5 - Apollo TV: The Copernican Turn of the Gaze
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
Summary
Abstract
This chapter claims that television coverage of the moon landing brings no less than a (further) Copernican revolution of the gaze and of human self-understanding. In a reversal of the gaze, the central perspective breaks down, and so does the Copernican order with the gazing subject in the center. The Earth appears on innumerable and omnipresent screens all over the visible surface of the Earth. From now on, every place on Earth is always visible as a picture taken from possibly every single other place on Earth. Television is no longer a matter of making something appear at another place by means of transmission technology, but of selecting from the multitude of always already available virtual images – and places – to make it actually appear.
Keywords: Moon landing, anthropocentrism, globalization, totality, liveness, media event
The successful American expedition to the Moon in 1969 with the Apollo project may have been an important event in the history of space travel, a catalyst for technological development of a kind previously only seen in phases of war, and of course a key date in the Cold War. But, first and foremost, it was the supreme television event. It also provided the basic model for all television events since then, so that changes in the variation, selection, and re-stabilization of television events in the time since could be measured and described in relation to the expedition to the Moon (Luhmann 1997, 413-594). After this event, nothing was ever the same again, as television established itself as a force of change rather than just a witness to it. Instead of putting itself at the service of the Moon project, it used the flight to the Moon to serve its own ends and turned it into its own agent.
In the following, I elaborate on the meaning and stakes of this claim in four movements, taking up topics that were already mentioned in Chapters 2 and 3 in a more systematic way. In the first movement, I explain the significance of the Apollo landing as a television event in greater detail. In the second movement, I argue that the flight to the Moon also marked an important turning point in the whole scopic regime of the modern era.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Thinking Through Television , pp. 95 - 112Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019