Editor’s Note

This special issue is devoted to the theme of “astroculture,” a neologism coined by Alexander Geppert, organizer of this set of papers. The term, in part, aims to do temporal work, pointing to the rise in the mid to late nineteenth century of interest in exploration of space by humans and machines (and of space as medium for contact and engagement with the non-human) and, then, the persistence of this theme in subsequent decades. Astroculture, thus, serves as a conceptual bridge, connecting the before and after of that usual marker of the Space Age, the launch of Sputnik in 1957. It also aims at a broader historiographic problematic: the status and import of space-related thought, in its many manifestations, in modernity, with a focus on the West for this special issue. It seeks to account for how a relatively marginal interest gained a transnational network of adherents, drew together communities and institutions, increased in cultural purchase, and then, by the 1950s, moved from largely narrative to material expression, as space-related activities became integrated into the geopolitics of the Cold War.

This historical trajectory finds resonance with recent methodological interest in “imaginaries” as a means for grappling with how cultural orders get defined and constituted. Here, for example, Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim’s notion of “sociotechnical imaginaries” and Charles Taylor’s “modern social imaginaries” suggest the historiographic stakes attached to astroculture as concept. ¹ As presented in this issue, the term captures the salience of science and technology as sites of cultural production, but, also, drawing on Taylor’s analysis, it brings forward the question of how space-related thought, in different ways and places, intersected with and reflected broader patterns of modern values and concerns through the last century. As one instance of the latter, among many, consider Hannah Arendt’s preface to her Human Condition, published in 1957, in which she saw spaceflight as bound up with fundamental issues of the modern, particularly the status of the human in a cultural order that valued technology as preeminent means to address contemporary problems. ² The articles in this special issue speak to, with different inflections, the phenomenon of astroculture and its fruitfulness as a research problem for deepening our understanding of the modern experience.

Notes

1. Jasanoff and Kim, “Containing the Atom” and Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries.

2. Arendt, Human Condition.