Orbital Poetics: Literature, Theory, World by Philip Leonard (review)

In many ways, it is only befitting that I sit down to organize my thoughts on Philip Leonard's new and important book Orbital Poetics: Literature, Theory, World (2019) the very day people are celebrating—urbi et orbi, I am tempted to say—50 years from the eventful July 20th 1969, when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. Neil Armstrong's "one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind" was for the 1970s and 1980s and has arguably remained, at least for the first decade of the post-Cold War era, a sort of space-age rhetorical pendant to the Pope's regular address at once to the people of Rome and to the whole world. For both declarations are predicated on a pars pro toto geocultural logic, implying as they do a determinate location and community from which and on behalf of which the entire planet could be reached, known, and, some worry, ruled technologically or theologically, openly or overtly. There is, the same people might suggest, something troublingly interchangeable about all this, about how the technology of faith as well as the quasi theology of modernity's technological developmentalism swing into action to further homogenizing, totalizing, and hegemonic agendas in which both the American space program (and the United States largely) and the Vatican (and Catholicism more generally) presume to represent—in all senses—a much vaster, more complex, and epistemologically intractable world. It bears noting, in the same vein, that Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden issued hours ago an anniversary statement making similarly all-embracing references—with an important difference, though: Biden's "mankind" is now, for all electoral intents and purposes, explicitly American. "We were," said Biden, "in th[e] moment [of moon landing], quite simply, Americans—joined together in our wonder, awe, and shared humanity" (2019). The humankind he has just mass-e-mailed is also his country's body politic, whose fractures the Biden campaign is aspiring to "heal" in response to the Trump Administration's policy of systematic divisiveness and social-media-weaponized populism.¹

To be sure, the dramatic scaling back—and, geophysically speaking, down—of the human to a particular nation makes for a counterintuitive if somewhat expected commemoration of the aeronautic milestone. The national, nationalist, and, with Trump and his ilk, white nationalist retrenchment of the quintessentially ecumenic category of humanity lays bare retroactively the camouflaged ethnolocation from which Armstrong and with him a whole discourse of orbital "detachment" were actually already addressing the world, "out-of-this-world" hi-tech props and cosmographic scenery notwithstanding. What is even clearer now than half a century ago is America's strategically benevolent self-billing as humanity's welldeserving stand-in, exemplary in its capacity to propel itself, ethically and technologically, above our "petty differences" and, by the same token, to come ahead in a Cold War race whose objective, among other things, was to claim this very position and wield the symbolism of its internationalist humanism. With the first Sputnik launch, the competition became literalized, taking on a very physical—and astrophysical—dimension, for, after 1957, it was all about the competitors' technological ability to rise above spatially, to distance and elevate themselves stratospherically and farther beyond. Once demonstrated at the expense of those left behind and first and foremost of the Soviet contender, this exclusive aptitude for altitude would putatively accrue the winner elevations and superiorities of other, intellectual, epistemological, political, and moral sorts. These would all converge in a kind of "definitional" authority over the meaning, perchance the political destiny of humanity, the implication being that once you have gone (or risen) where nobody has before, you are, topologically and otherwise, in a position to tell others where they ought to go.

Such an authority hinged, as Leonard cogently explains, on non-terrestrial self-positioning and its perceptual leverage. Where a long sci-fi tradition in film and other media has bestowed this non-terrestrial capability on aliens traveling to Earth and weighing "us" up from above, the critic...