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Beneath a Modern Sky: Space Technology and Its Place on the Ground Author(S): Peter Redfield Source: Science, Technology, & Human Values, Vol

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Beneath a Modern Sky: Space Technology and Its Place on the Ground Author(S): Peter Redfield Source: Science, Technology, & Human Values, Vol Beneath a Modern Sky: Space Technology and Its Place on the Ground Author(s): Peter Redfield Source: Science, Technology, & Human Values, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Summer, 1996), pp. 251-274 Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/689708 . Accessed: 19/01/2011 11:55 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. 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Sage Publications, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Science, Technology, & Human Values. http://www.jstor.org Beneatha ModernSky: Space Technologyand Its Placeon the Ground Peter Redfield Universityof California,Los Angeles In delineatinga trajectoryof humanhistory, anthropology and othersocial sciences have tended to describe traditionallife in particulargeographic termswhile leaving modern experienceuniversal in scope. Studiesof science and technology,while helpingto locate and describecenters of modernpractice, have less frequentlyexplored their edges. Using a case studyof the location of theprimary French/European space launchsite in French Guiana, this article examines technologies associated with the developmentof space beyondthe atmosphereby evaluatingthe impactof rocketsand satellites on the construc- tion of humanspace on the ground. Exploringthe social significance of a modern sky and its transformationof one tropical margin into a technical center, the question of where things are becomes one of how they are defined. The modern appears less a placeless universal center and more a moving boundary,one dividinghumans, nature, and technologyinto less stable domains. Modernity,we are often led to believe, has no place. More accurately,it might be claimed that moderntechnology creates spaces that are not imme- diately defined by their location, togetherwith the possibility of living fully within them without knowing where one is. Amid uniformlandscapes con- jured from steel and concrete, carefully climatized and fed with waves of images floating freely overhead, coordinates of time and space become simultaneouslyuniversal and ephemeral.In the last century,railroads and rifles appearedto travel the earth with impunity, and such contemporary cousins as television and missiles acknowledgeeven fewer boundaries.An enduring general assumption-however belied in practice-lingers when discussing modernsand their things; once sufficientlyadvanced and properly AUTHOR'S NOTE: In additionto the editor and three reviewers of this journal, the author thanksAlice Bullard,Richard and Sally Price, PaulRabinow, Marc Redfield, Lucien Taylor, and Silvia Tomaskovafor readingsand perceptive comments on draftsof this article.The University of California,Berkeley; the CamargoFoundation; and the NationalScience Foundation(Award no. 9400155) generouslysupported the research. Science,Technology, & HumanValues, Vol. 21 No. 3, Summer1996 251-274 ? 1996Sage Publications Inc. 251 252 Science, Technology,& HumanValues ordered,they will function in the same mannerno matterwhere they are. Is this not, after all, the magic of the modern, its most alluring or terrifying promise? Considerthe following postcard.A blue machinesits in a vaguely defined room,surrounded by greenpanels and the glow of fluorescentlight. The focus rests on the controlpanel at its center,a glowing bankof buttons,and as one's eye travels away from it the field of vision grows blurredand uncertain, sensing a roomful of motion. Nothing in the image itself conveys a sense of specific context; only the legend on the reverseside securely locates it as an interiorshot of the space centerin Kourou,French Guiana. Unlike neighbor- ing scenes along the rackof souvenirs-shots of exotic animals,people, and tourist landmarks-the card intentionally portrays something apart from conventional locality: some dynamic artificial space, free from ties to the world. In this sense, it is a veritablesnapshot of modernity,of a where that could be anywhere.And yet, significantly,the card does mark a particular site on the globe and a set of human activities embeddedin it. Indeed, the appealof the image to its potentialpurchasers is based partlyon this fact, for the room that could be in Houston,Texas, or in suburbanParis actuallylies in northeasternSouth America, on the edge of a vast rainforest. What should not be modernsometimes is; what is modernsometimes rests on what is not. Withinthe frame of one transgressingpostcard, the orderof modernityis at once establishedand undermined:a technicalcenter, there on the margin. I encounteredthe image in question on a hot and slow afternoonin the summerof 1990, duringmy initial visit to FrenchGuiana. Few people were out in the streetsof Cayenne,few doors open following the noon siesta, and, newly arrivedon a flight from Paris,slightly jet-lagged and uncertainof my surroundings,I felt strikinglyout of place. Coming upon a stationerystore near the center of town, I stepped inside to escape the sun. Instantly,the surroundingsbecame familiar:the constantclimate of air-conditioning,the orderedracks of items displayed for sale, the (comparativelydim) wash of fluorescentlight. Momentarilyrevived by this modern environment,I re- membereda purposeand examined the postcardrack for a likely means of communication.Here the unhurriedexpanse of experienceoutside lay neatly andattractively packaged in well-chosen shots:carefully framed landscapes, tropicalanimals, old buildings, and traditionalpeoples. In this assembly of postcards,the world of FrenchGuiana became manageableand consumable, simultaneouslyequal and present, ordered,separated, and-so to speak- clearlyworth seeing. Then I noticed a rack with rocketsand othermachines, attractionsof a differentorder, focused more on the future and iess on the past.Amid them I found the postcarddescribed, so remarkablyplaceless and Redfield / Space Technology 253 empty of people and yet so appropriatelyavailable to representand authen- ticate this immediateexperience of my travels. This essay examines a portion of the history of technology behind that image with an eye to where things fall on and off maps. The case at hand is particularlygermane because it involves the realization of natural space beyond the confines of the globe: the literal "outerspace" of the Space Age andconsequent redefinitions of the humansphere below. Thus this discussion revolves aroundtwin meaningsof the term"space," one thoughtin physical terms and the other in humanterms. This unavoidableword play serves to underlinethe historicityof the abstractexpanse of the universe,recalling that before the launchingof the first artificialsatellite there was no active outer space to redefine the more immediate active one below-in a sense, no modern sky above a modern ground. I would advance the claim that tech- nologies associated with the exploration and commercializationof outer space have significantly transformedexperiences of "social space" on a global scale, exemplifiedby the redefinitionof the equatorrelative to rockets andsatellite orbits. The exampleof Kourouand the GuianaSpace Center both illustratesthis point and describes its anthropologicalsignificance, serving as a reminderthat human technologies unfold between horizons of human history and geographyand also amid narrativesof humantemporal location embedded in expressions such as "Stone Age" and "Space Age," for tech- nologies, in addition to acting on the world, play significant roles-literal and symbolic-in efforts to differentiatebetween groups of humans inhab- iting it, both past and present. What follows, then, is writtenbetween theory and empiricalobservation, moving back and forth from general themes to a particularinstance and invoking more than one modern narrativetradition. Even as its subject is alternatelyabstract and exact, so too will be the language,for I would make my point as I have found it: betweengeneral statements, personal experience, reflection,and the words of others.' If thereis a special promise in the social study of science and technology, I believe it lies in the incongruitiesof the objects underscrutiny, their mixture of irrepressibleartificiality and natural- izing certainty.Unsettling definitions of realms social and natural,scientific practices, and technological artifacts open a back door to anthropology, returningus to an order of humansthrough an order of things. By its very existence, the space center in French Guiana negotiates the boundary of worlds, providing means of transportationacross them. In examining the context of this technicalcenter
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