Back to top
6.
Degrees or Attitudes to Environmental Control.
Original holograph draft manuscript (2 foolscap sheets, pinned at top left corner), together with another holograph draft manuscript + author’s typescript of the revised text, re-titled ‘Degrees of Environmental Control’ (each 4pp., gathered by two paper clips). No date (c. 1967).
The text include a graphic chart “representing the total environment as experienced by the human”, showing “the interaction between the sensory stimuli which act on the nervous system and the channels they pass through on the way to the brain and classification of all the activities of man”.
Probably written for a proposed magazine article (presumed unpublished), the texts form part of Boyle’s contemporary preoccupation with the dislocation of the senses (in order to feel “the full force of the environment that surrounds us”), his ambition to examine, record and “include everything in a single work”, and his increasing interest in “the changing human” within the wider social environment. The bibliography included at the end of the revised text lists works by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, R. Buckminster Fuller, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Ernst Gombrich, Otto Lowenstein, Werner Heisenberg, Jack Vernon and Marshall McLuhan, giving an idea of his frame of reference.
All three mss. in Very Good state and unfolded (slight rust marks to pin and paper clips).
