February 6, 2025 : Issue #85
WELCOME
An opening Gaza comment, and then: from the itsy bitsy to the megamammoth alongside the photocomposite impresario Michael Benson, and from there, back in time, to the as-it-were debate between Ren and Arthur C Clarke that bookended Benson’s very first volume in 2003.
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COMMENT
For the past few weeks, at least as far as this substack was concerned, I’d been inclined to take counsel from James Carville’s suggestion that in general, in line with Muhammed Ali’s famous rope-a-dope strategy, we should all just be letting Trump punch himself out here in the early rounds, keeping our powder dry (to change metaphors slightly) as he winded himself in this dizzying flurry of misbegotten initiatives, biding our time, and then, down the line, carefully choosing our moment before pouncing.
I suppose I was being guided by that, and then furthermore by H.L. Mencken’s famous dictum from 1916, oft-cited a few weeks back, to the effect that “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it, good and hard.”
The trouble with that latter formulation, however, is that, all their protestations to the contrary, Trump and the Republicans didn’t attain any sort of significant common people’s mandate in the recent election (not even a full majority of the votes—only 49.8% of the total presidential nods—indeed the slimmest such popular vote margin of any presidential candidate since 1968), nor did they register anything beyond the slimmest of legislative leads. And yet it’s everybody, all of us Americans, who now seem to be getting it good and hard.
And as for the rest of the world—none of whom had any say in the election’s outcome—it’s they, as regards the first point, who seem to be getting pummeled the hardest and most immediately as Trump punches himself out.
Which brings us to that appalling joint news conference cum mutual frottage that Trump and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu engaged in the other night. I’ll be having more to say about the ongoing catastrophe facing the Palestinians in the months ahead, but for the time being, let it just be noted that our Realtor-in-Chief’s thoughtlessly blithe notion that two million Palestinians should simply be shipped from their decimated homes to some beautiful welcoming country like, say, Jordan (which already hosts two million Palestinian refugees and another 1.3 million Syrians, amidst a total population of just over 11.5 million)—setting aside for the moment the fact that such a wholesale transfer of people would qualify as the dictionary definition of “ethnic cleansing,” an internationally recognized war crime—is a little rich coming from a president whose entire electoral campaign was founded on the proposition that a country of 350 million couldn’t possibly be expected to countenance the continued presence of 12 million (in fact actually quite demographically needed) undocumented immigrants.
Of those poor benighted souls, Trump’s battle cry has regularly been that they should all just go back to where they came from, no matter the horrors awaiting them there (many of which we ourselves are in no small part responsible for having fomented over the years). But okay, instead of Jordan, maybe the Gazans too should be required to go back where they came from, which is to say, to the very Israel from which they or their grandparents were all expelled in the first place—especially since Israel is directly and entirely responsible for the wholesale damage to property which Trump cites as the principal reason they now need to make way. If indeed they temporarily need to leave to allow for the systematic removal of debris and unexploded munitions and the rebuilding of apartment towers and schools and hospitals and farms and the like, Israel would be the obvious place for them to go. Short of that, come to think of it, the second most obvious place would be the United States, since it was our bombs and military aid which the Israeli military used to wreak such wholesale devastation across the enclave over the past fifteen months.
Or here’s a thought: why not ask them where they might like to go, or not?
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The Main Event
My old pal, the top-flight photomancer Michael Benson, was blasting through town the other day, out of Toronto and Provo (by way of the Spiral Jetty) en route to his current home base of Ljubljana, Slovenia, when he dropped by to show a group of us here in New York what he has been up to lately, which is to say a series of magisterial electron-microscopic vantages of all sorts of infinitesimal bedazzlements, or rather his own meticulously derived multi-scan photomosaics, as it were, of same. You know, things like this exquisitely detailed visual array of seaborne planktonian dinoflagellates, or rather the armored outer cellulose casings these gooey single-celled creatures built up to comfortably cruise around within (powered about by whiplike flagellate propellers piercing the casing’s outer wall),
all by way of a preview of coming attractions, to wit, Benson’s latest Nanocosmos volume, due out from Abrams this coming October,
their intricate structures looking for all the world like the sorts of StarWarsian true-life space probes whose photographic legacy Benson himself used to plumb back in the day, presently leading to his initial jaw-dropping trilogy:
As I say, Benson was no mere collector of images; on the contrary, like an old-time miner panning for gold in a churning stream, he trudged deep into NASA’s public cyber-archive, bulging with the digital data that the agency’s myriad space probes had been sending back for decades, year in and year out, much of it never previously processed; and from out of that floodtide of 0’s and 1’s he managed to wrest and refine extraordinary images, composites often fashioned out of dozens of individually focused details, culminating in panoramas never before seen. As for example in these almost randomly selected spreads from the first book in that series, Beyond: Visions of the Interplanetary Probes (2003):
As suggested by the captions in that selection, Benson was almost as entrammeled by the astonishing sophistication of the probes themselves as by the heartstopping imagery they were so regularly beaming back—a predisposition with a distinguished pedigree, going back to the original wondercabineteers of the seventeenth century, who were as eager to foreground the marvels of human craft and ingenuity as those of natural provenance, all of them considered equally evocative emanations of Creation and the Creator.
And indeed Arthur C. Clarke took a somewhat similar tack in his introduction to Benson’s volume (Benson and Clarke had been corresponding for some time in the lead-up several years later to Benson’s definitive study, Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece), going so far as to suggest that the true significance of this collection of Benson’s was as a milestone, an early intimation of mankind’s coming replacement by superintelligent machines, a prospect which if anything Clarke seemed to relish. As indeed he did when he took part, from his home in Sri Lanka by way of a satellite phone {!} connection, in an event celebrating Benson’s new book that I presently cobbled together in my then-capacity as director of the NY Institute for the Humanities.
At one point toward the end of that evening, in response to an audience member’s query as to any breakthroughs he might still be hoping to witness, Clarke averred as to how “As long as I have lived, and as you can tell I am now quite an old man, I am still waiting, achingly, longingly, to register any signs of intelligent life…” (two beats) “…on Planet Earth.” Brought down the house. Perhaps the machines, he seemed to suggest, might have a better run at things.
Though I myself had my doubts—misgivings as it happens that I’d already registered in the Afterword to Benson’s book, as a sort of rebuttal to Clarke’s introduction. Following Michael’s nanocosmos slideshow the other night, I went back to take a look at that 2003 afterword, and it seemed in some ways as pertinent today (in light of all the hoopla surging around the relentless rise of AI chatbots and the like) as it did back then, over twenty years ago. If not more so.
And I thought you might like to read it, too, so here it is. (For that matter, if you like, you can also access Clarke’s introduction here.)
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From the Archive
WHY IS THE HUMAN ON EARTH?
Ren’s afterword to Michael Benson’s Beyond
Pop quiz in seventh grade English. The teacher has her class address a simple question in the form of an impromptu essay: What is the purpose of human existence on earth? And she gives the kids fifteen minutes.
She gets a variety of responses, and one of them, from an at-that-time eleven-year-old girl (who, for the purposes of this essay, we will call my daughter, Sara), goes like this:
WHY IS THE HUMAN ON EARTH?
I believe that there is, despite the fact that we humans have done so much damage to the world, a reason for our existence on this planet. I think we are here because the universe, with all it’s wonder and balance and logic, needs to be marveled at, and we are the only species (to our knowledge) that has the ability to do so. We are the one species that does not simply except what is around us, but also asks why it is around us, and how it works. We are here because without us here to study it, the amazing complexity of the world would be wasted. And finally, we are here because the universe needs an entity to ask why it is here.
Which, I think you’ll agree, is not at all bad, as such answers go. I mean, it took Kant three thick volumes to get to just about the same place. And the pertinence of such comments (any minor grammatical or orthographic misprisions notwithstanding) to Michael Benson’s portfolio of space probe images could hardly be more manifest.
Wonder and balance and logic, indeed—to which one might add beauty and grace. But all of it—and this is Sara’s crucial insight—all of it for naught (or at any rate for naught in terms of “wonder” and “balance” and “logic” and “beauty” and “grace”) without the necessarily fragile and puny and utterly contingent human gaze.
The thing is, I think Arthur Clarke and the hearty band of futurists whose thinking he echoes in some of the notions one often finds him advancing, get it all wrong. (Gloriously, thrillingly, even inspiringly wrong—but wrong nonetheless.) Not so much in the claim that “these probes… may well turn out to be our successors,” with Homo sapiens giving way to Machina sapiens (carbon-based life, as I’ve heard the contention parsed elsewhere, giving way to its silicon-based successor). Could be. Hope not, but I don’t know.
No, where Clarke & Company (a company which I sometimes sense includes our marvelous host and curator Benson as well) really go wrong is in a somewhat more subtle side-claim. “Despite the evidence of these pictures, which surely must constitute some of the greatest landscape photographs ever seen, many,” Clarke asserts (referring, I take it, to such Luddite Neanderthals as myself) “will refuse to grant any degree of intelligence or creativity to these robots. But the sooner we acknowledge this,” he goes on, “the better. Even now we are developing machines that can learn from experience, profit from their mistakes and—unlike human beings—never repeat them.” And then a few sentences further along, clarifying his evolutionary point (and cleverly preempting my first stumbling attempts at a riposte): “It is a little difficult to see how a lifeless planet could progress directly from metal ores and mineral deposits to electronic computers by its own unaided efforts. But though intelligence and creativity can arise only from life, they may then learn to do without the fragile organic substrate that they require.” And that’s where he loses me.
.Granted: An entity capable of learning from experience and profiting from its mistakes may be said to evince a kind of intelligence and maybe even of creativity. But that sort of intelligence or creativity is not the fundamental bedrock of human consciousness. What about awe—surely the overwhelming reaction called forth by the merely human experience of images such as these? We are here, in the words of my daughter, because without us here to study it, the amazing complexity of the world would be wasted. And the way that amazing, ravishing complexity is experienced among humans is through the sense of awe—precisely the sense (and perhaps in the end, the only one) that machines and probes may themselves never prove capable of replicating.
Sartre, following in the footsteps of Heidegger and Husserl and indeed back to Kant, in his own 1943 tome Being and Nothingness, famously parsed existence between the In-Itself and the For-Itself, the In-Itself simply being everything, as it were, that is—all material reality (the world, the oceans, the continents, all the plants and animals, all the planets and stars, the vacuum between the stars, all the atoms and the spaces between atoms, the brimming plenitude of being, and yes, as part of all that, we ourselves in our mode of being as material objects, subject to all the prods and pressures of material reality). Of the In-Itself, it could be said that everything that is is the way a rock is a rock: It just Is. The For-Itself, by contrast, was Sartre’s way of evoking the notion of Consciousness: Being to varying degrees aware of itself with stirrings, longings, and so forth on its own behalf. Note that Sartre didn’t limit the notion of Consciousness to human beings—all consciousness, however initially inchoate, partakes of the same existential reality, a reality notably unlike that of a rock, a reality that never simply is what it is, that as much as it may aspire to such a state of plenitude and satiety is continually falling short and falling away. At various points in his argument, Sartre seems to equate the In-Itself with the “Being” of his title and the For-Itself with its “Nothingness.” And all existence for-itself is by definition fragile, mortal, utterly contingent (it never had to be here, it will inevitably pass away): Being, in that sense, hurtling (to varying degrees aware of such) toward death.
In these (admittedly over-simplified) terms, I would suggest that the primordial precondition for the experience of marvel or awe is that very “fragile organic substrate” which Clarke and his conceptual fellow-travelers so cavalierly dismiss on their merry conceptual dash toward that Machina sapiens nirvana. The planets and the probes as such are alike in partaking exclusively of the Domain of the In-Itself. For all its whirring gadgetry, a probe in itself is in the end precisely the way a rock is a rock, and nothing more. It can be directed to aim and focus and snap and transmit, it can even be directed over time to direct itself to aim and focus and snap and transmit all the more efficiently, but it cannot be directed to experience awe. And awe—marvel, wonder—surely this is the overriding lesson of the experience of Benson’s trove of images—these, in the end, are what matter; these, in the end, are what count.
The story goes that the incomparable Buckminster Fuller was asked one day, near the end of his life, whether he was finally disappointed, having done so much to bring about the era of space travel, at how he himself would never be able to experience outer space. To which the old man magisterially replied, “But, Sir, we are in outer space.”
The artist David Hockney, who’s the one who first told me the Fuller story, went on that day to observe how he himself could never seem to get interested in space movies. “They always seem to be about transport and nothing else,” he insisted. “Well, transport is not going to be able to take us to the edge of the universe—it’s like relying on buses—though a certain awareness in our heads might.”
Space probes as entities on their own soaring out there experiencing the universe in all its stupefying splendor? I suppose so: maybe. But in another sense (Hockney’s sense), they’re merely highly souped-up, hyper-elaborated eyeglasses: bifocals at the far end of seemingly endlessly elongating tethers. Interesting in and of themselves (and in fairness, of course, far more than that: fascinating, astonishing; objects themselves of drop-jawed marvel and awe for the sophistication of their workings, and, maybe even more so, the sheer audacity of their conception)—but in the end, simply extensions of something far more astonishing: the fragile human capacity—nay, propensity—to gaze and marvel.
Such that space probe photographs afford a veritable layer cake of wonder. The splendor of the heavenly bodies themselves, of course. Why is there anything, ask the philosophers, with their very first originary question, rather than simply just nothing at all? To which might now be added: And why—however possibly could there be—anything as stupendously, improbably, and heart-rendingly lovely as this? But that last formulation in turn opens out upon a greater wonder still, the shivering, shimmering ghost at the heart of the great machine: Given that there is something rather than nothing, why, how does it come to be (after all, how easily could it never have come to be!) (and how terrifyingly easily could it all yet cease to be) that embedded in its midst there is something capable of becoming aware of, let alone appreciating, all that splendor?
And the fragility, the sheer puny contingency of that second something, as against the vast plodding immensity of the first—the infinite algebra of that relation—that (and here I find myself coming into humble agreement with my little daughter) is the wondrous cosmic chord that keeps getting sounded across the pages of Benson’s marvelous, endlessly proliferating collection of photos.
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Incidentally, for the Canadian Cabineteeers amongst you (and actually, may we first say, Sorry, sorry, we’re all so sorry, none of us voted for the Orange Vulgarian, and come to think of it, could we all please please please just become your eleventh province?)—anyway, to those of you resident in or passing through Toronto, through April 5th, the Image Center there is hosting a sumptuous exhibition made up of lavishly clear large-scale photographic composites drawn from Benson’s trilogy (with ambient music by Brian Eno!), and lucky you to be able to immerse yourselves in it.
(Almost makes up for—actually, no, never mind, it doesn’t.) But still, for details, see here.
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ANIMAL MITCHELL
Cartoons by David Stanford, from the Animal Mitchell archive
animalmitchellpublications@gmail.com
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This was wonderful. Thank you for all of this well timed information and help.