2 Kinemorphosis

Eighteenth-Century Astronomy

While seventeenth-century astronomy focused on planets and comets orbiting the Sun, in the wake of Newtonian laws eighteenth-century astronomy began tackling deep space beyond the solar system. Very little was known circa 1700 about the distance, nature, and distribution of stars, apart from the conspicuous band of the Milky Way most astronomers considered the dominant structure of the universe. As to how the latter began, it remained largely a matter of divine creation shrouded in mystery. Isaac Newton envisioned a universe in perfect equilibrium between gravitation and centrifugal force, a well-regulated clockwork from past to future without a scenario for its origin.

Over the first decades of the eighteenth century, the clockwork began glitching. Astronomers detected countless irregularities in the Earth’s axis, which wobbled three different ways, while the Moon’s motions showed various perturbations in the plane of its orbit, its rotation, axis, etc. Newtonian mechanics proved unable to explain such secular inequalities soon understood to devolve from the way that more than two celestial bodies interact gravitationally (the three-body problem). All such perturbations suggested that cosmic states and cycles changed widely over time, but these changes were not yet articulated to the entire history of the cosmos.

There was a crisis in the firmament as well. Stars had been thought to be fixed lamps embedded in the celestial vault. But when Edmond Halley compared the positions of stars over time, he concluded not only that they seemed to move but that they did so in different directions, sometimes altering their brightness as well. In 1727, astronomer James Bradley decided to map out a year of daily positions of the star Gamma Draconis, always visible from London. He expected a specific set of measurements if it was fixed, another if it was moving. What he found was something in between. As a commentator puts it: “Something was awry either with the telescope or with the universe.”2 The issue was decided when Bradley realized that the discrepancy was caused by the “successive propagation of light”—the fact it was moving at a finite speed.3 Demoting light from its prior abstract instantaneity to a fully physical phenomenon was instrumental in both shaping photocinema and directing it toward photography. It also occasioned fierce debates between supporters of Christiaan Huygens’s wave theory—slowly gaining currency by the 1750s through mathematician Leonhard Euler’s research on the dynamics of matter—and a traditionalist camp opining that light was a stream of corpuscles.

The more burning issue was observational: chromatic aberration. When light refracts through a lens it is partially decomposed, lengthening the blue end of the spectrum, fuzzing up telescopic images, and severely limiting magnification for stellar astronomy. In the 1750s, London optician John Dollond innovated combination lenses with two kinds of glass, lessening the blue shift. This boosted preparations for the main astronomical event of the century: the twin transits of Venus in 1761 and 1769. It was hoped that the proper timing of the black dot of Venus gliding across the Sun would yield by simple trigonometry the distance from Earth to the Sun, enabling the exact measurement of the solar system. It was during the following transits of Venus in 1874 and 1881 that Jules Janssen deployed a photographic revolver representing the proximate precursor device for cinema. In fact, photography was meant to palliate the unforeseen issue that arose in 1761 and 1769, when the black circle of Venus elongated into a drop as it crossed the edge of the Sun (see chapter 4).

What is light? How does it interact with optical glass or planets? Can it reliably relay the true appearance of faraway stars? And how did the universe form and evolve? Each of these astronomical queries contributed to the long maturation of photocinema.

Maupertuis’s Plastic Visualization of Celestial and Raced Bodies

The word cosmology was scarcely used in its modern sense until the 1740s. The 1731 Cosmologia generalis of Christian, baron von Wolff rehearsed the “great chain of beings” of his teacher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz with a new twist, as an exegete of Wolff explains: “The world, or the universe, is the series of finite beings, either simultaneous and coexisting, or successive, that are chained together.”4 While “simultaneous and coexisting” taxonomies were theorized by Carolus Linnaeus and Georges-Louis Leclerc, count de Buffon, the “successive” evolution of celestial and living bodies at long durations remained completely enigmatic. Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis took an important step toward visualizing their plastic formation over time by focusing on motion, asserting that “the greatest phenomenon of nature, the most marvelous, is motion: without it all would be plunged in eternal death.”5

Maupertuis trained in astronomy in the 1720s, when Newtonian mechanics prevailed over Cartesianism and monadism in France.6 He studied analytical mathematics in Basel, Switzerland, with Johann Bernoulli to better understand force, key to explaining unaccounted motions. Was force extrinsic like a billiard ball hitting another or intrinsic to matter, like the life force of animate beings known as vis viva? Newton’s attraction between masses was vexingly halfway: an intrinsic force manifesting only extrinsically, through vision (trajectory) and time (clocks).7 Ever since Galileo’s studies of falling bodies, regular visual displacement—in ballistics, trajectories, rolling balls, comets, transits, eclipses, etc.—had acquired a commanding status. As Jessica Riskin demonstrates, quandaries of vis viva, mechanical motion, and biological growth became central to mid-eighteenth-century natural philosophy.8

Maupertuis contributed to that debate through a tangential but urgent question: the shape of Earth.9 For René Descartes, ether vortices making celestial bodies spin squished them at the equator, while Newton asserted that centrifugal force should make them bulge. In Discourse on the Different Figures of Celestial Bodies published in 1732, Maupertuis posed the problem anew, asking what “the figure that a homogeneous and fluid mass rotating around an axis must take.”10 This heuristic premise broke with the Aristotelian logic of solids, still present in Emanuel Swedenborg’s magnetic origin theory of the solar system. By visualizing the Earth’s plastic kinemorphic transformation over long durations, Maupertuis concluded that Newton must be right. In 1736 he took part in an expedition to Lapland to measure the curvature of Earth, which confirmed Newton’s hypothesis and his own visualization methodology.

Maupertuis’s visualization experiment relied on time compression. It was concurrent with the gradual expansion of the conjectural age of the cosmos from six millennia in the mid-seventeenth century (based on the Bible) to several million years by the 1750s. Maupertuis extrapolated the long duration deformation of Earth to stars: “Fixed stars are suns like ours; it is very likely they have, like ours, a rotational motion around their axis. Hence, they are exposed to flattening given the rapidity of their motion; and why would there be no flat stars in the skies? Especially if we realize that we know from no observation the figure of the fixed stars” (Discours, 77). The default shape of all celestial bodies for Maupertuis was an ellipsoid, not an abstract geometrical sphere. While proven wrong about disk stars, he was right about larger structures: most clusters and galaxies are ellipsoids. Maupertuis was quite aware that visualizing the temporal plasticity of unseeable celestial bodies constituted a new method: “this art which extends our sight to the last places of space, taking it to the smallest parts of matter; & which makes us discover objects whose sight had appeared forbidden to humans” (Oeuvres, 4:5). The mechanical economy of such visual transformations suggested to him a more general law of physics, namely “a metaphysical principle upon which all the laws of motion are founded. And this is that, whenever there is a change in nature, the quantity of action employed for this change is always the smallest possible.”11 This “principle of least action” accounted for the optimal motion and shape of celestial bodies but also the optimal route of light refracting through various media.12 Trusting the “spirit of system,” Maupertuis sought to transduce this universal principle to other fields like psychology, linguistics, and biology.13

Notoriously, he applied least action visualization to sexual reproduction in a euphemistically titled book of 1745, Physical Venus. Again, visualization and reproduction proved coextensive. Rejecting preformism—the simple upscaling of an invariant pattern—as flippant, he argued for epigenesis, the complex development of tissue through uneven accretion and growth proponed by William Harvey.14 One far-ranging implication of epigenesis was that it circumvented dualism since a coordinating “intelligent” force within organic matter was needed to structure and assemble the embryo. Maupertuis hoped that this vis viva shaping living bodies was akin to gravitation and centrifugal force shaping celestial bodies.15

Physical Venus has two parts: the first propones the epigenetic theory of reproduction, and the second expands on a best-selling pamphlet Maupertuis published (anonymously) the year before: “Physical Dissertation Occasioned by the White Negro.” That text concerns a South American child with albinism who was paraded in Parisian salons, catalyzing anxieties in plantocracies about natural mutations breaching the color line.16 Maupertuis approached processes of racial diversification according to the same dynamic purview as the developmental visualization of celestial bodies. He embraced the traditional thermometabolic model of racial mutation within the widespread premise of aboriginal whiteness. However, he was aware that the hypothesis that Blackness sprang from the “Malpighi layer” of skin had been debunked by capable anatomists.17 The “white negro” occasioned in Maupertuis a reconsideration of his ideas on racial phylogeny. He asserts that “we cannot doubt” that all races come “from the same mother” and that “the difference between white and black, so conspicuous to our eyes, means very little to Nature” (Maupertuis, Vénus physique, 106, 118–19).18 Yet this monogenic affirmation quickly devolves into a discourse of whiteness as cosmetic norm and Blackness as degenerative. Recycling racist tropes, he opines that “the black color lightens up but ugliness remains,” venturing that non-Black races “relegated these deformed races to the least inhabitable climates of the Earth” (98, 123, 130). This unlikely historical conjecture blatantly contradicts his earlier mention of racial difference resulting from climate (130). When considering mixed-race children, Maupertuis comes up with another surprise: “If a black man marries a white woman, it seems that both colors are mixed; the child has an olive-colored hue, and features half from the mother and half from the father” (69). Three radical arguments are wrapped into this one statement. First, since the child of a Black parent and a white parent is viable, mixed children plainly confirm monogenism—in fact, they invalidate polygenism once and for all. Second, mother and father contribute equally their genetic material, making reproduction equiparental and epigenetic.19 Finally, with his example of a Black man “marrying” a white woman, Maupertuis is willfully transgressive since the 1724 Code Noir stipulated (in the king’s voice): “We forbid our white subjects of one or the other sex to contract marriage with blacks.”20 It is fair to say that Maupertuis’s simple (and correct) statement was the most advanced affirmation of natural gender and racial equality.

What likely explains Maupertuis holding simultaneous antiracist and anti-Black sentiments is the fact that the wealth of his family came from the slave trade. His father, René Moreau, was a ship captain ennobled as Sieur de Maupertuis by Louis XIV for his privateering during the War of the Grand Alliance. Saint-Malo, France, where the Maupertuis family lived, endeavored at the time to rival Nantes and Bordeaux for the triangular trade. Moreau made multiple trips to the Caribbean in the 1680s and 1690s prior to being named director of Saint-Malo’s chapter of the Compagnie des Indes Occidentales (West Indies Company). This leaves no doubt that he traded enslaved peoples.21

Maupertuis expressed opposition to slavery and recognized Black intelligence. In his Essay on Moral Philosophy, he sides with the “slave” abused by a “cruel master” and envisions how “a ship returning from Guinea is filled with Catos who prefer to die rather than survive their own freedom” (Oeuvres, 1:223, 225). He states that “the Negro & the Philosopher have but one and the same aim: to better their condition” (226). In another text, he celebrates Africa, “formerly inhabited by the most numerous and powerful nations, filled with the most superb cities” where “sciences and arts” were duly cultivated (2:364–65). Elsewhere, he frames white recognition of Black subjectivity by foregrounding ethical visual animation: “My body is animated [animé] by a mind [esprit] that perceives itself; thence I judge that other bodies similar to mine do the same. I would be ridiculous if a taller or smaller size or slightly different features made me refuse a soul to other men of my species [espèce]: even features more different still, black skin, would not authorize me to deprive of soul [âme] the inhabitants of Africa.”22 Visual perception of the racial other implies that their and my mindful self-animation are equal. That is Maupertuis’s least action principle at its ethical best. Having isolated animated visualization as a new method of inquiry into the origin of both racialized human and celestial bodies, Maupertuis failed his antiracist insights, falling back on the biased discourses of his familial, class, and intellectual milieu.

Three-Dimensional Cosmological Visualization in Wright and Lambert

What makes eighteenth-century cosmological thinking protocinematic was not local kinemorphic insights like Maupertuis’s disk star but complete three-dimensional dynamic modeling at a macrocosmic scale. Two early contributors of this 3D pathway were Thomas Wright and Johann Heinrich Lambert. Wright was trained in projective geometry as a draftsman, landscape designer, and architect, and he transduced his skills to theoretical astronomy.23 In 1734, he sketched a map “representing in a section of the Creation, eighteen feet long and one broad, several thousand worlds and systems, and a great number of emblematic figures.”24 That map is lost, but a 1737 engraving illustrating the path of a solar eclipse shows his advanced skill at visually transducing orbital mathematics.25 In 1750, he published An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe, printed and illustrated by himself.26

Like most astronomers of the time, Wright equates the Milky Way with the entire universe, envisioning it as a spherical structure with myriad solar systems orbiting around its center. As Simon Schaffer indicates, Wright presents “a picture of an evolving system” based on the circulation of fire and comets, altering Newton’s “static world-view” and ushering in dynamic cosmology (“Phoenix of Nature,” 189). Yet Wright’s model is less about the physics of celestial structures than their 3D visualization, as Figure 2.5 shows in his keenly extrapolated drawing of a comet’s structure.27 Wright was fully aware of the novelty of his virtual purview. He defines the latter as a “new-created mind, or thinking being . . . suspended in the Aether, exactly in the midway, betwixt Syrius and the Sun,” who can observe the true shape of the Milky Way. This heuristic “being,” at once theoretical figment and extraterrestrial, he adds, “can scarce be called less than an ocular revelation” (Wright, Original Theory, 34, 76). Wright was a follower of mystic Jakob Böhme and believed that after death the soul becomes a disembodied observer, a virtual Oculus roaming the universe. He confesses that “it isn’t easy to know where to stop in such a scene of wonders” (61, 79). The book’s best-known plate showing countless eyes at the center of planetary systems should be read in its full polyvalence: all at once extraterrestrial observers, souls in their afterlife, deistic Eyes of Providence, and three-dimensional visualization making visible the unseeable cosmos.

Alsatian polymath Johann Heinrich Lambert also systematically investigated three-dimensional visualizations. A gifted mathematician, he researched perspective, optics, light, color theory, geometry, astronomy, and cosmology. His overarching concern harks back to Athanasius Kircher’s: how to visualize the structure of the cosmos through projective geometry and the behavior of light in disclosing it. In the 1750s he theorized various kinds of perspectives, including aerial, while improving the design of the perspectograph—a modified pantograph producing elevation drawings from floor plans.28 To improve the rendering of light and shadow in perspectival engraving, he built a quantified setup with candles and partial caches and screens to mathematize laws of surface reflectance and illuminance.29 He also computed the amount of sunlight the Moon’s surface reflects back to Earth. He called his new science of light quantification “photometria”—the second coinage of the prefix photo- after Kircher’s photosophia.

After reading Wright’s Original Theory and his friend Immanuel Kant’s cosmology (see below), Lambert limned out his own cosmology in 1761. Like Wright, he highlighted visualization as a method and a drive: “In every situation that affords a point of view we will place an observatory and an observer.”30 Eschewing Wright’s mysticism, Lambert latches on a real vehicle for his virtual visual exploration, comets, which “being attached to no particular system, are in common to all, and which, roaming from one world to another, make the tour of the universe” (Lambert, System of the World, 57). Born in the Swiss exclave of Mulhouse, Lambert became a wanderer working in Italy before landing at the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin headed by Maupertuis. He writes: “I love to figure to myself those traveling globes, peopled with astronomers, who are stationed there for the express purpose of contemplating nature on a large as we contemplate it on a small scale. The moveable observatory cruising from Sun to Sun, carries them in succession through every different point of view, places them in a situation to survey all, to determine the position and motion of each star, to measure the orbits of the planets and comets which revolve round them” (57). It is as if the enticement of visualization produces a fictional excess—something like the James Webb Space Telescope meeting Star Trek’s USS Enterprise. This fictional excess was, as we’ll see in chapter 7, instrumental for the inception of the cinema apparatus by Camille Flammarion, who drew direct inspiration from both Wright and Lambert.

Immanuel Kant’s Protocinematic Cosmos (1755)

With Kant, both kinemorphic astronomical visualization (in this section) and astroracial discourses (next section) reached an apex in natural philosophy. Practicing neither observation nor mathematics, Kant acquired an advanced knowledge of astronomy early in his career as a teacher. In 1749, he joined the Maupertuisian debate about vis viva in his first published piece, concluding brashly: “We have as yet no dynamics.”31 He subsequently published essays on wind theory, earthquakes, and geological changes, showing his predilection for large dynamic phenomena at long durations. In Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755), Kant expanded his entry for a prize question set by Maupertuis at the Academy of Sciences in Berlin regarding the future of Earth’s spin.32

The nucleus of Kant’s cosmology is Newtonian mechanics approached through modes of visualization developed by Maupertuis, Wright, and Lambert. The resulting model was qualitatively new in offering an exhaustive theory of the formation and evolution of the cosmos over time. It has three key features: all celestial bodies—stars, planets, moons, and comets—form through a gravitational process of accretion and centrifugal expulsion; the cosmos is in constant metamorphosis, not in a Newtonian static equilibrium; the cosmos is formed of embedded gravitational structures (planets and moons, planetary systems, galaxies, and galactic clusters). When Kant describes his visual simulation method, he tacitly couches it as a visual media setup: “I assume the matter of the whole world to be universally dispersed and I make complete chaos out of it. I see matter form in accordance with the established laws of attraction and modify its motion through repulsion. Without the assistance of any arbitrary inventions, I enjoy the pleasure of seeing the creation of a well-ordered whole by reason of established laws of motion which looks so much like the system of the world we have before our eyes that I cannot help but regard it as the same” (“Universal Natural History,” 225–26). Virtual sequential imaging and time compression are the main operations. A panorama of disordered floating matter makes way for sharper pictorial patterns, then closely interlinked pictures, the last of which matches extant stellar maps. Visualization here resembles a magic lantern show with slides depicting the progressive steps of cosmic accretion and distension, from past states that are unseeable to present observations.33 Like Wright and Lambert, he posits virtual viewpoints enabling him to envision cosmic features: “An eye situated in this plane of reference will perceive, in its view into the field of stars at the concave spherical surface of the firmament, this densest concentration of stars in the direction of such a drawn plane in the form of a zone illuminated by much more light” (249). Such visualizations rely expressly on motion parallax: “If such a world of fixed stars is viewed at such an immeasurable distance from the eye of the observer which is outside it, then it will appear under a small angle as a minute space illuminated by a weak light, the shape of which will be round as a circle when its plane presents itself straight to the eye and elliptical when it is seen from the side” (254–55). This lenticular shape of the Milky Way, echoing the lenticular shape of Maupertuis’s disk stars, incites Kant to imagine the origin of the Sun as a spinning cloud of particles condensing into a sphere.34 Planets replicate this process at a smaller scale while beginning to orbit the Sun’s ecliptic plane, and comets form as well in eccentric orbits crossing the ecliptic. He conjectures that Saturn’s rings resulted from particles emitted from that planet, which explains why they did not condense into moons. He then posits that the Milky Way itself formed through a similar process with smaller galaxies in various orbits in deep space. This cogent origin scenario combines gravitational and centrifugal forces through protracted kinemorphic modeling. It amounts to a virtual animation film. Recurring terms such as perspective, angle of view, field of vision, unfolding/evolving (Auswickelung), gradual/ly, successive expansion, sequence, and series emphasize this cinematic character.

Nebular formation hinges on the dynamic concretion and expansion of matter, which Kant simulates to its logical end: All orbiting bodies ultimately lose their centrifugal force and collapse into the central body whose hyperdensity causes it to conflagrate and redisperse into floating matter. A new cycle of nebular formation ensues, with subsequent collapses and regeneration ad infinitum (Kant, “Universal Natural History,” 320–21).35 This endless two-stroke engine of the universe leads Kant to entertain three major consequences (the third of which is discussed in the following section).

The first is sheer astonishment that this macrocosmic kinemorphic ballet really exists and, coextensively, that a human mind can visualize it. The two are often expressed together: “I represent the infinite nature of all creation, the formation of new worlds and the decline of the old ones and the unlimited realm of the chaos of the imagination”; “I find nothing that can raise the human spirit to nobler astonishment, by giving us a perspective on the unending field of the almighty, than this part of the theory that concerns the successive completion of creation” (Kant, “Universal Natural History,” 235, 312). The miracle is that visualization and the cosmos in a way commune through the same process: a “self-forming nature in thought through the entire space of chaos” (264). This produces a vivid sense of kinesthetic pleasure verging on euphoria: “It is a not inconsiderable pleasure to allow one’s imagination to roam freely beyond the limits of perfected creation into the realm of chaos and to see half raw nature in the proximity of the sphere of the formed world lose itself bit by bit through all stages and shadings of incompletion in the whole of unformed space” (315). Kant even wonders whether pleasure might not be the godhead’s motivation for creating the universe: “Meanwhile, so that nature will beautify eternity with changeable scenes [veränderlichen Auftritten], God remains busy in ceaseless creation to make the material for the formation of even greater worlds” (318). These “changeable scenes,” we should add, share a family resemblance with what Georges Méliès called “transformation views [vues à transformation]” (trick edits) in the 1890s.36 Kant indeed digresses on scenes of optical wonder: “Let us have our imagination represent a wonderfully strange object such as a burning sun as it were from close-up. In one glance, we see broad lakes of fire lifting their flames up to the sky” (327). These include counterfactuals such as imagining a ring around Earth (303). As in Wright and Lambert, cosmology entwines the universe with imagination’s jubilant powers of cinematic visualization.

The second consequence is that flights of visual fancy conceal the flipside of the cosmic scenario: the dysphoria of human finitude. If the universe is in an endless oscillating cycle, it has no specific aim, no end. Consequently, neither do human life and humanity, making the power to visualize the cosmos and see through God’s works a useless if not perverse faculty: “We see the first members of a progressive relationship of worlds and systems, and the first part of this infinite progression already gives us to understand what we can suppose about the whole. There is no end here but rather an abyss of a true immeasurability into which all capacity of human concepts sinks even if it is raised with the help of mathematics” (Kant, “Universal Natural History,” 256). This palpable ontological anxiety increases as the treatise goes on. Combining dizzying visualization and scientific simulation, it resembles Kant’s later twin category of the sublime (dynamic and mathematic). We might call it Kant’s dark kinemorphic sublime.

Because its publisher quickly went out of business, and because Kant turned away from natural philosophy to craft the modern foundation of epistemic critique, his cosmological book has remained on the historical sidelines. Its instrumental role in the eighteenth-century crystallization of ideas of photocinema is all the more crucial to reestablish.

Kant’s Telos of Whiteness

Kant’s third riposte to endless cosmic visualization is racial whiteness. Scholars have long probed the reasons for Kant’s critical turn at the completion of his cosmology. According to Michael Friedman, Kant was left with ontological anxiety about balancing freedom and faith, together with the puzzle of anthropology: the meaning of humanity (Friedman, Kant’s Construction of Nature, 590–91, 607). Kantian critique, in this view, recentered human life, reason, and historicity against the dark kinemorphic sublime. Yet between Kant’s precinematic cosmology and his critical anthropology there lies a submerged continuity: the structural role of race in orienting human ends.

Kant’s cosmology, indeed, has an overlooked racial component. Kant took the plurality of worlds for granted: “Most of the planets are certainly inhabited . . . and those that are not will be at some stage,” he affirms (Kant, “Universal Natural History,” 354). Like Bernard Le Bovier, sieur de Fontenelle, he takes white supremacy as a universal that, in turns, discloses the architectonic of the universe:

If a law is to be in place according to which the domiciles of intelligent creatures are distributed in the order of their relation to the common centre point, we shall have to place the lowest and least complete type that constitutes, as it were, the beginning of the type of the spiritual world, at that region that can be called the beginning of the entire universe in order to fill simultaneously with this and in equal progression all infinity of time and spaces with increasing degrees of perfection of the capacity to think and as it were gradually to approach the goal of the highest excellence, namely the divinity without, however, ever being able to attain it. (331)

In this somewhat opaque passage, Kant equates “lowest” intelligence with mass and pure embodiment, while higher intelligence is immaterial and close to the divinity. This directly translates the racist instrumentalization of Black peoples as reducible to their bodies and white peoples to their minds. Kant ascribed the center of the universe near the star Sirius, positioning Earth mid-universe: “Human nature, which occupies as it were the middle rung on the ladder of beings, sees itself as being between the two extreme limits of perfection” (329). As in Fontenelle, humans occupy the middle position in the cosmos and in the solar system insofar as white people occupy the temperate climatic lands on Earth. Kant blends all three cosmic scales together, exulting: “What an amazing sight! On the one hand, we saw thinking creatures among whom a Greenlander or Hottentot would be Newton, on the other hand, those who would admire him as an ape” (360–61). Rehearsing verses from Alexander Pope (which he quotes), Kant appears to relativize human intelligence from a cosmic perspective.37 By the same token, however, he naturalizes at the scale of the universe the racial hierarchy established by white supremacy. For Kant, planets of any star system—and the life-forms and inhabitants they produce—reflect different biophysics due to their distance to the star. Beings on higher planets (Saturn and Jupiter) display a “fineness of the material, in the elasticity of the vessels and in the lightness and efficacy of the fluids . . . which delays far longer the frailty that is the consequence of the sluggishness of coarse matter,” the latter characterizing beings on lower planets (Mercury and Venus). The difference extends to aesthetics as well. Kant contrasts Jupiter’s multiple moons and Saturn’s beautiful rings to “the lower planets [Mercury and Venus] on which this supply [of beauty] would be wasted uselessly, whose class borders more closely on the lack of reason” (363). Kant is not producing biophysical conjectures, he is rehearsing Fontenelle’s astroracialization—he is racing the cosmos. Kant’s chapter on multiple worlds indeed closes on a stark rhetorical question—namely, whether “those inhabiting the lower planets are attached too firmly to matter and equipped with far too few spiritual abilities to be permitted to bear the responsibility of their actions before the judgment seat of justice” (366). Again, decrypting this in racial terms plainly means that, from a cosmological vantage point, Black people and other people of color cannot self-govern and have no agency—are childishly irresponsible, justifying both white colonization and Black enslavement.

Insisting that inhabitants of the solar system “become more and more excellent and perfect in proportion to the distance of their domiciles from the Sun,” Kant muses that “satellites orbiting around Jupiter will light our way in the future,” perhaps after death (“Universal Natural History,” 359, 367). This migration from less-perfect dense Earth to more-perfect cold Jupiter has a clear racial parallel too: instances of kidnapped African individuals transplanted to and educated in Europe who attained a so-called white intelligence. Kant was certainly aware of his colleague Anton Wilhelm Amo. Taken from Ghana as a child and brought to Germany, where he completed a doctorate in philosophy, Amo taught at the University of Jena in the 1740s—a few hundred miles from Kant in Königsberg, Germany.

Because the cosmology of Kant is the first full-fledged scientific work that is through and through kinemorphic (and because he is, after all, Kant), its astroracist discourse, echoing Fontenelle’s, must be considered central for the racial foundations of the matrix of photocinema. Kant relied on two other racial constructs to anchor his idea of white supremacy, and both have a bearing on photocinema. He stated the first bluntly in unpublished notes from the 1780s: “All races will be wiped out . . . , except the white one.” As Jon M. Mikkelsen indicates, in between the two parts of this quote, Kant wrote: “[Native] Americans and Negroes cannot govern themselves. Thus are only good as slaves,” a comment interchangeable with lower extraterrestrials’ inability “to bear the responsibility of their actions.”38 Besides the philosophical rationale that Sylvia Wynter and Denise Ferreira da Silva adduce—that thinking subjects were construed by the Enlightenment as necessarily white (see the introduction)—Kant’s argument for the disappearance of nonwhite races comes from natural philosophy. Assenting to prevalent monogenism, Kant posited that all humans start from the same genetic germ or seed (Keime) and that, depending on thermometabolic conditions, this germ takes on different racial expressions manifested primarily by skin color: “white, black, red, and yellow.”39 We are returned to Francis Godwin’s Lunarian children downing race by bioadaptation to the Earth’s atmosphere.

Kant’s lectures on physical geography, which he gave yearly for four decades, show that he embraced the idea that Black peoples are born white, the thermometabolic theory of skin color, and Johannes Kepler’s notion that Black skin is thicker than white skin, together with Robert Hooke’s version of chromatic/racial blackness as the disappearance of light into skin pores.40 In the chapter on extraterrestrial inhabitants of his 1755 cosmology, Kant connects “the effect of light and heat” to “the ability of matter to accept them and more or less resist its drive” (Kant, “Universal Natural History,” 303). In the 1802 version of his course on physical geography, Kant indicates that “recent chemical investigations” show that light “is something material,” an acknowledgment of Jean Senebier’s photochemical work (see chapter 3) (Kant, “Physical Geography,” 498). Kant’s theory of race thus became more fully photological in the 1780s: Skin color is caused by exposure to light and passed on via heredity.41

The question is why the bioexpression of Kant’s common germ should favor the becoming-white of all races as a teleology of human history.42 My conjecture is that Kant’s photological racial telos is ultimately beholden to Newton’s Opticks, which remained a lifelong reference.43 James Delbourgo shows, for instance, that Newton’s color theory of the spectrum inspired an influential model of Black skin by John Mitchell in the 1750s, which Olaudah Equiano and Thomas Clarkson still embraced in the 1780s.44 What informs Kant’s telic whiteness, I propose, is Newton’s determinant experiment on the decomposition of white light into its color constituents and its subsequent synthesis back into white light.45 Newton used a solar microscope in a camera obscura, letting the light beam decompose through a prism before bisecting it with a fast-moving comb and then a convex lens. The beam was then projected onto a screen as white light: “And these ranges of Colours, if the Comb was moved continually up and down with a reciprocal motion, ascended and descended in the Paper, and when the motion of the Comb was so quick, that the Colours could not be distinguished from one another, the whole Paper by their confusion and mixture in the Sensorium appeared white.”46 Let us note first that Newton’s advanced apparatus—solar microscope, camera obscura, convex lens, shutter, and projection onto a screen—represents the core apparatus of pre-photography, while the shutter and screen projection belong to film technology. Newton adds that “every Body reflects the rays of its own Colour more copiously than the rest” (Opticks, 1:135). This lends itself to a racial interpretation in the sense that colored bodies belong only to their native emplacement in the spectrum while, by contrast, whiteness is synthetizing, unrestricted, and universal. Kant opined that Black people are born white (ontogeny) but also that “the first human lineal stem stock” closely resembled the phylogenetic makeup of “whites.”47 Kant’s natural racial teleology thus follows Newton’s decomposition of light to the letter: Racial whiteness is decomposed into people of color and then recomposed into telic whiteness.

Newton’s Opticks ends with famous queries, one of which harks back to Hooke’s redefinition of optical blackness (see chapter 1): “Do not black Bodies conceive heat more easily from Light than those of other Colours do, by reason that the Light falling on them is not reflected outwards but enters the Bodies, and is often reflected and refracted within them, until it be stifled and lost?” (Opticks, 3:133). Newton’s photological language here is as racialized as Hooke’s, making “black Bodies” supremely unfit to conceptualize light because they absorb heat. In his 1785 debate with Kant on race, Johann Gottfried von Herder rehearsed Thomas Clarkson’s continuum theory of skin color: “Complexions run into each other. . . . All are at last but shades of the same great picture.”48 Kant insisted instead that Blackness rested outside of this continuum, invoking a recent chemical rationale for Black skin: excessive intake of phlogiston.49 In the 1770s and 1780s, the explanation for photochemical blackening centered precisely on phlogiston (old model) or oxygenation (Antoine Lavoisier’s new model), particularly via the work of Senebier, which Kant knew (see chapter 3).50

Herschelian Cosmology and the Chrono-Imaging Equation

It was William Herschel assisted by his sister Caroline Herschel who finalized kinemorphic cosmology while formulating the conceptual bridge between static and cinematic imaging. While John Herschel is recognized as key to pre-photography history—assisting William Henry Fox Talbot’s research and giving photography its name—his father and aunt made contributions just as critical. Their saga needs no retelling, but let me provide salient points.51 William was a German musician who became passionate for astronomy in the 1770s after moving to England during the Seven Years’ War. An autodidact, he used reflector telescopes (parabolic mirror and lens) rather than the refractors (two lenses) almost exclusively used at that time. The mirrors he ground by hand were of such quality that in 1783 he became the first known person to discover a planet (Uranus), confounding the astronomical establishment. In the following years, always with Caroline’s expert assistance—she forced him to secure for her a Crown salary, the first woman researcher ever paid by a state—they resolved hundreds of double stars (including Polaris), which no other telescope could do, revolutionizing stellar astronomy. William built the largest telescope to date in 1789, discovering two moons around Saturn—the first new moons of the solar system since 1670. He and Caroline recorded thousands of nebulae and star clusters, coming up with a novel typology of star systems enabling a reliable outline of the natural formation of the universe based on solid data. For the educated public, the Herschels incarnated the freethinking Enlightenment remaking the world.52

William Herschel proceeded from a musical insight: fine-tuned rehearsed movement.53 He contrived a new mirror-grinding machine, experimenting with various strokes, pressures, and directions painstakingly documented in hundreds of pages and drawings in Caroline’s hand.54 Observation was optimized with Caroline taking down coordinates so William would not lose night vision, while implementing new visual techniques (based on Nicolas Louis de Lacaille’s): moving the telescope either horizontally counter to Earth’s rotation to accelerate observation of a celestial band (a “sweep”) or up and down across two adjacent bands (a “double swath”). To assess stellar distribution in the Milky Way, William conducted “star-gages”—that is, statistical approximations of 3D star density within a cone of observation. All such protocols combining vision, motion, and 3D visualization were unprecedented (Hoskin, Discoverers of the Universe, 82). During the day, William probed all aspects of observation, from the properties of glass and metal to the behavior of light, vision, and even ways of looking into the eyepiece—“practicing to see,” as he put it (Hirshfeld, Parallax, 179).55 This led him to experimenting in a camera obscura with lenses and prisms, wondering whether colors moved at different speeds by comparing the spectra of various stars—the beginning of spectroscopy. Noticing that red colors felt warmer to his eye, in 1799–1800 he measured the temperature of the spectrum and discovered a heat peak in the invisible margin beyond red: “calorific rays.” They were later called “infrared” (see chapter 3).

With the finest and largest catalog of nebulae and stars compiled by Caroline, William began “analyzing the heavens” in 1789, classifying star clusters by sketching their contours.56 With this vast panorama of shapes (over 2,500), the brother-sister team realized they held the key to the formation of star groupings. William uses an analogy with botany to explain it: “Is it not almost the same thing, whether we live successively to witness the germination, blooming, foliage, fecundity, fading, withering and corruption of a plant, or whether a vast number of specimens, selected from every stage through which the plant passes in the course of its existence, be brought at once to our view?” (“Catalogue,” 226). If the maturation of galaxies and star clusters could not be directly observed, their kinemorphic evolution could be visualized through discrete cluster contours organized in morphic sequences. In other words, a survey of different objects of different ages distributed in space disclosed their common evolution in time. William was aware of this, writing: “After having shown the extent of the power of my 40ft telescope to penetrate into space, I should have added page 84, that this instrument may be said to have also the power of penetrating into time: at least with respect to what is past.”57 With this new “method of viewing the heavens,” he adds, “we can, as it were, extend the range of our experience to immense duration” (226). Michael Hoskin points out that this purview “ushered in our modern astronomy in which everything—individual stars, clusters, even the universe itself—has a life history” (Discoverers of the Universe, 86).

William’s equation is pivotal for media history: An array of static images was shown to be equivalent to an unseeable but visualizable kinemorphic sequence in time. This is the epistemic condition of possibility for transforming sequential photographs—via chronophotography—into motion pictures. In sum, the Herschels transformed the cosmos from a realm of discontinuous objects and shapes to a coherent virtual film of its natural history. We cannot overstate the importance of this Herschelian equation: Charles Darwin, Ernst Haeckel, Étienne-Jules Marey, and Flammarion each expanded its kinemorphic visualization, expressly attributing it to the Herschels.58 Astronomy historians assert that William was not aware of the earlier dynamic cosmic models of Wright and Kant, but this is highly unlikely; more research will likely show that Berlin astronomer Johann Elert Bode was the bridge.59

Among other techniques of visualization, William used various pictorial strategies, from star cluster schematization to perspectival drawing and composite sketching. He writes: “The foregoing theoretical view, with all its consequential appearances, as seen by an eye inclosed in one of the nebulae, is no other than a drawing from nature, wherein the features of the original have been closely copied; and I hope the resemblance will not be called a bad one, when it shall be considered how very limited must be the pencil of the inhabitant of so small and retired a portion of an indefinite system in attempting the picture of so unbounded an extent” (“Catalogue,” 220). As Omar W. Nasim shows in his examination of William’s pictorial practices, copy is a summary term for a process of comparisons, collating and schematizing that synthesizes “composite pictorial representations, formed over time.” These crafted images amount to “a whole series of controlled glimpses turned into an extended and steady gaze,” another equation of discrete images with a dynamic process (Nasim, Observing by Hand, 17–18). William’s extended metaphor—“drawing from nature,” “copied,” “pencil,” “picture”—evokes rather remarkably the conceit of The Pencil of Nature, the title of the famous 1844 essay on photography by Talbot, who closely studied the work of William Herschel when training as an astronomer (see chapter 4). Yet the latter was never committed to static pictorial copies of the cosmos, and indeed “On the Construction of the Heavens” aimed foremost to provide “a section of our sidereal system” to sample cosmogenesis.60 While the copy he refers to is from a nebulae’s purview—that is, “objective” in the nonhuman model of vision I outlined in chapter 1—proto-photographic and protocinematic insights are closely entwined in his cosmology.

In the 1783 paper “On the Proper Motion of the Sun and Solar System,” Herschel asserts that “there is not, in strictness of speaking, one fixed star in the heavens” and “there can hardly remain a doubt of the general motion of all the starry systems, and consequently of the solar one among them.”61 Expanding on Bradley’s conjecture that the solar system orbits the center of the Milky Way, he muses: “A star, a sun, such as ours, may have a proper motion within its own system of stars, while at the same time the whole starry system to which it belongs may have another proper motion, totally different in quantity and direction” (“On the Proper Motion,” 276). Calling such compound cosmic motions “intersystematical,” William visualizes the cosmos as layers upon kinemorphic layers so that the motion of an object can only be relative to the scale of its structure. In other words, there is no proper motion in the cosmos since motion is ultimately dependent on a visual framework.62 This means that the cosmos may be simulated, visualized in samples, and illustrated in small areas but not mimetically pictured as a whole.63

Animating History: Astronomical Culture and the Specter of Slavery

Astronomy in the eighteenth century was equally pivotal for colonial power, instrument innovation, and panoptic Enlightenment ideology.64 The dynamic model of the universe that emerged from it altered public perception of the sensorium of space-time for both natural history and human history. Besides Kant, several philosophers intervened directly in astronomical culture. Voltaire studied Newtonian mechanics with Gabrielle-Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise du Châtelet and penned Micromégas (1752) to satirize the multiple worlds hypothesis, while Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel wrote his inaugural dissertation “On the Orbits of Planets” in 1801. Even a social philosopher like Adam Smith explored in the late 1750s, in “The Principles Which Lead and Direct Philosophical Enquiries; Illustrated by the History of Astronomy,” to try to understand, in the words of a recent scholar, “the constituents and dynamics of human nature.”65 Smith puzzles in particular on the workings of the imagination: “The supposition of a chain of intermediate, though invisible, events, which succeed each other in a train similar to that in which the imagination has been accustomed to move, and which link together those two disjointed appearances, is the only means by which the imagination can fill up this interval, is the only bridge which, if one may say so, can smooth its passage from the one object to the other.”66 I want to insist on the expression “intermediate, though invisible, events” because it encapsulates the inspiration for animated visualization and recurs in my reconstruction of the development of photocinema (see chapter 6). Smith adds that “a system is an imaginary machine invented to connect together in the fancy those different movements and effects which are already in reality performed” (“Principles,” 44). Contemporaneous with Kant’s dynamic cosmology, this comment foregrounds mechanical simulation over visual reproduction—a key feature of precinema.

Smith’s primary concern, however, was human history: understanding what dictates the conceptual progress of astronomy. Like Voltaire, Kant, and Hegel, he sought to derive from the achievements of natural philosophy new ways of modeling the dynamics of human conceptual evolution as a whole. This collective effort at modeling yielded an intriguing prototype of the cinema apparatus. In 1753, a medical doctor, linguist, experimental scientist, and gazetteer named Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg decided to construct an “imaginary machine” modeling history. A friend of Benjamin Franklin, he served as a conduit for French financial and logistic support to the American Revolution while translating and publishing the writings of Franklin and Benjamin Rush.67 In 1753 he published Chronography, or Description of Times, a pamphlet listing political, cultural, and artistic figures of world history since “Creation,” in parallel rows with columnar increments of ten years per inch.68 To render the flow of events more vivid, he also designed “a chronographic machine [une machine chronographique]”: an articulated casing with a fifty-four-foot scroll on two reels, which Denis Diderot describes in the Encyclopédie as comprising “two parallel cylinders, around one of which [the scroll] rolls itself at the same time that it unreels from the other, both exposing a quite large interval of time, & successively all the sequence of times & events, either descending from the creation of the world to us, or ascending from our time to that of creation.”69 In the pamphlet’s preface, Barbeu-Dubourg asks: “Indeed, what is History? It is the Collection of all that the eyes have seen, all that the ears have heard” (Chronographie, 1). It is an archive of collective audiovisual perceptions, not just the list of great men and events he sketched. This machine was willfully cinematic, displaying “an entertaining & as it were mechanical science speaking to the eyes & the imagination, a moving & animated tableau [tableau mouvant & animé]” (8). Unnoticed by media historians, it is the prototype for all subsequent two-reel visual apparatuses from rolling panoramas to film projectors and photo cartridges. Diderot’s astute comment about forward and reverse motion constitutes perhaps the earliest instance of this unique feature thought to be specific to the film apparatus. This chronographic machine is not a copying device, it is a history-visualizing media. As we see in subsequent chapters, visualizing the flow of history’s past and future represents an overlooked enticement for the matrix of photocinema. When he learned in 1769 from Franklin that Quakers had renounced slavery, Barbeu-Dubourg marveled at this “good example for the universe.” He believed that “all men are but one people made of Franco-Anglo-Negro-Sino-Turco-Russians,” a rare long view of national-ethnic mélange, in lieu of the Enlightenment’s segregated racial phylogeny.70

Around the mid-eighteenth century, astronomy’s considerable lengthening of the time frame of human history precipitated various reevaluations of racial difference, first from the purview of astronomy—as we saw in Maupertuis and Kant—then within debates about the maintenance of slavery. Astronomer David Rittenhouse illustrates the linkage between the two purviews. The leading astronomer of the American colonies, he was responsible for the success of the 1769 Venus transit observation campaign in America, which convinced Europe that the colonies now formed an enlightened polity whose autonomy was worth supporting. As Eran Shalev shows, Newtonian mechanics and astronomy were instrumental for John Adams’s and Thomas Jefferson’s spirit of independence, explaining why revolutionary discourse disproportionately tapped the astronomical lexicon of stars, Constellation, galaxy, and new planet down to the constellated banner of the new republic.71 In the words of Thomas Paine: “In no instance hath nature made the satellite larger than its primary planet; and as England and America . . . reverse the common order of nature, it is evident that they belong to different systems: England to Europe, America to itself.”72 In 1775, during the crucial Second Congress, Rittenhouse was recompensed with the keynote for the American Philosophical Association conference.73 Through a Smith-like recitation of the conceptual progress of astronomy, he took his audience on an imaginary trip through the cosmos, commenting, for instance, on star systems “sufficiently removed from each other’s attraction” as to cancel interaction—an echo of Paine’s independentist rhetoric. He leveraged the multiple worlds hypothesis to figure America as an extraterrestrial world whose inhabitants “are wise enough to govern themselves according to the dictates of that reason their creator has given them.” But then Rittenhouse addresses “real” aliens to critique America’s anti-Blackness: “Happy people, and perhaps more happy still that all communication with us is denied. We have neither corrupted you with our vices nor injured you with violence. None of your sons and daughters, degraded from their native dignity, have been doomed to endless slavery by us in America merely because their bodies may be disposed to reflect or absorb the rays of light, in a way different from ours” (Rittenhouse, Oration, 19–20). As British authorities threatened rebellious colonies with emancipation as a form of retribution, Rittenhouse’s antislavery dig came across as doubly anti-American to enslavers like Jefferson.74 Rittenhouse’s redefinition of racial difference as having merely to do with the physics of light reflection is nodal for this study. It explains why contemporaneous astronomers were often found at the forefront of abolitionism, why the new photochemistry became more racialized as antislavery movements arose, and why African American Benjamin Banneker embraced astronomy as a worthy pursuit in revolutionary times.75

In France, the leading antiabolitionist in the 1780s was Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, who trained in mathematics and celestial mechanics under astronomers Alexis-Claude Clairaut and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert. He tackled the three-body problem of gravitational interactions between Earth, the Moon, and the Sun, requiring complex calculus and high visualization skills. In 1777, he became secretary of the Académie des Sciences, among the most powerful positions in the Republic of Letters.76 In 1781, under the pseudonym “M. Schwartz” (“black” in German), Condorcet published Reflections on the Enslavement of Negroes, refuting key tenets of slavery: polygenesis, mental deficiency, and juridical rationales.77 Calling slavery a “crime” and an “injustice,” Condorcet nonetheless favored incremental emancipation with compensations for enslavers (Schwartz, Réflexions, 1, v).78 In 1789, Condorcet radicalized his views on equality, writing: “Either no individual in humankind has true rights, or all have the same rights, and whoever votes against the right of another, whatever their religion, color or gender, thereby forfeits his.”79 This expression of inclusivity in our contemporary sense made him a strategic target of the plantocratic lobby. After the 1791 revolution by enslaved people in Saint-Domingue—the first successful overcoming of slavery by Black actors—the revolutionary assembly voted in 1794 to abolish slavery in the French colonies, where it had little control, and thus to little effect. Meanwhile, the Committee on Public Safety unleashed the Reign of Terror against its opponents, causing Condorcet to take his own life in 1794 while hiding in despair.

During that loaded hiatus, Condorcet jotted Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind, proponing progress as a historical vector—that is, transforming astronomy-inflected natural history into social physics (he was the first to use the expression social sciences).80 The esquisse (outline) and tableau (view) of the title accentuate the visualizability of history’s flow:

This picture [tableau], therefore, is historical since, as it must be subjected to perpetual variations, it is formed by the successive observation of human societies at the different eras through which they have passed. It will accordingly exhibit the order in which the changes have taken place, explain the influence of every past epoch upon that which follows it, and thus show, by the modifications which the human species has experienced, in its incessant renovation through the immensity of the ages, the course which it has pursued, and the steps which it has advanced towards truth and happiness. From these observations on what man has heretofore been, and what he is at present, we shall be led to the means of securing and accelerating the still further progresses, for which, from his nature, we may indulge the hope.81

Condorcet models history as the “successive observation” of a sequence of events morphing into one another in a way that parallels the Herschels’ kinemorphic model of cosmic evolution. For Condorcet, human history is plainly coextensive with cosmology:

The progress of this perfectibility, henceforth above the control of every power that would impede it, has no other limit than the duration of the globe upon which nature has placed us. The course of this progress may doubtless be more or less rapid, but it can never be retrograde; at least while the Earth retains its situation in the system of the universe, and the laws of this system shall neither effect upon the globe a general overthrow, nor introduce such changes as would no longer permit the human race to preserve and exercise therein the same faculties, and find the same resources. (Outlines, 4–5; Esquisse, 7–8)

This macrocosmic history model, of which this text is but a sketch, was to be printed in decimal columns, like Barbeu-Dubourg’s chronography—its avowed model. Condorcet emphasizes the cognitive function of schematic visualization, meant “to gather a great number of objects systematically disposed so as to allow their relationships to be viewed at a glance” (Esquisse, 282). For him, the vector of history points unmistakably to a future devoid of slavery, colonialism, and religions, organized around a global and inclusive planetary republic (248–59). He developed this project further in a short summary titled “Fragment on Atlantis, or Combined Efforts by Humankind Towards the Progress of the Sciences,” which limns out this “universal republic of science” (Esquisse, 383–431). Supported by networks of astronomical and meteorological observatories, the planetary republic would rely on demographic, eugenic, and epidemiological research meant to increase the life expectancy of world populations. For philosophers of history like Hegel and Auguste Comte, as well as for the entire nineteenth-century European agenda of world colonization, Condorcet’s kinemorphic model was paradigmatic, albeit within an explicitly white suprematist view of world history that remains more tacit in Condorcet.

Western supremacy was not a given in cosmologically inflected models of history, as a frenetic 1799 novel attests, written by L.-M. Henriquez, a populist who satirized Jean-Paul Marat and Maximilien Robespierre and miraculously survived the Reign of Terror. Titled Voyage and Adventures of Frondeabus, Son of Herschel, in the Fifth Part of the World, Translated from the Herschelic Language, it is a picaresque satire of the lost utopia of the French Revolution.82 The hero Frondeabus (named after fronde et abus, or “rebellion and abuse,” formerly a political crime against the Crown) comes from Uranus to visit Earth, where he is met by “an aerial flotilla, headed by the best aeronauts of the four parts of the world” (Henriquez, Voyage et adventures de Frondeabus, 199). He brings a hedonic message of freedom partly based on sexual liberation: “A celestial fire descends, from one pole to the other, electrifying the universe; everything loves in nature” (115). He champions women’s rights and “the working industrious class, working like a machine” dreaming of liberating all people and ending slavery (194, 123). “In Africa,” the protagonist claims, “I am sold with two thousand negroes; I cover them with a cloud and lift them into the air,” also freeing Black enslaved people in America from hanging and Jews condemned by auto-da-fé in Portugal (207). The humans he brings back from Earth to Herchellipolis “are male and female, white, black, brown, olive-colored, of all hues and instincts,” representatives of the full spectrum of humanity. The narrative ends on a pious note for the revolution: “May one day this infant republic become a model for all people” (215). The novel was favorably reviewed by the anti-Jacobin Mercure de France and by another main periodical for its second edition.83 Substituting Herchellipolis, a new capital in Uranus named after the pioneer of modern cosmology, for the missed promise of the Revolution in Paris, Henriquez underlined the frailty of the revolutionary spirit allied with progress when antiracism vanishes from its core. But it also makes plain how kinemorphic visualization at the very end of the eighteenth century, as an antecedent to technologized moving images of the nineteenth century, intertwined the history of the universe and human history around the salient overcoming of anti-Blackness.