The Great Rock 'n' Roll Castration

Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious as portrayed by Anson Boon and Louis Partridge

 

Director Danny Boyle irritated me in 2012 with his ludicrous opening ceremony for the London Olympics, featuring a twenty-minute tribute to the NHS, so when I heard that he was making a six-part TV series about the Sex Pistols (based on Steve Jones's Lonely Boy memoir), I began to prepare for a heavily sentimental take on the story.   

 

But, having now read further details of the project - including who's cast to play Rotten and company - and seen images released from on set, I fear what we are about to be offered is a revision of the past that exchanges sneering nihilism for an uplifting tale of smiling punks in touch with their feelings and struggling to live up to their bad boy image, whilst dealing with issues of abuse, deprivation, and addiction 

 

Even the title of the series - Pistol - speaks of castration; of a band rendered sexless and transformed from cocky young 'erberts with an eye for fashion into sensitive boys crying out for attention and who only wanted to be accepted by society and loved as people.*   

 

Still, as a friend of mine said, you never know; the project might be redeemed by a brilliant script (co-written by Frank Cottrell Boyce and Craig Pearce) and some excellent performances from the young cast. I doubt it. But we'll see when the series airs next year.   

 

 

Notes

 

* John Lydon - who has already spoken out against Boyle's project - mocked this idea of poor misunderstood punks on 'Fodderstompf', the closing track of the first Public Image Ltd. album (Virgin Records, 1978): click here.  

 

For a related post to this one in which I discuss the relationship between acting and authenticity and address the question of whether anyone can be a Sex Pistol, click here. 

I Would Like to Know the Stars Again: Reflections on Astronomy and Astrology in the Work of D. H. Lawrence

"I would like to know the stars again ... I would like to be able to put my ego into the sun, 

and my personality into the moon, and my character into the planets, 

and live the life of the heavens." - D. H. Lawrence

 

I. There's a Star Man Waiting in the Sky

 

To his credit, Lawrence was always open and honest about his preference for astrology over astronomy. 

 

For him, the former is an ancient body of esoteric knowledge - a lost science - concerning the vital relationship between man and the universe; whilst the latter is merely an attempt to restrict human consciousness and kill the true splendour of the heavens, as his Introduction to Frederick Carter's The Dragon of the Apocalypse makes clear:

 

"I have read books of astronomy which made me dizzy with the sense of illimitable space. But the heart melts and dies, it is the disembodied mind alone which follows on through this horrible hollow void of space, where lonely stars hang in awful isolation. And this is not a release. It is a strange thing, but when science extends space ad infinitum, and we get a terrible sense of limitlessness, we have at the same time a secret sense of imprisonment. Three-dimensional space is homogeneous, and no matter how big it is, it is a kind of prison. No matter how vast the range of space, there is no release."*      

 

Works of astrology, on the other hand, bring a marvellous release of the whole imagination:

 

"In astronomical space, one can only move, one cannot be. In the astrological heavens, that is to say, the ancient zodiacal heavens, the whole man is set free, once the imagination crosses the border. The whole man, bodily and spiritual, walks in the magnificent fields of the stars [...] and the feet tread splendidly upon [...[ the heavens, instead of untreadable space." [46]

        

Essentially, Lawrence is contrasting two types of experience and privileging one over the other:

 

"To enter the astronomical sky of space is a great sensational experience. To enter the astrological sky of the zodiac and the living, roving planets is another experience, another kind of experience; it is truly imaginative, and to me, more valuable. It is not a mere extension of what we know: an extension that becomes awful, then appalling. It is the entry into another world, another kind of world, measured by another dimension. And we find some prisoned self in us coming forth to live in this world." [46] 

 

It's not that Lawrence wishes to deny the first experience. But he much prefers the sense of being part of the macrocosm that astrology affords him:

 

"I become big and glittering and vast with a sumptuous vastness. I am the macrocosm, and it is wonderful! And since I am not afraid to feel my own nothingness in front of the vast void of astronomical space, neither am I afraid to feel my own splendidness in the zodiacal heavens." [47]  

 

Astrological symbolism may only be a type of fantasy - may not be factually correct or true in the scientific sense that astronomy is true - but it provides one with a feeling of joy and sense of power as well as freedom: "So we need not feel ashamed of flirting with the zodiac. The zodiac is well worth flirting with." [47]**

 

 

II. Transcendental Egoism à la D. H. Lawrence

 

Let me begin by saying that I understand Lawrence's objection to positivism and his response to the inhuman scale of the cosmos as given to us within astronomy. When you first encounter the facts and figures of the universe you can indeed become dizzy with the sense of illimitable space. 

 

However, I think we should accept the challenge of this and affirm our vertigo and our imprisonment - Lawrence's word - within a godless and, for the most part, lifeless universe. Nihilism is not something to fear, or seek to overcome, but, as a form of intellectual integrity, something to celebrate.***

 

Alas, in order to guarantee imaginative freedom, Lawrence is prepared to dismiss empirical evidence in favour of subjective truth and to cheerfully exchange scientific knowledge for religious myth. As a fantasist and a theo-humanist, of course he prefers astrology to astronomy. And why not, when the former is so much more flattering to one's sense of self-importance.

 

By his own admission, placing his feet upon the heavens makes him feel alive and powerful; and that's not a minor consideration when you are as close to death as Lawrence was when writing here. Small and insignificant, Lawrence wants to project himself into "the great sky with its meaningful stars and its profoundly meaningful motions" [46]. He wants to declare his unity with the cosmos and, in so doing, achieve a certain immortality. 

 

But this dying man's wish is surely the same kind of transcendental egoism that Lawrence elsewhere ridicules in others. He boasts that he is not afraid to feel his own nothingness before the vast void of astronomical space, but, actually, he does seem frit when confronted with reality and ontological hollowness. 

 

However, scared or not, Lawrence at least knows what it is he wants: a release of the imagination in order that it might make him feel stronger and happier. Science doesn’t provide this, he says. At best, it satisfies the intellect by giving us a sun and a moon that are "only thought-forms […] things we know but never feel by experience" [51].

 

This, I have to say, is a bit rich: for so too are the sun and moon given us by astrology only thought-forms - and, arguably, nothing but colourful thought-forms, whereas the sun and moon spoken of within astronomy have some actual basis in material reality.

 

 

III. A Coda on Correlationism

I think it's fair to say that Lawrence's thinking can be characterised by what Quentin Meillassoux terms correlationism. Thus his preference for astrology over astronomy. For Lawrence is not really interested in the stars and planets, so much as he is interested in their relation to him and his relation to them. 

 

In other words, the paradox at the heart of Lawrence's writing is that whilst he rages against modern people for falling out of touch with the living reality of the cosmos, his fundamental concern is with human consciousness and language and he's not even going to try to conceive of the universe as existing in itself regardless of whether we are thinking it or not.

 

Perhaps this is why Lawrence instinctively hates what science tells him about the universe, in terms of its size, its age, its formation, etc. Statements, for example, such as the universe is 13.7 billion years old obviously posit a pre-human and non-human cosmos and Lawrence - for all his professed anti-humanism - simply doesn't want (or know how) to think events that are "anterior to the advent of life as well as consciousness".****

 

Ultimately, what Lawrence reveals himself to be in his late work is a subjective idealist; one who desperately wants to belong to a meaningful universe and is incapable of conceding that what science tells us about matter existing independently of man might be true. Indeed, he comes dangerously close at times to resembling one of those religious lunatics who insist that ancient wisdom is true because they feel it to be true and want it to be true. 

 

And that's disappointing to be honest ...

 

 

Notes

 

* D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to The Dragon of the Apocalypse by Frederick Carter', in Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 46. Future page references to this work will be given directly in the text.

 

** To be fair, Lawrence does later qualify this by adding: "But not in the rather silly modern way of horoscopy and telling your fortune by the stars." [51]

*** I agree with Ray Brassier, who argues that nihilism is an important speculative opportunity and an "unavoidable corollary of the realist conviction that there is a mind-independent reality". See the Preface to Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. xi.

 

**** Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude, trans. Ray Brassier, (Continuum, 2009), p. 9.

Just to be clear on this important point: it doesn’t matter whether Lawrence chooses to think such events true or false, but the fact that he is completely unconcerned with the modern scientific discourse which describes these events, does, I think, bring shame upon him. As Meillassoux points out, it is this discourse that allows us to have a rational and meaningful debate "about what did or did not exist prior to the emergence of humankind, as well as what might eventually succeed humanity" [ibid., 114]. In other words, it is science - and only science (not myth, religion, or poetry) - that can posit dia-chronic statements and makes dia-chronic knowledge possible (i.e. knowledge of a world without witness). Whether Lawrence likes it or not, no man, god, or sentient being need be on the scene for a mind-independent universe to exist and to carry on just as it has always carried on.

Some of this material has been extracted (and revised) from an essay entitled 'Sun-Struck' published on James Walker's Digital Pilgrimage: click here. The picture of a cosmic-looking D. H. Lawrence used at the top of this post is a detail from an image created by Walker to illustrate the essay as it appeared on his blog.   

Contrasting Visions of the Last Man in Nietzsche and Olaf Stapledon

 

 

 

Nietzsche and Olaf Stapledon both had a vision of the last humans ...

 

I. 

 

For Nietzsche, der letzter Mensch is the antithesis of a superior being. 

 

And yet, despite all his flaws and shortcomings, the last man is self-content and represents the culmination of humanity's desire to become the perfect domestic animal: passive, apathetic, averse to risk taking or living dangerously, in favour of all those things beginning with the letter C that Zarathustra so despises; comfort, convenience, and conformity, for example. 

 

The last man simply wants to earn a reasonable living and secure his own health and safety; i.e., self-preservation not self-overcoming is his goal and he cares more about walking the dog than exercising his will to power. He is small and he makes everything around him feel smaller. All that is different from himself - everything alien, queer, or superior - appears to him as criminal, insane, or obscene (in a word, evil).      

 

And yet, for all his profession of happiness, the last man is full of resentment and the lust for revenge; he is compelled to seek out those individuals who manifest this difference so that he may cut them down to size and bring them into line, thereby negating the chaos which generates dancing stars in the name of love, peace, equality, and justice.

 

The last man's dream is of belonging to a one great reconciled herd of humanity in which everyone wants the same and is the same and whoever thinks otherwise goes voluntarily into the madhouse. Or, indeed, to the Vernichtungslager.*

 

 

II. 

 

For the British philosopher and sci-fi writer Olaf Stapledon, on the other hand, the Last Men - whom he imagines living on Neptune 2000,000,000 years from now - are very much Übermenschen (though not in the Nietzschean sense).

 

As the eighteenth and final species of human being, these Neptunian Last Men are a perfected version of the relatively short-lived Seventeenth Men (created by the Sixteenth Men to succeed them and with an ability for mental fusion between individual minds resulting in an altogether new mode of consciousness).  

 

Essentially, the Last Men are a race of genderfluid polyamorous philosophers and artists with a penchant for ceremonial cannibalism. They are also potentially immortal; that is to say, whilst they can still have fatal accidents, be murdered by others, or die via suicide, they needn't worry about sickness or old age.   

 

Stapledon writes:

"If one of the First Men could enter the world of the Last Men, he would find many things familiar and much that would seem strangely distorted and perverse. [...] 

      Among the familiar things that he would encounter would be creatures recognizably human yet in his view grotesque. [...] Some of these fantastic men and women he would find covered in fur, hirsute, or mole-velvet, revealing the underlying muscles. Others would display bronze, yellow or ruddy skin, and yet others a transluscent ash-green, warmed by the underflowing blood. As a species, though we are all human, we are extremely variable in body and mind, so variable that superficially we seem to be not one species but many. [...] The traveller might perhaps be surprised by the large yet sensitive hands which are universal, both in men and women. [...] The pair of occipital eyes, too, would shock him; so would the upward-looking astronomical eye on the crown, which is peculiar to the Last Men. [...] Apart from such special features as these, there is nothing definitely novel about us [...] We are both more human and more animal. [...] Yet our general proportions are definitely human in the ancient manner. [...] Moreover, if our observer were himself at all sensitive to facial expression, he would come to recognize in every one of our innumerable physiognomic types an indescribable but distinctively human look, the visible sign of that inward and spiritual grace which is not wholly absent from his own species."**   

 

These multi-racial and bestial-bodied god-men with faces that remain (depressingly) all-too-human, habitually wander around in the nip, only wearing clothes for special occasions or for when they wish to fly (made possible thanks to a pair of overalls fitted with gravity-defying radiation-generators). They live a happy communal form of life, growing vegetables, observing the stars, pottering about in their garden, or home decorating.

 

What really sets them apart from all earlier human beings, we are told, is their unique love life; the Last Men are futuristic swingers in small multisexual groups that form the basis of super-individuality in which single brains become mere nodes within a giant network of mind:

 

"Of course the mental unity of the sexual group is not the direct outcome of the sexual intercourse of its members. Such intercourse does occur. Groups differ from one another very greatly in this respect; but in most groups all the members of the male sexes have intercourse with all the members of the female sexes. Thus sex is with us essentially social. It is impossible for me to give any idea of the great range and intensity of experience afforded by these diverse types of union. Apart from this emotional enrichment of the individuals, the importance of sexual activity in the group lies in its bringing individuals into that extreme intimacy, temperamental harmony and complementariness, without which no emergence into higher experience would be possible." [272]         

 

Ultimately, Stapledon's Last Men, rather like Nietzsche's letzter Mensch, form theselves into a perfect herd and the individual discovers his truest self as part of a transhuman collective made up from a million million brains and bodies. I don't know if any one objects to this process - or if there would be any point, for one suspects that resistance would be futile: 

 

"Ours is in fact a society dominated [...] by a single racial purpose which is in a sense religious [...] in each mind of man or woman the racial purpose presides absolutely; and hence it is the unquestioned motive of all social policy." [280]   

 

Stapledon regards this as the ultimate form of democracy: free of all serious conflict, as individuals learn to increasingly trust in the judgements and dictates of the hive mind. Nietzsche would despise such mystical-spiritual-utopian twaddle. And I despise it too: such cosmic idealism is just another form of fascism at last: Ein Volk, ein Welt, ein Geist ...      

 

 

Notes

 

* See Nietzsche, 'Zarathustra's Prologue' (5), in Part 1 of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85) on which I base this summary.  

** See Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men, (Gollancz, 2004), pp. 262-63. Further page references to this text will be given directly in the post. 

 

For a related post to this one, contrasting the thought of Nietzsche and Stapledon on the death of man, click here.

Nietzsche Contra Olaf Stapledon on the Death of Man

The nihilist and the transcendental idealist

 

 

Recently, I started exploring the speculative writings of British philosopher and sci-fi author Olaf Stapledon, whose fame rests mostly on two hugely influential works: Last and First Men (1930) and Star Maker (1937). 

 

So far, however, I've not been terribly impressed: for no matter how vast the range of material covered by Stapledon - how numerous the ideas or how sensational the imaginative experience offered - there is, as D. H. Lawrence would say, no sense of release. One comes away from his work feeling that one is still trapped within the same old moral-rational universe full of spiritual values and, behind it all, a disembodied consciousness or cosmic supermind.

 

And, even after 2000,000,000 years and eighteen distinct species of human being, when Stapledon decides the game is up and a death sentence can finally be passed on mankind via solar catastrophe, he can't help hoping that we might yet find some way to spunk our essence into the wider galaxy and thus disseminate among the stars the seeds of a new humanity. 

 

And nor can he help coming to the final conclusion: 

 

"Great are the stars, and man is of no account to them. But man is a fair spirit, whom a star conceived and a star kills. He is greater than those bright blind companies. For though in them there is incalculable potentiality, in him there is achievment, small, but actual. Too soon, seemingly, he comes to his end. But when he is done he will not be nothing, not as though he had never been; for he is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things." [1]

Obviously, as a Nietzschean and as a nihilist, I can't let that pass and I would refer readers (once more) to the little story that Nietzsche tells us:

 

"Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of 'world history', but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die." [2]

 

Nietzsche comments:

 

"One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no additional mission which would lead it beyond human life." [3]     

 

Push comes to shove, I think Nietzsche is on the money and that Stapledon - like all idealists - is kidding himself. As Ray Brassier notes: 

 

"Nietzsche's 'fable' perfectly distils nihilism's most disquieting suggestion: that from the original emergence of organic sentience to the ultimate extinction of human sapience 'nothing will have happened'. Neither knowing nor feeling, neither living nor dying, amounts to a difference that makes a difference – 'becoming aims at nothing and achieves nothing'. [4]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men, (Gollancz, 2004), pp. 303-304. 

[2] Nietzsche, 'On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense', in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale, (Humanities Press, 1979), p. 79.

 

[3] Ibid. 

 

[4] Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 205-206. 

 

For a sister post to this one, on visions of the last men in Nietzsche and Stapledon, click here.  

On Becoming a Vaccine Hero

 

 

One of the big differences between the old school fascism of law and order and our new age fascism of health and safety is that whereas the former terrorised its population into compliance and conformity, the latter unfolds via the insidious infantalisation of its people who become ever-more dependent upon the nanny state (that kindest of all kind monsters).

 

The iron fist has morphed into a helping hand and the boot in the face has become a pat on the head ...

 

Thus, for example, if and when you go to have your coronavirus vaccination - as I did this morning - you'll be subjected to the usual humilations that we've become all-too-accustomed to over the past twelve months. 

 

But, adding insult to injury, just when you think the process has finished and you're free to go, a woman standing by the exit steps forward to place a little sticker on your person featuring a heart and a crown design signifying you've been a brave little boy or girl and that you're a model citizen (or a vaccine hero as I heard someone else say).

 

What is one to do? 

 

Perhaps when I return in a few weeks time for my second jab, I'll wear my Foucault t-shirt and hand out leaflets reading: 

 

Biopower: diverse techniques allowing for the subjugation of individual bodies and the coordination of entire populations by the modern state under the guise of defeating Covid-19; often justified in the UK with the slogan Save Lives and Protect the NHS.    

Why Arachnophobes Have Even More Reason to be Fearful Than They Ever Imagined

D. folliculorum as seen under an electron microscope 

(Credit: Power and Syred / SPL)

 

 

I.

 

Like many other people, a friend of mine - let's call her Miss Muffet - has an intense and irrational fear of spiders: If one were ever to crawl on me, I would die, she has said on more than one occasion. And so I've always resisted the urge to inform her about the existence of a genus of skin mites that live on the human face called Demodex ...

 

 

II.

 

Commonly known as face spiders [1], these tiny arachnids are divided into two species; those that live in hair follicles (D. folliculorum) and those that live in the sebaceous glands connected to hair follicles (D. brevis). 

 

Each has a semi-transparent elongated body, covered in scales, and consisting of two fused segments and eight short legs attached to the first body segment. Each also has a little mouth adapted to grinding up dead skin cells and sucking up the oils which accumulate in the hair follicles. 

 

Sleeping by day, at night they like to slowly stroll around the surface of the face in the hope of finding a mate. Once fertilised, eggs are laid inside the hair follicles or sebaceous glands and take 3-4 days to hatch. The larvae develop into adults within a week and then live out their brief lives within the facial pores of their human host.     

 

It's important to note - before you start scrubbing your face like a lunatic - that Demodex pose no threat to our wellbeing; unless they gather in unusually large numbers, in which case they may provoke certain skin conditions that necessitate a visit to the dermatologist. 

 

But that's rare; most people - including my friend Miss Muffet - live blissfully ignorant of the fact that their face is crawling with hundreds - maybe thousands - of microscopic mites, feasting and fucking [2].  

 

Notes

 

[1]  Actually, they don't look much like spiders and the name Demodex - derived from the Greek terms δημός and δήξ - gives us a better idea of their appearance (i.e., fat-bodied and fat-loving little worms). I'm not sure this will do much to calm my friend, however. 

[2] Interestingly, whilst Demodex might eat, sleep, and reproduce on your face, they're not shitting on it in a conventional sense as they possess no anuses via which to do so. What happens, rather, is that they retain their waste matter throughout their lives, then, at death, there's one large release of the stuff in what some describe (somewhat exaggeratedly) as an explosion of shit. It's thought that this might cause skin irritation and/or inflammation in some people.   

Talaria: On the Secularisation of Winged Footwear from Hermes to Jeremy Scott

 

Adidas Originals by Jeremy Scott 

JS Wings 2.0 Gold (2014)

 

 

As everybody knows, the first pair of winged sandals belonged to the Greek god Hermes ...

 

Made of imperishable gold, they enabled him to fly as swift as any bird and to move freely between worlds (which is handy when employed as a divine messenger). They also magically ensured that he left no footprint at the scene of a crime (which is convenient when out on the rob). 

 

Interestingly, Perseus famously wears the sandals to help him slay the Medusa. But how he came to be in possession of them - and what happened to them afterwards - I don't know.  

 

What I do know, however, is that we live today in a very different world; one in which, thanks to irreverent American fashion designer Jeremy Scott,  everyone is entitled to wear wings on their feet, not just gods and heroes ... 

 

Determined to become a fashion designer from a young age, Scott launched his own brand in Paris, in 1997, just a year after graduating from the Pratt Institute in New York, mixing street style, pop culture, and high fashion in a distinctive style. Although considered neither serious nor commercial by many within the fashion establishment, Scott became a cult figure with an enthusiastic fan base.

 

Recognising his talent and his appeal, Moschino appointed him as their creative director in 2013. But that's not what interests me here. What interests me here, rather, is his extraordinary collaboration with Adidas beginning five years earlier ...

 

When Adidas Originals launched Scott's eye-catching collection of footwear in 2008, his winged high-tops transformed the sneaker market and elevated him to superstar status with mass appeal. Since then, there have been various versions of the shoe, including my favourite version shown above from 2014, designed in reflective gold patent leather, with a gum sole speckled with gold dust.       

 

Who could ask for more? They make the talaria made by Hephaestus pale in comparison and John O'Connor's winged boots designed for Mr Freedom in the early 1970s - as famously worn by Elton John (and written about by Paul Gorman here) - look somewhat clumsy and clownish.

 

 

At the Polar Bear Hotel

 Photo: Xinhua / Rex / Shutterstock

 

 

I wouldn't go so far as Morrissey, who once described the Chinese as a subspecies of human being due to their absolutely horrific record on animal welfare, but, really, do the owners, staff, and guests of the new Harbin Polar Land Hotel feel no shame?

 

It's bad enough how the Chinese treat their own native bears - with the exception of the panda, which is regarded as a national treasure and thus afforded some degree of protection - but do they really need to import members of a threatened species all the way from the Arctic, just to make a sad spectacle of them for the amusement of tourists? 

 

The hotel, in the frozen north-east province of Heilongjiang, resembles a giant igloo and is built in a reverse panopticon manner around a brightly lit central enclosure, complete with fake rocks and icicles and a white painted floor, housing a pair of live polar bears. Guests can thus gawp out of their windows and watch or photograph the animals 24/7. 

 

To be fair, even some Chinese commentators are raising voices of concern. But the fact is that businesses are allowed to exploit animals in any manner they may wish without having to worry about infringing any laws. 

 

I suppose the best that can be said is that at least these snow-white bears are not being milked of their bile like their Asiatic cousins and that, push comes to shove, an air-conditioned enclosure is better than being kept in a cage that is not large enough even to stand up in or turn around. 

 

What's more, if those who bang on about melting sea ice are correct, then polar bears may be heading for extinction by the end of this century. So perhaps those individuals that find sanctuary of sorts - and a life in showbiz - at a theme park hotel might one day be regarded as the fortunate ones ... 

 

 

Picture This: In Praise of the Photo Booth

 

Although we might trace the history of the photo booth back to the late 19th-century, I think it's fair to say that what most people understand to be a photo booth - coin-operated and complete with curtain - didn't debut until September 1925, on Broadway, in NYC. 

Known as the Photomaton, it was the patented invention of a Jewish immigrant from Russia, Anatol Josepho, which would take, develop, and print a strip of eight snaps in under 10 minutes for just 25¢. 

 

In the first six months of operation, the Photomaton captured the images of 280,000 people and soon booths were being placed across the United States. So popular was the Photomaton, that white-gloved attendants stood by the machine during hours of operation in order to control the crowds (and provide any necessary maintenance).

 

In 1928, Josepho - who had arrived in America only five years earlier - sold the rights to his invention for $1,000,000 and guaranteed future royalties. 

 

The new master of the Photomaton, Henry Morgenthau Sr. - a lawyer and businessman who amassed a fortune from real estate and once served as the US ambassador to the Ottoman Empire - told The New York Times that the Photomaton would enable him to do in the field of photography what Henry Ford had accomplished in the automobile industry.

 

When, in 1929, the Photomaton was introduced into the European market, many notable figures were keen to have their pictures taken, including the artists André Breton and Salvador Dalí. 

 

So perhaps it's not really surprising that Andy Warhol would later reveal himself to be a big fan of the photo booth, for whom the latter represented "a quintessentially modern intersection of mass entertainment and private self-contemplation" [1].  

 

I'm sure Warhol also recognised the erotic nature of such an intimate space; once squeezed inside a photo booth with someone on your knee, it's almost impossible not to cop a feel or snatch a kiss. 

 

But for him, as an artist, the real fascination was with the actual strip of single frame images produced: "The serial, mechanical nature of the strips provided Warhol with an ideal model for his aesthetic of passivity, detachment, and instant celebrity." [2]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm quoting from a text posted on the website of The Metropolitan Museum of Art to accompany a Photobooth Self-Portrait produced by Andy Warhol (c. 1963): click here. 

 

[2] Ibid.

 

See also: Jason Fate, 'The New Warhol Photobooth!' (2 August 2013), on the behind the scenes blog of The Andy Warhol Museum: click here.  

The 4-frame strip of images used to illustrate this post - featuring an anonymous young couple - was found in a photo booth in Ramsgate, in November 1986.

Only an Astronaut Can Save Us: Notes on the Overview Effect and Overview Institute

The famous Blue Marble photo of the Earth taken by 

the crew of Apollo 17 on their way to the Moon (1972)

 

 

I. 

 

When it comes to seeing the big picture, astronauts obviously have an edge over the rest of us. Indeed, there is even a term for their cosmic perspective and the cognitive shift that it sometimes triggers: the overview effect ...

Apparently, when viewing the Earth from space, some astronauts experience a kind of epiphany; they suddenly realise the fragile beauty of the small blue planet they have left behind and how rare and precious the life that it supports. All borders and boundaries become meaningless and all divisions between people seem arbitrary if not irrelevant and absurd; the need to create a planetary system that acknowledges the brotherhood of man becomes imperative if we are to safeguard the Earth and survive as a species.

 

 

II.

 

I have to say, I'm highly suspicious of this cosmic euphoria ...

 

More precisely, whilst I'm prepared to accept that some astronauts genuinely experience a subjective feeling of awe and wonder - and that this has nothing to do with a faulty oxygen supply or even a God gene - I don't much like the way this is then articulated in the language of moral and political idealism by self-proclaimed space philosopher Frank White [1] and fellow members of the so-called Overview Institute. 

 

In their Declaration of Vision and Principles, they churn out a familiar line of what I would describe as sinister utopian bullshit: this is a critical moment in human history ... we face many challenges ... our greatest need is for a global vision of unity based on the revolutionary experience of the blessed few so that we might transform human culture, etc., etc.

 

The Overview Effect (note their use of capitals) is a fundamental perspective-altering experience which must be brought to the masses via space simulation (i.e. virtual reality and other forms of technology) and space tourism, in order to raise human consciousness to a cosmic level, so that mankind might finally fulfil the Socratic injunction to rise above the Earth.     

 

Hallelujah and amen! 

 

 

III. 

We have, of course, heard all this - or something very similar - many times before; for the will to Oneness and a desire for transcendence is depressingly common throughout human history. 

 

When will we realise that it is our monomania that is so fatally mistaken? When will we accept that the beauty of man is that his unfolding is towards infinite variety, not universal sameness? 

 

As D. H. Lawrence notes, when men finally learn how to live in touch then "the great movement of centralising into oneness will cease / and there will be a vivid recoil into separateness" [2] with all the differences given free expression.

 

Staying true to the earth means climbing down Pisgah into the nearness of the nearest - not zooming into space and thinking this gives you a god's eye view from which to judge how everyone should live.

 

 

IV.

 

Perhaps it's just me, but when I look at the above photo of the earth taken by the Apollo 17 astronauts, I don't come over all Louis Amstrong and think to myself what a wonderful world. 

 

Like Nietzsche, rather, I realise there were eternities during which the earth and the clever animal man did not exist, just as there are eternities to come after the earth and mankind are no more. And that when it's all over, when the last trace of human intelligence has long vanished from the universe, nothing will have changed, nothing will have mattered [3]. 

 

How's that for an (admittedly nihilistic) overview!

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Frank White was the writer who coined the term and first explored the concept of the overview effect. See The Overview Effect - Space Exploration and Human Evolution, (Houghton-Mifflin, 1987). 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Future States', in Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 526. See also the related verse 'Future War', p. 527.  

 

[3] See Nietzsche, 'On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense', in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale, (Humanities Press, 1979), p. 79.