MONOLITH IN A HOLLOW: PALEOFUTURISM AND EARTH ART IN STANLEY KUBRICK’S 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY

The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, No. 59 (2020), 36–78 ABSTRACT This article analyses 2001 in terms of what I term paleofuturism. Fusing deep future and deep past, this cyclical figure reconciles rational machinic intelligence with diverse repressed temporal layers: archaic cultures, the embryonic state of individuals, and bygone biological and geological eras. In 2001, paleofuturism is nourished by Nietzsche’s Übermensch of the future, reborn as a child, and by Jungian ideas of individuation, the reconciliation with the shadow of the collective unconscious that leads to the black cosmos itself. Further paleofuturist contexts for 2001 are explored in the so-called “ancient astronaut thesis” of science fiction, speculative science, and pseudo-science. Finally, in minimalism and earth art of the late 1960s we meet a structural parallel to 2001’s bypassing of the organic human body, one that bridges the inorganic entropic realities of deep future and deep past.

match cut implies that, indeed, there are skeletons in the closet of evolutionary progress. 1 In the September 1968 issue of Artforum, published just five months after the premiere of Kubrick's evolutionary fable, and seemingly without influence from it, the artist Robert Smithson was on a related track when he unfolded the ideas behind the brand-new trend of "Earth Projects" (what were later to become "earthworks," "land art," or, as I prefer to call it here, "earth art"). In a striking parallel to 2001's juxtaposition of deep past and future artefacts, Smithson remarked, "Even the most advanced tools and machines are made of the raw matter of the earth. Today's highly refined technological tools are not much different in this respect from those of the caveman." 2 But whereas Kubrick's match cut is symptomatic of a highly ambivalent attitude to mankind's prospects that re-expose the past in the future, one hovering between technological optimism and ethical pessimism, Smithson excludes ethical anxieties to instead celebrate the obsolescence of progress, the future turning into, in Vladimir Nabokov's words, "the obsolete in reverse." 3 In this article, I show that Kubrick's film and Smithson's earth art foreground different sides of the same paradigm, one in which the deep past and the deep future become entangled through continuities and mirroring, and which I therefore term paleofuturist. With what could be posited as a graphic peak in the 1960s, but widely traceable in modern philosophy, art, scienc and popular culture, paleofuturism implies that the more we proceed into a future of advanced technology, disembodied subjects, and rational information, the more we seem to re-actualise all kinds of deep and repressed pasts: archaic cultures, bygone biological and geological eras, and the embryonic state of individuals. The 1960s may present this tendency particularly intensely because it fuses two of this decade's seemingly antagonistic trends: a strong optimism regarding the potential of civilisation's most advanced technology, supported by the period's economic boom, on the one hand; and on the other hand, an equally strong rebellion against all sorts of bourgeois authority-embodied by the Hippie movement, student revolts, the civil rights movement, women's liberation, and avant-garde dissolutions of the autonomous artwork-each with its implications of a simplified and ultimately more primordial way of living.
We may discern an early manifestation of a paleofuturist sensibility in 2001's central literary impetus, Nietzsche's philosophical novel, Also sprach Zarathustra (1883- 85), in which the overman of the future is compared to a child, a conception that is radicalised in 2001's final images of the reborn human appearing as a foetus in outer space. I will demonstrate that the idea of turning the inorganic black universe itself into a womb with which the reconceived human reunites is more specifically derived from Carl Gustav Jung, whose individuation, the unification with the collective unconscious, Kubrick  A Space Odyssey, it is because its temporality seems suspended between an almost manic belief in cognitive progress, and an awareness that such progress somehow involves the recurrence of deep, even suppressed, pasts. The progressive side of paleofuturism is expressed in one of Kubrick's interview comments on the film, in which the astronaut, David Bowman, is expressly described as reborn as "an enhanced being, a star child, an angel, a superman, if you like, and returns to the earth prepared for the next leap forward of man's evolutionary destiny." 4 As clearly signalled by 2001's opening sequence, the artificial sunrise created by the camera surging upwards behind moon, earth and sun, and sustained by the ecstatic overture to Richard Strauss's tone poem, Also sprach Zarathustra (1896), the material for this view of evolutionary progress is derived from Nietzsche's identically titled philosophical novel about man's transformation into overman. As Zarathustra states: All creatures so far created something beyond themselves: and you want to be the ebb of this great flood and would even rather go back to animals than overcome humans? What is the ape to a human? A laughing stock or a painful embarrassment.
And that is precisely what the human shall be to the overman: a laughing stock or a painful embarrassment. 5 Nietzsche also compares the necessary enhancement of the human spirit to a triadic metamorphosis of animals: from the camel obeying the dragon of tradition, to the lion battling this dragon, to the newborn child. 6 As partly pointed out by Philip Koberski, this whole metamorphosis may be clearly detected in 2001's imagery. 7 The disciplined inhabitants of the spaceships and moon colonies-from visitors, to stewardesses, to astronautsact as the Nietzschean camels, blindly obeying the dragon of tradition, with its command, "Thou shalt." The supercomputer HAL 9000, whose mind is one with its automated machinery, emerges as the over-dragon, who is killed by the camel-turnedlion, David Bowman. However, since the lion has only freed itself from old values but developed no new ones, the dying Bowman metamorphoses into the foetus hovering in space above the Earth, after passing through the monolith, which now functions as a cosmic gate. This appears as a radicalisation of the Nietzschean child signalling "innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a wheel rolling out of itself, a first movement, a sacred yessaying." 8 As in a premonition of Kubrick's The Shining (1980), the rejuvenated Bowman is no longer a "dull boy," all work and no play.
The ability of the film's central catalyst, the alien black monolith, to cause leaps forward in man's evolutionary destinygreat floods instead of an ebb-is implied by a spectacular temporal symbolism. When the monolith turns up the first two times-in the rocky hollow among the African humanoids, and excavated on the moon-we discern an accelerated movement of time (Fig. 1) . Although the dispersed sunlight-first cast on fragile, shadowy clouds, and then on the fringes of the otherwise dark lunar excavation site-clearly indicates a sunrise, the sun actually is revealed at its midday zenith, right over the dark monolith. Command in Huntsville, he emphasises how machinic intelligence will universally outdistance organic life, as biological evolution will be increasingly controlled, to "a degree which does not exist today, even in dictatorships." In this mechanised future, in which emotions and irrationality play almost no role, except as a hindrance to progress, the durability and more efficient modularity of computers will do away with alleged animal weaknesses such as illness, death, slow learning and lack of the possibility to improve an IQ. 12 Faced with the emphasis on machines as the future masters of the universe, Kubrick's choice of a black monolith as representative of extra-terrestrial intelligence in 2001 does not seem to be only a question of abstract symbolism, to avoid the danger of, in Kubrick's own words, "the traditional bug-eyed monster of pulp science fiction." 13 The media Kubrick imagines will take over the warm, fragile bodies of organisms resemble, in a surprisingly concrete way, the black monolith and its hard geological or otherwise inorganic surroundings in outer space: "…  I suppose that intelligent rocks or crystals, or statues, with a silicon life base, are not really impossible, or even conscious gaseous matter or swarms of sentient electrical particles." 14 According to Carl Gustav Jung's interpretation of the post-war phenomenon of flying saucers-one that oscillates ambivalently between outer space and the collective unconscious-a "sentient electrical field" is also what "speculative ufologists" imagine as a possible seat of alien intelligence; and Kubrick joined this speculative crowdprobably inspired by Jung, as we will see. 15 Yet, simultaneously with its pointing outwards to alien intelligences, the monolith also points inwards to human technology. Here, its black geometry seems little more than shorthand for those machinic encasings that are already in the process of converting the astronauts to a state of purified rational intelligence, based in inorganic, posthuman media that reach beyond the organism. This is confirmed by the monolith's rectangular form being echoed in many instances in the artificial surroundings, notably as frame for the red eye of HAL 9000, the already incorporeal intelligence.
However, the black monolith not only signifies pure, rational intelligence, but also creativity-to the point of becoming a meta-commentary on the film itself as a trigger of evolutionary becoming. As has been observed with increasing frequency on the Internet in recent decades, 16 the rectangular format of the monolith is identical with the frame of the cinematic screen, a link emphasised in the prelude to 2001, in which the cinema screen is shrouded in monolithic darkness for several minutes, while the soundtrack plays György Ligeti's Atmosphères (1961).
This signals a mise-en-abyme in which the very images of the film emerge as a result of the monolith's spark of creativity, the monolith simultaneously a product of the film it generates. In this way, Kubrick emphasises that human creativity, with its zenith in his own cinematic genius, is at the point of becoming part of the cosmic evolutionary genesis. In transforming themselves into Nietzschean overmen, human beings assume the role of God, or rather, become his naturalized followers in the form of the supreme cosmic intelligence with which they communicate.
In the foregoing perspective, the monolith becomes a rather ambiguous figure, pointing not only towards a more or less incorporeal intelligence, but equally towards an embrace of rationality's suppressed counterpart, nature's subconscious drives. This ultimate reconciliation of intelligence and matter, the paleofuturist circle's conjoining of deep future and deep past, is consistent with the similar paradoxical fusion of opposites that Zarathustra strives for in Nietzsche's novel: joy and pain, love and hate, blessing and curse, noon and midnight, what Nietzsche sums up to the world. 17 In 2001 this striving for worldly synthesis is negatively hinted at in the scene where Heywood Floyd gives his moralistic speech to Clavius's crew, claiming that the people of Earth would experience a cultural shock if they were to hear of the alien monolith, and that therefore it should be kept a secret.
Surrounding this scene of anthropocentric bigotry are what may be seen as the purely rationalistic anti-poles to the black monolith, three cinematic screens glowing with an empty white light (Fig. 2) . 18 Throughout the film one observes that the spark of creation, the ability to conceive, moves from a purely male to a more complex female or androgynous sphere, from intelligence Accordingly, the Discovery One spaceship introduced eighteen months (two human pregnancies) later manifests the womb for this double impregnation of the moon. Yet the spaceship's sperm-like, spherical head and tail of nuclear energy units also represents a rational male extension of physical impulses. In fact, this extension is so dominant and immature that the male-female coupling develops into conflict. This unstable womb-brain ends up aborting its own off-spring, the three hibernating astronauts in their metallic cocoons and Frank Poole, whose oxygen tube, the artificial umbilical cord, is broken by HAL, its uncaring male mother. Only after disconnecting HAL's intelligence, an act that also takes place in a red, womb-like room, is Bowman ready to enter the Star Gate, a vaginal passage leading him, inside his spermatozoan pod, to the primordial depths of a truer cosmic womb. Through a sort of reversed evolution, an infantile regression-from geometric patterns (rational urban civilisation), to inner-corporeal biological/cosmic ones (organic body), to archaic rocky and watery landscapes (vibrant inorganic matter)he ends up in what could be understood as a more functional alliance between brain and womb, in a white, Louis XV rococo interior that the extra-terrestrial intelligence has generated from his imagination, and which finally produces his Nietzschean rejuvenation, the cosmic foetus floating in space without any trace of technology, rationalism's offspring. The idea that Dave, in his journey, is approaching the big Other of separate consciousness could be confirmed by consulting Jung's analysis of The Black Cloud (1957), one of the many science fiction novels by noted astronomer, Fred Hoyle. 32 The saucer-shaped cloud of extra-terrestrial intelligence that disturbs the orbits of Saturn and Jupiter, and is expected to reach the Earth in eighteen months (cp. the length of Discovery's journey), is seen as such a powerful manifestation of the collective unconscious, utterly uncontainable by consciousness, that its earthly communicators fall into delirious states followed by death. Elsewhere, Jung remarks that if the unconscious is exposed like that, collective dream images link to cosmic qualities, such as temporal or spatial infinity, enormous speed and extension of movement, 'astrological' associations, telluric, lunar, and solar analogies, changes in the proportions of the body, etc. … The collective element is very often announced by peculiar symptoms, as for example by dreams where the dreamer is flying through space like a comet, or feels … that he is dead, is in a strange place, is a stranger to himself, confused, mad, etc. 33 Apart from these Jungian passages, several scenes in 2001 seem to specifically draw on a series of delirious visions Jung himself described, provoked by a near-death experience in 1944.
As recounted in Jung's widely read memoirs, dictated in 1957 to Aniela Jaffé, and which he edited himself: It seemed to me that I was high up in space. In A Clockwork Orange (1971), the title itself merging the mechanical and the organic, the young thug, Alex, has become a prisoner of his prehuman, animal instincts, an instrument for engaging in sexual ultra-violence for pleasure, in an existence otherwise paralysed by civilisational boredom. However,    Here, the mythical material that Kubrick evokes with respect to recent paleoarcheology is the biblical tale of the Fall. The African savannah, with its dry leaves as its fruits, is a demonstratively harsh Edenic garden; the monolith is a hard Tree of Knowledge; the homicidal alpha male is Cain. In this modernised version of paradise, God seems, Nietzsche-fashion, to be long dead, or perhaps displaced to other parts of the universe and to humanity's future. By being mentally fertilised by the monolith, itself implanted by an extra-terrestrial, quasi-divine intelligence, the humanoids now have the possibility of becoming divine, the ethical dilemma being that the path to divinity goes through the valley of death.
Over a vignette of a revolver-which sets the scene for Kubrick's match cut from bone to satellite-Ardrey concludes "that the continuity of development in man's cultural efforts is not truly that of the tool; it is that of the weapon." 48  In Kubrick's new universe, martial aggression has therefore not evaporated. Like sex, it has merely been displaced to the machinery that ultimately has become a potential enemy of humans. This is revealed when HAL 9000, upon being threatened with disconnection, kills Poole and the hibernating astronauts.
Since the technological dangers of HAL add up to Nietzsche's dragon from Also sprach Zarathustra, the over-systematised tradition of duty, it must be fought-which happens when Bowman metamorphoses from serving "camel" into rebellious "lion." However, considering that the monolith indicates a future in which machines have replaced organic bodies as seat of the most advanced sort of cognition, HAL's murderous action is also premonitory of this imminent evolutionary take-over. As posited by Kubrick, then, the dilemma of humans vs. machines is highly complex, and resembles Heidegger's dilemma of Enframing.
Although Enframing presents the utmost danger, Heidegger also notes, with introductory lines from Hölderlin's hymn Patmos, "But where danger is, grows/The saving power also." For, "The saving power is not secondary to the danger. The self-same danger is, when it is as the danger, the saving power. The ascent to its location, an artificial rocky plateau, recalls the pitfalls of Nietzsche's Zarathustra: if a climber falls down (and does not break his neck), he will become the "laughing-stock of the expedition," reminding us of the Nietzschean relationships of ape/man and man/overman, including the dangerous rope crossing that links the latter dualism, from which the tightrope walker actually falls and dies. 73 The skeletons in the closet of evolutionary progress are heavily and/or myths, but whose influence has been subdued in later stages of human culture. 75 However, we are now approaching an     What made the "monuments" of science fiction especially appealing to the paleofuturist sensibility were their "geological" and "archaeological" dimensions: their frequent placement in environments of raw earth and stone, whether the Earth's deserts,   or logical depth (Charles Bennett). 102 The more the elements of a mass-the molecules of a gas, the stones of a desert, the brushstrokes of an abstract painting-break into smaller units that increase the encompassing heterogeneity of the mass, the more this infinitesimally differentiated but randomly distributed chaos will approach a state that, from a certain distance, appears as its exact opposite, an increasingly homogenized and greyish sameness whose external parameters could be taken as orderly.
Whether this mass should be categorised as chaos (with enormous amounts of inaccessible information) or order (with information approaching zero) is a question of the observer's distance, and the two poles determine each other dialectically. Moreover, as art historian Rosalind Krauss has remarked, developing Hubert Damisch's ideas on cloudy painterliness, simple repetitive ordered patterns, such as the dense grids in Agnes Martin's minimalist paintings, also, at a distance, generate surfaces of sameness, whose underlying patterns may just as well have been chaotic when inspected closer up. 103 Smithson's notion of entropy easily applies to 2001, since outer space, drained of organic life, becomes the domain par excellence for entropic phenomena: the monotony of infinite black space, of rocky surfaces of moons, of gaseous planets, and of their mirror images in the habitations that humans use to shield themselves in these hostile areas, the hard inorganic space architecture, structured as grids and shiny surfaces. One might object that the aesthetics through which Kubrick approaches these spaces pertains more to an awe-invoking sublime than to Smithson's disillusioned entropy. 104 But entropy may be seen as a collapsed sublime. Based, like entropy, on non-enclosed, mostly inorganic matter, from amorphous chaos to geometric seriality, the sublime observes these from a still secure distance, invoking what Edmund Burke termed delight, the relief of being saved from destruction. 105 On the other hand, in the entropic phenomenology of minimalism and earth art, this Cartesian distance has shrunk.
Bringing space "down into an abstract world of mineral forms," Judd, for instance, is involved in what Smithson calls the "The Deposition of Infinite Space." 106 Thus, Kubrick's inorganic hovers between a sublime distance, sustained by extropianism's escape from matter, and an entropic myopia, which re-absorbs itself into matter.   (1968; Ill. 16 ), which took place beside a Gerrit Rietveld mansion in Bergeyk, Holland. 110 Recalling that entanglement of banality and awe evident in the astronauts posing for a souvenir photograph in front of the monolith, the burial of this 10-inch stainless steel box is also part of a photo session. Here, the local "crew" comprised LeWitt's Dutch friend, Mia Visser (who was asked to place an artwork, now unknown, inside the cube), her husband, one of their friends, the metal fabricator, and LeWitt himself. When touched on in existing art history, the paleofuturist sensibility of minimalism and earth art has been somewhat divided between forward-and backward-looking modes. A rare futurist framing of modern sculpture in its entirety, including minimalism, is delivered in the visionary but now largely forgotten Beyond Modern Sculpture (1967), by the artist and art theorist Jack Burnham. 116 Burnham was -like Kubrick and his consultant on extra-terrestrial intellegence, Frederick Ordway, whose work with Roger MacGowan Burnham in fact refers to -an extropianist who believed that intelligent machines were about to take over evolution, recreating life through technology. 117 Sculpture's recent move towards information, systems, and the totality of the environment, as seen in minimalism, was a preparatory step toward "our destination as a post-human species. Thus, without resorting to either Smithson's sarcastic sci-fi or any ancient astronaut theses, Lippard layers prehistoric monuments, ornaments, and rituals with those of minimalism, earth art, and performance. Ironically, we have to resort to wild speculation on alien intervention in prehistory-in this case Ordway and MacGowan's-to get the full paleofuturist appreciation of modern art's strangeness, its corridor from prehistory to the future bypassing humanism: "Doubtless, many of us who view what passes for art in this modern age feel prone to attribute it to an alien influence." 122 To a large extent, the re-evocation of ancient cultures and the deep geological strata is part of minimalism's and earth art's famed phenomenological quality, their evoking of a sense of being physically entangled with non-representational objects, lumps of exposed matter. 123 Strikingly, then, this breaking out of sculpture's illusionist sphere and into a direct engagement with the viewer's exposed body happens through a corresponding draining-out of sculpture's usual referent, the anthropomorphic body, challenging the viewer to adapt to essentially dehumanised, non-organic forms. A parallel fossilising movement is felt inside the spaces of 2001, and in general, in Kubrick's later work. Like classical sculpture, with which minimalism breaks, mainstream films have human figures as their centre of attention, and are driven by these figures' narrative acts and utterances, thereby reducing the less organised environment, space, to mere background. 124 However, the non-verbal, subconscious quality, the renewed mythic language with which Kubrick intentionally seizes the viewer in 2001, is achieved by foregrounding these former backgrounds, and, indeed, embarking on an odyssey into space and its materials. 125 Since in 2001, this space, a celestial echo of tellurian minimalism and earth art, is the location of the most entropic and least organised phenomena-infinite vacuum, rocky terrain, hard geometric containers-its human actants, logically, seem to fossilise in their adaptation to it. 126 In a parallel with Smithson's fondness for mannerism-the inorganic's invasion of anthropomorphic bodies in an otherwise naturalistic framework-this could indeed be termed a mannerist move. 127 The scene with the humanoids gradually approaching their hands to the hard surface of the monolith almost suggests metacommentary on the new and more direct phenomenological relationship to things that manifests in both minimalism and Kubrick's film. The apes' initial reaction-the anxious withdrawing of their hands, as though the surface were glowingmay recall the permanent one of formalist critic Michael Fried, who denigrated minimalism's break-down of the distance to the viewer, what he termed its literalism and theatricality. 128 But, again, the deeper mystery of the monolith-and the field that minimalism explores-is not merely its invitation to touch matter, but matter's reconciliation with intelligence. In the midst of others' phenomenological framing of minimalism, Sol LeWitt directly categorised it as conceptual art, and Robert Morris noted its oscillation between "the known constant and the experienced variable." 129 Perhaps Heywood Floyd's calm re-touching of the monolith on the moon, his glove casting a deep shadow on its shiny surface, allegorises this mystery more fully (Fig. 17) . As minimalist sculptor Carl Andre remarked in 1969, "An astronaut who slips out of his capsule in space has lost his environment, any living organism has an environment." 130 Thus, Floyd's protective environment, his space suit, may be seen as a materialisation of that conceptual framework, the passage to intelligence, through which matter-phenomenology's foundation exposed through the Jungian shadow-is re-approached in the paleofuturist circle.