Absolute Zero

Prof. Julian Allwood

cam.ac.uk 

 

We don't need any more talking - just action!

 

 

As I'm sure most readers will know, carbon neutrality refers to that glorious time to come - presently projected to be 2050 in the UK - when we finally achieve net-zero carbon dioxide emissions and make the radical transition towards a post-carbon economy in which all the major concerns of a modern state - transport, energy, agriculture, and industry - will be sustainable and environmentally friendly.  

 

Unfortunately, such an eco-utopia probaby won't be so great for the majority of people living within it: they'll be poorer, colder, less mobile, less free, and living on a diet of rice and dried insects. 

 

This becomes clear when you read a 2019 report from the UK FIRES consortium entitled Absolute Zero and published by Cambridge University. Authored by Professor Julian Allwood and colleagues, it sets out to answer the question of how Britain might achieve its net zero goal - to which it is legally committed thanks to the Climate Change Act - within 30 years.   

 

The report - which can be read by clicking here - basically says yes to electric cars, trains, heat pumps, and homegrown vegetables, and no to pretty much everything else: from steel and cement to beef and lamb; from aviation and shipping to gas central heating.

 

And you thought life in lockdown was grim! 

 

Well, brace yourself, for this has just been a trial run for what lies ahead: a revolutionary period in which our present lifestyle is abandoned in favour of a model that seems to have been borrowed from the Khmer Rouge ... It's tough, kid, but it's green ...         

 

 

Note: readers interested in this topic might like to watch a 25-minute video on YouTube in which Professor Allwood tries to sell us the notion of absolute zero, arguing that we can still enjoy a good life whilst reducing our energy consumption by 60%, providing, that is, we accept restraints in certain areas - such as what we eat and how we travel - in order to deliver zero emissions and secure a safe future: click here. 

      It's amusing how, on the one hand, Allwood says that the kind of drastic social and economic changes being advocated clearly require public debate, whilst, on the other hand, he insists that we don't need any more talking - just action (a view that all ideological fanatics ultimately subscribe to). 

 

 

Notes on An American Werewolf in London

Nurse Price and David Kessler enjoy a tender moment 

before things get hairy

 

 

Last night, for the first time in a very long time, I watched An American Werewolf in London (written and directed by John Landis, 1981). And whilst it is neither as funny nor as frightening as many once found it to be, I don't begrudge this comic horror the critical and commercial success it enjoyed at the time, or the cult status it has since attained amongst cinephiles [1].

 

For whilst it's not a great film, it is an enjoyable film to watch, with a strong lead performance from David Naughton as David Kessler, the unfortunate American backpacker attacked by a werewolf whilst trekking by moonlight across the Yorkshire Moors [2] with his buddy Jack Goodman (played by Griffin Dunne). 

 

The film also stars Jenny Agutter, as nurse Alex Price, who falls in love with David whilst looking after him in the intensive care unit of the London hospital in which she works. And, as male readers of a certain age will know, Jenny Agutter is the sexiest and most beautiful English actress ever to have graced the screen. It's always a pleasure to see her and my only regret is that it was David, not Alex, who wakes up naked in the wolf enclosure at London Zoo. 

 

Still, you can't have everything you might wish for in a movie, and Landis does offer some erotic compensation in the form of Linzi Drew as Brenda Bristols in the film-within-a-film entitled See You Next Wednesday - a soft-porn movie showing in the seedy Soho cinema that David finds himself in towards the end of the movie [3].

 

Now, whilst Linzi Drew is no Mary Millington, she did have a successful (and varied) career in the UK sex industry during the 1980s, working as a stripper, glamour model, and porn star. She also landed minor roles in a number of other mainstream movies apart from American Werewolf (Ken Russell was something of a fan).

In sum: there's more than enough good things in An American Werewolf in London to justify spending another 97 minutes of your life staring at a screen - and I haven't even mentioned the demonic Nazi stormtroopers that appear in a terrifying dream sequence that the Chapman brothers would've been proud of, or how the film is crucially tied to the question of Jewish identity and feelings of cultural estrangement ... [4] 

 

 

 

 

Notes

[1] An American Werewolf in London was released in August 1981 and grossed $30 million at the US box office and $62 million worldwide (against a budget of $5.8 million). Whilst not every critic loved it - Roger Ebert, for example, found it curiously unfinished - most wrote positive reviews, finding it not just funny and frightening, but an intelligent film also. Particular praise was reserved for Rick Baker's makeup effects used in the transformation scene.  

 

[2] Filming took place in Feb/March, because director John Landis wanted to ensure bad weather. But it took place on location in Wales, not Yorkshire.  

[3] In an interview with Jason Solomons for The Guardan in 2009, Landis says that the title of the porno film was "in the best smutty British tradition", but that really doesn't make any sense (to me at least); was he perhaps thinking of the euphemistic backronym for the word cunt - See You Next Tuesday? Possibly. But it should be noted that the line See You Next Wednesday (usually referring to a fictional film) is a recurring gag in most of his films and that he probably picked it up from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), where it is spoken by Frank Poole's father.

 

[4] There are numerous essays and articles discussing the Jewish aspect of the film: see for example Joshua Rothkopf's 'How "American Werewolf in London" Transformed Horror-Comedy', in Rolling Stone (19 August 2016). According to the author, the film is an allegory of exoticised Jewishness (made monstrous). Click here to read the piece online. For an equally interesting piece by Esther Saks entitled 'What's So Jewish About Werewolves?', and published in the offbeat online Jewish arts and culture magazine Jewcy (31 Oct 2017), click here. 

 

Bonus: to watch the official film trailer on YouTube, click here. 

 

Cum Play With Mellors: On the Sexual Politics of Ejaculation

Faith Holland: Ookie Canvas (detail) [1] 

faithholland.com 

 

 

I. 

 

Readers familiar with D. H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) will doubtless remember the long and explicit tirade that Mellors delivers when Connie asks him why he married Bertha Coutts. 

 

Detailing his frustrating sexual experience not only with the latter, but also with several other women - some of whom he describes as unresponsive and some of whom he labels lesbian - Mellors also informs Connie of the fact that, in his view, the vagina is the only place in which it is right and proper for a man to ejaculate.

Mellors hates those women who find coitus distasteful and simply lie there waiting for him to finish. And he also hates those women who prefer to actively bring themselves to orgasm after he has already come [2]. But so too does Mellors despise women who love "'every kind of feeling and cuddling and going off [...] except the natural one'" [3]. 

 

That is to say, women who, for example, prefer oral to vaginal sex and "'always make you go off when you're not in the only place you should be, when you go off'" [4].  

 

 

II.            

 

Ultimately, despite his penchant for anal sex, Mellors subscribes to a very conservative model of what constitutes legitimate and fulfilling sexual activity for adults: a heterosexual model which privileges genital penetration and terminates as soon as the man has deposited his semen inside the cunt. Freud would approve. But many men (not to mention many women), might find this model - one which is firmly tied to reproductive function rather than to erotic pleasure divorced from such - rather limited and restrictive [5].

 

Nice as it is to spend oneself inside the female genital tract, some men prefer to splash out in other ways, though it's interesting to ask to what extent this preference has been shaped by contemporary pornographic convention. For as Linda Williams reminds us, whereas earlier porn films occasionally included spectacles of external ejaculation, it wasn't until the 1970s and the rise of hardcore movies that the so-called money shot (i.e. cum shot) assumed "the narrative function of signaling the climax of a genital event" [6] and vouched for the scene's veracity. It has since become a standard feature - arguably to the point of cliché - loved by some, loathed by others [7].    

 

Thus, there's a whole politics involved around the question of when and where to come. Not only have options expanded (both on and off screen) to the point whereby men are encouraged to ejaculate on just about every part of a woman's body, but those who are jizzed-upon are expected to enjoy the experience and find novel ways to erotically play with semen; swallowing it, rubbing it in, forcing their partners to lick it off them, etc.    

 

Just don't tell Oliver (Quick! Let me come inside you) Mellors ... [8]

 

Notes

 

[1] Faith Holland's Ookie Canvases are pictures composed of cum shots sampled from pornography or submission, isolated from their background, colourised, and then collaged together to form an all-over composition.

 

[2] In this post I am using come as the verb and cum to refer to the resulting substance, but there is no established rule governing these spellings.   

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 203.  

 

[4] Ibid.

 

[5] What Mellor's doesn't seem to appreciate is that for a sexually active woman without access to reliable methods of birth control, coitus interruptus is perhaps her best hope of avoiding an unwanted pregnancy when her lover insists on vaginal penetration but refuses to wear a condom. 

      Interestingly, it has been suggested that the cum shot first became popular in hardcore circles only after the actresses decided that ejaculation inside their bodies was risky, inconsiderate, and unnecessary. In other words, it does not signify a secret male desire to visualise ejaculation, nor is it a dark desire to humiliate or degrade women in some manner. See: Joseph W. Slade, Pornography and Sexual Representation: A Reference Guide, Vol. 2., (Greenwood Press, 2001), pp. 654-56.

[6] Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible", (University of California Press, 1989), p. 93.

 

[7] As one commentator on this tricky (not to mention sticky) subject reminds us, since the '70s anti-porn feminists have often singled out the money shot for particular criticism, though their views have since been challenged by feminists writing from a more sex-positive perspective:

 

"'It is a convention of pornography that the sperm is on her, not in her,' Andrea Dworkin argued in 1993. 'It marks the spot, what he owns and how he owns it. The ejaculation on her is a way of saying (through showing) that she is contaminated with his dirt; that she is dirty.' But, as Lisa Jean Moore points out in Sperm Counts (2007), Dworkin ignores 'that these actresses exhibit pleasure and that it is their pleasure that many of their male partners enjoy. It is perhaps more accurate to theorize that men, both as spectators and actors, want women to want their semen.' In Moore's view, it's not the woman's humiliation, but her enthusiasm, that is so hot." 

      See Maureen O'Connor, 'The Complicated Politics of Where to Come', New York Magazine (13 July, 2015). It can be read online in The Cut by clicking here.   

 

[8] Connie, however, is a different kettle of fish. She has a fetishistic fascination with the male body, particularly the sexual organs, and at one point when admiring the erect penis of her lover, she goes "crawling on her knees on the bed towards him" and puts her arms around his white slender loins, "drawing him to her so that her hanging, swinging breasts touched the tip of the stirring, erect phallos, and caught the drop of moisture". 

      One imagines from this that Connie would be more than happy for Mellors to ejaculate on her tits, thrilling as she does to the feel of precum on her body and, later, the heavy rain in which she frolics naked and holds up her breasts.   

      - D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, op. cit. The line quoted is on p. 210 and the scene referred to in the rain is on p. 221. 

 

Great Moments in Rock 'n' Roll History as Seen on TV: Bowie Performs 'Starman' on Top of the Pops (6 July 1972)

David Bowie performing 'Starman' on Top of the Pops 

(6 July 1972): click here to watch on YouTube

There's a starman waiting in the sky / He'd like to come and meet us 

But he thinks he'd blow our minds

 

 

Blow our minds: isn't that precisely what Bowie did with his seductively camp performance of 'Starman' on Top of the Pops on July 6th, 1972? 

 

But not only did he blow our minds, he also blew away the past and announced the coming of an alien future in which binary oppositions would become increasingly difficult to enforce and seem not just ever more untenable but artificial and restrictive [1].    

 

And it's for this reason that Bowie's performance has to be included in any short series of posts on great moments in rock 'n' roll history that, crucially, also happened to be televised and thereby becoming fixed in the cultural imagination. 

 

For whilst the song, 'Starman', would still be an excellent track with a catchy chorus even if you only ever heard it on the radio [2], it was seeing Bowie on TV looking like the most beautiful man on the planet in his brightly-coloured jumpsuit, spiky red-hair, and painted fingernails, that's key. 

 

Bowie perfectly captures the look of music and the sound of fashion, as Malcolm McLaren would say, and his appearance on Top of the Pops is - just like Elvis's second appearance on The Milton Berle Show in June 1956 - a genuine event (i.e. something that comes unexpectedly from the outside and changes everything). 

 

But whereas Elvis, however, marks the point at which white popular culture becomes black, Bowie signifies the queering of popular culture. 

 

Appearing confident and playful, Bowie drapes his arm around the shoulder of guitarist Mick Ronson and, famously, points directly into the camera lens at one point, not merely engaging with his television audience directly, but seeming to address each one of them individually. 

 

Although Bowie had been on the music scene for a number of years, experimenting with different sounds and different looks, it was this performance that made him a star and a seminal figure for many of those watching him that evening who would later go on to have careers in pop music themselves [3]. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Bowie doesn't just challenge sexual and gender binaries; he also, for example, curdles the division between American and British English by using slang terms from the former sung with a London accent. And he makes us think about questions of authenticity and artifice; is he a genuine rock star, or an actor merely playing the role?  

 

[2] 'Starman' was released as a single in April 1972, taken from the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (RCA Records, 1972). The song, which delivers a message of alien salvation to the world's youth, was partly inspired by 'Over the Rainbow' as sung by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz (1939).

      Upon release 'Starman' sold reasonably well and earned some positive reviews, though many thought it simply a space-age novelty record. It was only after Bowie performed it on Top of the Pops that it became a top ten hit and helped propel the album up the charts also. Today, of course, the song is regarded by critics as one of Bowie's greatest.

 

[3] Amongst the many viewers sat at home watching Bowie on Top of the Pops that evening were Adam Ant, Boy George, Gary Numan, Pete Murphy, Ian McCulloch, Morrissey, Robert Smith, and Siouxsie Sioux. They were all immediately placed under his spell and would often recall in later years how this performance was a major turning point in their lives. 

 

 

For another great moment in rock 'n' roll history as seen on TV - Elvis's performance of 'Hound Dog' on The Milton Berle Show (5 June 1956) - click here.    

 

 

Great Moments in Rock 'n' Roll History as Seen on TV: Elvis Performs 'Hound Dog' on The Milton Berle Show (5 June 1956)

Elvis performing 'Hound Dog' on The Milton Berle Show 

(5 June 1956): click here to watch on YouTube

 

I. 

 

If you have even vague intentions of writing an intermittent series of posts on great moments in rock 'n' roll history that also happened to be televised - thereby becoming lodged forever in the cultural memory - then there is really only one moment, one place, and one date to begin: Elvis Presley's sexually-charged (yet clownish) performance of 'Hound Dog' on The Milton Berle Show, June 5th, 1956 ...   

 

 

II.

 

This wasn't Elvis's first appearance on national TV - it wasn't even his first appearance on The Milton Berle Show (that had been two months earlier, on the 3rd of April). But it was his most notorious and the moral uproar provoked by his live performance that evening made him the most divisive figure in American popular culture: loved by teenagers, hated and feared by their parents and other figures of authority, including members of the clergy, the press, and even the FBI [1]. 

 

After the June 5th appearance, things would never be the same again for the then 21-year-old Elvis. Indeed, things would never be the same again for any of us. For no one had seen a performer like Presley before and everything that was to follow in the world of popular music can to some extent be traced back to this moment. 

 

Not that anyone could ever repeat this performance: it was, philosophically speaking, an event, i.e., something that does not make sense according to the rules of the situation, something that is genuinely revolutionary and which changes everything. 

 

But what, it might be asked, is it that makes Elvis's performance that evening so particular? 

 

Well, there are doubtless several factors involved, as even simple events lasting less than three minutes are a complex unfolding of chaos. The choice of song, for example, plays an important part: 'Hound Dog' is a strangely provocative twelve-bar blues number [2], even when sung in a more conventional manner and without Presley's outrageous dance moves and suggestive use of a stand up microphone. 

 

Then there's the fact that Elvis looks so perfect: physically and stylisically. You can look and dress very differently and be equally astonishing, but you can't look or dress any sharper or cleaner than Elvis looks and dresses here.         

Miraculous events - and those charismatic individuals who embody them - are, however, often not accepted as things for which we should all be grateful. Indeed, those who fear change and newness will always react with horror when someone like Elvis comes along. 

 

Thus, we should not be too surprised by the critical reaction which mostly followed a similar line: Elvis lacked any discernible singing or musical ability ... he was a bumping and grinding burlesque performer ... he had dragged popular music into the depths ... he was a crude sexual exhibitionist who incited his teenage audience to riot ... etc., etc.

Unfortunately for his critics, their condemnation only made his fans love him more and by whipping up a storm of controversy they ensured ticket sales for his shows went through the roof and that 'Hound Dog' - released as a single on July 13th - went on to sell ten million copies globally and top the US charts for eleven weeks.

    

 

Notes 

 

[1] Some readers might think I'm making that last bit up about the FBI, but, as a matter of fact, the Bureau kept a fairly extensive file on Elvis, consisting of press cuttings, outraged letters from members of the public, and various other documents. Although never officially under investigation, Presley was regarded by some within the Bureau as a danger to national security, arousing as he did abnormal sexual urges in American youth. Ironically, Elvis regarded J. Edgar Hoover as a hero and even asked President Nixon if he could become an FBI Special Agent. 

 

[2]  'Hound Dog was written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. Originally recorded by Big Mama Thornton in August 1952, it was released on Peacock Records in February the following year (selling over 500,000 copies). Elvis's version, however, which has a very different feel and differet lyrics, was based on a sanitised send-up of the song by the popular Las Vegas lounge act Freddie Bell and the Bellboys (released in 1955).        

 

Can Anyone be a Sex Pistol?

 Anson Boon / Johnny Rotten

 

 

I. 

 

For whatever reason, I'm still thinking about Danny Boyle's new six-part series based on the story of the Sex Pistols. And the question that keeps returning is this: Can Anson Boon convincingly play the part of Johnny Rotten? 

 

Or is it the case that, in order to truly inhabit a role, an actor needs the same lived experience [1] as the person they are portraying? Ultimately, what is the relationship between acting and authenticity?

II. 

 

Firstly, let me say this: I know why some people think it important that, for example, black actors play black characters on stage and film and that such roles aren't given to white actors wearing theatrical makeup. I understand the issues surrounding blackface and how it has lent itself to racial stereotyping and, indeed, racist caricature and can see why such a practice is now considered offensive (even when there is no wilful malice or disrespect intended by the actor playing the part). 

 

Similarly, I sympathise with disabled actors who time and again see roles for which they would seem to be ideally suited go to able-bodied performers. It seems discriminatory - and probably is discriminatory. For although the performing arts take place in an aesthetic space that is uniquely different to what most people think of as the real world, that space is not entirely separate from the latter and still unfolds within a wider cultural history and a network of power and politics, privilege and prejudice. 

 

As Howard Sherman writes:

 

"If we lived in a society, a country, where everyone was indeed equal in opportunity, then the arguments for paying heed to the realities of race, ethnicity, gender and disability might be concerns that could be set aside. But that's far from the case, and if the arts are to be anything more than a palliative, they must think not just of artifice, but also about the authenticity and context of what they offer to audiences." [2] 

 

Unfortunately, whenever someone points this out they are immediately told that the very essence of acting is people pretending to be what they're not; about performance, persona, and pretence; that it's not about the lived reality of an actor, who is paid to wear a mask not bear their soul or expose their true selves. 

 

However, as Sherman goes on to argue, the it's called acting defence is one that often serves to uphold a state of affars in which too many people have been marginalised and unfairly treated for too long; where the lived experience of those who don't determine the rules of the game - including the rules and conventions of the supposedly liberal world of the arts - has been denigrated or dismissed.      

 

 

III. 

 

Having said that - and this brings us back to Danny Boyle's project and the question I asked at the beginning of this post - one of the key lessons of The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle was that anyone can be a Sex Pistol, regardless of their background.

 

Why? Because it's all about attitude, rather than authenticity; style and swagger, rather than an identity rooted in one's so-called lived experience. As much as Boyle's castration of the Sex Pistols irritates me - click here - the idea that actors can only play people who are the same as them is clearly absurd. 

 

It can be vexing - I wouldn't say offensive - when posh people attempt to portray working class life, or straight actors play gay characters. But, as Julie Burchill says, "if an actor doesn’t look like he’s making fun of someone, we should trust him to give a part his all - and more credit to him if the part is outside of his experience" [3]. 

 

So, good luck to Anson Boon in his attempt to play Rotten! 

 

And good luck also to Louis Partridge as Sid Vicious and Maisie Williams as Jordan. These bright young thespians may never quite understand what was so phenomenal about the Sex Pistols, but that needn't detract from their performance and, as Burchill also points out, there's a danger in getting too uptight about all this: for such anxiety about casting "is merely the equity branch of the cultural-appropriation asshattery" [4]. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] This moral-ideological notion - increasingly used to negate objective reality - is one I have italicised throughout this post in order to indicate my own scepticism regarding its legitimacy. For those who are interested, it is discussed at length by Brendan O'Neill in a recent essay entitled 'The tyranny of "lived experience"', Spiked, (19 March, 2021): click here.    

 

[2] Howard Sherman, 'The Frightened Arrogance Behind "It’s Called Acting"', (2 August, 2016): click here. Sherman - an arts administrator, advocate and author - was Interim Director of the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts (New York), from 2013 - 2017. Although I'm sympathetic to his concerns, I worry that his arguments can be extended in a way that ultimately renders acting - and, indeed, even the imaginative creation of characters by writers - almost impossible. In other words, that a call for political correctness ends in a form of woke puritanism.         

 

[3] and [4] Julie Burchill, 'It’s called acting for a reason', Spiked, (21 August, 2018): click here.

 

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.