Ad Astra Issue 2

AD ASTRA A Journal of Aspiration and Achievement

Issue 2 - Autumn/Winter 2013

Front cover: Erika and Myrtle by Anna Dean

Acknowledgements Staff Editor: Art Editor: Production and Copy Editor: Executive Editor: Cover Art: Design & Printing:

Kat Pugh Dora Wade Graham Gardner Elizabeth Phillips Anna Dean NHA Asssociates Ltd

An online version of this journal is available at www.stmaryleboneschool.com.

Ad astra is wholly owned and produced by The St Marylebone C.E. School. Copyright in text and images resides with the individual authors and creators of those works.

The St Marylebone Church of England School is a charity and an academy trust company, limited by guarantee, and registered in England and Wales.

Company number: 7719620. Registered office: 64 Marylebone High Street, London, W1U 5BA.

AD ASTRA Issue 2 - Autumn 2013

Contents Artwork by Matthew Dudek ii List of Contributors iii Artwork by Katie South iv List of Contributors (continued) v Artwork by Esme Mull vi About AD ASTRA by Kat Pugh vii Artwork by Flora Grant viii Editorial by Graham Gardner ix Artwork by Oskar Brockbank x Three Questions about King Lear by Eliza Frayn 1 Artwork by Michelle Smith 4 Representing Modernity by Sacha Marson 5 Artwork by Alice Smith-Goss 8 Artwork by Jessie Keegan 10 Feminist Sociology by Urmi Kabir 11 Artwork by Judy Al-Hajjar 14 The Technology Gap by Imogen Crane 15 Artwork by Alice Smith-Goss 16 Artwork by Pui Yee See Toh 18 Class and Allegiance in The English Civil War

by Sara Semic 19 Artwork by Hazel Deger 24 Artificial Intelligence by Imogen Foster 25

Artwork by Matthew Dudek Artwork by Mary Higgins Leonardo Da Vinci’s Anatomical Studies

by Anna Fletcher Artwork by Isabella Busoni-Conway The Art of Gerhard Richter by Mary Higgins Artwork by Bronwen Rose Anwyl Exploring Imagination by Chris Belous Artwork by Kitty Glavin Artwork by Flora Grant Artwork by Molly Monroe Artwork by Katie South A Ladder To The Moon? by Jess Allen-Hyttinen, Maisie King and Kamil Kurdiziel Artwork by Bronwen Rose Anwyl Artwork by Antonia Blakeman Eonomics and the EU by Diana Beltekian Artwork by Katie South Artwork by Anna Dean Artwork by Sacha Marson The 2012 Olympics by Nellie Khossouri Artwork by Isabella Busoni-Conway Intertextuality and Parody by India Hill AD ASTRA - Issue 2

26 28 29 34 35 38 39 40 42 46 48 49 50 52 53 56 58 62 63 66 67 i

Artwork by Matthew Dudek

Contributors JESSICA ALLEN-HYTTINEN (Year 13) is

ANNA DEAN (Year 13) is studying Art, Drama

studying Biology, Chemistry, and Psychology.

She aims to study Veterinary Science at the Royal Veterinary College

and English Literature, and working towards the Extended Project Qualification. She aims to read English Literature at Oxford or English Literature & Drama at Queen Mary.

BRONWEN ROSE ANWYL studied English Literature, History and Fine Art. She is now studying Art Foundation.

CHRIS BELOUS studied Maths, Classics, English, German and Latin. She is now reading English and German at Edinburgh.

DIANA BELTEKIAN studied Economics, Government & Politics, Maths and the Extended Project Qualification. She is now reading Economics at Cambridge.

ANTONIA BLAKEMAN studied Drama, Psychology and Fine Art. She is currently studying Art Foundation at Central St Martin’s.

OSKAR BROCKBANK studied Fine Art, History and Music Technology. He is currently studying Art Foundation at Central Saint Martin’s.

HAZEL DEGER (Year 13) is studying English, Turkish and Fine Art and working towards the Extended Project Qualification. She plans to study Fine Art at Goldsmiths or The Slade.

MATTHEW DUDEK studied Fine Art, Economics and English Literature. He is now studying Architecture at Liverpool.

JUDY EL-HAJJAR studied Design & Technology, Fine Art, Mathematics and the Extended Project Qualification. She is currently studying Architecture at UCL.

ANNA FLETCHER studied Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics and the Extended Project Qualification. She is currently on a Gap Year.

IMOGEN FOSTER studied History, Philosophy and Politics & Government. She is currently on a Gap Year.

ISABELLA BUSONI-CONWAY studied Dance, Religious Studies and Fine Art. She is currently studying Art Foundation at Central St Martin’s.

ELIZA FRAYN (Year 13) is studying English, Religious Studies and Drama, and working towards the Extended Project Qualification. She aims to read English at Cambridge.

IMOGEN CRANE studied English Literature, Geography and History. She is now reading English Language and Literature at Oxford.

KITTY GLAVIN studied Art and Design, Fine Art and Media, Film & Television. She is now studying Art Foundation.

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Artwork by Katie South

Contributors FLORA GRANT studied Dance, Psychology and Art. She is currently on a Gap Year.

(continued)

SACHA MARSON studied English Literature, Fine Art and History. She is currently studying Art Foundation at Central St Martin’s.

MARY HIGGINS (Year 13) is studying English, History and Fine Art. She aims to read English Language and Literature at Oxford.

INDIA HILL studied English Literature, Geography, Government & Politics and the Extended Project Qualification. She is now reading English Language and Literature at Oxford.

MOLLY MONROE studied Design & Technology, English Literature and Fine Art. She is currently reading History of Art & English Literature at Reading.

ESME MULL studied Fine Art, Psychology, Religious Studies and the Extended Project Qualification. She is now studying Fine Art at Oxford.

URMI KABIR studied English Literature, Philosophy and Sociology. She is now studying Sociology at LSE.

SARA SEMIC studied English Literature, French, History and the Extended Project Qualification.

She is now reading History at Oxford.

JESSIE KEEGAN studied Business, Fine Art and Media, Film & Television. She is currently studying Art Foundation at Central St Martin’s.

NELLIE KHOSSOUSI (Year 13) is studying Economics, English Literature and Mathematics. She aims to read Economics at Cambridge or Economics with Persian at SOAS.

MAISIE KING (Year 13) is studying Biology, Chemistry and Physics. She aims to study Veterinary Medicine at Bristol.

MICHELLE SMITH studied Biology, Design & Technology, Fine Art and the Extended Project Qualification. She is currently studying Art Foundation at WMC.

ALICE SMITH-GOSS studied Biology, English Literature and Fine Art. She is now studying Art Foundation.

PUI YEE SEE TOH studied Economics, Mathematics, Chinese and Fine Art. She is currently studying Art Foundation at Central St Martin’s.

KAMIL KURDIZIEL (Year 13) is studying Chemistry, Physics and Mathematics (with Further Mathematics), having completed A2 Polish. He aims to study Theoretical Physics at Cambridge.

LILY WOOLCOCK studied Geography, Mathematics and Physics. She is now studying Physics with Astrophysics at Manchester.

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Artwork by Esme Mull

About AD ASTRA

A

d astra, simply translated, means “to the stars”. We could interpret this phrase as a declaration of intent, an invitation, an exhortation, even a command. But for us at St Marylebone, ad astra connotes something more important: possibility.

As such, the phrase articulates a guiding ethos of St Marylebone. Every member of staff believes in the potential of every student here to reach extraordinary heights, and is dedicated to helping show them the way. Hence AD ASTRA: a journal showcasing some of the best of St Marylebone students’ aspirations and achievements.

Every piece of work in this journal bursts through the strictures of assessment objectives and examboard specifications. Testing and marking, though an integral component of teaching and learning in our increasingly competitive world, should never be allowed to obscure the importance of creation as a good in its own right, whether as an act of affirmation, of rebellion, or of self-definition. To simply file creative works behind exam-board coversheets with a “full-marks” score on the front does not do them justice; even the tiny asterisk in A* is too monochrome and meagre.

Yes, the writing and art included here earned or will earn their creators points which contribute to a score on a list produced by an exam board and submitted through UCAS to universities which add their names to an undergraduate register. But these pieces are so much more than means to this end.

They are the work of students who have dared to question: to explore and engage with ideas, concepts, knowledge and experiences way beyond textbook margins, in the manner admired by William Faulkner, one of the great American men of letters: “At one time I thought the most important thing was talent. I think now that the young man or the young woman must possess or teach himself, training himself, in infinite patience, which is to try and to try until it comes right. He must train himself in ruthless intolerance - that is to throw away anything that is false no matter how much he might love that page or that paragraph. The most important thing is insight … to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does.”

This too is entirely in accordance with both the St Marylebone ethos and the wider context from which the phrase ad astra is taken: “est ad astra mollis e terris via”: “there is no easy way from the earth to the stars”. Great achievements are not a gift; they are the result of great effort, diligence and persistence. We are celebrating here not only the heights attained, but the uncompromisingly aspirational hard work and application involved in getting there.

So as you read, gaze and learn, we hope you will be impressed by the quality of the work here.

Equally, we hope you will be inspired. There is no easy way from the earth to the stars, but the means to getting there are available to all of us. How will you reach ad astra?

KAT PUGH Headteacher Designate

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Artwork by Flora Grant

Editorial

I

am very glad to welcome you to the second, Autumn 2013 issue of AD ASTRA, the St Marylebone CE School journal of aspiration and attainment. This issue offers a rich variety of writing, ranging from an examination of French artist Fernand Léger’s ‘mechanical period’ to an examination of the economic consequences of EU membership and an answer to the question of whether we might soon be able to holiday on the moon.

Interspersed with these essays are more than twenty pieces of art work, their style ranging from the representational to the surreal, and their tone equally varied. These artworks are as integral to the content and spirit of AD ASTRA as the written

word. In keeping with the ethos of the school, AD ASTRA seeks to reflect aspiration and achievement in whatever shape or form it appears.

The only constraint on the content of AD ASTRA is the size of the journal itself. The goal is to represent as much outstanding work as possible. For that reason, some of the essays are extracts of longer works. I wielded my editorial scissors with great reluctance, and only because the alternative would have been an issue which represented the work of far fewer students; such an outcome would have been a great injustice in the light of the quality that was on offer. I hope that you enjoy reading and looking at the second issue of AD ASTRA as much I have enjoyed producing it.

DR GRAHAM GARDNER, Director of Independent Learning

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Artwork by Oskar Brockbank

Change, character and Cordelia: three questions about Shakespeare’s King Lear Eliza Frayn

H

aving read King Lear over the summer I was very much taken by it; these essays are a collection of my initial thoughts.

How does Lear change over the course of the play?

Lear begins the play as a materialistic person. As he is surrounded by great wealth, in this way he is provided with constant visual reminders of his success; in this same way he asks for this literal, tangible confirmation from his daughters. Some might perceive this as a narcissistic arrogance; however, it could be argued to in fact be an anxious need to be constantly affirmed and reassured. So this is not a result of great vanity; in fact it is the opposite – an incredibly low self esteem shielded and guarded by aesthetic, consumerist items.

Over the course of the play, Lear then undergoes a radical progression; as his wealth and power are removed, undermined by his daughters, he is no longer blinded by material possessions or purposes and is able to see that true self-confirmation can only be assured through the invisible and intangible yet vital relationships one holds with others.

It is often thought that over the course of the play Lear goes mad. However, it could be seen as him actually finding sanity, sanity in the absolute rather than the conditional. The seemingly solid but actually insubstantial foundations of his kingdom

are shaken, making way for his realisation of the solid foundations of Cordelia’s love. In this way, Lear becomes incredibly sane and seeing, ironic in a play that heavily encompasses the themes of blindness and the removal of sight and clarity.

As Lear changes from one mental state to the other, so do his relationships. He finds companionship in the Fool, which is highly significant as an incredibly symbolic parallel can be drawn between the two characters, the Fool potentially being a projection of King Lear as he used to be: a fool and an entertainer, mocked by his two daughters as unknowingly he was asked to perform.

Lear’s death from grief is only another testament to his journey through to sanity and humanity. At the beginning of the play his lack of empathy towards his youngest and favoured daughter is revealing of his warped sense of love, manipulated by his other daughters, whereas by the end of the play he finally experiences true love, true compassion: to die out of grief for the loss of a loved one can be seen as utterly sane. A love so strong, that just as in Cordelia’s case, words would not suffice, only death would encompass the overwhelming emotion of love.

In conclusion, Lear changes over the course of the play both mentally and emotionally, the loss of material wealth making way for the emotional wealth of love AD ASTRA - Issue 2

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and forgiveness, and a transition from selfishness to selflessness as he moves from blindness towards sanity.

Who seems like the most heroic and who seems like the most villainous character?

Many would argue that the most heroic characters in the play would be Gloucester and Edgar: Edgar for his unfaltering loyalty to his Father Gloucester, and Gloucester for his unfaltering loyalty to Lear.

However, it could also be argued that Cordelia in fact is the most heroic character as her consistent morality provides a higher love for the other characters to aspire too. Her sense of true self perseveres throughout the play, and Lear’s journey leads him to a mental state of clarity and emotional maturity that she begins and continues throughout the play with her moral compass guiding him.

Despite this, I think the true hero of ‘King Lear’ is the Fool. Unlike Cordelia who could be seen as too high and mighty to be fully heroic, the Fool is not conscious of himself in this way and unlike any of the other characters he sticks by King Lear through pure love, unmotivated by politics or personal gain. His child-like naivety and innocence sets him apart from the others who are tainted, even the other children, Goneril and Regan are poisoned by the selfish desires that possess the sane. The fool is without these complications, giving him in one sense the clearest sight of any character in the play.

The fine line between sanity and insanity is no better highlighted than in the fool, his honesty being both endearing and refreshing. His cleansing presence and faithfulness in my eyes makes him the most heroic in King Lear.

The most villainous characters in the play by action are Edmund, Goneril and Regan for their dispassionate betrayal. But on a deeper level, in word and in thought, the worst betrayal is that of the self, and for this, Lear is ultimately culpable.

‘King Lear’ is a tragedy; a notable feature of a tragedy is that the protagonist has one fatal flaw that 2

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leads to their eventual undoing. A striking theme of the play being betrayal, the worst betrayal is King Lear’s fatal flaw: his betrayals of his true self. In a sense he is his own worst villain.

Lear’s betrayal of himself occurs in the beginning of the play where hypocritically he condemns Cordelia, telling her to “mend her speech, lest she may mar her fortunes”, this order needing to be applied to himself. He references “fortunes” meaning literal wealth, making him appear shallow and conceited, his obsession with the material marring his relationships, which he places at a lower priority, allowing fickle fancies to supersede them.

Lear is disgusted in others by what he hates in himself; his hate is a projection of this own selfloathing, hence his constant need for positive reassurances of his good character. He projects and mirrors (e.g. onto the Fool) his faults and weaknesses in order to disguise himself from himself. This wilful blindness is the greatest act of villainy as it brings about his destruction, and he spends the rest of the play trying to compensate for this mistake, a lost soul searching for his true self upon the moors in the rain.

What is Cordelia’s function?

Cordelia has several functions in King Lear. Her function in the play on a literal level is to be the contrast that makes the reader abhor her sisters and Father when she is set next to them; as her goodness comes up against evil, she throws into sharp relief the other characters.

On a metaphorical level, Cordelia is the moral compass that either guides the other characters to a level of higher love, or pushes them further away into their own demise. Lear says “nothing will come of nothing”, but her silence is the most powerful speech in the play, her absence of words provokes not nothing, like Lear predicts, but instead great upheaval. Because of this, she is also the catalyst for great change; she marks the beginning of a journey for all of the characters.

At a spiritual level, Cordelia’s function is yet more profound and complex. In a God-like divine way, she is all seeing; despite Lear’s best efforts, she sees his transparency and is ashamed. Likewise, she says to her sisters, “I know you what you are”, this chilling awareness causing her to appear in a way like God, as she stands in judgement and is also attuned to the faults of human nature.

In these ways, she is an incredibly complex character, pure and virginal but also cold and calculating. Like God, in her judgements, she either raises people up into heaven/higher love or pushes

them down into a hell. Her clarity, insight and judgements are merciless; she stands above everybody. Just as she marks the beginning of Lear’s journey to self realisation, she also ends it in her death, absolving him of guilt as his love overwhelms the need to even live. Ultimately, only God can absolve sinners, only God can forgive, and in King Lear Cordelia could be seen to serve this function, as God’s instrument on earth, demonstrating the Christian virtues of mercy, love and forgiveness. She is thus like the Virgin Mary, and as such helps to show that King Lear is a deeply religious play.

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Artwork by Michelle Smith

Representing Modernity: the ‘Mechanical Period’ of Fernand Léger Sacha Marson

F

ollowing the fin de siècle, the early 20th century marked a new era that revolutionized society and subsequently the art world. War, commercialisation and, crucially, technological innovation unquestionably prompted and drove the art of Fernand Léger during his ‘mechanical period’ from 1914 to 1935. Questions remain, however, as to whether Léger’s work of this time is ultimately an image of unity or instead a discordant and unnatural reflection of a rapidly-paced modern world. In subverting traditional ideals of beauty, Fernand Léger and his contemporaries were criticised by traditionalists for creating dissonant and abstracted images. This is interesting as it raises the questions of the role of conventional form and techniques in accurately presenting dynamic experiences of the modern world and whether a visually pleasing piece of work equates to an interesting one. I will argue that during this period of cultural flux, the way in which events such as the First World War, rapid commercialisation and the mass adoption of new technologies (such as cinema) affected Léger’s experience of the modern age is shown in the visual discord of his pieces. Through his artworks, however, the artist was able to unify his audiences in identifying similar experiences of the modern world in war, the city and, crucially, the experience of technology.

At the beginning of August 1914, on the declaration of war, Fernand Léger was mobilised and sent to the Argonne front and later the battle of Verdun. This first-hand experience of war not only

had a revolutionary impact on Léger’s artwork, but also signalled a rebuilding of the European consciousness. Class barriers were broken as countries such as France unified against German threat. Léger himself claimed “it was the war that bought me back to earth” as he found himself “on a level with the French people”. Away from the exclusivity of the art world, the war brought about a unification of all walks of life; once in the Engineers, Léger’s counterparts included miners, navvies as well as workers in wood and metal. The artist describes his fellow men’s “precise sense of utilitarian reality” something he sought to emulate in his work following the war. Here, through discovering the French nation Léger recognised that craftsmen, like him, functioned as mechanical elements of society.

This functionality of the individual was heightened during the war with the use of machinery which put man directly at odds with the consequences of technology. The automatic nature of modern warfare (prompted by the development of technology) also contributed to the depersonalisation of the individual in Léger’s work. This allowed him to break Romantic and aesthetic ideals of human form, instead merging man to become a part of the mechanical environment. This is seen in his 1917 composition, The Card Game which depicts soldiers simplified to their basic forms matching each other at a game of cards. This ‘game’ can be likened to Léger’s experience of the modern world in the tactical and AD ASTRA - Issue 2

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calculative nature of war. Soldiers in the painting had become mechanical and de-personalised, the functionality of each limb holding prominence in the foreground of the image, yet merging into a mass nearer the background, making comment on the depersonalised nature of war.

The image is predominantly discordant in the artist’s striking use of contrasts, both tonally and in the use of juxtaposing primary colours. The angularity of limbs typifies the colliding shapes that characterise the discordance of the painting. It was the brutal nature of war which influenced Léger’s Mechanical Period, as the relationship between various elements is founded by startling and sometimes violent contrasts. He claimed, “It is my ambition to achieve the maximum pictorial realization by means of plastic contrasts”, thus creating “anti harmonious pieces”. This demonstrates Leger’s experience of war to be detrimental - reflected in the jarring and antiharmonious imagery of The Card Game. Although the angular uniformed nature of the piece thoroughly assesses war as a force against human individuality and emotion, Leger’s painting also demonstrated a unity with machinization in the wider public’s identification with it.

This embodies a rejection of late 19th century French art, which pursued ideals, with movements such as aestheticism reaffirming art’s supposed aim to please; that is, create something beautiful. Léger instead insisted on “mak[ing] some life” drawing purely on his creative powers to embrace the new realities and materials of the industrial age. For the artist, reality in modern society was now built on geometrical conceptions, a revolutionary idea progressing away from natural ideals of beauty. It is important to note that for Léger, the machine did not serve as an object for irony, rebellion or sexuality as it had done for fellow artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst, but instead as a vehicle to express admiration for a period. This ‘admiration’ as such was a product of Léger’s primary brutal 6

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experiences of the destructive capabilities of technology in war.

The strength and power of the artist’s technologically-influenced pieces bear witness to how Léger was simply “dazzled” by the mechanics of a gun and what it represented. Due to this emotive connection to the object, Léger consciously avoids likeness - devoid of emotional significance - instead pursuing equivalence in his work. This allows his pieces to communicate the poignant horror represented by the machine during the Great War. Yet, through the atrocities of war, Léger was able to fully respect the symbolism of a single object and how that symbolism is capable of unifying people.

He claimed “it is a good idea to appeal to an object” as it “takes on a social significance” and, thus becomes “accessible to everyone”. Léger recognised Europe’s unified devastating experience of war, creating art that all, including those he met on the front, could empathize with. Thus, through the discord of society in war, Léger unified his audience represented by modernity and the machine.

During the commercial boom of the 1920s, business interests often battled self-appointed ‘defenders of the landscape’. French journalists argued over whether or not the increase in advertising argued well for French industry and commerce or would incite moral chaos. This signalled a revolution in French culture, as the basis of our modern world (and the worries surrounding it) manifested itself for the first time. Léger himself described the consuming and immutable billboard as modern society’s “fever and laughter, violence and ruin, electricity and oblivion”, admitting it as the “art of this age”. The brightness of electric lamps and advertising panels, the towering height of tall buildings, the rhythms of business transactions as well as the nervous state of the city’s inhabitants each present themselves as problems as well as vital forces in the mechanics of the modern world, something Léger sought to present in his pieces.

Baudelaire argued the artist must “set up his house

in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of motion, in the midst of the figurative and the infinite”. He was writing with reference to the late 1860s. It is interesting to note that these words reigned true some 60 years later. This demonstrates the failure of the late 19th Century pursuit of ideals, as the flâneur only lives through simple observation of the modern world, without prescribing a remedy for its flaws. For the flâneur the city was not a home but a showplace; for Leger the city was its public. It was through accepting and embracing the seemingly discordant aspects of modern life that Léger found the essence of the city, translating modernity into a visual form. Here the artist borrows from the urban landscape: billboard lettering and imagery, the boundaries of streets, scaffolding, buildings, mechanised bodies and billowing smoke, recreating these elements in his pieces.

The monumental La Ville (1919), however, is not a cityscape in any traditional sense: the artist provides no means of understanding the space and direction of the streets, the location and size of the buildings, the movement of pedestrian and vehicle traffic. Léger believed La Ville presented itself as revolutionary due to its ability to achieve depth and dynamism without “resorting to imitative techniques like chiaroscuro and modelling”.

Overlapping and layered planes within the expansive and panoramic canvas envelopes the audience to an emersion of the senses. The piece displays a discordant image of the city as shapes of the foreground and backgrounds are bound together, clashing the viewer’s perspectives.

These juxtapositions are further achieved through pairing contrasting primary and secondary colours, colliding different aspects of city life. An example of this is in the central strip of road running vertically up the canvas. This entirely distorts the viewer’s perception in presenting recognisable elements of city life in abstracted circumstances. The two figures depicted in Leger’s La Ville further heighten its character of discord as their bodies seem to smelt

into the bustling city atmosphere, similar to The Card Game in physically embodying the mechanical elements of the city. Existing only as half forms, the figures are sapped of individuality and in turn become an entity with modern life. In this way Leger unifies the viewer with the discordant modern landscape and the society it represents.

Combinations of movement and speed prompted neurological conceptions of modernity. When one crosses a landscape by vehicle it becomes fragmented; it loses its descriptive value but gains a synthetic value. This was an idea which Léger obsessed over and influenced his use of billboards in his works, as they not only represented the hold of a consumerist society, but also epitomized an experience of technology: advertisements were able to balance the slower pace and vision of the stroller with the rapid and kinetic motion of the automobile.

It was the cinema which was integrally related to the mechanisms of the industrial age and to the fundamental moral principle of the era: speed. This prompted Léger to include Le bebe Cadum, an omnipresent billboard image of “monumental vulgarity” in his film of 1924, Le Ballet Mecanique.

This promotes cinema as a crucial art form for the new culture: “a more fragmented and faster moving [life]. . . than in previous eras”. Standish Lawder has described the way this film captures these “pulsating energies of modern life” including “fragmented images and aggressive signals of advertising. . . like the city”. As well as relating to the mechanisms of the industrial age, Léger’s Ballet Mecanique also calls upon later themes in his work, such as speed. Here the artist, again, is able to utilise cinema as a new synthetic means of communal imaginative experience in the face of an advanced, yet horrifically unnatural world.

Léger, alongside Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, sought to deconstruct the dominant models provided by commercial cinema, instead pursuing an extension or creative prolongation of the activity of painting. This rejection of mainstream film AD ASTRA - Issue 2

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Artwork by Alice Smith-Goss

demonstrates the artists’ aims of producing a new perception of modernity through dramatic shifts in scale and disruptions of spatial continuity. This removed the medium from the mediocre and regressive applications made of it by the film industry. In Léger’s own words he asserts, “il est jeune, modern, libre et sans tradition. C’est sa force” (it is young, modern, free and without tradition. It’s its own force). This explains Léger’s view of the “depressingly marginal” place of modernist painting in French society, by way of a contrast with film. He claimed the process of technical procedures employed in film such as cutting, juxtaposition and close-up, as well as the isolation of images, enabled cinema to capture life’s raw materials. Similarly to the work of his mechanical period following the war, the subject matter of the film demonstrates the value of an object in itself, in movement as well as when static. This seeks to demonstrate the sheer importance of cinema in presenting the modern age, as the process of the piece imitates and draws upon life’s movements, similarly to how technology emulates life’s actions.

Léger’s works exhibit dissonance in society; yet, through this he unifies his audience in the understanding of this fact. Elements of discord in the modern world, such as war and the individualistic nature of rising commerce are communicated through Léger’s paintings and films in his play of harmonies and rhythms. Léger chooses to directly address these issues of the contemporary world by bonding viewers through familiar objects, displaying these using bold background colours and surface lines, distances and shocking contrasts. He in turn heightens the importance of technology in the modern world demonstrating within his pieces its immediate destructive capabilities and through this the unifying experience of modern innovation.

Artworks The artworks referred to in this essay can be viewed online: For The Card Game (1917), go to web.sbu.edu/theology/bychkov/leger_cards.html.

For La Ville (1919), go to http://www.moma.org/collection_images/resized/5 03/w500h420/CRI_151503.jpg.

For the film still from Le Ballet Mecanique, go to classconnection.s3.amazonaws.com/704/flashcards /514704/jpg/picture51304903295766.jpg

Bibliography Affron, M. (1998) Fernand Léger and the Spectacle of Objects, The Museum of Modern Art. Duchil, G. (1985) F. Léger, Bergamo Green, C. (1976) Léger and the Avant Garde, Yale University Press Leymarie, J. C. (1973) Léger, Drawings and Goaches, Thames and Hudson Verdet, A. (1969) Léger (20th Century Masters), Hamlyn

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Artwork by Jessie Keegan

Feminist Sociology and Our Understanding of Society Urmi Kabir

F

eminist sociologists, while diverse in outlook, are linked by their aim of uncovering and removing gender inequality.

Their contribution to our understanding of society, however, is a subject of dispute. Whilst some sociologists argue that radical feminists have made a crucial contribution to our understanding of society by revealing the significance of cultural forms such as patriarchy, others argue that alternative perspectives, notably, Functionalism, have made a greater contribution by uncovering how every part of society functions in terms of the whole. The role of radical, Marxist and postmodernist feminists can also be seen to be important. This essay, however, argues that liberal feminists have made the most effective contribution to our understanding of society today by both uncovering causes of gender inequality and campaigning to bring about social policy changes in order to make society more equal.

It appears that the greatest feminist contribution to our understanding of society has come from liberal feminists. Liberal feminists, who focus on how women can demonstrate and advance gender equality through their own actions and choices, acknowledge the progress women have made but emphasise that there is still a long way to go before reaching ultimate gender equality. For example, Dale Spender’s research into the hidden aspects of patriarchy revealed that there remained a great deal of gender inequality within the family despite apparent moves towards gender equality. Such research has led to more

government-funded initiatives and organisations, such as domestic abuse helplines and Sure Start, being aimed at women to help reduce the inequality they had to deal with. This means that liberal feminists have made highly effective contributions to our understanding of society as their research has stimulated social policy reforms regarding gender, making society more equal.

Although liberal feminists recognise that there has been progress, the British feminist Natasha Walter, author of Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism, argues that there are still continuing problems which affect all women such as low pay and lack of childcare.

However, this stance can be criticised, as campaigning for equal rights has helped lead to important changes in legislation such as the Equal Pay Act, which show that society is no longer as patriarchal as some liberal feminists make it out to be.

Furthermore, it could be said that the liberal feminists’ contribution only applies to certain aspects of society such as, gender policy. It has been argued, for example that structuralist Marxists such as Louis Althusser have made a greater contribution by highlighting the extent to which society is controlled by repressive and ideological state apparatus.

Althusser suggests that we have no choice whatsoever in every part of society since we are either coerced into accepting ruling class ideology by repressive state apparatus (RSA) such as, the law, or ideological state apparatus (ISA) that put us under a ‘false class consciousness’. Such arguments can seem powerful.

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However, since Althusser was writing, society has moved on. Much of what he wrote seems too negative and inevitably cannot take into account that in society, there has been more progress towards equality. Even the government, which Marxists such as Althusser label as only being there for control through repression and ideology, has passed legislation, such as the Working Tax Credit, that has helped bring more equality in society. This shows that unlike Marxists, liberal feminists seem to largely appreciate the progress towards gender equality, as well as finding ways to continue to improve the condition of the oppressed.

Radical feminists, who claim that gender inequality is the result mainly of patriarchy and want women to free themselves from men, have made a partially effective contribution to understanding society by uncovering the origins of patriarchy. Kate Millet, notably, identified several institutions which she argued often encouraged female oppression, such as religion and education.

For example, in the Roman Catholic Church, there are only male priests and in Islam there are only male prophets. This means that Millet discovered some of the underlying causes of female oppression, giving us a better understanding of society by showing how agents of social control like religion can promote gender inequality. However, this can be criticised as ‘postmodernists’ argue that ‘metanarratives’ such as religion are losing threre influence in society, and therefore no longer have the same hold over people as they once did. As Weber argues, religion no longer provides a ‘sacred canopy’, as people now find their own ‘meaning routes’. This suggests that although Millet, whose research was in the late 1960s and early 1970s, demonstrated the patriarchal nature of agents of social control, this no longer applies so much to the individualistic society of today.

Shulasmith Firestone, a Candadian-born radical feminist, provides an alternative view by arguing that patriarchal subordination of women is rooted in 12

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biology as well society. Women have to deal with child birth, breast feeding and menstruation, which impose physical, social and psychological disadvantages making women seem inferior to men.

For example, when a woman has a baby, it may consume all her time so that she may not be able to work, making her economically dependent on the father of her child. However, this view can also be challenged as today, women have the freedom to choose whether they want a child or not, they even have the power to stop their menstrual cycle, showing that women no longer need to be subordinated by the family or biology. On balance, however, although Millet and Firestone’s contribution no longer applies so strongly to society today since there is more gender equality, radical feminists have highlighted important sources of patriarchy, which in turn has allowed us to understand how to improve the condition of the oppressed. This shows that they have made an important contribution to understanding society, as their research has revealed the causes of patriarchy, supporting campaigns for change to prevent it continuing.

Marxist feminists, who see the inequality of women as being rooted in class structures, also make a useful contribution to understanding society; however, their contribution only focuses on the economic aspects of society, making their contribution not as useful as the liberal feminists, whose focus is more wide-ranging. From the Marxist perspective, men have more power than women because they have more access to higher paid jobs. Petra Henderson has developed this idea to show that women are oppressed due to ‘patrilocality’. This means that women become financially dependent on their husband because when they get married they have to accommodate with the husband’s family. However, this can be criticised, as it is most appropriate to nonindustrialized societies. In modern Western society today, there is more ‘matrifocality’, meaning men are moving in with their wife’s family, showing that

women are no longer as financially oppressed.

Furthermore, Marxists would argue that it is the working class who are financially oppressed, not women as such. In society today, agents of social control such as the education system promote a ‘false class consciousness’ onto the working class so they do not rebel. For example, Marxists would argue that the recent increase in university tuition fees is to put off working class students from going to university and push them into having low paid jobs. This suggests that the Marxist feminists’ contribution to understanding society focuses too much on women being financially oppressed and ignores that the whole of the working class, including men, are also marginalised. On balance, this suggests that the liberal feminists make a more useful contribution to understanding society because they research all aspects of gender inequality, rather than just focusing on economics.

Postmodern feminists make the least effective contribution to understanding society because they provide no solution to gender inequality.

Postmodern feminists argue that there has been no progress towards gender equality (partly because progress has no single meaning) and that no one theory can explain patriarchy since different women want different things. Postmodern feminists have contributed to our understanding by showing that language itself is biased in favour of men, which

causes gender inequality. However, although this might highlight an important issue, that patriarchy arises from language, postmodernists provide no realistic solution of to how to overcome this issue.

Furthermore, as Sylvia Walby argues, postmodern feminists lose sight of the importance of gender inequality. Postmodern, feminists have thus made the least useful contribution to understanding society because they provide no method of how to tackle gender inequality.

Overall, it appears that feminist perspectives have contributed to our understanding of society by revealing the patriarchal values that govern our everyday lives. The weight of the evidence suggests that the feminist perspective that has made the most useful contribution to understanding society is liberal feminism. Although radical feminists have in the past played an important role in identifying sources of patriarchy, their contribution no longer applies so much to society today because there is less of a patriarchal nature. In contrast, Marxist and postmodern feminists seems to provide the least useful contribution as they seem too negative and focus on certain narrow areas of inequality. Liberal feminists have not only campaigned for more reforms in social policy to benefit women, but also recognise that in society today, there is much more gender equality, something which other branches of feminism often fail to do.

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Artwork by Judy Al-Hajjar

The Technology Gap Imogen Crane

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he technology gap is the lag of time between the creation of new technology and its acquisition by a country. There are varying degrees of technological access around the globe; while some countries, such as Kenya, North Korea and Iran remain decidedly technologically underdeveloped, thus widening the gap, there are others, such as Afghanistan, along with NGOs and scientists in GM food development, who are moving towards eradicating the gap.

In many less industrialized countries (LICs), however, the gap is being widened because of the lack of funding and opportunity regarding technology. In Bhutan for instance, being an LIC means that only 925 people out of a population of 725 000 are connected to the internet. The story is similar in Kenya, but here the problem is more pronounced in the agricultural sector, where subsistence farming makes up 75% of agricultural output. The gap is being widened in Kenya because of a lack of capital investment, which has led to there being only 12 844 working tractors in the entire country (UN, 2001). Thus the gap is being severely widened in developing countries where funding and capital are in short supply.

In some countries, it is active restrictions on access to technology, not GNP, that is widening the gap. In North Korea, political censorship means the population remains disconnected from the rest of the world, which widens the communication gap.

Despite there being one million mobile users in North Korea, they are restricted to North Korean service providers only, which prevent contact with the

outside world, and mobile internet is only provided to the elite. Cultural barriers can also be significant, such as with the treatment of women, as this hinders the closing of both the technological gap and the development gap. In Iran, the government has excluded women from certain university courses, including nuclear physics, which limits the potential skilled labour force. In China, similar restrictions apply, as higher university grades are required for women, which reduce their educational opportunities. This shows how some countries that are developed, are still contributing to the widening gap because they are choosing to opt out of the globalised world and restrict parts of their population.

However, in countries that have ‘leapfrogged’ the issue of technology, the gap seems to be decreasing.

‘Leapfrogging’ means effectively missing out intermediate stages of technological development.

Skipping technological developments allows countries to catch up rather than always remain one step behind, thus closing the gap. A notable example of this is Afghanistan; 72% of the country is covered by a mobile-network, whereas only 1% has landline phones. Similar developments are being pursued by mobile healthcare services in Rwanda and ‘M-Pesa’ (a text based mobile payment system) in Kenya.

This has led to the development of other apps such as ‘M-Farm’, which allows small-scale farmers to find the up-to-date market prices for certain crops.

One hope is that these schemes will reduce the issue of instability in ‘disconnected’ LICs and therefore encourage foreign direct investment (FDI). If this were to happen, more investment would go into AD ASTRA - Issue 2

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Artwork by Alice Smith-Goss

that country’s technology, which would in turn make developing countries less dependent and hopefully generate internal investment. This would improve quality of life as well as decrease the technology gap.

The situation is also ameliorated by NGOs, who work to close the gap, and in many cases are succeeding. The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) programme aims to equip every child in developing countries with access to the internet in school and/ or basic computer facilities. It has so far taken root in 11 countries, including Afghanistan and Nepal, and has made a marked difference. In Africa, where currently only 5% of the continent has internet access, the O3b Network is looking to implement satellite access at low cost. These two schemes exemplify the ways in which the gap is being closed on both sides through small and large schemes.

Finally, genetically modified (GM) crops offer an alternative method of farming to help close the technology gap as well as improve food security in developing countries. The introduction of ‘Miracle Rices’, high yield varieties (HYV) of crop, is the main action plan. Indeed, in 1982, HYV only accounted for 10% of Africa’s agricultural output,

but by 1997, it accounted for 30%, However, such varieties often use ‘terminator’ technology that prevents reproduction of seeds, meaning farmers have to replenish seed stocks on a regular basis at a high cost (often annually), such as has been seen in India. GM crops are complicated as a solution as they offer the possibility of technology serving to reduce the development and technology gap but also raise a number of concerns, mainly the domination of developed countries and transnational corporations (TNCs) who exploit the market to make a profit. Thus, GM crops serve to both close and widen the gap.

Overall, there is a dire technological disparity across the world. Although it is currently widening in countries such as North Korea and Bhutan, many NGOs and developing countries are picking up on the issue. Realising that a wider gap weakens global markets, they are investing in schemes such as OLPC. In other countries, successful ‘leapfrogging’ schemes, for example ‘M-Pesa’ and ‘M-Farm’, allow countries to close the gap from the bottom up. The gap is far from being closed, but the small steps being taken are at the very least reducing the rate at which the gap is widening.

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Artwork by Pui Yee See Toh

Class and Allegiance in The English Civil War Sara Semic

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he authoritarianism of Charles I and his attempts to impose religious reforms upon Scotland exacerbated the combustible political atmosphere in mid-17th century England, and helped precipitate the English Civil War of 1642-51. However, despite a silent majority steadily taking up arms for Parliament, a support base remained for Charles. This split in allegiance is open to a variety of interpretations.

Brian Manning, author of The English People and the English Revolution, argues that Royalist support was highest amongst the peers and gentry, whilst the greatest part of tradesmen and freeholders joined the Parliamentarians. However, David Underdown, author of Revel, Riot and Rebellion, challenges this emphasis on class primacy, arguing that local tensions rather than national, constitutional resentment, influenced the choosing of sides. John Morrill, author of The Nature of the English Revolution, argues that it was loyalty to Charles and the cause that formed the bond of Royalist allegiance, whilst Robert Ashton, author of The English Civil War: Conservatism and Revolution 1603-1649, argues that on both sides supporters showed indifference to the cause and were coerced into fighting. Morrill also presents allegiance as split along religious divisions, a judgement which is disputed by Blair Worden, author of The English Civil Wars 1640-1660, who argues that religion gave a greater impetus to the Parliamentarians than to the Royalists. It is within this ambit that I will judge which factor was the primary cause of the split in allegiance.

Manning is a principal exponent of the class thesis, arguing that the ‘middling sort’, characterised by ties to the world of commerce, launched an offensive ‘impelled by hostility towards the nobility and gentry and richer classes, and that this converted constitutional, political and religious issues into class conflict.’ However, Underdown challenges Manning’s sweeping statement, arguing that local concerns overrode national, class hostilities. The judgement of Royalist historian Edward Hyde of Clarendon (1609 - 74) appears to support Manning’s argument: Though the gentlemen of ancient families and estates [in the county of Somerset] were for the most part well affected to the King [...], there were a people of an inferior degree who by good husbandry, clothing and other thriving arts had gotten very great fortunes, [and] were angry that they found not themselves in the same esteem and reputation with those whose estates they had...These from the beginning were fast friends to parliament.

Richard Baxter (1615 - 91), an English Puritan church leader of the time, agrees that on Parliament’s side were ‘the smaller part (as some thought) of the gentry in most of the countries, and the greatest part of the tradesmen and freeholders and the middle sort of men, especially in those corporations and counties which depend on clothing and such manufactures.’ Baxter himself was not a tradesman but a chaplain for the Parliamentarians, intimating a religious motivation AD ASTRA - Issue 2

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that broadens the narrow class thesis. Moreover, having initially been reluctant to serve in the war, Baxter moved to the Parliamentarian stronghold of Coventry and joined the Parliamentarians shortly after in 1645, highlighting the influence of locality and challenging Hyde’s view that it was solely those of ‘inferior degree’, contemptuous of the nobility, who became ‘fast friends to parliament.’ Indeed, Underdown argues that in order for class to be treated as the primary determinant of allegiance, there would have to be ‘a perception of the war in terms wider than the localism which made the inhabitants so reluctant to serve outside their own area’, highlighting the discrepancy between Manning’s gentry thesis and the number of country gentlemen, such as William Davenport of Bramhall, Cheshire , who remained neutral.

The importance of local conditions is manifest in Malcolm’s research on Cornwall, where despite most of southern England coming out in support for Parliament, it was ‘the remoteness of Cornwall from London [that] was probably instrumental in promoting the royalism of Cornish commoners’. This illustrates how the strength of the county unit overrode the traditional influence of class divisions in party allegiance, which Manning’s thesis fails to account for. However Manning does acknowledge the importance of localism in his other work, arguing that ‘the great importance of the county unit and the fact that it commanded a loyalty which could compete with wider loyalties is shown by the widespread efforts to keep individual counties out of the war’; this supports Underdown’s argument for locality and neutrality, and highlights the oversimplification of class as being the primary motivation.

Although Hyde’s account supports Manning’s class thesis for Somerset, it can be seen, having been written during the Restoration, as largely slanted against Parliament, admonishing the Parliamentarians as being of ‘inferior degree’, which undermines its objectivity as a historical account.

Manning’s thesis largely neglects regional 20

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idiosyncrasies and the strength of locality in determining allegiance and promoting Neutralism, as Underdown highlights, thus challenging the case for the primacy of a narrow class motivation as the basis for the spit in allegiance between Parliamentarians and Royalists.

In contrast to arguments over the importance of class, religion and locality, Ashton claims that ‘Roundhead and Cavalier soldiers...fought prompted not by enthusiasm or understanding but by a combination of deference to and fear of authority’, arguing that indifference was the most common attitude on both sides. Morrill, however, contends that on the Royalist side, ‘personal loyalty to the king and a deep anger at and fear of Parliamentarian populism drove many to arms in 1642’, presenting the Royalists as fervent supporters of both Charles and the cause. This is clear in the memoirs of Royalist Edmund Verney (1590 / 1596 - 42), who claimed that he had no choice but to ‘preserve and defend those things, which are against my conscience to preserve and defend’ and that he was bound ‘in honour and gratitude to follow [his] master, whose bread [he] had eaten for thirty years’. This suggests a deep loyalty to the King, although not a ‘deep anger’ at Parliamentarian populism, as Morrill opines.

Despite his resistance to the Laudian religious policies and his own son, Ralph, turning against him to serve the Parliamentarians, Verney remained fervently loyal to Charles, supporting Morrill’s argument.

However, Verney’s memoirs, expressing his personal predicaments, cannot be treated as typical of the Royalists as a whole. Indeed, Ashton challenges the view of Royalists being motivated by loyalty, arguing that in Lancashire, it was the Lord lieutenant James Stanley who ‘wielded power over the lives of a great many people, both their tenants and other persons, many of whom later claimed that they had been forced to fight for the king against their will’, and that this was paralleled on the Parliamentarian side where the Earl of Warwick’s personal authority ‘was at least as important a factor

as political, religious and ideological commitment to the parliamentarian cause in making Essex the most solidly Roundhead county in England.’

However, this suggestion of coercion being a great factor in allegiance is somewhat challenged by Malcolm’s evidence on Cornwall, as despite the fact that ‘common people seem to have shared the religious prejudices and political aims of Parliament, simple attachment to one’s landlord rather than any larger issue brought commoners into the royal camp.’ It is important, however, not to view Cornwall as a paradigm for the war and extrapolate a countrywide motivation from its example, as Southern England was generally a hotbed for Parliamentarianism.

The example of Cornwall does, however, throw Ashton’s argument into doubt, as although James Stanley did indeed raise over 6,000 men in his county for the king, there is no evidence to suggest they were coerced. Equally, Richardson argues that although the Earl of Warwick was vital in recruiting Parliamentarian volunteers in 1642, most men supported Warwick out of ‘economic self-interest, and because of his Puritan religious leanings.’ This evidence is strengthened by Parliamentarian Baxter, who claimed that ‘the poor plowman understood but little of these matters’, supporting Ashton’s thesis, ‘but a little would stir up their discontent when money was demanded,’ corroborating with Richardson’s judgement on the motivation of economic selfinterest. This acknowledgement of the monetary motivations that ultimately swayed individuals to fight, despite his religious stance, makes Baxter’s account honest and credible, and challenges Ashton’s emphasis on deference to, or fear of authority.

It is clearly problematic to argue that all Royalist supporters were loyal to the cause, as Morrill does.

However, although Ashton’s view on the indifference of many supporters is more convincing, it overlooks the pragmatic, personal motivations, often borne out of local situations, which played a greater part in individuals taking up arms, than

respect for or fear of authority.

Morrill argues that despite local circumstances obscuring clear-cut allegiance patterns, religion was the crucial dividing factor, and that the active royalists were ‘the defenders of episcopacy’ whilst the ‘puritan activists launched the parliamentarian movement’. However Worden argues that ‘the royalist struggle to preserve the ecclesiastical order did not incite the degree of belligerence that was fired by the Puritan determinism to overhaul it,’ presenting religion as a greater pull on the Parliamentarian side. Hyde had claimed in a response to a Parliamentary letter that the Parliamentarians were ‘a faction of malignant, schismatical, and ambitious persons; whose design was...to alter the whole frame of government, both of Church and State.’ This can be treated as a typical response from a loyal supporter of Charles, vindicating the cause in the face of verbal attack from the Parliamentarians. However by revealing a constitutional fear of the demolition of social order, it sophisticates Morrill’s narrow view.

Worden’s judgement that the Parliamentarians were driven by a ‘Puritan determinism’ is supported

by Baxter, who claims that it was principally ‘religious matters that filled up the parliament’s armies, and put valor into their soldiers.’ Baxter observed during the Battle of Naseby that ‘the greatest part of the common soldiers [on the King’s side] were ignorant men, of little religion’, suggesting that Charles’ supporters were less pious, which challenges Morrill’s thesis. Although Baxter was the chaplain for the Parliamentarian side and so would have naturally denounced the Royalists as less devout, his case is supported contextually; private correspondence captured by the Parliamentarians at the Battle of Naseby in 1645 which showed Charles plotting to hire foreign mercenaries and repeal antiCatholic laws helped him become seen as the ‘man of blood’, and defeat at Naseby forced Charles to recruit any soldiers willing to join his side, regardless of their spiritual compasses.

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Although Morrill’s argument may have been plausible for the case up to 1642, religion as a motivation for the Royalists appears not to have had the longevity or intensity that it did for the Parliamentarians. The importance of religion for antiRoyalists was manifest in the Parliamentarian and fervently Puritan Stephen Marshall’s claim, that ‘the question in England is whether Christ or Antichrist shall be lord or King,’ aligning Charles with the Antichrist. Marshall was considered by Hyde to have an influence on the Parliamentarian side greater than that of Laud on the Royalist’s, strengthening Worden’s view that the Parliamentarians were swayed by their religious conscience, appealed to by powerful preachers like Marshall.

In fact, in Morrill’s later work he argues that although religion ‘impell[ed] most of those who made others make intolerable choices for Parliament in 1642’, he ‘would no longer claim that things were so straightforward on the royalist side’, illustrating the difficulty in narrowly categorizing religion as a ubiquitous motivation. The Royalists were guided by a tug of honour and reflex loyalty to the king, as well as self-interested motivations rooted in their socio-religious positions, whilst the Parliamentarians were, as Worden argues conclusively, bound by Puritanism, which gave them ‘the degree of belligerence’ unparalleled on the Royalist side.

Although Manning’s thesis on the primacy of class may be convincing for certain areas, it is, as Underdown highlights, undermined by the influence of locality. However, although Underdown convincingly argues the importance of local and personal circumstances, his thesis fails to account for those driven to fight by more ideological motivations. Ashton’s argument on the ideological indifference of individuals in the war ultimately carries more weight on the Royalist side, particularly alongside evidence from the Battle of Naseby and Charles’ growing desperation. Nonetheless like Underdown’s thesis, it disregards the radical, religious supporters who propelled and prolonged 22

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the war. As a result, Worden’s thesis on the religious radicalism of the Parliamentarians is the most convincing, as it looks beyond local idiosyncrasies but also sophisticates Morrill’s narrow judgement.

Like Manning, Morrill sees a traditional concept as being the primary motivation for taking up arms, on both sides, whilst Worden intimates that the Parliamentarians grew more ‘belligerent’ with the gradual demise of Charles’ reputation, drawing strength from their Puritanism. Although the Royalists, desirous of preserving their socio-religious positions, seemed equally belligerent in 1642, individuals on both sides ultimately acted flexibly in reaction to the ebb and flow of the war, making Manning’s view, of traditional concepts such as class predetermining patterns of allegiance, problematic.

Bibliography Ashton, Robert, The English Civil War: Conservatism and Revolution 1603-1649, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978 Cannon, John, A Dictionary of British History, Oxford University Press, 2009 Gaunt, Peter, The English Civil Wars 1642-1651, Osprey, 2003 Malcolm, Lee, Joyce, Caesar’s Due, Royal Historical Society, 1983 Manning, Brian, Neutrals and Neutralism in the English Civil War, Oxford D. Phil. Thesis, 1957 Manning, Brian, The English People and the English Revolution, Heinemann, 1976 Morrill, J.S, Nature of the English Revolution, Longman, 1993 Morrill, J.S, Revolt in the Provinces: The People of England and the Tragedies of War, 1630-48, Longman, 1998

Richardson, R.C, Town and Countryside in the English Revolution, Manchester University Press, 1992

Baxter, Richard, The Practical Works of Richard Baxter, ed. William Orne, Volume 1, J.Duncan, 1830

Underdown, David, Revel, Riot and Rebellion, Oxford University Press, 1987

Clarendon, Hyde, Edward, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, Printed for J. Wilfred, London, 1721

Worden, Blair, The English Civil Wars 1640-1660, Orion Publishing Group Limited, 2009 PRIMARY SOURCES: Baxter, Richard, Reliquiae Baxterianae, ed. M Sylvester, London, 1696 Baxter, Richard, The Autobiography of Richard Baxter, Dent, 1974

Marshall, Stephen, A Sacred Panegyric, Bowtell, London, 1644 Verney, Frances Parthenope, Memoirs of the Verney Family During the Civil War, Volume II, Longmans, London, 1892 (orig. 1696)

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Artwork by Hazel Deger

Could Artificial Intelligence Ever Be Intelligent?

Imogen Foster

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his essay will firstly examine what intelligence really is and how it is currently tested. It will then go on to state the reasons why one preliminary definition of intelligence does not work, and subsequently will examine the reasons why computers cannot be conscious. The implications of the creation of intelligent artificial intelligence will then be discussed, and it will be concluded that intelligence is consciousness and that there is little reason to believe there could not be a conscious robot in the future.

This question hinges on how we define intelligence; therefore this will be the first issue to be addressed. The most famous answer to this question was proposed by Alan Turing, who suggested a way to test intelligence which has become known as the Turing Test. During the Turing Test, a human judge engages in a written conversation with both another human and a computer for five minutes, without being able to see which is which. If the judge cannot tell which conversation is with the computer, the computer is said to be intelligent. This means that for a computer to be intelligent, it must be able to engage in humanlike conversation.

The Turing Test has been criticised on many fronts. A well-known criticism comes from John Searle, who suggests that even if a computer can pass the test, it is not intelligent. Searle gave his argument in the form of the Chinese Room thought experiment. For the sake of this experiment, it is imagined that the Turing Test is in Mandarin; in

place of the computer, there is a man in a room who does not speak Mandarin. When he receives the messages from the judge, he consults a manual to find out what to reply. Whilst to the judge it may appear that the Chinese output of the room is intelligent, we would not say the room is intelligent as there is no understanding involved in the process.

The output is not intelligent as it is merely the consequence of rules being followed. The experiment implies that conscious understanding is the main component of intelligence; that it requires self-awareness. Therefore, however complicated a computer may be, it is always just following a set of rules, and therefore never contains any conscious understanding and so can never be truly intelligent.

As we have now established that conscious understanding is a prerequisite for intelligence, we must now examine whether multiple realizability is possible. Multiple realizability is the idea that any mental states could potentially be produced by physical systems other than my brain, such as another brain or the electrical systems of a robot.

The easiest way to address this issue is to look at the arguments for why computers cannot be conscious.

The first reason we might think computers can never be conscious is that only biological matter can produce consciousness. However, just because the only things we have ever seen produce consciousness are biological, this does not mean these are the only things that can produce consciousness in the future; this would be to generalize from a single case. There AD ASTRA - Issue 2

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Artwork by Matthew Dudek

might also be, in the future, biological matter used within computers, similar to the use of enzymes in washing powders. Therefore, computers might become intelligent by using biological matter.

A second reason to believe that computers cannot produce consciousness is that robots will always be too simple to produce consciousness. The human brain is the most complicated thing in the known universe, with over one hundred billion neurons, and therefore, it would be far too difficult to ever replicate this kind of complexity within a computer.

However, it is impossible to know how complex robots may be in the future. It may also be possible to produce consciousness in something far less complicated than the human brain. We know that it is possible for artificial hearts to do the same thing as human hearts even though they are much simpler, so there is no reason to believe this could not be possible with the brain as well. Therefore, it may be possible in the future to create a computer or robot complex enough to create consciousness.

Since we cannot rule out the possibility of computers producing consciousness, it is necessary to now discuss the implications if computers do become intelligent. This would firstly pose a problem for substance dualists, who believe that we are made up of a material body and an immaterial mind. If an intelligent computer is created, it must be accepted that this is a material object creating consciousness in the absence of an immaterial mind.

This clearly conflicts with substance dualism, so its advocates would have to re-evaluate their stance, perhaps to only see an immaterial mind as a purely human attribute that cannot be placed on other physical objects. If we accept substance dualism,

however, then computers cannot be conscious.

The creation of artificial intelligent would also challenge many religious beliefs. This is because in many world religions, it is believed that God has provided humans with their minds, intelligence and consciousness. However, if it becomes possible for a human to create the same kind of intelligence as supposedly created by a God, then the strength or existence of this God must be called into question.

This could lead to a large number of the world-wide population needing to question where they originally thought they came from. And so, the creation of artificial intelligence could have a great effect on the lives of many as they see it now.

In conclusion, intelligence must be defined as conscious understanding. While it may seem outlandish at this time to believe that we create could a computer that is conscious, there is no compelling reason to believe that, with scientific developments, we will not be able to at some time in the future. However, there still stands the issue of the ‘explanatory gap’, which suggests that however far neuroscientific exploration goes, it may never be able to explain the ‘magic moment’ of when brain activity creates conscious experiences. If the explanatory gap is never understood, then it is highly unlikely that artificial intelligence could ever be intelligence, but equally, at this point in time, it is impossible to rule out the explanatory gap ever being bridged. In theory, computers could one day be conscious. If they are, it will have a huge impact on the world, but with so much uncertainty surrounding the future scientific progress in this area, we currently have no way of knowing whether they will be.

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Artwork by Mary Higgins

Leonardo Da Vinci’s Anatomical Studies: from Art to Science Anna Fletcher

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eonardo Da Vinci: this is a name that immediately connotes great works of art from the Italian Renaissance, his most famous being the Mona Lisa. He is widely regarded as a man of immense talent with an unquenchable curiosity. We find no trouble attaching the word artist to Leonardo as his paintings are accepted as awe-inspiring pieces of work; however he was also a pioneer in the field of human anatomy. Anatomy captured the interest of Leonardo and he produced over 200 pages of studies of the human body based on dissections he had performed. Are these drawings enough to give Leonardo the title of a scientist, or were they merely an extension of his work as an artist?

Leonardo himself once said scientists are those, ‘who have penetrated through the senses as a result of experience, not feeding the investigators on dreams but always proceeding successively from primary truths and established principles’. Leonardo followed this path throughout his study on anatomy; his experience was established through tireless dissections, and his conclusions were often a result of challenging and expanding on established theories. The traditional definition of a scientist is based on the applications of Isaac Newton; a scientist must ‘formulate a hypothesis in order to create a general rule that is derived from the theory, which can then be applied to situations’. In this sense a lot of science is rooted in mathematics combined with experimentation, to accept this as a finite definition of science would imply that

Leonardo’s anatomical work is not scientific.

However the broader view that science is devotion to unravelling the mysteries of the Universe readily incorporates Leonardo’s work.

Scientific study played a central role in Leonardo’s work. He commenced his first period of anatomical study in 1489 and his second in 1507, which then continued until his death in 1519. Leonardo had therefore occupied at least 12 years of his life with the study of anatomy, with a particularly intense period in 1507 in which he dissected the body of an old man in Florence. This shows that what began as an interest with the study of the skull in 1489 soon developed into a major goal to achieve perfection and ‘unravel the mystery of life’. It required Leonardo to delve deeper into the study of the human body and in doing so occupy the mind of a scientist.

Curiosity was a characteristic that can be readily associated with Leonardo and one that has to be possessed by a scientist in order to ‘unravel the universe’s mysteries’. In order to reach proper conclusions, the mind has to be open to knowledge and be constantly questioning established principles.

Leonardo demonstrated this with his course of anatomical study, which began with the aim to search for the secrets of man’s soul. Analysis of this aim clearly shows a desire to understand the subject he is drawing and this in itself shows the beginnings of a scientist.

The word ‘secrets’, which Leonardo used implies a sense of the unknown and that he was about to embark on a series of discoveries to uncover something.

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Acknowledgement of the unknown allows Leonardo to become a scientist as he is using his interest to drive forward his investigation into the ‘secrets of the soul’, and demonstrates how ‘mere curiosity can become profound scientific research’, ultimately resulting in new discoveries. As Jonathan Pevsner recognised in the journal Trends ‘we are fascinated by Leonardo today because his curiosity was unparalleled’. This implies that Leonardo possessed a characteristic that scientists today distinguish as crucial. Furthermore, as no more advances on this subject have been made today it shows that Leonardo dared to go where others are less inclined, demonstrating his unique ambition and drive.

Moreover Leonardo also adopted an exhaustive attention to detail, surrounding his drawings with meticulous notes to make sure that everything was fully explained. An example of this is his study of Nerves Leading off the Cervical Vertebrae, which is surrounded by exact measurements of nerves, showing an interest beyond the aesthetic quality of the drawing. His desire to be accurate can only be due to Leonardo’s specificity; a characteristic of his scientific mind. This attention to detail was shown throughout Leonardo’s anatomical work as ‘he was not content to record how a thing worked; he wished to find out why’. In order to do this Leonardo dissected muscles and pulled apart the innermost components in order to demonstrate and then sketch how they worked within the body.

Dissection is a word commonly associated with scientists in pathology labs and not artists. This implies the investigation Leonardo carried out was in pursuit of scientific knowledge and therefore recognises Leonardo as a scientist.

The Renaissance era was a time when accepted views in art and science were being challenged and the emergence of the links between art and science became apparent. White stated in his book that ‘ironically it was the artists of the period who made the greatest strides in the advancement of anatomy’; although it was clear that Leonardo was at the 30

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forefront. It was required for artists to have knowledge of anatomy, as the accepted principle was that the artist had to understand every aspect of the human body to paint it accurately. This meant watching dissections and studying books such as Jacopo Berengario da Capri’s Isagogae Breves (A Short Introduction to Anatomy), which was recommended for both surgeons and artists. It therefore becomes apparent why Leonardo embarked on a course of study in anatomy.

However, his intellectual curiosity led him to investigate aspects of anatomy that could not have benefited his painting therefore implying that Leonardo was a different kind of artist, one more comparable to the anatomists of the time. It was common for artists of the period to attend dissections; however Leonardo took this further by carrying out his own dissections on ‘dozens of cadavers’. This shows that Leonardo was not content to observe others dissecting bodies but wished to enter the process himself as a surgeon.

To define Leonardo as an artist seems restrictive as he clearly went beyond the role and so deserves recognition as a scientist. This is supported by the full dissection he carried out on an old man in 1507 in a Florentine hospital. He successfully ‘diagnosed vascular failure as the cause of death’. The word ‘diagnosed’ here connotes the professional opinion of a qualified doctor and so immediately implies that Leonardo was in the same league as these professionals and that his opinion was trusted. Furthermore, the diagnosis Leonardo made was the first clear description of atherosclerosis in medical history, showing that Leonardo was clearly not just attempting to examine the body for benefit of his art but wanted to make discoveries that would go down in medical history. The diagnosis shows a motivation to discover answers to questions Leonardo felt would go unanswered if he only occupied the mind of an artist. By thinking like a scientist he strove to find answers and make discoveries.

Ultimately Leonardo’s impetus led him to surpass any other artist of the time and discover much more

than would have been expected of him as a 16th century artist. This implies he was driven by scientific and not artistic goals.

The dissections Leonardo carried out offered him a starting point to develop techniques that were not only unique but ahead of his time. Using these techniques he was able to make scientific discoveries that laid down the foundations for further developments within the medical world. This shows Leonardo to be a figure worthy of medical history as it can be argued that without him some important breakthroughs may not have been made today.

White says that ‘Leonardo was probably the first anatomist in history to observe how the optic nerves left the back of the eye and made connections with the brain’. The bold use of the term ‘first anatomist’ immediately gives Leonardo a title and emphasises the importance of his observations, implying that he should be remembered for this discovery.

Moreover, the technique Leonardo used to make these observations further solidifies the statement that he is a scientist, as it was built on the mistakes of others and a desire to correct them. Leonardo’s predecessors had struggled to examine the eye as on cutting it open it collapsed. Leonardo refused to accept defeat and meticulously worked in order to formulate a successful technique. This allowed him to perform a successful dissection of the eye stating that ‘in order to be able to see the inside well without spilling its watery humour, you should place the whole eye in the white of egg and make it boil and become solid; then cut the egg and eye transversely’. This not only demonstrates the unique workings of Leonardo’s mind, but also clearly reflects the thinking of a scientist striving to find solutions by investigating alternative possibilities and building on prior knowledge.

Leonardo was also able to recognise his own mistakes and use them as an opportunity to improve on his work. Examples of this were the studies he made on the brain. He produced one study in 1490 showing the anatomy of the brain and scalp, which

was limited as no full dissections had been carried out. Leonardo recognised this and, driven by a desire for scientific accuracy, corrected his work by producing two later drawings of the human head which clearly demonstrated the precision he intended. This was due to a technique Leonardo used of injected wax into the skull cavity allowing a mould to be made of the brain. This allowed Leonardo to make a study showing precisely the channels and undulations of the brain. This reveals Leonardo as someone who aimed for scientific accuracy, implying an aspiration for knowledge beyond the benefit of his art.

Furthermore Leonardo’s drawings have highlighted the importance today of imaging in aiding the teaching of anatomy and medical science.

His technique of displaying all the layers within a structure ‘is effectively what we’re copying today’.

He secured the future of medicine as one that depends heavily of the use of imagery and pictures and also set the standard as ‘his drawings were only bettered in terms of accuracy in the 19th century with the introduction of CAT scans’ .

A scientist is often identified based on the studies they conduct and the results they present and then publish. Leonardo took on this role as a scientist in the way he carried out experiments to shed light on human anatomy and then used drawings as a way to present his findings. However, due to the nature of the period he was unable to publish his findings, which may offer explanation as to why Leonardo is not regarded higher as a scientist. It was not until the 20th century that scientific work began to be published and so Leonardo, living in the 16th century, had no means to present his work as scientists do today. His anatomical studies remained hidden from the public eye until 1900 when they were finally published, 381 years after his death. By this time many of the discoveries Leonardo had originally made had been rediscovered with others gaining the acclaim. This means a great amount of Leonardo’s work is less valued, however it is clear AD ASTRA - Issue 2

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that the processes he went through show him to be the scientist we would recognise today.

The restrictions Leonardo faced offer an insight into the struggles he would have overcome in order to pursue his scientific goals. Firstly, it would have been hard to obtain bodies as autopsies were rare and the pope had expressly forbidden the dissection of humans. However Leonardo did manage to obtain bodies, although there is a ‘repeated claim’ that the dissection of them caused him to be ‘persecuted by the religious authorities’. This shows how willing he was to distance himself from the glamorous life of a well-established painter in order to pursue his anatomical interest. The practical obstacles facing Leonardo were the resources at his disposal; in an age without disinfectants and preservatives Leonardo would have been limited to the time he could spend dissecting a body before it began to decay. The knowledge that he had to work quickly only heightens the greatness of his studies as they show how skilful Leonardo was to accurately depict the body in spite of such limiting factors. They demonstrate determination and desire to succeed at all costs, characteristics true of a passionate scientist.

Despite the restrictions Leonardo faced he was able to conduct experiments in the manner of a scientist. Using the example of his studies on the heart he began with a hypothesis: ‘the movement of blood through the heart produces heat’, and then set about investigating it. Leonardo used the movement of milk in a churn to demonstrate his theory and if correct it would be proved by the production of heat from the milk as it moved.

Investigations like these show Leonardo to be a scientist as he adopted processes similar to today’s in order to research a idea and in doing this it verifies that he ‘was attempting to prove theories, not just satisfy a thirst for knowledge’.

Leonardo presented his ideas in the format of his studies surrounded by detailed notes, which is synonymous to a scientist writing up a report today.

Leonardo felt that drawings were the best way to 32

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describe and capture the beauty of the body as he said ‘the more words you use and minutely describe the more you lead away from the thing you described’.

This shows clearly Leonardo considering the most appropriate and also effective way of presenting his work. The word ‘minutely’ that Leonardo uses implies the extent of the detail and intricacy he was attempting to capture, which can only be achieved with the use of studies and drawings. It is evident Leonardo took on the role as a scientist when producing his studies and it seems that ‘if we accept the idea that scientific ideas can be expressed pictorially then Leonardo can be considered a scientist’.

The viewer today may place so much emphasis on the knowledge to be gained from Leonardo’s studies and their place in medical science that they will be overlooked as works of art. The curator of the Leonardo anatomist exhibition stated that ‘Had Leonardo published this work, he would now be known as one of the greatest scientists in history’. The exhibition therefore gave the audience the opportunity to re-evaluate their opinion of Leonardo and perhaps begin to consider him as a scientist, if they had only before seen him as an artist. It is therefore concluded that the viewer’s perception of Leonardo and the reasons for looking at his anatomical studies will determine whether he will remain as just an artist or be seen as a credited scientist.

Note: This is an extract from a much longer essay in which the author goes on to consider the evidence for Da Vinci being considered more an artist than a scientist.

Bibliography Baxandall, Michael. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Clark, Kenneth. Leonardo Da Vinci. Rev. ed.

London: Penguin, 1959.

Clayton, Martin. “Medicine: Leonardo’s Anatomy Years.” Nature 484, no. 7394 (April 18, 2012): 314-16.

Da Vinci, Leonardo. Leonardo Da Vinci Notebooks.

Edited by Thereza Wells. Compiled by Imra Richter. New York, USA: Oxford University Press, 1952.

Contributions to Neuroscience.” Trends 25, no. 4 (April 2002): 217-20.

Rath, G. Inception of Cadaver Dissection and Its Relevance in Present Day Scenario of Medical Education. Journal of the Indian Medical Association 104, no. 6 (June 2006): 331-33.

Da Vinci & the Code He Lived By. Directed by Robert Gardner. Narrated by Sam Mercurio.

2005.

Rifkin, Benjamin A., Michael J. Ackerman, and Judith Folkenberg. Human Anatomy; A Visual History from Renaissance to the Digital Age. New York, USA: Abrams, 2006.

Hudson, Mark. Leonardo Da Vinci: Nothing to Find but Disappointment. The Telegraph (London), March 13, 2012, Culture.

Tucker, Holly. Blood Work: A Tale of Medicine and Murder in the Scientific Revolution. New York, US: Norton and Company, 2012.

Jose, Antony Merlin. Anatomy and Leonardo Da Vinci. Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine 74 (2001): 185-95.

Universal Leonardo. Last modified 2012. Accessed October 27, 2012. http://www.universalleonardo.org/trail.php?trail=3 45&work=355.

Kemp, Martin. Leonardo Da Vinci: The Marvellous Work of Nature and Man. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Artists. Translated by George Bull. N.p.: Penguin, 1965.

Kwint, Marius, and Richard Wingate. Brains: The Mind as Matter. London, UK: Wellcome Collection, 2012.

Von Hagens, Gunther. Korperwelten - Fascination Beneath the Surface. Heildelberg: Institute of Plastination, 2001.

Leonardo: Anatomist. Nature Video. Video file, 6:52. Posted by Nature Video Channel, April 18, 2012. Accessed July 12, 2012. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9xUL5Yi_8M

White, Michael. Leonardo Da Vinci; The First Scientist. London, UK: Abacus, 2001. First published 2000 by Little, Brown and Company.

Leonardo Da Vinci Anatomist - Introducing the Exhibition. Produced by Martin Clayton. The Royal Collection, 2012.

Murray, Linda. The New Century. In The High Renaissance and Mannerism, 7-14. London: Thames and Hudson, 1967.

Zollner, Frank. “The Artist as Natural Scientist.” In Leonardo, 37-42. Koln, Germany: Taschen, 2000.

Zollner, Frank, and Johannes Nathan.

“Anatomical Drawings.” In The Graphic Work, 404-84. Vol. 2 of Leonardo Da Vinci. Koln: Taschen, 2011.

Parker, Steve. The Concise Human Body Book.

London, UK: Dorling Kindersley, 2007.

Pevsner, Jonathan. “Leonardo Da Vinci’s AD ASTRA - Issue 2

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Artwork by Isabella Busoni-Conway

Defying Conclusions: The Art of Gerhard Richter Mary Higgins

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his February, I volunteered to take part in the competition for the ARTiculation Prize.

This annual event, organised by the University of Cambridge and the Roche Court Educational Trust, is intended to “promote the appreciation and discussion of art”. The competition is open to Sixth Form students; each entrant must write and present a ten minute speech to an audience on a work of art, an artefact or an example of architecture, of their choice. Each competing school can only enter one contestant.

Below is the text of my presentation for the regional heats of the 2013 ARTiculation prize at the Saatchi gallery. Although I didn’t get selected for the nationals at Cambridge University, I went with several others in my art class to the subsequent presentations, after which we were treated to a tour of the Cambridge Cast museum by a Classics student and to an eye-opening talk by Griselda Pollock, a world-renowned art historian and scholar of feminist studies in the visual arts. It’s been a really inspirational experience and I will definitely be entering myself again next year.

The images referred to in this talk can be viewed online at www.gerhard-richter.com.

“Good evening. My name is Mary Higgins.

These three abstract oil paintings [shown via projector to the audience] are titled, ‘January’, ‘December’ and ‘November’ and they were painted in 1989 by Gerhard Richter. Each 10-by-13 foot canvas is completely unfathomable, daunting almost in their obscurity; so what I ask is - what is it about them that possesses such intensity? Exactly how do streaks of paint composed in a seemingly purely aesthetic composition manage to evoke emotion?

I began by examining their context: Germany has perhaps one of the most compelling records of recent history to its name. Hitler and the rise of Nazism brought the otherwise humble nation under the calculating glare of the entire globe. Since then, the country has found itself at the centre of two world wars, the Cold War, and in 1989 its capital city became symbol of social revolution when the Berlin Wall fell. This is the Germany Gerhard Richter grew up in; a war-torn, guilt-ridden, ideologically polarised society. An open wound.

Symptoms of this oppressive and troubling culture pervade his entire body of work between the late 1980s and 90s. For me, it is as if Richter has condensed all these ideas, all this anguish into this beautiful triptych - despite their abstraction, these paintings are in fact records of German history.

What’s interesting is how dislocated these works seem from the rest of the collection titled 18 October 1977. The other paintings are in Richter’s blurred photographic style and illustrate members of the Baader-Meinhoff group - the most notorious cell of the Marxist Red Army faction, a group that AD ASTRA - Issue 2

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operated as an armed guerrilla band in West Germany from 1970-77. The group was partially motivated by the perception that a number of former Nazis continued to hold positions of power.

They staged increasingly violent terrorist activities until they were eventually captured and held in Stuttgart’s Stammheim Prison. Meinhof was found hanged in 1976; the remaining members of the cohort were found dead in their cells on the night of the 18th after the failure of the Lufthansa hijacking.

The deaths were officially ruled as suicides but many suspect that the rebels were murdered by the state.

Richter nurtured a morbid fascination with Meinhof and her gang. What really captured the world’s attention was that both Baader and Meinhoff had come from comfortable backgrounds with excellent educations - that these privileged youths could have allowed their Marxist beliefs to mutate into revolutionary terrorism was morbidly fascinating, and particularly so to Gerhard Richter.

Richter created an Atlas of 100 pictures that he assembled as part of his research in the run up to this exhibition. Their blurred quality negates a photograph’s conventional function as a piece of information. It is Richter’s reaction to the generic form in which these same images would have been printed in the countless papers that published the story. The blur is one of Richter’s trademarks, if you like, and he also incorporates it into his paintings.

These three are simply titled ‘dead’. For me, this generic label highlights how although Richter’s exhibition focusses on the traumas of a single date, the questions and themes it evokes are universal.

Death is universal, so is terrorism. Neither of them are even particularly unusual - we protected Westerners can become desensitised to such horror by the sheer quantity of images that depicts it.

Through partially smudging their facial features, Richter depicts these infamous characters in such a way that the viewer can engage with them on a more personal level simply because their mistiness allows us to realise their similarity to ourselves.

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It is in this dark, politically controversial context that a gallery-goer approaches our abstract triptych.

This is ‘January’ [pictured]. There is a pervading atmosphere of grief and relief being emanated from this painting, through my eyes. The smears of milky grey and white that seem to cascade downwards like a waterfall in the foreground connote rain, tears and glinting light. It possesses gravity. Solemnity. These three paintings become completely altered when abandoned by their context. And this is a point on which I am fixated; how a painting that rejects any literal subject has a limitless flexibility; its meaning is in the eye of the beholder.

Take Wasilly Kandinsky for example, a Russianborn artist working during the turn of the 19th century. He had synaesthesia, meaning that his brain was fine-tuned from birth to make very specific connections between and across the senses. A sound conjures an image, or vice versa. For example, Kandinsky always associated the colour yellow with a middle C played on the trumpet. I reference Kandinsky here only because I personally detect parallels in the synaesthetic qualities of his work and in Richter’s. Both artists experiment with the boundaries of how subjective a painting can be to the point at which its meaning is obtuse; every viewer is free to make their own interpretation. For Kandinsky, these sensory connections were as defined as the alphabet, but I think that we all to some extent respond to our own innate visual and sensual comparisons that we have collected in our life time. These are the links we unconsciously make when confronted by such complex abstraction in order to derive meaning.

I regard Richter’s sensitive use of tone and texture in abstraction as an essentially pure art form playing with the idea of subjectivity. There is something incredibly organic about his creative process. Every one of his decisions is subjective to him; he responds only to his own innate sense of composition.

Corinna Belz, a German documentary film maker, spent three years recording Gerhard Richter’s

painting process. See the meditative approach he takes to his abstracts and how the squeegee blindly creates the compelling shapes in the paint scraped away [pictured]. There is no subject. The painting is called simply ‘abstract painting’, unlike the work of cubists such as Picasso or Braque who influenced how their paintings are perceived and interpreted by naming their paintings after their subjects.

To be unable to define is to finally yield to the painting as a painting and nothing else, to realise that not everything is defined, that there is beauty in the unknowable. It is their lack of premeditated order that makes them come alive and Richter describes how ‘by not planning the outcome, [he] hopes to achieve the same coherence and objectivity that a random slice of nature always possesses.’ This abstract triptych and the ‘October’ series share a refusal of absolute knowledge - the dull blurs obscure from our sight any definable element.

Richter embraces this realm of the unknown images that deny any rational considerations.

Through crucially lacking any planned meaning these paintings become universally and infinitely meaningful. The spontaneity of his abstract paintings allows Richter (in his own words) to get to something ‘which is better and wiser than I am, and which is also more universal.’

These paintings mark a complete revolution in

the art of oil painting. If one recalls the work of the old masters, who used the depth and richness of oil paint to perfectly and accurately depict scenes of wealth and ownership, it seems that Richter’s methods could not be more different. In Ways of Seeing, John Berger explores the idea that all those dated oil paintings were to showcase the owner’s and the painter’s belongings - landscapes, women, rich food, paintings within the painting - all tangible, own-able objects. There is nothing in Richter’s triptych that can be owned. We can share, however, the terrifying sadness that rips through the canvas.

In this way, we attempt to own these abstracts by defining them.

My conclusion is that these paintings defy conclusions. Following 18 October 1977, the triptych has a dark historical context. Having just seen the gloomy photo-paintings of the dead terrorists, the gallery-viewer is already in a fragile state, a gloomy state of mind. Onto these canvases (that are effectively as devoid of definitive meaning as Richter’s grey paintings) we project our gloomy emotions on to the streaked and blurred canvas. Whatever it is we feel, the painting allows the viewer to pour ourselves into it - it acts like a vessel just as it acts the part of a mirror. So the conclusion, whatever it may be, is subtly different for everyone. They represent mourning on a global and intimate level.”

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Artwork by Bronwen Rose Anwyl

Exploring the Possibilities of Human Imagination Chris Belous “The mind of man is capable of anything.” (Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness)

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he imaginative use of language has always been instrumental in controlling the world around us, from the courtroom rhetoric of Cicero for persuasion to the methods of modern advertising for financial gain. This is equally clear in the world of fiction, such as in the late-eighteenth century works of Coleridge, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), and The Wasp Factory (1984) by Iain Banks. All three focus on the possibilities of the imagination for gaining and losing control of the internal and external worlds within the works, as well of the audience outside those worlds. However, there is no consensus on which the imagination is more effective for, or even if it can be effective for such ends at all.

Though Coleridge has some interest in controlling his internal world due to domestic events, his poetry ultimately displays a loss of control, and even revelry in a lack of control. In This Lime Tree Bower My Prison, for example, the speaker’s imaginative flight (which can be read as Coleridge’s, as the Conversation poems were intended as deeply personal ruminations in form) illustrates how an imaginative re-interpretation of a situation can be used to control emotions. A typical Conversation poem, Lime Tree deals in conflictresolution; Coleridge employs a rondo structure set-up, meditation, conclusion - to reconcile himself with reality by trying to change his attitude (here, misery at being housebound due to injury, signified by the resigned opening interjection “Well”). As the

conflict in Lime Tree is of feeling trapped, Coleridge’s implicit aim is to cope with this, which he manages effectively. A jarring, irregular use of blank verse signifies his “sudden” change in mood: line 43 has only four iambs, line 44 completing the pentameter with the anapaestic, jovial “a delight”.

What enables this change is Coleridge’s imaginative journey; his past observations (in his terms, the “Primary Imagination”) of the nature surrounding his Southey home are transferred into comforting poetry (the imagery is the same, but its “mode of operation” has been changed using the “Secondary Imagination”). Thus, he can experience the “roaring dell” as vividly as if he were really there, as emphasised by the repetition of this phrase.

Coleridge’s demonstration of control over his internal emotions shows the imagination’s potential as a coping mechanism.

Nevertheless, Coleridge excels more in losing control, using mind-altering substances to change his internal perceptions. Kubla Khan, written after an opium-induced dream, is arguably an example of Coleridge losing his inhibitions to explore the imagination at its freest. The inconsistent structure, with rhyme schemes varying from ABAAB to ABBA, demonstrates this, and the poem’s fragmented nature - whether caused by the interruption of a man from Porlock or employed deliberately - exemplifies a Romantic belief in the burst of creativity being the best form of the poetic process. Here, as is typical of Coleridge, the imagination is represented by fountains - the imagery of a “mighty fountain” “momently forced” thus reflects the violent burst of creativity which created the poem. Coleridge praises AD ASTRA - Issue 2

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Artwork by Kitty Glavin

the imagination’s power, revelling in the sublime experience - though the fountain causes rocks to be “vaulted like rebounding hail” in a simile suggesting danger, these rocks also “danc[e]”, a more positive personification.

The imagination’s rooting in a natural metaphor exemplifies Coleridge’s One Life philosophy, a unity between disparate parts of reality as perceived by the creative mind. Arguably, the internal world is Coleridge’s refuge; responding to an era when Romantic poets viewed creativity by as stunted by the order and urbanisation of industrialisation, Coleridge escapes this both literally and metaphorically through nature and natural creativity, thereby highlighting the possibilities of the human imagination for escapism, if not for control itself.

Coleridge is united with the characters of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by a desire to control the internal world through the imagination, although George and Martha face different pressures: insecurity caused by childlessness in 1950s America, an era defined by the American Dream, which amongst other things idolised the traditional family.

The couple’s childlessness is a central focus in the internal world of their marriage.

NICK [to GEORGE; quietly]: You couldn’t have... any?

GEORGE: We couldn’t.

MARTHA [a hint of communion in this]: We couldn’t.

Their identical responses to Nick’s question and repetition of the first person plural pronoun emphasise their unity, and the religious reference to “communion” hints that they have lived their lives by a belief system. Here this manifests as an explicit acceptance of childlessness, whereas before the belief was in their imagined son, the implicit “communion” shown in the very fact of their marriage. This implies they are able to gain control in the way that many do, using religion to make sense out of chaos.

Moreover, from a secular perspective, if the

American Dream of perfect family life is a purpose they cannot fulfil, they instead create a purpose of their own, thus alleviating an existential crisis.

However, this proves short-lived - they lose control of their internal world once Nick and Honey know their secret, with George “wheeling” on discovering that Martha let slip “as if struck from behind”; the physicality of his response reflects a loss of internal balance, showing the imagination’s limitations in maintaining internal control once something is made public. Unlike Coleridge, the characters of Who’s Afraid... fail because their imaginations are unequipped to deal with the scale of their dilemmas - the former, accepting the imagination’s constraints, tries mainly to control his own attitudes, while the latter try to control rather than accept their own natures in the face of a society insistent on conformity to traditional values.

In The Wasp Factory, the protagonist’s internal conflict arises from a desire not to control his nature, as in Who’s Afraid..., but to gain control by creating a stable sense of self. Since Frank has no official identity, alongside being insecure in his gender due to his alleged castration, he instead tries to gain control through self-discipline. Frank’s methods range from an obsessive-compulsive morning routine (he cites it hyperbolically as a “ritual”, suggesting discipline and rhythmic certainty, meaning this daily event is a symbolic comfort) to the careful justifications of his murders (he kills Paul for “fundamental reasons”, implying internal logic) He is living in a subjectivist internal reality where his own perceptions seem unquestionable because of his role as first-person narrator, an arrogance exemplified by the first word of the novel being the first person pronoun “I”.

This, however, doesn’t prevent the unpredictable, such as the fight with the buck. Caught off guard, he can only act “at the instinctive level”, implying a loss of self-control because the animalistic id has taken over. This both destabilises his sense of selfcontrol, and from a structuralist perspective is AD ASTRA - Issue 2

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Artwork by Flora Grant

emasculating; if masculinity is associated with prowess in combat, then because Frank lacks this, he becomes associated with the binary opposite: femininity. His paranoia about not being masculine enough, wryly labelling himself as an “honorary man” (showing he must use humour to cope with physical disability), proves justified upon the discovery that he is actually female.

A central part of his identity proves false, causing him great confusion, as implied by the rhetorical questions about his murders - in questioning something that has previously been vital to his stability, asking “Why?” and “How [he could] have done those things?”, and using a distancing demonstrative determiner to express a disassociation with his previous identity, it seems his internal world has been shattered. Again, the imagination cannot fully enable control of one’s internal reality; Frank. like George and Martha in Who’s Afraid..., succeeds only in the short term.

While in these two texts, characters fail due to the huge scale of their predicaments, Coleridge succeeds in controlling his internal reality because he aims to alleviate smaller, shorter-term problems (for instance, as in Lime Tree, a small injury), recognising and accepting the imagination’s limitations. Coleridge recognises the limitations of his imagination for controlling his external world, particularly regarding interpersonal relationships. In Frost at Midnight, another personal Conversation poem, he expresses a desire for his son to live the Rousseau-esque life of the noble savage which he himself never could.

But thou, my babe! Shalt wander, like a breeze, By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds, Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear Of that eternal language, which thy God Utters, who from eternity doth teach Himself in all, and all things in himself.

Great universal Teacher! He shall mould

Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask. (lines 59-69) The indicative verb “shalt” denotes certainty; Coleridge has no doubt that his son will “wander” freely through nature, the simile “like a breeze” suggesting both the noble savage’s uncorrupted gentleness and the ability to move unrestricted.

Coleridge also alludes to Neoplatonic ideas of unity with God through nature with the balancing chiasmus of “himself... all... all... himself ” in line 67; the poet goes so far as to dictate that God will “mould [his] spirit”, the verb “mould” implying the child is malleable and will be easily influenced by nature and God. Coleridge accepts that, while he could not control his own upbringing, which he would have preferred to have been outside the influence of the city (which he views negatively, being “pent mid cloisters dim”, “pent” highlighting a sense of imprisonment which opposes his preference for the liberty of the noble savage), as a parent he is better equipped to give his son this experience, perhaps even desiring to live vicariously through him. Though unable to control nature itself, Coleridge can imagine control over his child’s response to nature, focusing on the possibilities of the imagination to control only that which he recognises is within his reach in the external world, as with the internal world before.

Unlike Coleridge, the characters of Who’s Afraid... are desperate to control through the imagination an external world which is ultimately out of their hands - the setting is a microcosm of the Cold War-related paranoia and changes to traditional societal attitudes characterising the “long 1950s”. Consequently, characters try to uphold a societal façade. George and Nick wage a linguistic Cold War throughout, mirroring the wider contemporary atmosphere of false peace and diplomacy occasionally broken by events like the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis; their very names hint at this, as they could be inspired by George Washington and Nikita Kruschchev.

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in a conversation about declension, where George uses his imagination to invent “bested” alongside the usual “good, better, best”; frustrated that Nick “doesn’t answer [his] question”, he finds he has lost control. His question, “How do you like that for a declension, young man?”, and use of a patronising epithet imply that he is seeking adulation for being older, a typical part of a social dynamic which had begun to crumble with the 1950s teenage rebellion.

Nevertheless, he instead feels threatened, the imperative “Don’t you condescend to me!” expressing a futile desire to hold onto a superiority which he, in making this command, subconsciously admits he has lost. In spite of best attempts, the imagination fails to help control the external world in Who’s Afraid..., as tradition seems destined to become destabilised; Albee implicitly recognises, like Coleridge, that the imagination can only go so far in keeping the external world in check.

Frank, focusing (in contrast to Who’s Afraid...) less on society and more on nature, is keenest to control the external world of The Wasp Factory through the imagination, his relish of physical destruction reflecting a Gothic fascination with immorality and power. His destruction of the natural world is a form of power play, taking childhood games to a harmful level; this is perhaps a comment on the conflicts that defined the 1980s, particularly the 1983 Falklands War, characterised by news footage of island conflict shot from a distance so as to make those in combat appear animalistic, fighting in flocks or swarms, which may have influenced the imagery of island warfare present in Banks’ novel. Frank is established as having a God complex when he builds then bursts a dam, using “little shells to represent the people”, which then “all [sink], meaning everybody died”.

Active in every stage of the process, he lives out a fantasy where he is master of all he surveys and able to influence the external world however he pleases, as shown by the active participles “bursting”, “letting”, “planning” and “building”. Moreover, the candid way Frank narrates the pretend-deaths of a 44

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pretend-village, selfishly calling the process “satisfying” (which here carries a sadistic implication), gives him the air of an immoral, unempathetic psychopath, corresponding to Botting’s idea that “Gothic fictions seemed to promote vice and violence, giving free reign to selfish ambitions”.

Frank’s imaginative power thus lets him dominate the natural world as he sees fit, though his arrogance gets the better of him on occasion, as with the buck.

Predicting “the existence of such a brute” - this hyperbole illustrating how shaken Frank is - seems to have been beyond his imagination, his admission that he’d “left the rabbits alone for too long, or [he’d] have known about [the buck’s] existence” betraying a loss of power due to being out of touch with the realities of the external world. “[E]xistence” belies a subjectivist world-view, but one that has failed Frank - believing his own perception of the rabbits is all he needs to control them has cost him this very control. In The Wasp Factory, therefore, the imagination is effective for gaining control of the external world so long as one does not lose touch with reality completely; much like Coleridge and Albee, Banks shows that controlling the external world is not fully within the imagination’s reach.

Unlike the other writers, who concentrate on external and internal control within the worlds of the texts, Coleridge concentrates more on controlling his audience through the imagination by challenging established symbolism. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which Coleridge called “a work of [...] pure imagination”, sees established symbolism subverted. Sometimes this symbolism is political, as with the “storm-blast”, “commonly used in the 1790s to describe the French Revolution and the violence of the people”, which Coleridge “reverses”, instead “blaming government for war and destruction”, emphasised by the storm being “tyrannous”, connoting despotism. Elsewhere this symbolism is literary, as with the sun and moon, which, though normally signalling positive and negative atmospheres respectively, are also reversed;

as Robert Penn Warren argues, “in [Rime] the good events take place under the aegis of the moon, the bad events under that of the sun”; this reversal is exemplified by the Albatross, originally seen positively as a “Christian soul”, which Coleridge first associates with a semantic field of darkness and moonlight - “fog”, “mist”, “vespers”, “white moonshine” - but which, once shot, a negative memory which “plague[s]” the Mariner, heralds the sunrise.

Coleridge also subverts established literary symbolism in The Nightingale, openly protesting its “melancholy” association.

And hark! The Nightingale begins its song, “Most musical, most melancholy” Bird!

A melancholy Bird? O idle thought!

In nature there is nothing melancholy. (lines 12-15) After quoting Milton, a staple of the literary canon, from Il Penseroso, Coleridge criticises him, expressing here through the word “idle” and later with “many a poet echoes the conceit” that calling a nightingale “melancholy” is lazy art. A new symbolism permeates the poem through a semantic field of pleasure which is both innocent, the nightingale being “merry” and “Sweet”, and sexual, its “wanton” song “like tipsy Joy” becoming Bacchanalian. Thus, for Coleridge, the imagination’s greatest power is that it can make the audience appreciate the world in a different light. Although it is uncertain that Coleridge truly controls his audience’s imagination (indeed, as with the case of Mrs Barbauld complaining about Rime, he sometimes achieved the opposite), this is a distinct focus of his, and the fact his poems remain widely read two centuries later shows that he has made more impact on readers than not.

Albee’s Who’s Afraid... is less a vehicle for raising appreciation of the imagination’s power, but more for educating the audience, using the imagination to shock, control audience reaction, and comment on delusion. Albee, in the New York Times, stated that it is “not a funny play”, and though there is some

risible dialogue, for the most part, it is not - indeed, it was met with offence, being denied the Tony Award it should have won in 1963 on grounds of obscenity. Albee’s implied aim is to satirise American culture’s false illusions - according to Matthew Roudané, though Albee did not consciously write the play with Virginia Woolf and her exploration of “the gulf between the ideal and the real” in mind, that Albee chose the title after seeing the question scrawled on a bathroom mirror gives the play a clear focus on the fear of reality. As Albee has stated: “And of course, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf means who’s afraid of the big bad wolf... who’s afraid of living life without false illusions.”

If Albee aimed to expose a cultural fear en masse through the imagination, he succeeded, as proven by the backlash triggered by the play’s première. The play’s ending, containing monosyllabic dialogue (Martha and George utter no more than a “Yes” or “No” at points) harshly juxtaposed with the earlier elaborate dialogue, suggests that the imagination ultimately has no place in reality. Albee comments on the imagination’s power using the imagination itself, presenting its possibility for social commentary and controlling an audience response which, though negative, is desired nonetheless.

Iain Banks, like Albee, seeks to control the audience through shock, though rather than confronting us with a shocking scenario, he subverts typical audience response itself, acting as Coleridge does to change established opinion. We find ourselves relating to someone who treats death as a joke. Dark humour is employed to make Frank appear admirable and charming, as with the anecdote about the ironic death of a racist uncle who is killed by a black person - the bathetic juxtaposition of his ridiculous, prosaic last words, “My God, the buggers’ve learned to fly...” with the poetic, imaginative wordplay of “before his coma became a full stop” serves as a punchline to a joke we cannot help but laugh at, even if we are uncomfortable about doing so. As such, Banks AD ASTRA - Issue 2

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exploits the possibility of the imagination to enable the writer to gain control of audience response.

As Banks gains control, the audience loses control, in that we also find ourselves empathising with Frank, relating to him because he can convince us he is sane compared to his brother. Frank’s thought process leads the audience to seeing Eric as stereotypically insane - he is bluntly called a “loony”, and compared to Frank’s “catapault[ing]” of “gerbils, white mice, and hamsters” to get the skull of Old Saul, which he rationalises using phrases connoting discourse and sense such as “all things considered”, Eric’s burning of dogs without apparent purpose is dismissed as “just nonsense”. As Frank’s purposeful destruction is juxtaposed with Eric’s senseless destruction, the reader can relate more easily to the former. By portraying immoral activity positively, Banks, in a mode akin to Gothic literature, exposes the darker sides of readers’ minds, allowing them to confound their expectations of their responses to immoral characters like Frank and even lose control of their typical responses.

Therefore, Banks uses the imagination to free the audience of imaginative boundaries as much as to control the audience’s imagination.

Though the possibilities of the human imagination for gaining control are broad and varied between Coleridge’s poetry, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and The Wasp Factory, these works show that such attempts at control are by no means always successful; if anything, it is those who accept a loss of control who are most effective. Coleridge is most accepting of a chaotic world that is beyond his control, reflecting a Romantic protest against the stifling orderliness caused by industrialisation, and perhaps a yearning for political change in Britain as had occurred in eighteenth century France. In Albee’s and Banks’ works, conversely, characters seek control

in a world where, reflecting the chaos of the warblighted twentieth century, there is too little order; historically, social boundaries and notions of identity were blurring, and gender and family ideals were becoming harder to achieve. However, these sociopolitical issues prove larger than they are, so the imagination ultimately fails to provide the possibility of control in the long-term; though in the shortterm, escapism and self-delusion somewhat empower the protagonists of the twentieth century works, the characters must nevertheless face a reality which has more control over them.

Bibliography Albee, E, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Vintage, 2001 Banks, I, The Wasp Factory, Abacus, 1997 Botting, F, Gothic, Routledge, 1996 Bottoms, S.J, Albee: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Cambridge University Press, 2000 Bottoms, S et al, The Cambridge Companion to Edward Albee, Cambridge University Press, 2005 Halmi, N et al, A Norton Critical Edition: Coleridge’s Poetry & Prose, W.W. Norton & Company, 2004 Flanagan, W, The Art of Theatre No. 4: Edward Albee, The Paris Review, 1966, Fall, Number 39 Spencer Hill, J, Imagination in Coleridge, http://www.english.uga.edu/~nhilton/232/stc/im33-f.htm, viewed on 14th February 2013

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A Ladder To The Moon?

Jess Allen-Hyttinen, Maisie King and Kamil Kurdiziel

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n today’s world, going on holiday to the moon is still the stuff of dreams and imagination, having only ever been seen on TV and in films.

The big question, however, the one that people really want to know, is whether this could one day be a reality. Could the moon one day be a genuine holiday destination, through the creation of a cheap commercial route to get there? In an attempt to answer this question, our team of three sixth formers investigated the theoretical possibility of building a direct ‘ladder to the moon’ and what materials might be used to do so.

Building a ladder to the moon seems simple in theory. All you need is a ladder that is 384,403km (238,857 miles) tall and able to withstand the pressures and temperatures of the upper atmosphere and space. When you look at this challenge in more detail, however, you soon realise that there are a huge number of factors to consider, including the orbit of the moon and the earth, the rotation of the earth on its axis and all the forces, such as gravity, such a ladder would have to withstand.

Our first idea was to literally build a direct ladder to the moon, using carbon nanotubes. Carbon nanotubes are immensely strong compounds, made purely of carbon arranged in a cylindrical structure.

Their unique strength comes from the special type of bond present between each individual atom (a result of orbital hybridization for you keen chemists who want to know more), and is stronger than any other known material, even diamond.

Both single-walled nanotubes (one atom thin) and multi-walled nanotubes (consisting of multiple rolled

layers, or concentric tubes, each one atom thin) are possible, each providing the overall compound with varying properties. Multi-walled carbon nanotubes, where one tube is placed inside another, another inside that, and so on, are extraordinarily strong. In 2000 a multi-walled carbon nanotube was tested and found to have the ability to endure a weight of 6422kg (14158 lbs) on a cable with a cross section of 1mm2. That roughly equates to a large elephant hanging from a few human hairs!

The slight complication with the permanent ladder idea is the fact that the moon orbits the Earth, and the Earth rotates on its axis, meaning our ladder would need to accommodate these factors.

Interestingly, we only ever see one side of the moon, because the rotational period of the moon is identical to its orbital period, so we could have a permanently fixed point on that one side. The bigger issue however is the rotation of the Earth on its axis. If the ladder was fixed on Earth and the moon, as the Earth spins on its axis, the ladder would wrap around it like a ball of string (assuming it was this flexible; if it wasn’t, it would break).

To have a ladder permanently fixed on the earth and on the moon would require a raised track over 40,000km long around the earth’s equator on which the ladder’s base would have to travel at 1670 kilometres/hour (That’s about 15 times faster than the legal speed limit on a British motorway!). This would ensure that when the Earth rotates, the ladder would remain straight, with the base moving along the equator track in the opposite direction to the rotation.

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a track all around the equator - it would be costly, and a few countries might object to having their towns and cities demolished. Furthermore, the moon is actually moving away from the earth (albeit by a tiny distance per year - less than a centimetre), so the ladder would have to be extended regularly to ensure it stayed fixed at both ends.

As our initial idea does not seem viable, a different approach would need to be taken.

Some scientists have considered the idea of a ‘space elevator’ which is simply one long carbon nanotube extending into space. However, engineers are faced with many problems when attempting to design a cable for the space elevator. The main force that has to be considered is the weight of the ladder itself due to gravity, as the cable would be incredibly long; the material would have to be able to withstand its own weight, which would be significant.

The downward gravitational force would be at its highest on Earth. At some point in space, the weight would be opposed by the centrifugal force (a force that draws a rotating object away from the centre of rotation) pulling a counterweight outwards. At some stage the two forces would be even; above this point, weight due to gravity is no longer an issue.

This is much like a game of swingball, with a ball attached by a string to an upright pole. In ‘flight’, the ball pulls away from the pole, stretching the string taut. This is pretty much what would happen with a space elevator; think of the ball as a counterweight, the string as a carbon nanotube, and the pole as Earth.

So there we have it: all we need to do is to build a ‘space elevator’ and we can make the moon a realistic destination for our next summer holiday…

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Artwork by Antonia Blakeman

How Far is the EU Economically Advantageous to its Members?

Diana Beltekian

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he European Union was originally founded as a means of preventing another global war following World War II. Its focus on encouraging good political and economic relations with other European countries made it similar in intent to Coudenhove-Kalergi’s Pan-Europa in the years following WW1. However, as the threat of internal conflict has receded, advocates of closer union have increasingly emphasised the economic benefits of integration. Euro-sceptics, in contrast, have warned against the dangers of over-integration claiming it can have severe repercussions on economic performance. This essay addresses the question of whether membership of the EU is in fact economically advantageous to its members, using the examples of UK, Germany and Greece, all of which are part of the EU but have widely differing experiences and relations with the community.

As Germany’s economy is arguably one of the most closely integrated into the EU, being both a member of the eurozone and the wider community, it should, if EU advocates are correct, reap relatively high economic rewards. It is in fact one of the most prosperous economies in the community. As a founding member of the EU in 1952 Germany took on the responsibility of ensuring the long-term success of European integration. It benefits from the single market, in part because of Germany specialising in manufacturing and exports making

up 50% of Germany’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). More than 60% of German exports are to the EU, highlighting the EU’s significance in sustaining the strength of their economy. Free movement of capital and goods allow Germany to open factories for its automobile industry in Eastern Europe, taking advantage of the cheap labour and higher productivity levels available. This lowers Germany’s costs, meaning it can sell goods more cheaply and increase its international competitiveness. Outsourcing has become a viable option through the borderless market, further lowering costs. German manufacturing is at the heart of the economy’s health; GDP grew by 3.6% in 2010, and 2.7% in 2011. Germany’s recovery from its 2009 recession was owed primarily to manufacturing orders and exports – increasingly outside the eurozone. Without a borderless market allowing its reduction in production costs, Germany’s global ranking would slip.

Germany’s labour market has benefited greatly; among the larger rich countries in the West, only Germany can boast a jobless rate lower than before the 2008 global economic crisis. In 2003, German labour market reforms (strengthening employment protection legislation) established a positive relationship between the trade unions and Social Democratic government, laying the foundations for a more stable and flexible labour market. This was AD ASTRA - Issue 2

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facilitated by the Adonnino Report submitted to the European Council, formalised by the Single European Agreement (SEA) of 1987, a mutual recognition of professional qualifications. The report boosted the existing highly skilled labour force through welcoming foreign workers to address skills shortages in the short to medium term.

According to Eurostat, in 2007 Germany had the highest involvement of enterprises in innovation activities in Europe. Total expenditures on Research and Development totalled 2.5% of GDP, illustrating its significance. However it is unviable to import labour in the long-term. German investment in R&D requires domestic workers to ensure skills accumulation; otherwise the progress might be lost through the departure of highly skilled foreign workers. The Adonnino Report essentially increased German labour market flexibility allowing skilled labour to permeate the market, correcting skills shortages.

Much of Germany’s experience has been positive.

However its economic success has brought with it a high degree of responsibility towards other members as well as criticism. Germany is a big net contributor towards the EU budget; as Europe’s largest economy, it paid more than the 19 lowest paying member states combined toward the budget. Its budget expenses in 2007 were approximately 6.3 billion euros, 0.9% of gross national income. By 2011 this contribution had risen to 7.5 billion euros, suggesting that Germany’s input will continue to rise. One disadvantage Germany may face is its growing expenses due to its membership and strong position amongst other member states.

However, the small percentage of GDP it contributes suggests that it will not have a severe impact on the country’s fiscal position in the short to medium term.

Germany’s economic influence means that it plays a large part in the economic wellbeing of other countries. Consequently, there have been accusations that Germany is bullying other, smaller 54

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countries and causing them economic disadvantage.

A study by the IMF (2008) suggests that between 1998 and 2007 an increase in German GDP of 0.5 percent attributed to a 0.25 percent increase in eurozone economic growth. The extent of its impact grants Germany power over other nations. Recent criticism has centred on austerity measures imposed on Greece by Germany for its next tranche of bailout payments. Greek citizens are unhappy with the fiscal austerity (further cuts of 325 million Euros) as part of the package of cuts and reforms with ‘strong political assurances’ of its implementation by the Greek government. Critique, especially from well known figures such as President Obama and George Soros, has the potential to damage Germany’s political standing in the international community, which could have further impacts on its economic performance in the long run.

Conversely to Germany, Greece’s membership of the EU has been economically disadvantageous, neither the euro nor the community helping to banish economic costs. Greece joined the euro in 2001, relinquishing control over its monetary policy, which would have been useful in pulling the country out of recession. Eurozone design failures have slowed Greece’s recovery. First is the single monetary policy for 17 member states set by the European Central Bank (ECB). A central bank is a stabilising feature, designed to deal with debt and instability. The monetary mechanism at international level does not match all national economic cycles, exacerbating downturns in countries like Greece when stronger economies are growing. Second, national level stabilisers preventing recessions have not been transposed at monetary union level, leaving states defenceless in unfortunate economic circumstances.

Greece also highlights the dangers of monetary union centralising money while leaving macroeconomic policies at national level, resulting in idiosyncratic movements to deal with booms and busts. Divergences up to 2007/2008 include

Germany’s current account surplus prompting higher interest rates to combat inflation. In contrast, countries with current account deficits, like Greece, could benefit from lower interest rates to slow down the increase in their debt levels. Guy Verhofstadt (President of the European Council) expressed his support for this measure in the European Parliament, commenting ‘the Greek debt problem lies not in some superficial solidarity that may or may not be implemented but in favourable interest rates which will allow Greece to repay its debts at an affordable cost.’ The absence of a lender of last resort, a currency’s central bank, can have catastrophic effects on the economy, no longer guaranteeing bond holders there are sufficient financial reserves to buy them out. High interest rates make borrowing on commercial markets unfeasible for Greece, forcing it to rely on bailouts from the EU. Thus unitary interest rates have contributed to Greece’s poor economic performance suggesting reforms are needed in eurozone policy.

Greece also demonstrates how community membership can leave members vulnerable through economic overdependence. The EU aims to reduce the gap between richer and poorer countries to promote cohesion and encourage growth; however it failed Greece even before it joined the eurozone.

Strict criteria for membership included low national debt and budget deficitsbut Greece had been living beyond its means long before. Its budget deficit was covered up with government expenditure recorded as financial transactions. Claiming it was buying equities in Greek railway companies, the Greek government lost billions, which were invisible on the nation’s budget. Further, public sector wages rose 50% between 1999 and 2007- far faster than other EU countries. Government income was depleted by widespread tax evasion, worsening the budget deficit. In 2004, when Peter Doukas took over as budget minister, there was a 7% of GDP difference between the budget that had been prepared and the real balance sheet, which showed

an 8.3% budget deficit. The government wanted to present an optimistic picture of Greece’s economy, partly because of the Olympic Games taking place that year. Instead of working towards paying off its debt, Greece borrowed more in fear of strikes before the Games. This borrowing was unsustainable; budget deficits should not have been more than 3% of GDP, as agreed by the ‘Stability and Growth Pact’.

Members signed up to this pact allowing the EU to fine governments that breached this limit. However, after 1989 both France and Germany had a deficit higher than 3% of GDP; Germany’s reunification swallowed a sizeable amount of the country’s budget.

Both the latter and former exceeding the pre-agreed limit highlights the minimal pressure exercised by the EU to reduce countries’ deficits. Instead, the EC was pressured by members’ democratically elected governments, EC finance ministers voting against fining France and Germany as a result. Both prior to and after joining the euro, Greece has not been supported correctly by the EC and by extension the EU, worsening its economy.

Solutions proposed to correct eurozone design failures include restoring the EC’s credibility and readiness of member states to accept its authority as a politically independent enforcer of the Maastricht Treaty. However, unelected ministers forcing elected governments to implement policy would bring the EU’s democratic legitimacy into question. Lord John Kerr, British Ambassador to the EU, argued the EC should not be democratised; it should be the ‘unpopular policeman’ ensuring legislation is followed looking after the common interest.

The EU has been costly to Greece. Many of its woes were self inflicted prior to joining the eurozone; eurozone design failures have exacerbated Greece’s downturn, not catalysed it. Nevertheless, its inability to follow through with economic policy resulted in the mismanagement of Greece’s economy, to the detriment of its prosperity.

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experience higher economic growth than the latter.

It joined the EU in 1973, before the Single European Act was ratified in 1987 and created the largest market in the world. The SEA has historically at least, arguably been one of the greatest advantages for the UK. The single market relaxed controls allowing easier movement of goods and labour across borders. The UK, geographically isolated for the centre of Europe, gained access to 500 million consumers. This new exposure allowed £100 billion worth of exports in goods and services partially owed to the single market. The EU accounts for 48% of total UK goods and services exports (53.5% of UK goods, 39.7% of services). It remains the UK’s largest exporting partner in services, accounting for 39.7% of total UK exports. Thus, free movement has promoted economic growth in the UK. Gains include increased competition in the domestic economy as firms compete across the EU. This increases efficient allocation of resources resulting in higher productivity and cheaper, higher quality goods boosting the UK’s competitiveness in the global market. Moreover, foreign direct investment tends to the UK, to take advantage of the single market due to high investor confidence in its economic stability. Firms considering expanding to foreign countries are already productive, resulting in skills and knowledge transfers. In 2011, the UK received funds from Qatar for completing the Shard; Jaguar Land Rover and Mini have been revitalised by investments from India and Germany; while investors from China and the Middle East are among those building infrastructure the country needs for the future.

Foreign direct investment has improved the UK’s economy in both the short and the long run through aiding the completion of projects essential to economic prosperity.

Whilst the single market has undoubtedly been an asset to the UK in the past, however, its present and future benefits are questionable. Although the UK is not the most dependent on the EU export

market, it makes up a sizeable share at 53.5%. With over half of exports bought by the EU, the UK risks economic over-dependence. This can have repercussive effects in crises when exports fall as consumers tend to save more. As things stand, continuing focus on the EU market would be detrimental to the UK’s economy, given the current eurozone crisis. Weaknesses in the EU community could lead to economic contagion, with the collapse of the monetary union threatening the UK’s longterm growth prospects including employment levels, FDI potential and market confidence; an important component of demand.

Membership of the EU also poses the problem of over-regulation. Services are crucial for the UK’s economy, especially financial services. The UK has a 61% share of the EU’s net exports of international transactions in financial services. In the 1990s and 2000s the UK influenced regulation across Europe in accordance with its national interest, reducing barriers to entry and creating more opportunities for UK firms, thus boosting domestic businesses.

However the financial crisis of 2008 and eurozone crisis has seen the UK losing influence over EU financial regulation. EU voting rules underrepresent Britain relative to the size of its finance industry and stricter financial regulation law restricts policy input. Furthermore, new regulation in place to prevent future crises increases limitations on the financial sector, worsening the UK’s position relative to autonomous economies free of such legislation.

Lastly, the UK has been a net contributor as early as 2007, its budgetary payments exacerbated by the accession of less developed member states that are net beneficiaries. Costs faced include EU budget contributions, estimated to be £14 billion per annum. The Common Agricultural Policy is controversial, being a significant source of financial investment, 31% of the EU budget in 2010, yet targeting only a small minority of EU businesses.

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of French exports in 2010. In contrast, the UK does not reap as many of the benefits offered by the CAP, its own agricultural sector contributing 1.4% of GDP in 2010. Instead, according to the Civitas thinktank, ‘the policy costs Britain – in raised food prices, regulations and other indirect effects – an estimated near £10 billion a year.’ Therefore whilst agriculture in the UK is partially subsidised by the CAP, the costs outweigh the benefits primarily because agriculture is such a small part of the UK’s economy. Thus the UK’s membership brings with it increasing contribution costs from which it does not gain nearly enough remit to be beneficial and may suffer in the long-term as a result of this agreement.

The varied experiences of the Greece, Germany and the UK suggest that the economic impacts of the EU on its members depend on the strengths and weaknesses of individual national economies, what goods and services they specialise in and how far national interests are similar to the community’s interests. Germany has benefited greatly from EU membership due to its high level of influence over policy direction that enables it to direct them broadly in its favour. Similarly, the UK has gained a great deal through the single market and the further impact that has had on the economy, bringing FDI into the country to take advantage of free trade between member states. When membership has brought fewer benefits, and arguably even disadvantages, it can be attributed to the idiosyncratic movements of eurozone members to which EU policy and mechanisms have not been correctly tailored. Greece’s misfortunes existed before membership which, rather than alleviating them, served to worsen them.

Moulding of national economies by historical circumstances, size and culture means that a range of other variables must be accounted for. Therefore, the EU does offer economic advantages to members, but the extent to which this is so depends on the make-up of each economy. More generally, the EU and other communities are advantageous in so far

as members make it to be.

This is an extract from a much longer essay which goes on to set the experiences of the UK, Germany and Greece against the cases of Norway, China and Japan.

Bibliography Alexander, H. (2012) ‘Is Norway’s example really an option for Britain?’, Telegraph, 8th July. [Online] Available at: www.telegraph.co.uk/ news/worldnews/europe/norway/9383678/IsNorways-EU-example-really-an-option-for-Britain .html, viewed 20/12/2012 Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (2010) Greek Recovery is undermined by too high interest rates, Press Release. [Online]. Available at: www.alde.eu/press/press-and-release-news/pressrelease/article/greek-recovery-is-undermined-by-to o-high-interest-rates-22863/, viewed 14/03/2013 Anderson, R. (2012) ‘German economic strength: the secrets of success’, BBC News, 16th August.

[Online] Available at: www.bbc.co.uk/ news/business-18868704, viewed 20/12/2012 Asia for Educations (2009) Japan and the West: The Meiji Restoration (1868-1912), Columbia University. [Online] Available at: afe.easia. columbia.edu/main_pop/kpct/kp_meiji.htm, viewed 12/02/2013 BBC, (2012) ‘Athens clashes in Greece over Greece eurozone austerity deal’, BBC News, 10th February 2012. [Online] Available at: www.bbc.co.uk/ news/world-europe-16981783, viewed 23/12/2012 BBC, [no date] ‘EU Budget: Who pays what’, BBC News. [Online] Available at: news.bbc.co.uk/ 1/hi/world/europe/8036097.stm#start, viewed 23/12/2012 AD ASTRA - Issue 2

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Booth, S. and Howarth, C. (2012) Is EU membership still the best option for UK trade?

[Online] Available at: www.openeurope.org.uk/ Content/Documents/Pdfs/2012EUTrade.pdf, viewed 19/12/2012

Europa [no date] Employment, Social Affairs & Inclusion- Working Time Directive. [Online], Available at: ec.europa.eu/social/ main.jsp?catId=706&langId=en&intPageId=205, viewed 20/12/2012

Cabinet Office, Government of Japan, (2012) Monthly Economic Report, December 2012.

[Online] Available at: www5.cao.go.jp/keizai3/ getsurei-e/2012dec.html, viewed 31/12/2012

Europa [no date] Renewable Energy. [Online] Available at: ec.europa.eu/energy/ renewables/index_en.htm, viewed 23/12/2012

CIA (2013) The World Fact Book, Germany, Central Intelligence Agency Library. [Online] Available at: www.cia.gov/library/publications/theworld-factbook/geos/gm.html, viewed 20/12/2012 Civitas, [no date] Common Agricultural Policy.

[Online] Available at: www.civitas.org.uk/eufacts/ mFSPOL/AG3.htm, viewed 14/03/2013 Davis, E. (2012) The EU Debate: Britain should stay in the European Union, LSE and BBC Radio 4 public debate, chaired by Evan Davies, London School of Economics and Political Sciences, 27th July 2012 De Grauwe, P. (2012) The Eurozone’s Design Failures: can they be corrected? Podcast, 28th November. Available at: www2.lse.ac.uk/ publicEvents/events/2012/11/20121128t1830vO T.aspx, viewed 28/12/2012 Economist, The (2012) Idle Hands, May 12th.

[Online]. Available at: www.economist.com/node/ 21554572?zid=295&ah=0bca374e65f2354d5539 56ea65f756e0, viewed 20/12/2012 Economist, The (2012) Too Timid By Half, 1st December. [Online] Available at: www.economist.com/news/leaders/21567360rather-squabble-over-details-europes-leaders-shoul d-rethink-entire-eu-budget-too-timid, viewed on 23/12/2012

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Europa [no date] Treaty Establishing the European Coal and Steel Community: ECSC Treaty. [Online] Available at: europa.eu/legislation_ summaries/institutional_affairs/treaties/treaties_ec sc_en.htm, viewed 13/08/2012 Groom, B. (2012) ‘Foreign Investment in the UK up 7 per cent’, Financial Times, 6th July. [Online] Available at: www.ft.com/cms/s/0/525a7546c6b1-11e1-943a-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2FWqv uXDk viewed 19/12/2012 Hughes, K. (2012) Non-EU Norway ‘almost as integrated in union as UK’, BBC News, 17th January. [Online] Available at: www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-16594370, viewed 20/12/2012 IMF (2011) Japan: Lower Public Debt, Structural Reforms Critical, International Monetary Fund, 19th July. [Online] Available at: www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/survey/so/2011/CA R071911A.htm, viewed 29/12/2012 The Japan Research Institute (2012) Monthly Report of Prospects for Japan’s Economy, December.

[Online] Available at: www.jri.co.jp/ MediaLibrary/file/english/periodical/report/2012/ 12.pdf, viewed 31/12/2012 John, K. (2004) The Truth About Markets: why some nations are rich but most remain poor, Penguin, London Little, A. (2012), 1989: Reshaping Europe, BBC

Podcast, 10th March. Available at: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00p5qv6, viewed 4/11/2012 Little, A. (2012) Breaking the Pact, BBC Podcast, 17th March. Available at: www.bbc.co.uk/ programmes/ p00pcj81, viewed 4/11/2012 Martin, J. (2012) When China Rules the World, Penguin, London McCormick, J. (2011) Understanding the European Union: A Concise Introduction, Palgrave Macmillan, New York

PanEuropa, [no date] History. [Online] Available at: www.paneuropa.org/, viewed 18/11/2012 Rabinovitch, S. (2013) China forecast to overtake US by 2016, Financial Times, 22nd March.

[Online] Available at: www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ 0a3f5794-92b3-11e2-959300144feabdc0.html#axzz2PWVLdJed, viewed 04/04/2013 Wasserstrom, N. J (2010) China in the 21st Century What Everyone Needs to Know, Oxford University Press, New York

Momagri (2011) Agriculture is a key sector for the French Economy. [Online] Available at: www.momagri.org/UK/a-look-at-the-news/ Agriculture-is-a-key-sector-for-the-Frencheconomy_1012.html, viewed 14/03/2013

World Bank [no date] Export Generation: Germany. [Online] Available at: siteresources.worldbank.org/ECAEXT/Resources/ 258598-1284061150155/73836391323888814015/8319788-1324485944855/06_ germany.pdf, viewed 20/12/2012

OECD [no date] How Does Japan Compare, Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. [Online] Available at: www.oecd.org/japan/32562071.pdf, viewed 29/12/2012

World Bank [no date] Exports of goods and services as a percentage of GDP (2008-2012). [Online] Available at: data.worldbank.org/indicator/ NE.EXP.GNFS.ZS, viewed 20/12/2012

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Artwork by Sacha Marson

The 2012 Olympics: Was it Worth it?

Nellie Khossouri

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n the 6th July 2005, it was announced that London would be hosting the 30th Olympic Games in 2012. It took seven years to prepare for this event and although it was a massive success, the question remains, was it really worth the £9 billion that was spent? Was the opportunity cost far too high? Have the benefits of the Olympic Games outweighed the massive amounts of time and money spent? Have other parts of the United Kingdom benefited from the games as much as London?

To begin with, the Olympics was thought to have damaged trading and significantly decreased footfall in the West End as many people were avoiding central London and so were not visiting shops, restaurants, hotels or tourist attractions. Research group Experian said that the number of people visiting the shops on Friday 27th of July, which was the start of the Olympics, was 10.4% lower than a year previously. This might have been due to the fact that Transport for London were warning local people to avoid using public transport and visiting many parts of London during the Olympic period to try and cope with the large increase in demand for public transport and to avoid disruption and over-crowding. During the second week of the Olympics, London Underground tried to encourage people to visit attractions in London, while The New West End Company, which represents retailers in Bond Street, Oxford Street and Regent Street, launched a marketing campaign called ‘No Tickets Required’ to attract both local people and tourists to the area to encourage spending.

However, despite many people avoiding the West

End, the Olympics did increase retail footfall overall.

John Lewis’ sales figures which included the second week of the Olympic Games, showed sales of 15% above the same period in 2011. The biggest boost was to sportswear, which was up by 178% due to the Olympics, in large part because people were purchasing the Team GB kit. There was also a significant increase in footfall on August 5th 2012, which was the day after Britain won six gold medals.

This has been attributed to people getting into the Olympic spirit and enjoying the atmosphere in London, which encouraged consumers to increase their spending and thus boost the economy.

In addition, the suspension of the Sunday trading laws meant that shops in England and Wales with a floor area greater than 280 square metres were able to stay open until 10pm on Sundays. There were eight Sundays during the Olympic and Paralympic period during which shops in the West End were open later than usual. Despite this being opposed by the shop workers’ union Usdaw, which said that there was no evidence that it would boost the economy or the numbers of visitors, many shoppers took advantage of the later closing time.

The effects of the Olympics on retailers have also been seen in the longer term, as the ending of the Olympic Games saw another large boost in sales.

Many major brands opened new stores in central London both during and after the Olympic period.

Over the 100 day Olympic period there were fifty new retail and leisure openings across the West End, including an Alexander McQueen store and fashion designer Oscar de la Renta’s first UK store. Fashion chains Victoria’s Secret and luxury brand Burberry AD ASTRA - Issue 2

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have also recently opened flagship stores on Bond Street and Regent Street.

London has seen major benefits from the Olympic Games. However not all of the UK has experienced the same benefits. Despite the overall increase in footfall in London, across the United Kingdom as a whole footfall fell by 0.2%. This may have been due to numerous warnings about transport and many Britons staying indoors to watch the Olympics on television. John Lewis stores in the South East of England outside the West End reported a fall in sales. Brent Cross saw a decrease of 0.5% and Bluewater in Kent was down by 5.5%.

Weymouth also did not benefit greatly from the Olympic Games despite hosting the Olympic sailing events with Portland. Weymouth had predicted that there would be 60,000 visitors to the town each day.

Despite the main spectator area being sold out, the 15,000 capacity ‘live arena’ on the beach struggled to see more than 1,000 people at one time. The Olympics is seen to have damaged businesses in Weymouth as people stayed away from Olympic sites to avoid disruption.

The new GDP figures released on Thursday 25th of October 2012 showed that in the third quarter of 2012 the economy grew by 1%, bringing Britain out of recession. GDP was boosted by the Olympic Games, with the Office for National Statistics reporting that 0.2% of the growth had been caused by ticket sales. 2.7 million Paralympic tickets were sold, beating targets by 200,000 and predicted sales by £10 million. Economists had predicted an increase of 0.6% in GDP and so were pleased that the new figures had exceeded their predictions. The Olympic village created many jobs in an area of high unemployment, giving people more disposable income. Government spending also contributed a lot to the economic growth, creating thousands of new opportunities.

More than 1100 Olympics jobs were still being advertised just three days before the London Games begin. This gave many people the chance to still get 64

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involved even at the last minute. The latest employment statistics show that the number of people in work has increased by 236,000 to 29.6 million, which is the largest quarterly rise for two years. The number of part-time workers has also increased by 134,000 to 8.12 million which is the highest since records began in 1992. The Broadcast and Press Centres in Hackney, which cost £295 million, is thought to provide 3,500 jobs now that the Olympics has finished.

To make a more efficient connection between Olympic venues, the Emirates Airline was introduced for people travelling between the O2 Arena in Greenwich and the ExCel exhibition centre. The Emirates Air Line is a £60m cable car service which opened to the public on the 28th June 2012. Transport for London said the service had exceeded its target of carrying 1.3 million people in the first year. However, it is seen as more of a tourist attraction than a transport solution. In September 2012 it carried 229 people an hour, significantly less than its 2,500 capacity. The London 2012 Active Travel programme has invested over £10 million in making improvements to over 75 kilometers of walking and cycling routes leading to London 2012 venues both in and outside of London. This will have had many short and long term benefits, initially helping people travel to and from London after the games and subsequently encouraging people to walk and cycle more, making the United Kingdom more environmentally friendly.

Security was a very important part of the London 2012 Olympics as there had previously been security issues and threats at Olympic host countries. £553 million was spent on park security, and £475 million was spent on the police, the army and the security services. The largest private security firm in the world, G4S, underestimated the extent and importance of the Olympic security job. G4S finally revealed that it was going to be necessary to call in the military because of the massive task of crowd control and public safety. At the last minute, the

army was called in, which forced the government to turn 3,500 British soldiers into security guards. The tight security meant that some people felt uncomfortable with all the protection and made them felt that they were in a place that could have been targeted. Despite the initial problems, however, the huge scale of the security meant that thousands of people did feel safe at venues, which was essential, and made sure that there were no threats and London was well prepared for any possible attacks.

The Olympic venues will be re-used for future events, inspiring many generations. The Olympic Stadium which cost £430 million to build has been the subject of four bids and is now the national centre for athletics. It could be used for the World Championship Athletics in 2017. The Athletes Village will be used for apartments and transformed into 2,800 rental properties. The Arcelor Mittal Orbit, which cost £22.7 million and gives a spectacular view of London, will be opened to the public in spring 2014. The aquatics centre which costs £250 million will also be opened in 2014 and will host the 2016 European swimming championships. The multi-use arena (Copper Box)

will be transformed from handball events to being used for community sports, competitions and business events and re-opens in summer 2013.

On the whole, I think the £9 billion spent on the Olympic Games has been worthwhile as the evidence suggests that it has had a positive impact on the economy, helping the UK to start to recover from three consecutive quarters of negative growth.

The positive atmosphere of the Games has been incredible and provided a great summer for Great Britain. For the thousands of people that worked and volunteered for London 2012 it was a chance to share a moment of history and make the games happen. Many of the new venues created for the Games will be re-used for future events, meaning that the sporting legacy will continue for our city, encouraging more people to get involved with sports and volunteering. Despite many of the jobs provided being short term, there are also long term jobs provided from the new shops that have opened and when the Olympic venues are re-opened and used in the years to come. The improved transport links such as cycle and walking routes and the Emirates Air Line, which is now also seen as a tourist attraction, are also long term benefits.

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Artwork by Isabella Busoni-Conway

Intertextuality and Parody; A literary Skill or a Plagiaristic Sin? India Hill

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he aim of my Extended Qualification project was to produce a number of intertextual pieces that reflected what I had learnt throughout regarding the production of parody, the importance of intertextuality and what makes a piece of literature ‘great’. I initially challenged myself by aiming to produce six pieces, including poetry, prose and plays. My aim was to produce both obvious and subtle intertextual pieces that would make a broad audience question whether intertextualising the work of others should be considered a literary skill or akin to plagiarism. I realised from the very beginning of the project, having read Genette’s theories of transtextuality, that this process would be challenging, as intertextuality is a fluid concept that is already thoroughly debated, and therefore understanding it fully myself was going to be difficult.

My initial inspiration for the production was a tutorial with Professor James Macbain at Magdalen College, Oxford. I began with an initial comparison between Thomas Watson’s sonnet and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130. Having thought, prior to this, that Shakespeare’s sonnets were plainly about love, I was provoked to question this view. I began to consider how ideas and concepts are passed down through generations in literature, music and art. Genette’s theories began to clarify the literary aspect of this and Eliot’s essay Tradition and Individual Talent furthered the idea that perhaps originality is no longer a possibility. When considering the argument for my project and indeed what I wanted to

produce, I looked towards what I myself wanted to discover through the research that was to come. I thus decided that I wanted to explore whether or not intertextuality and parody in particular is respected as a literary skill, or whether it is seen to undermine greater pieces of art.

As for my product, I wanted the opportunity to utilize the skills of parody that I acquired through my research to produce my own intertextual pieces.

One of the most useful sources I studies was Gross’s The Oxford Book of Parodies, as it contained a range of intertextual pieces written throughout history and this book gave me reserve of sources to analyse.

For each piece that I produced, I had a number of sources that guided my writing; for example when writing ‘Alice and the Lost Dream’ I looked at Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Isaac Watts’ Against Idleness and Mischief, Lewis Carroll’s How Doth the Little Crocodile, Walt Disney’s 1951 film, William Sterling’s 1972 film and the recent 2010 film directed by Tim Burton.

For the most part it was only in hindsight that I realised how much work went into the production of each text, and it was in reflecting on my research that I could form a strong argument in favour for parody being a literary skill. The sources that proved most useful to me were articles from The English Review on the topics of Intertextuality, Parody and Intention. I gleaned from these that parody can be broken into ‘pastiche’, ‘burlesques’ and ‘mockpoems’ and therefore, parody is a multifaceted AD ASTRA - Issue 2

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device as it can have many different effects. One of the main arguments that the article presented to counter my project argument was that parody can be damaging to the integrity of the original piece.

The articles from the review are incredibly comprehensive and detailed and they were therefore vital to the development of my project.

My journey through the Extended Project has guided me towards literature that I might otherwise have never encountered, such as Ralph Marcellino’s article in The Classical Journal from 1953. This resource was not only incredibly useful for understanding Housman’s motives for creating Fragment of a Greek Tragedy but it also identifies the core features of Greek plays and the issues with translating the original texts into modern English.

This piece of criticism added to my project massively as I was given insight into the complex network of motivation, innovation and information that goes into a piece of parody. In addition to this, Marcellino’s enthusiasm and appreciation for the piece was apparent in his writing, as he describes the piece as “clever” and “brilliant”.

As my investigation progressed, it became more and more apparent that the focus wasn’t, or rather couldn’t solely be, on intertextuality alone. I had to delve deeper, into the complexities of ‘intention’ and the concept of ‘death of the author’ as the pieces I studied couldn’t be judged without taking authorial intent into account as well. According to Barthe’s essay, Death of the Author, there is a conflict between the meaning of text alone and the meaning that it gains when understood within its context. This essay was very interesting when compared to the aims of my project as I began to truly understand who my stories were aimed at; someone who had never read Carroll’s original tale wouldn’t understand the transtextual relationship, therefore I had to make sure that my stories were of equal literary worth to people who didn’t have peripheral knowledge.

Throughout the project I have used a range of skills but particularly I have implemented my ability 68

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to collect, collate and utilise extensive research in order to reach informed conclusions. The level and depth of research that was required for the writing of each piece informed the conclusions of my project as I gained newfound respect for those willing to embark on a process of parody. I certainly relied on my creative skill as well as my ability to time-manage as I had to learn to motivate myself to work and produce high quality writing. I learnt how to evaluate and prioritise different sources which proved invaluable to my project, as due to my broad subject area I had many articles, essays and books to choose from; for example, rather than including every critical essay I read, I only included the ones that were directly relevant to my project. I also learnt how to make my natural inquisitiveness to the benefit of my project, such as I went to Colmar at Christmas and decided to include the Grunewald triptych into my research.

My criteria for success at the beginning of my project was to write six parodies which reflected that intertextuality and parody should be considered to be literary skills. To gauge the success, I had to record my own opinion but also the views of my supervisor, as well as engaging with a broad audience of readers.

My project set off to an ambitious start and taking into account the degree of extra commitments, revision and work I have balanced alongside my EPQ, I think that I produced high quality work that met the aims I originally set for myself, despite not entirely following the original plan. I produced three pieces of prose (Alice and the Lost Dream, Young Gatsby and The Horrible House Party) and two poems (Howling in the Night and Old Mrs. Hill) as well as acquiring many ‘works in progress’ and skeleton drafts of other possible parodies.

My success was also measurable by the feedback that I got from my readers. One reader said “I particularly enjoyed reading Young Gatbsy, as I felt that not only did the piece appreciate the romantic thinking of the young Jay Gatz, but it also employed similar ‘Fitzgerald-esque’ devices, such as his use of

synaesthesia. I would love to read on”. Another audience member commented, “I thought the modern fairy tale was very funny and would really speak to a young teen audience!” And finally, what really proved my success to me was a comment that I received regarding Howling in the Night, which was “Even though I have not read Howl by Allen Ginsberg, I think that your poem is still a very powerful literary piece.”

Not only do the parodies I produced demonstrate the development of my project argument, but my research process equally justifies the conclusions that I eventually drew from the investigation. Guided by the critical works of Barthes and Eliot and drawing upon the articles that I read in the English Review, I eventually concluded that intertextual works occur inevitably as every writer is influenced by what they have read and admired. Equally, parody in all its forms is a vital part of literature as it encompasses humour, analysis, politics, literary commentary and many other intrinsic elements of literature. Although I do appreciate that these pieces can be damaging to the integrity of the original piece, and I understand that if badly written, they don’t particularly merit any commendation, I fully appreciate the amount of research that goes into writing parody is enough to justify it as a literary skill.

One each of the short stories and poems are reproduced below, so that readers can see what they think.

Bibliography

(2003 edition) Penguin Eliot, T. S. (1919) Tradition and the Individual Talent in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1997 reprint edition) Faber Geronimi, C., Jackson, W., Luske, H. (1951) Alice in Wonderland (animated film) Walt Disney Animation Studios Gerrard, C. (1998) Parody: Critical Idiom, The English Review, Volume 5, Issue 4 Ginsberg, A. (1986) Howl and Other Poems (Reissue edition) City Lights Books Gross, J. (2012) Oxford Book of Parodies (Reprint edition) OUP Houseman, A.E. (1921) Fragment of a Greek Tragedy, http://www9.georgetown.edu/ faculty/jod/texts/housman.html Marcellino, R. A. E. (1953) Housman’s ‘Fragment of a Greek Tragedy’, The Classical Journal, Volume 48, Number 5 (Feb., 1953), pp. 171-178+188, Richards, B. (1995) Intention: Critical Idiom, The English Review, Volume 8, Issue 4 Scullion, V., Treby, M. (2012) Thinking about literature: Roald Dahl and intertextuality, The English Review, Volume 22, Issue 4 Shakespeare, W. (2008) Sonnets and Poems White’s Books

Allen, G. (2000) Intertextuality: New Critical Idiom, Routledge

Sterling, W. (1972) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (film) Joseph Shaftel Productions

Barthes, R. (1968) Death of the Author (translated

by Richard Howard), Aspen, 5+6 (Fall-Winter)

Watson, T. (1581) The Hekatompathia or Passionate Centrurie of Love, VII

Burton, T. (2010) Alice in Wonderland (film) Walt Disney Pictures

Watts, I. (1715) Against Idleness and Mischief, http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/ againstidleness-and-mischief

Carroll, L. (1865) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

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Howling in the Night I saw the best minds of my generation, naked and writhing and the worst, destroying the earth with madness and divine hysteria, preaching the end with black characters on card, dragging themselves, angry, towards oblivion, who gazed out of windows in tower blocks at night, who saw the sky a sea, filled with metal monsters, screaming and smoking, who plunged out into the night to stop the endless noise of machines, who awoke to the morning and to Heaven and monstrous angels towering, trembling, who sent them to the slaughter, human cattle, buses and taxis and cars and sweating bodies, who travel on trains, trains, train tracks rattling, racketing, rumbling, roaring, underground, over ground, amid the masses, hungry and crawling, who took pills by canals and jumped into the calm only to have their stomachs pumped to remove the demons, the foul fiends, who stubbed out cigarettes, to brand hollow flesh, to make them theirs, or His, who choked on spliffs on Primrose Hill and really saw the horizon, who read Marx in an hour and mused over romantic fraternity, who denied knowing and disappeared into the ether, who staggered, wasted, into the night, struggling against the human tide, who lingered alone on street corners at three in the morning, waiting for a lethal lightning strike, who screamed at the clouds and howled on their knees for proof, who jumped on the tube and willed the ceiling to collapse and for everyone to be crushed to a pulp of brains and bones and blood, who dreamt of chained incarceration and woke up free, who watched naked female warriors, sentencing 70

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Adam to an eternity in the hell fire, bare-breasted, men at home, hands in pants, drooling at the rainbow box, blaring, scaring, the megaphone of Cameron and his bawling bitches, who sat in anonymous rooms wanting to stab their eyes out with biros rather than be led blindly, who wept as they filled out endless forms, conformed, lived the social norm, who had four screaming changelings, stuffed in prams, strangled by bonnets, who scattered into clubs in search of love, to be satisfied in cubicles, who drank so much they couldn’t see, who faintly recalled throwing up in a friend’s friend’s biscuit tin and hiding it in a cupboard, who scribbled over walls in red lipstick to initiate rebellion, who painted over scribblings on walls and wound up in a suicidal drama on Blackfriars’s Bridge, who told their fathers to f-bloody off and never looked back, who looked at the sun until it burned their eyes into black bitter pits, who curled up, foetal, in cardboard boxes outside railway station, locking their jaws against the cold, who dressed for the occasion, baring a middle finger and a knuckle duster, who died alone in a cold flat among mouldering furniture and memories, who died and weren’t greeted by the winged seraphim but by the monster dark, who yielded to uncertainty and the tears, who dreamt of greatness atop the wall of Zion with a flaming sword of fire and redemption, who will never know and never try, who will save them?

Young Gatsby The evening was cool and crisp. With hot cheeks it was satisfying to brace the chilly breeze. On leaving the music and dancing and escaping to the balcony, he had swiped a flute of Champaign. He rested the glass on the stone balustrade, gazing at the bubbles forming fireworks within the amber liquid. Silver spot lights shone from stars suspended in the velvet sky, casting bold shadows across the cold granite.

The shadows bulged and shattered with each passing headlight. He half closed his eyes and through silken lashes the fluid light danced like sunshine at the bottom of a swimming pool.

He inhaled the night. The smell of the city, of streets soaked in water from laundrettes, of shaving cream and men’s cologne, of starched shirts and shoe polish, of Champaign and wood smoke and a whole web of intricately woven intrigue, adrift on the breeze. Each gust carried with it music, soft blue light, attracting dancers with illuminating beams.

He straightened up, one cold fist, clenched inside his jacket pocket, the other, gently rested on his chest, fingers exploring the round curvature of one of his jacket buttons. He stood silent as the carved figures at his flanks, watching his own breath escape into the air. He observed the twinkling sea of

revellers, tripping between bars. A sea of golden stars, reflecting the sky above. Lamps for reading, for drinking, for darning socks. Lamps on street corners. And all pulsing, waning and growing brighter, as though the very city has a heartbeat. The Champaign was tart and sour, cutting through the smooth air, making his fingertips tingle.

There was an explosion behind him as the door swung open. Wild jazz, creating triangles and twirls.

She had the same flush in her cheeks that he had had. Her bright blond curls had been disturbed by the vigorous lindy hops. She stepped towards him and stole a sip of Champaign. It was her legs that he looked at. Her lipstick marked the glass, a ghostly kiss. The outlines of her eyes were smudged. She was a graceful nymph, the shadow of childhood still present in her features. He loved that her stockings didn’t mask a graze and a poppy bruise; a relic from cycling too frantically down country lanes. He loved that her neck and wrists were pale and bare where other women would have worn pearls. Her lips hinted at a cautious smile. She too, gazed across the sea of shifting lights.

He stood uneasily. The city had stopped breathing. Could it sense the expectation? Was it listening? Did the world stop when two hands, rested on stone, touched?

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