Voicing Things in Space in a Post-Planetary Age: The Scientific, the Hard, and the Weird
Résumé
This essay offers a re-interpretation of the notion of secularization as disenchantment by focusing on the history of extraterrestrial music within American literature and culture. It argues that if modernity disenchanted the Earth, the extraterrestrial remained magical. Yet with the coming of the Space Age, the now historical heavens did enter a process of disenchantment. This made itself felt within the attunements of lyrical writing. As humans and robots visited the moon and other planets, near space lost its magic and became available to extractivist endeavors and imaginaries, even as magical exoplanets appeared deeper in space and the song of the Earth as heard from space became more distinct. Thinking beyond inherited oppositions between earth and heaven, this essay seeks to highlight how the astropastoral strains in American lyric can elicit critical resistance to Anthropocene’s the new space economy.