The great encicler Brief history of the frontiers from the Bronze Age to Space Louis Ranine The two powers that managed to accomplish the most succesful and extensive expansion of their core territory through the progressive penetration and settlement of wild land during the 18th and 19th Centuries were also the ones that protagonized man's jump into space during the following century. The direct territorial rule over the colonial empires of France or Britain faded away, and the last ambitious project of territorial expansion and settlement in european territory, that is, operation Barbarossa and the never realized Generalplan Ost, ended on a cataclism. But Russia and America, on the other hand, managed to expand and consolidate their territory to its physical limit: the Pacific Ocean. This short article will be a brief, reduced yet wide in time historical study, discussing some ideas inside the concept «frontier» through history with the purpose of tracking down through time the deeper ideological purpose of the frontier as myth and as political reality, so we can find, in the final, part how those ideas extended to space exploration. At the end of it, I will argue if the space frontier comes as a «good replacement» of the old forms of the frontier. I will focus, mostly, on how those attitudes reflected in America, leaving most details about Russia for a more specialized essay; as I don’t consider the following words an exhaustive exploration, but instead, the opening provocation for an argument I am eager to have with the reader. In ancient egyptian culture, the word “snt wr”, translated as “the great circle” or “the great encircler”, refers to the ocean serving as perimeter of the world. This ocean could be identified with the two seas around Egypt (the Mediterranean and the Red Sea), or in their absence, with a great flow of water like the Euphrates river, that served as border of Egypt during its period of greatest territorial extension. This aquatic great encicled was the container of all lands that belonged to the pharaoh, as we can read in the following statement by pharaoh Amenophis II, He (= Amun) assigned to me that which is with him, which the eye of his uraeus illuminates, all lands, all countries, every circuit, the Great Circle The cosmic boundary imposed by this great circle in the end of the world, beyond which there is only endless chaos,was named by historian Mario Liverani as the “static border”, term we will also use. Within those borders, the duty of the sovereign is to extend the state’s own borders further. Ideally, all that territory belongs to the sovereign, but on practice, the territory outside of it still remains outside his authority. Therefore, Egypt found itself, paradoxically, with two different boundaries according to its ideology; this last border inside the more overreaching static border was the one that separated the territory ruled by the sovereign and the “rebel” and chaotic territories beyond. Liverani refered to it as the “dynamic border”, and of course, the territory that contained was the same as our own common idea of border. Under Egypt's “centralist” ideology, the frontier of the realm must always move outwards in order for the pharaoh to bring order to an always increasing amount of territory (most often through vassal states), and his failure on accomplishing this task could only be a sign of
the pharaoh's abandonment of the gods and of his spiritual corruption. The idea of conquest as a pushing the frontier towards an ideal form can be specially seen in one of the main terms used for "conquest", "in'i dsw" (or "in’i phw" or "in'i drw"), translated as "to acquire the limits". An example from a description of the assumption of power by Thotmes I, (...) who acquired the boundaries of the Two Lands, (they being) with bowed head, who guarded Egypt and broadened its boundaries This proccess of continuous broadening the national boundaries was seen as an "equalization of inner and outer territory", and thus, ideally, should not last at perpetuity by definition, as the world was finite as described by the static boundary. But of course, in practice, that would never be the case in Egypt’s history, and the proccess was always being perpetually realized, but never completed. These two great paradoxes we have seen remained always at the heart of Ancient Egyptian foreign policy, and had to deal through their consequences a variety of explanations of why the omnipotent pharaoh was unable to complete this proccess, all of them, vague and little more than an afterthough. This shows how extraordinary in human history is the position of America (and, in a less extent and different form, Russia) as a country that effectively "fulfilled" her territorial destiny when she managed to control the territory contained in the static boundary created by the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. We need to study in detail how these concepts of old middle eastern politics could translate into 19th Century America. As the reader will recall, in ancient Egypt the frontier was defined by the great mass of water that ended the world. In the case of America, whose far superior knowledge of world geography gave a more adecuate idea of world’s shape, the static boundary is more limited but similarly defined: two large masses of water, the Pacific and the Atlantic, encycling their territory. This definition can already be seen in the first documented usage of the term "Manifest Destiny" in the House of Representatives, during a speech by congressman Robert C. Winthorp, I mean that new revelation of right which has been designated as the right of our manifest destiny to spread over this whole continent. (...) There is a right for a new chapter in the law of nations; or rather, in the special laws of our own country; for I suppose the right of a manifest destiny to spread will not be admitted to exist in any nation except the universal Yankee nation In the definition of America’s static boundary, we can also find yet another commonality between the past and present conceptions of it: the religious dimension. Although there’s an obvious radical change in theology, religion continues to be the one factor that ordains control of the sovereign over the territories contained inside the "great encicler". We can see this in the words of journalist John L. O'Sullivan, coiner of the term "Manifest destiny", In its magnificent domain of space and time, the nation of many nations is destined to manifest to mankind the excellence of divine principles; to establish on earth the noblest temple ever dedicated to the worship of the Most High-the Sacred and the True. Its floor shall be a hemisphereits roof the firmament of the star-studded heavens, and its congregation an Union of many Republics, comprising hundreds of happy millions, calling, owning no man master, but governed by God's natural and moral law of equality, the law of brotherhood-of "peace and good will amongst men.
This same expansion defined and ordained by divinity can also be appreciated in the following words by Samuel Bowles in Switzerland of America, published in 1865 If God has set His sign, His seal, His promise there – a beacon upon the very center and height of the continent to all its people and all its generation. Religion comes into play in both conceptions because it serves as the institution capable of presenting a superior and natural law beyond human ambitions, so the struggle becomes one for the fulfilment of such a defined divine plan that would bring progressively order and peace to the world. This is the way in which the pharaoh's quest for domination rhymes, thousands of years later, in America's quest for progress. Why this nation in particular? The answer is easy, and was well put by the most famous historian and theorist of the frontier Frederick Jackson Turner. «The most significant part about the american frontier is that it lies at the hither edge of free land»; that allowed America a form of frontier that was simply unable to exist in the well-settled European territories. I will leave my reflections on how the concept of frontier as understood in America was imported to Europe with catastrophic consequences for another essay. The existence of this free land served as a perpetual invitation to the expansion of progress, which as we have seen, was founded as the fulfillment of a preordained goal. We can be seen in the view of their own revolution as unfulfilled yet already won. To understand this conception, we will take a quick detour for a quick reflection on the abolitionist view about the question for emancipation, which was also defended as a fulfillment of those "static" promises of the american war of independence. And so, during the debates of Stephen Douglas against Abraham Lincoln, the future american president «main thurst was the accusation that Douglas had departed from the position of the founding fathers», as James M. McPherson argued. Progress moves towards a not yet realized but clearly defined goal, towards which movement must be continuous unless the nation had distanced itself from the moral law; therefore the attack towards Stephen Douglas precisely for wanting to slow down movement. We can see this conception of progress more on a beatiful metaphor in the words of Henry Adam, when describing his childhood road journey to George Washington's Virgina estate in the antebellum South: «The moral of this Virginia road was quite clear, and the boy fully learned it. Slavery was wicked, and slavery was the cause of this road's badness which amounted to social crime - And yet at the end of the road and product of the crime stood Mount Vernon and George Washington.» We can also appreciate in this metaphor how this fixed idea of progress and a fixed location in the territory intertwine. Territory was of clear influence in the vision of American slavery, to the point that Turner considers the slavery issue of importance in the civil war precisely because of «its relationship with westward expansion», and not the other way around. The agent of progress in territory is the "pioneer". This figure, «the true hero of american utopia», according to Paul Virilio, was also defined by Gaston Rébuffat as a person who «takes his body where his eyes have been»: this definition reflects this idea of the frontiersman as going to a previously defined goal. The proccess of going from the current position to this point in the future has as a consequence the full realization of the individual. Frederick Jackson Turner considers the act of moving beyond the frontier as a proccess of personnal change, in which, through the integration and mastering of the wilderness, he and society form themselves. This is the most important consequence of the frontier, and the reason why there’s a great difference in nations formed through the settlement beyond it. The thrill of the pioneer comes from the shape and self knowledge that he arrives through the mastery over the wilderness. It will be noted here, however, that this proccess is, by it’s very nature, condemned to be finished: man realizes himself through the mastering of the wilderness and the conquest of unordered territory, but in doing so, he extinguishes the wilderness. While in egyptian history, this proccess was never over and there
was always a «beyond», America reached a point with little precedent in which that was no longer the case. The pioneer had settled, and that moment of fulfillment led briefly afterwards to a sensation of nostalgia. The idea of bringing civilization through territorial expansion and integration was over. American culture entered into a contradiction of a different nature to the one the pharaoh of Egypt had to deal with: how could progress come to an end? This question could only be resolved or avoided through the search of a new static border. And it was answered through two main solutions: the breaking of american isolationism, through which America extended the static boundary beyond the nation state and would lead into a globalizing project, and, a few decades later, in the push towards the exploration and «conquest» of space. Many words could be said about the first one, but for the purpose of this study, we will only focus in the later, and what has changed between the pioneer and the astronaut. The main reason why there would be a shift to begin with between both of those figures is the necesary intervention of high technology in the proccess. Although expansion has always been dependent on technology, specially medicine, this time the technology is of such magnitude it completely overcomes the individual. We can see this as pioneers in the West were often people that had been displaced by the quick industrialization of american society. Many skilled workers that had been displaced by the rapid transformation of the production model moved West, where industry had yet to arrive. As McPherson’ argues «the rapid westward expansion of the urban frontier, the extraordinary mobility of the american population, and regional differentials in the pace of technological development meant that skilled workers who were displaced by new technology in one part of the country could go west and have a job». This displacement from technology is what opens the door towards a reappraisal of old forms in the uncivilized territories, and therefore, towards individual and social edification. Turner saw in the proccess of bringing civilization forwards a form of "dialogue" with the wilderness, in which the colonizer grows through his adaptation: «Wilderness always wins over the colonizer»; and for this dialogue to occur, there is a need for an acknowledgement of the limitations of technology for the rediscovery of more primitive techniques: «It takes him (the colonist) from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe». That is, however, an absurdity for space exploration: it was Sputnik, not a man, the first that went to outer space. In Rébuffat’s definition, both the eyes and the body require extensions of themselves, they have been molded into something different. As the most glaring symbol of that situation, we can observe that even the terrains that were once beyond the frontier have been overtaken by technology. In his travelogue through the United States “America”, Jean Baudrillard writes about his time visiting three technological enclaves in the middle of what once was the Old West: Salt Lake City, Alamogordo, and Torrey Canyon, “peaks of realized fiction” with the monumental background of America's nature, “sublime and transpolitic places”. This time is about the definition of the boundaries of the proccess itself. It’s in this precise moment that we can fully realize how technology has replaced religion as the main ordainer of the frontier. This becomes a vicious nihilistic circle, as the frontier is defined by the same means dedicated to achieve it. It’s purpose is spiritually void. Once there, man discovers that he is not breaking and struggle against a limit, but fully acting inside of it. Man will never be able to break from the rigid mold given by technology, and fully embrace the wilderness of outer space beyond it. The journey towards space served to give a reminder of something that seemed overlooked all through this history: that man is limited, and short legged. It is useful to recover here another concept from Bronze Age middle eastern politics: the stela. The stela was an inscribed solid object, in the case of the Middle East an upright rock, which served as a marker for the exact location of the frontier, the last piece of territory that the sovereign had managed to bring order into. Technology had also gave us arti-
facts in outer space thar could double as stellas: most famously, the Pioneer plaques containing a summary of man and his mission in outer space for space civilizations. In art, we can also find an interesting example of a stella: Lebbeus Woods's never built Einsteins tomb, a colossal memorial built through high technology that would be launched, if the means to construct it are some time possible, into outer space, never to be seen again once in route towards the void of space. This project should be seen as celebratory as stellae once were, a well deserved homage to the triumph of science. But also, we cannot forget it’s gloomy reality of the monument being a grave. A silent monument going through the stars, serving as memento of mans limits, and his place several steps behind technology. Out of the potential material outcome of expansion into space, far outside the scope of this article, space exploration will always be completely unable to be a solid replacement of the frontier spirit that once replaced. The first question to make ourselves is: should it be? Could the endless perfection of technology and techniques become instead, if not a frontier, a solid pathway for humanity? And if we answer this question negatively... Can we find another replacement for frontier? May this be on a journeying inwards, or a journeying to the past? The debate for this question was my reason for writing this piece.