Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries, and Cultures

Chapter 1: The Invention of Air Space, Outer Space, and Cyberspace

1 @ The Invention of Air Space, Outer Space, and Cyberspace james hay This chapter offers a genealogy of three related discourses and programs about achieving, enacting, and managing communicative space: air space, outer space, and cyberspace. I first consider how something called “outer space” (a space of freedoms, an object of government and policy, and a space “settled,” understood, and organized through a new regime of technologies fit for global communication) developed out of a pre–World War II conception of air space (having to do with both radio and flyover space, and hence a conception of space supporting and problematizing national sovereignty). I then suggest ways that these two historical conceptions of space and regimes of communicative space (air-space before World War II, and outer space during the Cold War) became a framework for imagining, requiring, and inventing something called “cyberspace.” In this chapter, I emphasize the ongoing problematization and regulation of extraterrestrial outer spaces since the late nineteenth century in order to suggest a historical connection between the reinvention of outer space and political modernization (the reinvention of liberal government). In this sense, I offer a way of thinking about the relation between the invention of communication, the invention of space (that solves or manages problems of communication), and the ongoing experiments aimed at “advancing” and reinventing liberal government as a system invoking the virtue of communication as the most peaceful and civil way to exercise freedom and achieve security. While I focus on how this reinvention of communication, space, and government occurred in the West (and particularly from the United States), I also underscore how these ongoing programs of invention were rationalized as solving problems of global governance and of waging global peace through extraterrestrial communication. Furthermore, while I am interested in the practice and mentalities of invention, I also emphasize the experimentalism, failures, and insecurities surrounding the solutions for managing space, and in this way underscore the changing regimes of truth in governing and securing a “free world” and open skies, through communication technology. This chapter makes a number of contributions to the discussion of satellite technologies of communication. First, it offers a history of the present, considering how the current (“neoliberal”) governmental rationale about securing cyberspace has emerged out of a modern preoccupation with securing , regulating, and pacifying air space and outer space. Second, it addresses how understanding satellite technology depends on recognizing the historical and geographic relationship between communication and transportation technologies. Third, it rebuts technological determinist accounts of contemporary communication technology by emphasizing instead how the invention of communicative space has been predicated on the changing rationalities of liberal government—particularly from the United States. And fourth, it offers a theoretical and methodological alternative to accounts of modernity and globalization that see space as an epiphenomenon of communication networks, economies, and political government, and their modernity or modernization. Modernity’s Babel Complex It is by nature that one of the uses that God has given to the seas and rivers is that of opening up routes that communicate with every country in the world by navigation. And it is by police that we have made towns, public squares, and other places appropriate for this use, and that those of each town, province, and nation can communicate with all the others of every country by great highways. —Jean Domat, Le droit public Although this chapter is mostly concerned with developments over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it recognizes the importance of an even longer history of communication, space, and government. Noteworthy research into this historical context includes James W. Carey’s discussion of the relation between communication and transportation during the nineteenth century and how that relation temporally and spatially organized emerging nation-states such as the United States, and Armand Mattelart’s explanation of “the invention of communication” as a swarming of scientific discourses and projects in eighteenth-century France preoccupied with the “health” of circulatory systems—from the human body to national territory— as unblocked, freely flowing arteries. Carey and Mattelart both call attention to the interdependence of communication and transportation, though Mattelart more fully acknowledges the relation between economic modernity james hay 20 (laissez-faire) and modern communication as transportation (laissez-passer), and between liberalism and the various “paths of reason” (the rationalities, technologies, and networks) on which communication’s “invention” and modern application depended.1 The chapter’s title refers to Mattelart’s history of the...