The Cosmic Symbol Michelle Henning Published as: Michelle Henning (2009) 'The Cosmic Symbol' in Candlin, Fiona and Guins, Raiford (eds) The Object Reader, London: Routledge. THE COSMIC SYMBOL 456 THE COSMIC SYMBOL I was given my first camera on my tenth birthday, my initiation into double figures. It was a Cosmic Symbol, and I loved it. I loved the tiny white symbols on the lens, the little figures, the tower block and trees representing infinity, and the weather symbols, similar to the ones used on film instruction leaflets. And I loved the name: Cosmic, like cosmonauts, signified to me the Soviet world of space exploration. I knew little else of the Soviet Union, except that it produced the gymnast Olga Korbut. The camera was, of course, also an instrument for me. It came after the cameras made from the malt tins of home-made beer kits, which we used to enter a newspaper pinhole camera contest, and after I had learnt to develop prints in the cupboard under the stairs. It was my first real 35mm film camera. With it I could do manual photography without having to understand the numerical system for shutter-speeds or fully grasp the workings of the aperture. This was made possible by the pictograms on the lens. They were descendents of Isotype, the system of pictorial statistics invented by the logical positivist and socialist Otto Neurath. Isotype was intended as a transparent universal and neutral language, able to overcome barriers of literacy and mathematical competency. It was officially adopted by the USSR in the early 1930s and gave a neutral, modern and pedagogic air to state propaganda. By the 1960s, pictograms were being used to give a design identity to successive Olympics, and as part of the styling of commodities, alongside brand logos. On Soviet cameras, first the 1964 Voskhod camera then the Smena Symbol (exported as the Cosmic Symbol), these symbols are highly stylish, but they serve the old purpose of enabling the camera to be operated by the photographically semi-literate. It was a cheap, easy-to-use introduction to controlling the technology of photography. It was a teaching tool as well as a means to make pictures. The Cosmic Symbol was imported to Britain by a company called Technical and Optical Equipment, which promoted Russian photographic equipment on the basis of its functional and durable character, and by association with the Soviet space programme. As an export name, 'Cosmic Symbol' attempts to conjur these same associations. THE COSMIC SYMBOL 457 But to me the name also signified something mystical, universal, something occult. Small wonder that the photographs I took with it showed ghostly apparitions which could not be seen with eyes alone. My camera was an instrument for penetrating beyond the world of strictly visible phenomena, a magical means of exposing a world of spirits, and its images corresponded to my 10-year-old self's intensified, hallucinatory perception. In this I was only unwittingly following in a long tradition: for a decade or two after its invention the camera had been used as a means to establish spiritualism in rational and scientific terms. Science had established the existence of forces and rays invisible to the human eye and, with instruments like the x-ray, had penetrated beyond the seen world into the unseen. That photography might similarly reveal imperceptible presences had seemed highly plausible as spiritualism took off in both Eastern and Western Europe in the 1870s and again after 1918, promising the bereaved some last contact with relatives and loved ones killed in war and revolution. Even a series of highly publicized frauds and the appearance of numerous clearly faked ghost photographs intended to ridicule spiritualism did not entirely shake the spiritualists’ faith, nor the faith in the camera as a scientific and objective instrument. The camera as instrument simultaneously lent support to Neurath’s ‘physicalist’ and anti- metaphysical view of an empirically knowable universe and the aims of the spiritualist movement to establish the truth of a non-sensuous reality, a world of spirits beyond the visible. There is no paradox in this. More interesting is the way in which the potential for the production of spectres is literally built in to the Soviet camera. My ghostly apparitions were mostly light leaks (though some were the result of shooting directly into the sun – a surefire way of conjuring angels). The first photographed ghosts in the mid-nineteenth century were also accidents, in which poorly cleaned plates revealed older images beneath the new exposure. The otherworldly also manifested itself as indistinct blobs and blurs. By the 1970s, few consumer model cameras in the West leaked light, while Soviet cameras had a reputation of being shoddily built. But these were not produced simply as cheap exports: since the 1930s, 35mm cameras had been significant domestic commodities, the fact that anyone could own one standing as evidence of Soviet social and technological achievement. They originated as homegrown copies of the Leica rangefinder cameras, constructed by besprizorniki, children orphaned and abandoned as a result of war and famine. In the Dzerzhinsky commune in the Ukraine, set up by and named after the founder of the secret police and led by the educationalist Makarenko, whose militaristic pedagogy emphasized productive work, these children manufactured the first few Soviet Leicas (FEDs) in 1932. The Dzerzhinsky commune’s success led to the mass production of cameras by military optics factories, then, from 1962, in a joint-stock company formed by their merger with the Kinap Motion Pictures Equipment plant: the Leningradskoye Optiko Mechanichesckoye Obyedinenie (Lenigrad Optical & Mechanical Enterprise). Dzerzhinsky’s was one of the first statues to topple following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The photography industry he indirectly instigated has been a little more fortunate. LOMO cameras now fetch relatively high prices and are admired for their ‘lo-fi’ aesthetic, in particular their tendency to leak light: the technical result of a manufacturing system that required ‘tolerant’ exchangeable parts that were easy to assemble and a planned economy that emphasized quantity. This manufacturing system was itself the product of the need to produce goods outside (and alongside) a capitalist market system, of the specifically Soviet commodity production system. THE COSMIC SYMBOL 458 One of the difficulties with Marx’s theory of the commodity is that it is specifically concerned with the commodity under capitalism, and offered no prognosis for the fortunes of the commodity in a communist society. Under capitalism, Marx suggested, the simple useful object becomes a performer. His example is, not incidentally, a wooden table, which gets up and begins to dance, just as the tables in nineteenth century spiritualist photographs of séances rise from the ground and leap about. And, as in the séance, it conjurs up spirits, for out of its 'wooden brain' arise fraudulent apparitions, 'grotesque ideas'. As Derrida observed, commodity fetishism is a spectral thing, haunting and animating the object. Revolutionary uprising, Marx implies, can also animate the thing-world, turning the tables, and raising the spectre of communism. But the ghosts produced by fetishism are mystifications resulting from the capitalist economic system; in a socialist society, presumably, they would be exorcised. In fact, the Soviet Union initially attempted no such thing, developing its own quasi-capitalist consumer culture under the New Economic Policy of the 1920s. But avant-garde artists and writers of the period did try to envisage the socialist consumer object; and they envisaged it primarily as functional and utilitarian. Commodity fetishism animates the object only once it has been rendered mute, like the medium’s trance state which allows the spirits to speak through her. But the socialist thing, freed of fashion and status-signifying, would be a socially active, transformative technology, dynamic, flexible, and geared to the demands of a collective society. We know now that technologies don’t eliminate ghosts but generate them. The gaps and flaws, the white noise, the blurs, the incomprehensible interruptions and accidental marks that haunt modern media are such ghosts. And they have now become the trappings of style, of a marketable aesthetic, the useless marks of distinction, fetishistic hauntings which functionalism failed to eliminate. The aesthetic and marketing possibilities of Soviet 35mm cameras were recognised in the early 1990s by two Austrians who signed a deal with LOMO to become worldwide distributors of the LC-A camera. Now they also export the Cosmic Symbol, this time as the Smena Symbol, and its technical failings have become selling-points. Nevertheless the spectres generated by this technology, by its inbuilt technical flaws, as well as by the incompetency of its user, are also the spaces of imagination, intimations of possibility which suggest that the world might be more, or other, than it appears. More than a commodity, or technical instrument, the Cosmic Symbol remains, for me, a Utopian thing. References Fricke, Oscar (1979) ‘The Dzerzhinsky Commune: Birth of the Soviet 35mm Camera Industry’, in History of Photography, vol.3, no.2, April 1979, pp. 135-155. Klomp, Alfred (2007) ‘Why I don't like LOMOgraphy’, ‘The Voskhod’, ‘Introduction to the Soviet System’, ‘The Smena SL’, ‘Technical & Optical Equipment (London) Ltd’, available <http://cameras.alfredklomp.com/> (accessed 24 September 2007). Michelle Henning Department of Culture, Media and Drama, University of the West of England, Bristol