Astronautic Subjects: Postmodern Identity and the Embodiment of Space in American Science Fiction — Page 2:
6 Modern criticism has long debated the function(s) of utopian fantasies for the process of cultural self-fashioning, pointing to the peculiar link between visions of the future and references to the present. "[B]y examining people's ideas about the future," Claudia Springer observes, "we can learn about their responses to present-day issues, for contemporary cultural battles find expression in even the most shocking and improbable speculations about the future" (15). Conceived in this manner, the obsession of contemporary science fiction with images of transgression can be seen as a comment on the current dilemma concerning identity roles. The realm of science fiction abounds with visions of gender-neutral or matriarchal societies, of sex-changes and miraculous bodily transformations, of hypersexual, multisexual, and sometimes asexual creatures. In this essay, I will argue that the motif of identity subversion is combined in American science fiction with another key image most characteristic of cultural self-models: the discovery and utilization of new frontiers. The merging of gender issues with issues of cultural self-fashioning is necessarily ambiguous, revealing a model of the future that can be both affirmative and subversive. This model may reconstruct old frontiers in the guise of new ones, but it may also open up truly alternative ways of conceptualizing the world.
Fashioning the Astronautic Subject
7 The figure of the astronaut stands at the center of such fantasies. Sci-fi texts can either accentuate the spacewalker's national affiliation or point to his/her resistance to any form of collective identity. The fashioning of "astronautic subjects," however, is not limited to the realm of science fiction, nor is it restricted to a certain terrain within the cultural imagination. The "astronautic subject" is a quite real phenomenon of postmodern social and cultural practice. Since it ostentatiously conceals the protagonist's actual biological sex behind a thick uniform, the concept of astronautic subjectivity encourages us to question the validity of any form of core identity. Moreover, by highlighting the astronaut's desire to conquer new terrains, it intimates the possibility of a far-reaching transformation of social patterns.
8 Hence, the astronaut can be seen as a chronotope for the transcendence - and eventually subversion - of (gender) identity. In a Bakhtinian sense, the space traveler not only transgresses time and space, but also condenses time in space.[2]The name "Chris" can be interpreted as a metonymy, referring to the pioneer status of the astronaut in the 1960s. Like Jesus Christ, the astronaut is both a missionary and a martyr. The iconic function of the astronaut in <em>You Only Live Twice</em> is underpinned by the fact that the actor who plays Chris is not specified in the film's credits which only refer to Norman Jones and Paul Carson as the actors playing the two astronauts on the first spacecraft. The images of the first spacewalker, Edward H. White, taken in June, 1965, can hardly be distinnational icons attached to it and the helmet (which even hides facial features), we guished from the pictures of Bruce McCandless, shot almost twenty years later. Time seems to be meaningless for the spacewalker. In such illustrations, astronautic identity is portrayed as a surface - consistent in its utter appearance, but also inscrutable as far as the structure behind it is concerned. The lack of mimic play and outward gestures makes the astronaut a projection field of our own ideas. Since the astronaut's appearance is marked mainly by the spacesuitwith its are continuously looking for clues behind this cold façade - some hidden meaning, a sign that enlightens us about the astronaut's true identity.
Figure 3 and 4: Astronautic subjects: Edward H. White in June, 1965, and Bruce McCandless in February, 1984.
The Nexus of Time and Space
9 The symbolic nexus of time and space has always been a characteristic feature of scientific texts on space traveling. Pointing to the potential transformation of individual experience during aeronautic activities, time and space serve as central metaphors for the constitution of astronautic identity. Two years after the founding of NASA, Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline published a path-breaking essay, "Cyborgs and Space," in which they praised the astronaut as a model of human progress. "Space travel challenges mankind not only technologically but also spiritually, in that it invites man to take an active part in his own biological evolution" (26). In his introduction to D.S. Halacy's bestselling book on cybernetic organisms, Cyborg - Evolution of the Superman, Clynes summarized this view, now emphasizing the frontier as the marker of astronautic identity:
A new frontier is opening which allows us renewed hope. The new frontier is not merely space, but more profoundly the relationship between "inner space" to "outer space" - a bridge being built between mind and matter, beginning in our time and extending into the future. (7)
10 According to Clynes, the astronaut must be regarded as a wanderer between the worlds, a composite creature which oscillates and mediates between inside and outside, present and future, mind and matter. One of the main challenges of space travel, the two scholars argue, is that it invites the scientist to control the processes of human evolution, endowing the astronaut with the capability of adapting to an alien environment. If the human body could be integrated into the necessities of the space age, the result would be a new form of humanity. The main task, according to Clynes and Kline, was to adapt man's body "to any environment he may choose" (26). Although the alterations in the astronaut's body that Clynes and Kline recommend - hypnosis, the use of drugs, especially mental energizers and amphetamines, and even surgery to improve the bodily system - do not appear realistic today, the vision behind it is still frighteningly present in current discourses. By arranging a collaboration between cybernetic systems and the astronaut's own bodily powers, man would be "[left] free to explore, to create, to think and to feel" (Clynes & Kline 27). The declared goal of this rhetoric was the modification of the man-machine complex into a self-regulating organism which incorporated the spirit of individual freedom while also retaining a notion of human progress. In an interview published thirty-five years later, Manfred E. Clynes reaffirmed this credo:
The main idea was to liberate man from constraints as he flies into space - […] it seemed necessary to give him [the] bodily freedom to exist in another part of the universe without […] constraints. (Gray 47)