct, unmediated manner, historians can study how it was represented, communicated and perceived. In addition to presenting the core questions that drive the Imagining Outer Space volume this chapter introduces the umbrella concept of ‘astroculture,’ discusses the necessity to ‘Europeanize’ space history and suggests to regard ‘science fiction’ and ‘science fact’ as complementary rather than contradictory. The article also draws attention to two further characteristics of twentieth-century astroculture, that is its futuristic, often explicitly utopian strand as well as a strong transcendental, if not outspokenly religious undercurrent.

The Institute of Advanced Studies welcomes applications in response to this Call for Papers for a conference entitled 'Towards an Anthropology of Space: Orientating Cosmological Futures Conference' to be held on 18 September 2017. The deadline for applications is 22 May 2017. An epochal ‘move to space’ (Olivier 2015) has been articulated by various commentators as a crucial historical turn for all mankind, from Sputnik, through the Apollo missions to the recent realigning of NASA’s primary mission from Space Exploration to Space Settlement (Augustine Commission 2009). The effect of images of Earth from Space has produced ‘globe talk’ (Lazier 2011:606) where horizons of social worlds are now planetary in scale. These universalising rhetorics nonetheless also hide the hegemony of normative frames of reference used to define humanity’s ‘final frontier’, along with the concept of ‘humanity’ itself. David Valentine (2012) describes how Space demarks a spatial edge used to distinguish the limits of the globe, which can be both revealed and transcended by techno-science. Space exploration then, is able to act as an ‘empty signifier’ (Ibid) holding the promise of a spatial fix to the future of humanity whilst simultaneously delimiting this same future as it masks the endurance of the forms of relations it claims to transcend. As Debbora Battaglia suggests, the figure of the extra-terrestrial is a symptom of failures to critically understanding the conditions of social life (2005:9), perhaps symptomatic of an inability to conceive of an adequate ‘constitutive outside’ (Butler 1993), which is often a euphemism for a political or social ‘other’. The binary that extra-terrestrial implies may thus also be contested ethnographically. For example, Suzanne Blier (1987) has observed how dwellings of the Batammaliba track the passage of celestial ancestors through various light apertures whilst Lisa Messeri (2016) notes how Mongolian shamans have been visiting space for many years. Authors such as Alice Gorman (2005), Peter Redfield (2002) and others note how the local world of Space Centres, rocket launch sites or telescopes assume ‘translocal’, often neo-colonial, dreams (Redfield 2002:808) effacing local concerns. And whilst Soviets and Americans positioned Space as a location to enact utopian futures, different kinds of utopian ideological expansions may also occur through modern space narratives in places such as Ghana, China and Brazil. What can we make of the new space race ethnographically? How would the consideration of relations between earth and off-earth life enable a fruitful theoretical development of social science enquiry? And, ultimately, in what ways can Anthropology think through the political, the material and the transcendent dimensions of an epochal turn to Space? In this workshop we will investigate the heuristic devices used in the creation of new forms of connectedness and separation that a relation with the extra-terrestrial could enable. Please submit abstracts of 300 words for papers of 15-20 minutes in length by 22/05/2017 to Dr David Jeevendrampillai ([email protected]) and Dr Matan Shapiro ([email protected]). We welcome a variety of approaches to the ‘move to space’ but particularly welcome those which consider the theological/cosmological, the material and bodily, and the political. Initially we plan to have three sessions along these lines with a senior respondent in each and a roundtable at the end of the day. We aim to work the papers into a special issue journal.

History and Technology, 2012

Militarizing Outer Space: Astroculture, Dystopia and the Cold War, 2021

Militarizing Outer Space is the final volume in the European Astroculture trilogy. This epilogue discusses the successful establishment of astroculture as a field of modern (European) historiography and suggests three new perspectives for further research on global astroculture and the making of our planetized present.

Space Talks

This text is a draft version of a talk that I will be giving on November 11th as part of the NYU Space Talks series. https://www.space-talks.com/ I am posting it here in advance in the hopes of helping my listeners to better understand my talk and with the aim of receiving more and better feedback on the text. The central thesis of this paper is that outer space doesn’t exist. This assertion-- mostly articulated in terms borrowed from Markus Gabriel's New Realism--may seem crazy or absurd, but it is rather less radical than it sounds, in no way involving the denial of the reality of the Moon, Mars, and the stars, and only insisting that the real location of outer space is in culture. The obvious importance of this claim for the study of astroculture is clear, if at first it may seem tantamount to denying the possibility or the legitimacy of the study of astroculture as it has been carried out up to the present. Yet recognizing that outer space doesn’t exist both legitimates the study of astroculture and sheds light on the nature of this endeavor. It also helps to see the limitations of outer space as a concept for thinking critically about the social, economic and ecological implications of the new space economy, and so clarifies why we may need to develop alternative and resolutely realist approach to the study of astroculture.

H-Soz-Kult, 2023

It is my pleasure to introduce the first piece in a the Deutsch Security Square new series of occassional exchanges on topical security issues of the day. In this pioneering conversation, Nikola Schmidt and Bohumil Dobos, both with the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University discuss the future of European astropolitics. The exchange was stimulated by Dobos’ article ‘Geopolitics of the Moon: A European Perspective’ published by Astropolitics 13(2015):1. Schmidt challenges Dobos’ case for desirability of ‘colonising’ the Moon to prevent access denial of space exploration by potentially hostile actors by pointing to several political, legal and technical issues that problematise this position, leading to dialectical development of Dobos’ argument and situating it in a broader context of EU’s strategy. Ondrej Ditrych, D.SQ Coordinator

2018

Imagining Outer Space makes a captivating advance into the cultural history of outer space and extraterrestrial life in the European imagination. How was outer space conceived and communicated? What promises of interplanetary expansion and cosmic colonization propelled the project of human spaceflight to the forefront of twentieth-century modernity? In what way has West-European astroculture been affected by the continuous exploration of outer space? Tracing the current thriving interest in spatiality to early attempts at exploring imaginary worlds beyond our own, the book analyzes contact points between science and fiction from a transdisciplinary perspective and examines sites and situations where utopian images and futuristic technologies contributed to the omnipresence of fantasmatic thought. Bringing together state-of-the-art work in this emerging field of historical research, Imagining Outer Space breaks new ground in the historicization of the Space Age.