Review of Lahusen, Thomas, and Gene Kuperman, eds. Duke UP, 1993. Minnesota UP, 1993. The lithograph, the printing press and the museum, all machines for putting images in motion, are forms of early cinema.
Cinema realizes a new interface between machines and bodies.
The Challenger space shuttle explosion in 1986 threatened political mythologies of the final frontier, and, in a larger sense, cast doubt on systems theories and the entire cultural project of biotechnical systems building. In the public discourse of the Challenger disaster, extending into public hearings and sociological analyses of NASA, the body was reconstructed within an organizational safety model that denied any further possibility of collapse. The Rogers Commission attempted to reinstate national faith in technological existence, made safe through vigilance and the most minute surveillance of body-machine relations. Invested in government consulting, the academic response was an effort to restore the vision of manned space flight, and, in an entirely self-referential mode, to reassure its academic audience that their ideologies, disciplines, and bodies were still in place and all was right with the world. Thus, the disaster provided the text for the post-catastrophe extraterrestrial survival of the knowledge class, constructed and maintained through living systems theories.