“The Family of Man” has been read both as an expression of the United States’ new power and position in the world, and as an attempt to combat the threat of communism by promoting a vision of American openness and of consumer culture as embracing the cultural diversity of the world. As I argued in part I, when it is read as the foregrounding of human solidarity in the face of a common danger (the atom bomb), “The Family of Man” can be understood more broadly in terms of a postwar brand of humanism and more specifically in relation to Steichen’s pacifist desires. Cousteau’s underwater films presented an entirely different response to the war and its aftermath. On the one hand, they can be read as a naïve yearning to escape the horrors of war and military occupation, and as a humanistic and phenomenological commitment to the planet’s oceans through the popular culture of cinema. On the other hand, they can be seen as expressions of France’s imperialistic ventures into unexplored territory, and as a quest to control untapped resources in a decolonizing world.
Steichen and Cousteau shared a common view of the ways in which media (photography, film, and later television) could enable a popular type of environmental pedagogy and facilitate forms of global community and solidarity by representing previously hidden relationships and bonds. In this sense, and despite the differences between their projects, both Steichen and Cousteau augment our perceptions of the planet through their respective emphases on limits (Steichen’s apocalyptic vision of the end of the world) and expansion (Cousteau’s representation of ocean wonders). Each created specific kinds of mobile interfaces (the exhibitions and the films) that traveled around the world and consolidated a global audience.
Part II, “Worlds,” focuses on smaller utopian projects found in spatial events such as a national festival and a world’s fair that occupy cities to create experiences articulating a particular view of futurity which grows out of the concept of worlds. Chapter 3 is devoted to future visions, to the discourse of the global and an emerging globalization politics presented at the Festival of Britain in 1951—an important moment of reconstruction in Europe. A global vision of the nation lay at the heart of the new approaches to urban planning, along with the films and media on display at the Festival. Indeed, a critical relationship existed between the utopianism of town planning in the United Kingdom in the late 1940s and 1950s and the new forms of cinema and spectatorship on display at the Festival, including the Telekinema, which combined stereoscopic 3D film and large-screen television, as well as many other film events throughout. Media (3D, television, films, festivals) enabled a utopian vision. Chapter 4 extends considerations of these utopian experiments with urban planning and media through Montreal’s Expo 67. At both the 1951 Festival of Britain and the 1967 World Exposition (Expo 67), a planetary sensibility emerged out of a newly globalizing media culture—in television, film, and intermedia networks such as photography and print journalism. An architecture of futurity framed each event, which embodied the world-making energies of the postwar period in the building of nations (the Festival) and media cities (Expo).
In their very design, both of these events can be seen as forms of what Jakob von Uexküll calls umwelt—in these cases, human spheres in which distinct and particular worlds are defined by how living organisms subjectively perceive their own environments. As we saw in the preceding chapter, a central premise of Uexküll’s umwelt theory maintains that all beings, human and nonhuman alike, inhabit unique worlds. World expositions are literally utopian world-making events in which nations are made to articulate, on the one hand, unique forms of sociality, governmentality, cultures, and inventions, and, on the other, a supposed common humanity that the form of the world’s fair demands in its very structure as an encounter between people, places, and things.