No More Learning

That is why - and now comes the second thesis - the unfulfilled wish for moving images prodnced another medium, which could at least satisfy it in the realm of the imaginary for a period of time before the invention of film: romantic literature. Under this term I also include, in contrast to many Germanists, the so-called German or Weimar classic period.
When this is taken for granted, it is easy to prove the second thesis. Take, for example, the first German ghost novel of all, Schiller's uncompleted The Ghost-Seer, which was published in several thrilling instalments in the Thalia, Schiller's own newspaper, between 1787 and 1789. The hero of the novel is a German Protes- tant prince, who is only separated from the throne by a few senior relatives who are still alive. According to the arch-positivistic proof offered by a Germanist in 1903, this prince may actually have been a prince of Wiirttemberg. It can also be proved that he believed in spiritualism or the practice of seeing ghosts, and after the death of Duke Carl Eugen, Schiller's own pedagogue or despot, he had well- founded prospects for the line of succession for a time. While this hero stops in Venice on the Cavaliers' tour, which was an absolute requisite for members of the nobility at that time, one of his bother- some relatives dies in a mysterious and unnatural way. The prince hears rumors in Venice that a group of mysterious people, including a so-called Armenian, are interested in eliminating these bothersome relatives and thus helping the prince himself achieve the princely line of succession. The first part of the novel, however, mostly deals with a ghost conjuration, which a nameless Sicilian is holding for the prince and his entourage in the hinterland of Venice on the beautiful Brenta.
We found in the middle of the room a large black circle, drawn with
charcoal, the space within which was capable of containing us all very
easily. The planks of the chamber floor next to the wall were taken
up, all round the room, so that we stood, as it were, upon an island.
102
? ? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
An altar, covered with black cloth, was placed in the center upon a
carpet of red satin. A Chaldee Bible was laid open, together with a
skull; and a silver crucifix was fastened upon the altar. Instead of candles some spirits of wine were burning in a silver vessel. A thick smoke of frankincense darkened the room, and almost extinguished the lights. The Sorcerer was undressed like ourselves, but bare-footed; about his bare neck he wore an amulet, suspended by a chain of human hair; round his middle was a white apron, marked with cabalistic characters and symbolical figures. He desired us to join hands, and to observe profound silence; above all, he ordered us not to ask the apparition any question. He desired the Englishman and myself, whom he seemed to mistrust the most, constantly to hold two naked swords crossways, an inch above his head, as long as the conjuration should last. We formed -a half moon round him; the Russian officer placed himself close to the English lord, and was the nearest to the altar. The sorcerer stood upon the satin carpet with his face turned to the east. He sprinkled holy water in the direction of the four cardinal points of the compass, and bowed three times before the Bible. The formula of the conjuration, of which we did not understand a word, lasted for the space of seven or eight minutes; at the end of which he made a sign to those who stood close behind to seize him firmly by the hair. Amid the most violent convulsions he called the deceased three times by his name, and the third time he stretched forth his hand towards the crucifix. On a sudden we all felt, at the same instant, a stroke as of a flash of lightning, so powerful that it obliged us to quit each other's hands; a terrible thunder shook the house; the locks jarred; the doors creaked; the cover of the silver box fell down, and extinguished the light; and on the opposite wall, over the chimney-piece, appeared a human figure, in a bloody shirt, with the paleness of death on its countenance. "Who calls me? " said a hollow, hardly intelligible voice.
(Schiller, 1904-5, II, pp. 248-9)
It later comes to light that the figure rudely chasing away the phan- tasmagorical figure of the spirit conjured by the Sicilian is none other than the Armenian. He has the Sicilian arrested by the Venetian police and forces him in jail to reveal to the prince all the technical tricks involved in producing magic. The readers of the novel then learn, along with the prince, that the ghost of the deceased was projected onto an artificial curtain of smoke using a lanterna magica, and the flash of lightning, which was felt by everyone present, was triggered by a hidden source of electrical energy - presumably a Leyden jar, as voltaic batteries did not yet exist. For those of you attending these lectures, however, this systematic enlightenment is hardly necessary:
103
? ? ? ? ? I'"''
OPTICAL MEDIA
you will have already recognized the simtlarities between the events organized by tbe Sicilian and those organized by Schropfer, and in the fictional Venice you will also have recognized the historical-empirical Leipzig coffee house.
I begin the new year, the last one of this millennium, with the wish that it has begun well for all of you and that it will also continue to go well. Naturally, tbat does not mean that all of the good resolutions you would like to make must also be fulfilled. What will be fulfilled first is only my good resolution to begin the new year by continuing to the second major part of these lectures, whIch deals witb optical media technologies. In today's lecture, the tales from the history of art and literature, witb which I have sought to entertam you up until now, come to an abrupt end.
I have already emphasized that Schiller's novel was published in instalments, which were designed to produce more suspense for the reader. This is the reason why a magical Armenian sud- denly emerged from the circle of ghost conjurers and put a stop to the Sicilian's deceitful game by whipping up a three-dimensional ghost instead of a two-dimensional one. As if to allegorize Hegel's battle between the Enlightenment and superstition, therefore, the
1,1,
I:,? " Armenian hovers between the power of disillusionment and the
1,1"
i,? ? "
power of creating even more remarkable illusions. On the one hand, by handing the Sicilian over to the Venetian police and then system- atically interrogating him in prison, the Armenian provides the prince with a technically pure enlighteument that is above all the tricks that marked the conjuring of ghosts. In the second part of the novel, on the other hand, this apparent enlightenment proves to be a stratagem
",I" under whose protection the Armenian is able to go from exposing first-degree magic to producing second-degree magic without arous- ing any suspicions. It even turns out that the Sicilian was only one of the minions employed by the Armenian himself, and his intentionally transparent deception was supposed to set the stage for the actual deception. The novel is not about ghostly apparitions for their own sake, out of pure curiosity so to speak; rather, it is about a German and thus an enlightened and absolutist prince who is made to believe once again in apparitions. The perfect example of this optical belief is called Catholicism in the novel, and more specifically the Jesuit Order. Only a decade after most Central European states, includ- ing even the Vatican itself, suppressed the Jesuit Order, everything revolves around the machinations of an order that seeks to regain its power over German princedoms by either murdering Protestant heirs to the throne or converting them to the only true church. The early
104
? ? ? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
modern rule cuius reglO, eius religioSwas valid, at least pro forma, until the time immediately preceding Napoleon's dismantling of the old empire. All of the illusionary techniques that Schiller borrowed from his close knowledge of Schriipfer were accordingly transferred from the German swindler to the secret Catholic organization, and the theory of the Counter-Reformation presented here receives a literary support that can also be supplemented with a philosophical one without any difficulty. Kant's Critique of Judgment furnishes proof that for human powers of imagination (and actually without paradox) the most sublime thing is the imageless God - in the sense of Mosaic law - and conversely, every illustratlon of religion is already a governmental abuse of power that can only support the Counter-Reformation:
[W]here the senses see nothing more before them, and the unmistak- able and indelible idea of morality remains, it would be rather neces- sary to moderate the impetus of an unbounded imagination, to prevent it from rising to enthusiasm, than through fear of the powerlessness of these ideas to seek aid for them in images and childish ritual. Thus governments have willingly allowed religion to be abundantly pro- vided with the latter accompaniments, and seeking thereby to relieve their subjects of trouble, they have also sought to deprive them of the faculty of extending their spiritual powers beyond the limits that are arbitrarily assigned to them and by means of which they can be tbe more easily treated as mere passive beings. (Kant, 1951, p. 115)
In Schiller's novel fragment, it is precisely this Counter-Reformation stratagem that triumphs: on the last published page the prince has just attended his first Catholic mass. To work such wonders of con- version, however, it was not enough to pull the wool over the eyes of enlightened aristocrats with lanterna magica gadgets like those of Schriipfer or the Sicilian. Quite apart from a few tricks with telescopes, the Armenian had to supply the prince above all with a woman, with whom a romantic like the prince could not help falling in love. This woman, a so-called Greek woman who naturally spoke German and was of the most noble German descent, tbus appeared to her lover for the first time in disguise and devoutly Catholic in one of Venice's famous baroque churches surrounded by the holy paintings and ceiling frescoes of the Counter-Reformation. It is like
5 A Latin phrase meaning "Whose realm, his religion," which refers to the compromise by which princes were allowed to determine the religion of their territories.
I
105
? ? 1"
. . ''''
! , ? ? ,o,
. , . . ,,'
OPTICAL MEDIA
a stage production of love at first sight, on which romantic love by definition is based, and at first glance it appears to be a novelistic6 relapse from Schriipfer to Tintoretto, from the lanterna magica to the traditional panel. But far from it!
When the prince iustructs his servants and escorts to try to track down the Greek woman, who disappeared again immediately after going to church, the medium that instilled this irresistible romantic love in the prince is finally mentioned. As we are all painfully aware in 1999, there are of course media technologies without love, but there is no love without media technologies. In the case of Schiller's princely ghost-seer, this eroticizing medium is by no means painting, but rather literature. The only reason why it was impossible for his escorts to track down the Greek woman in Venice is that the prince could not describe her at all due to his passion for writing literature. To cite Schiller's words:
[U]nluckily, the description the Prince gave of her [the Greek woman]
was not such as to make her recognizable by a third party. The pas-
sionate interest with which he had regarded her had hindered him from
observing her minutely; for all the minor details, which other people would not have failed to notice, had escaped his observation; from his description, one would have sooner expected to find her prototype in the works of Ariosto or Tasso than on a Venetian island. (Schiller, 1904-5, II, p. 335)
I will come back later to the problem of wanted posters, passport controls, and forensics, which was theoretically as well as practically insoluble before the invention of photography. For the moment, however, it will suffice to ask why the prince could not see or describe the Greek woman he loved. The answer is in the text: he did not perceive the image of this woman at all, but rather he read it in the most famous verse romances by Tasso or Ariosto. His love is the kind of love found in romantic novels, and the Armenian's strategic art lay in replacing the transparent optical illusions of the lanterna magica with the opaque illusions of romantic literature. The explicit villain in the novel thus employs precisely the same medium as the novel's author. And because Schiller does not leave any doubt that his novel is one of the countless enlightened broadsheets against crypto- Catholic and above all Jesuit machinations, this parallel between the
6Here, Kittler employs the term romantechnisch (literally "novel-technical"), which is a play on the word romantisch (romantic).
106
? ? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
novel's villain and the novel's author implies that romantic literature itself proposes to take the place of the techniques of illusion of the Counter-Reformation in the great image war. Schiller's ghost-seeing prince consequently proves that the claim Lessing put forward only as an imperative or objective - that readers were supposed to be more conscious of the author's ideas than the words written down and read - had in the meantime created "real" readers. I could discuss here the new pedagogical techniques used in reading and writing instruction around 1800, which as a historical novelty helped even small children learn to read silently. As for the goal of this training, it is sufficient to mention Hegel's famous dictum that only silent reading could serve as the pure foundation for the interiorization of every subject, and this interiorization would then give rise to pictures of the read material. If there should still be any doubt as to whether Schiller's fictional prince serves as a model or role model for all actual readers, it disappears when reading the sentence with which Schiller signalled to the readers of his newspaper that the novel would be temporarily ending, which also unfortunately turned out to be the final end of the novel fragment. Schiller wrote:
To the reader who hoped to see ghosts here, I assure you that some are
yet to corne; but you yourself see that they would not be deployed for
such an unbelieving person as the Prince still is at that time. (Schiller,
1904-5, II, p. 426)
"Here" in this passage clearly meant: here in this newspaper, here in my novel, here on these printed pages, of which hundreds or thousands of identical copies could be manufactured ever since Gutenberg's invention of the printing press. It is a fantastic claim that literature, as far as I see it, had never made either previously in old European times or later under technical conditions. In the classi- cal-romantic epoch, however, this claim was self-evident for writers as well as for readers. Only a few years after Schiller's novel frag- ment, Leipzig scholar Johann Adam Bergk's book entitled Die Kunst, Bucher zu lesen (The Art of Reading Books) was also published in Jena. In its fight against religious superstition, this book was just as resolute as The Ghost-Seer, but it did make one exception: namely, if spirits can appear despite all religious skepticism, then they are only to be found in intellectually stimulating books (Bergk, 1799).
Such comments are not historical plays on words that simply swing back and forth between spirit in the sense of meaning and spirit in the sense of ghost. Rather, they describe a style of fictional
107
? ? "n"" ,,,. ,,
. ",. '"
il,,""
OPTICAL MEDIA
text that is also of the utmost importance, especially for film and television studies. To put it plainly: in contrast to certain colleagues in media studies, who first wrote about French novels before discov- ering French cinema and thus only see the task before them today as publishing one book after another about the theory and practice of literary adaptations - in contrast to such cheap modernizations of the philological craft, it is important to understand which historical forms of literature created the conditions that enabled their adapta- tion in the first place. Without such a concept, it remains inexplicable why certain novels by Alexandre Dumas, like The Three Musketeers, have been adapted for film hundreds of times, while old European literature, from Ovid's Metamorphoses to weighty baroque tornes, were simple non-starters for film. Even when the Odyssey is adapted in Hollywood, it is only adapted the way a nineteenth-century novel- ist would have retold it.
In her book, The Haunted Screen, Lotte Eisner precisely and cor- rectly pointed out how early feature films returned to the themes and techniques of romantic literature (Eisner, 1973, p. 40), but she offered no explanations for this.
If I guess correctly, on the other hand, the difference between filmability and unfilmability, romantic and pre-romantic texts, lies entirely in the media image war that romantic literature won for a time against opponents like the church, which gradually surrendered. The winner in the battle between the Enlightenment and superstition, as in all of history, was the return of the same. In other words, the production of books, otherwise known as the Enlightenment, itself became an image technology.
It is even possible to go one step further and conclude from the visually hallucinatory ability that literature acquired around 1800 that a historically changed mode of perception had entered everyday life. As we know, after a preliminary shock Europeans and North Ameri- cans learned very quickly and easily how to decode film sequences. They realized that film edits did not represent breaks in the narra- tive and that close-ups did not represent heads severed from bodies. Other cultures, however, reportedly had great difficulties in following the syntax of living images (before World War II, that is, when our media companies began to colonize all perception worldwide). For this reason, it seems reasonable to assume that the ability to see image sequences followed from the historically acquired ability to follow not letter sequences as such, but rather letter sequences as imaginary image sequences. With lessons in silent reading, Europeans and North Americans would also potentially become subservient to cinema.
108
? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
SchIller's ghost-seeing prince is obviously not enough to support such a bold thesis. Although he is a novel reader, we know nothing about his actual reading techniques, but rather only about his ideas of women, which sound as if they could only have come from Tasso or Ariosto. To conclude this ride through the history of literature and to provide a transition to chemically pure media technology, therefore, we will now consider Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann and romanticism in the narrowest sense of the word.
2. 3. 3. 2 Hoffmann
Hoffmann's Gothic novel The Devil's Elixirs was published during the same period as the old monastery churches were being filled with ghost projections thanks to Etienne Gaspard Robertson and his silent mobile lanterna magica. The setting for the novel are the same old monastery churches, and it is about the same elixirs or drugs, namely a common visual hallucinosis, which will simply prove to be the correlate of a new silent reading technique. What remained only an empty promise with Schiller - ghosts would still appear to readers, while the author just decided to stop his novel - is taken literally or technically by Hoffmann. Not only do his fictional characters have repeated visions, but the entire novel also functions as an optical vision for all readers. The foreword by the so-called editor, which is de facto naturally that of the novelist Hoffmann, reads from begin- ning to end as follows:
Dearly would I take you, gentle reader, beneath those dark plane-trees
where I first read the strange story of Brother Medardus. You would sit with me on the same stone bench half-hidden in fragrant bushes and bright flowers, and would gaze in deep yearning at the blue moun- tains whose mysterious forms tower up behind the sunlit valley which stretches out before us,
Then you would turn and see scarcely 20 paces behind us a Gothic building, its porch richly ornamented with statues. Through the dark branches of the plane-trees, paintings of the saints - the new frescoes in all their glory on the long wall - look straight at you with bright, living eyes. The sun glows on the mountain tops, the evening breeze rises, everywhere there is life and movement; strange voices whisper through the rustling trees and shrubs, swelling like the sound of chant and organ as they reach liS from afar; solemn figures in broadly-folded robes walk silently through the embowered garden, their pious gaze fixed on the heavens: have the figures of the saints come to life and descended from their lofty cornices? The air throbs with the mystic
109
? 1'". "" I'"
"P''''
"""
>"",,,
,,,,''''
OPTICAL MEDIA
thrill of the wonderful legends which the paintings portray, and will- ingly you believe that everything is really happening before your eyes. It is in such surroundings that you would read the story of Medardus, and you might come to consider the monk's strange visions to be more than just the caprice of an inflamed imagination.
Since, gentle reader, you have now seen the monks, their monastery,
and paintings of the saints, I need hardly add that it is the glorious garden of the Capuchin monastery in B. to which I have brought you. Once when I was staying at the monastery for a few days, the vener- able prior showed me Brother Medardus' posthumous papers, which were preserved in the library as a curio. Only with difficulty did I overcome his objections to letting me see them; in fact, he considered
that they should have been burned.
And so, gentle reader, it is not without fear that you may share the prior's opinion, that I place in your hands the book that has been fashioned from those papers. But if you decide to accompany Medar- dus through gloomy cloisters and cells, through the lurid episodes of his passage through the world, and to bear the horror, the fear, the madness, the ludicrous perversity of his life as if you were his faithful companion - then, maybe, you will derive SOme pleasure from those glimpses of a camera obscura which have been vouchsafed to you. It may even be that, as you look more closely, what seemed formless will become clear and precise; you will corne to recognize the hidden seed which, born of a secret union, grows into a luxuriant plant and spreads forth in a thousand tendrils, until a single blossom, swelling to maturity, absorbs all the life-sap and kills the seed itself.
After I had with great diligence read through the papers of Medardus
the Capuchin - which was extremely difficult because of his minute
and barely legible monastic handwriting - I came to feel that what we
call simply dream and imagination might represent the secret thread that runs through our lives and links its varied facets; and that the man who thinks that, because he has perceived this, he has acquired the power to break the thread and challenge that mysterious force which rules us, is to be given up as lost.
Perhaps your experience, gentle reader, will be the same as mine. For the profoundest of reasons I sincerely hope that it may be so. (Hoffmann, 1963, pp. 1-2)
I have cited this section in full to show how rigorously and systemati- cally a romantic novel turns all questions about book technology into qnestions about image technology. Hoffmann, who neither only edited nor copied The Devil's Elixirs out of old books, bnt who rather first saw these stories, like all of his other tales, as colorful visions before his eyes (as described in his tale The Sandman) - this Hoffmann actually pretends to take the text from an old manuscript, whose
110
? ? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
unreadability refers back to the monastic practice of copying books prior to Gutenberg's invention. Hoffmann's readers, on the other hand, are not supposed to be bothered at all with the problem of decoding letters; the preface does not present them with that monkish manuscript, but rather with the landscape in which Hoffman read the manuscript for the first time. According to a lovely comment hy Freud, "letters of the alphabet [. . . Jdo not occur in nature" (Freud, 1953-74, IV, p. 278); readers, whom Hoffmann can de facto naturally only lead under a dark plane-tree with his letters, therefore do not notice that they are reading. The training of silent and unconscious readers around 1800 won the first victory. The second and strategically crucial victory immediately follows: the landscape into which Hoffmann leads or seduces his readers is none other than the monastery landscape where the story itself will begin and also end. The readers who are transported to this landscape through the power of imagination therefore see the same church paintings and holy pictures that the protagonist himself also saw. And when these images "descend from their high ledge [. . . J to become alive," the readers are in exactly the same drugged or hal- lucinatory condition as the novel's protagonist: they also have "special visions" of a painted saint, who at the same time becomes the sale and incestuous love object of all of the novel's characters.
An optical ecstasy that Hoffmann only needs to acknowledge and award a good mark for: "Since, gentle reader, you have now seen the monks, their monastery, and paintings of the saints, I need hardly add that it is the glorious garden of the Capuchin monastery in B. to which I have brought you. " In the context of these lec- tures, however, it is important to note the following: the fact that the narrative inventory of a romantic novel is exhaustively enumer- ated with "holy pictures, monasteries, and monks" emphasizes like nothing else that it is precisely these powers which allow this novel to become part of the image war. The prior of the monastery where the plot of the novel takes place and from which its autobiographi- cal manuscript also comes wanted to "burn the papers. " Hoffmann, on the other hand - only a decade after the great plundering of all monastic libraries in the Reichsdeputationshauptschluss (decision of the imperial deputation) on Fehrnary 25, 1803, which transformed monastic knowledge into university knowledge and at the same time supplied the university library in Munich with its famous collection of manuscripts - ignores all prohibitions, which are obsolete because they are religious, and uses the self-same papers to create firstly his copyrighted novel and secondly his occupational sideline, which is protected by civil service law. The result is that the individual novel
111
? ? ? i'''''''' ,,,,,
,,""'" ",,,,,,
",""-'
;1,,'-"'"
OPTICAL MEDIA
reader does not actually buy the "book formed from those papers" at all; rather, the reader acquires - and I quote - "the manifold images of the camera obscura that are revealed to you. "
I can only say to that, like the mathematician, quod erat demon- strandum. It is simply written that German romanticism itself inher- ited the successful legacy of all Renaissance camera obscuras and all baroque lanterna magicas. This triumph came at a heavy price, though - namely, the fact that it halted media research m Germany for almost half a century because the historically awakened desire for images already appeared to be fulfilled in the imaginary world of the readers' souls - but I will discuss this later. When, to channel Novalis, "a visible inner world according to the words" of any author unfolds to the "right readers" who are trained in the new elementary school literacy techniques, or when, to channel Hegel, the collected history of western thought is reduced to a "gallery of images" after having rnn the ganntlet of Hegelian description, literature has arrived at the historic end of its monopoly on writing and it has caught up with all of the privileges of the camera obscura and the lanterna magica. Around 1820, the only remaining alternatives were either to perfect or technologize this magic. And technologize meant, as we will discnss in the next session, to remove the one fnndamental deficit that the literary and thns imaginary camera obscura practically lived on. So that readers would continue buying romantic novels, it had to be absolutely impossible to store what Hoffmann called "inner faces" anywhere other than on paper, and they could therefore only be bronght to life and pictured by the perfect literate reader and his inner world. The monopoly of writing was over from the moment that moving images could be transferred onto paper without any literary description or any help from a painter's hand (even if this hand was only tracing sketches made by a camera obscura). This
break occurred with the invention of photography through Niepce
and Daguerre, whose surname already contains the word for "war. "
Post tenebras lux, after darkness comes light, as Niepce's son named one of his polemics. But before we have a look at this light, which will incidentally bring forth its own entirely new types of darkness, infrared and ultraviolet, I would still like to make a few remarks concerning the film history of this romantic reading technique.
2. 3. 4 Romantic Poetry
It appears once more as if Virilio is the only one who recognized the relationship between romantic silent reading and film viewing. It
112
? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
would never have occurred to any of the Lutheran housefathers, who had to read suitable chapters out of the New Testament to their con- gregations every Sunday, to hallucinate the text like a projection from a lanterna magica.
It was the silent and solitary reader who first carried out reading as a perspective on the visual information provided in the text (Virilio, 1989, pp. 36-8). In contrast to the hundreds of specta- tors in the peep show theater, however, this reader was absolutely alone. The reader's perspective could not be disputed by any fellow theater patrons occupying other positions in the audItorium, and for this and only this reason it could be completely beheved, which means the illusion could be. As a French thinker, Virilio chooses the
example of a newspaper reader in the Parisian metro to demonstrate that nobody likes it when others read over his shoulder. As a former Germanist, I should rather choose the classic example from Goethe's Elective Affinities, where this rule as well as its exception was for- mulated for the first time in 1809: Goethe's solitary reader Eduard made an exception to this rule, namely, when the person reading over his shoulder was Ottilie, who was at the same time object of a no less imaginary love.
It should not be too difficult to recognize, with Virilio, that the indisputable and imaginary perspective of solitary reading is a histori- cal study of people's ability to perceive feature films and, to go a small step further, the exception to its rule of exclusivity is at the same time something like a preliminary historical study of the film star. The task that still lies before me is to eventually incorporate the pin-up girl into his concept, which requires a look past Hoffmann's foreword to the text of the novel itself. While reading alone in the monastery garden, the foreword states, holy pictures rise up from their ledges in the inner eye of the reader. It does not give too much away to say that the plot of Hoffmann's novel also talks about nothing else. The monk Medardus, around whose subjective perspective everything in The Devil's Elixirs revolves, in principle only falls in love with women who resemble a painting of Saint Rosalia installed in the monastery church. The historical basis of this confusion between heaven and earth is once more the Counter-Reformation and more specifically a painter who, as an ancestor of the novel's protagonist, took the baroque commission to create holy pictures that would
arouse the sensuality of church visitors so literally that he chose the greatest whore in the world (also known as Venus) as the model for his Saint Rosalia. And even though the church expresses its thanks for this heinous deed by placing a curse on the painter's entire gender, it still does not prevent his holy-whore picture from continuing
113
? . ,. ,. ""
,. )"""
OPTICAL MEDIA
to be exhibited: apparently, even old European powers needed theu pin-up girls.
Unfortunately, however, Medardus, the descendant of the painter and the novel's protagonist, does not reach the obvious conclusion that his entire lust for the flesh is an artefact of historical power. Rather, as a prototype of all romantic readers - and the women among you have surely already registered that Hoffmann's foreword is only addressed to men - the hero wants to make the holy picture of Rosalia congruent with a female co-reader standlllg behind his shoulder. It matters little that this beloved turns out to be his own blood relative. It is more important that Medardus, as the young woman's father confessor and religious instructor, pulls out all the stops to impose a readable underlying erotic meaning on the words of the Christian faith:
[Aurelia's] presence, her nearness to me, even the touch of her dress set my heart aflame; the blood surged into the secret recesses of my mind, and I spoke of the holy mysteries of religion in vivid images whose ulte- rior meaning was the sensual craving of an ardent, insatiable love. The burning power of my words should pierce Aurelia's heart like shafts of lightning, and she would seek in vain to protect herself. Unbeknown to her the images which I had conjured up would grow in her mind, taking on a deeper meaning and filling her heart with intimations of unknown rapture, until at last, distracted with passionate yearning, she threw herself into my arms. (Hoffmann, 1963, p. 71)
In other words, while the novel works as a camera obscura, according to the foreword, the protagonist acts or seduces like a lanterna magica. The reproduction of images thus turns into image production. And this projection of erotic images into a woman's soul succeeds. Aurelia becomes the monk's bride. He is not actually able to seduce his bride in conversation simply because in the moment of embrace a chaste image of her double, Saint Rosalia, appears as a warning before his inner eye. But when Aurelia becomes a romantic solitary reader, there is almost nothing more standing between the plot of the novel and coitus, or between the worship of holy pictures and incest:
For several days I did not see her [Aurelia], as she was staying with the Princess in a country residence not far distant. I could not stand her absence any longer and rushed to the place. Arriving late in the evening, I met a chambermaid in the garden who pointed out Aurelia's room to me. As I opened the door softly and went in, a breath of warm air perfumed with the wonderful scent of flowers dazed me,
114
? ? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
and strange memories stirred m my mmd: was this not Aurelia's room in the Baron's palace where I . . .
As soon as this thought struck me, a dark figure seemed to appear, and a cry of "Hermogenes! " went through my heart. In terror I rushed forwards, pushing open the door to the bed-chamber, which was ajar. Aurelia, her back towards me, was kneeling in front of a tabouret, on which lay an open book. I looked instinctively behind me. I saw nothing, and cried in a surge of ecstasy:
"Aurelia! 0 Aurelia! "
She turned round quickly, but before she could rise I was kneeling beside her, holding her in my arms.
"Leonard! My beloved! " she whispered.
An uncontrollable desire was seething within me. She lay powerless in my embrace; her hair hung in luxuriant tresses over my shoulders and her bosom heaved. She gave a gentle sigh. Savagely I clasped her to me; her eyes burned with a strange glow, and she returned my fierce kisses with even greater ardour. (Hoffmann, 1963, p. 203)
To understand the sexuality of our century one need only heighten this eroticism using media technology and replace readers with film- goers and film producers. In Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon's great world war novel, there is a fictional expressionist director named Gerhard von Gall whose masterpiece is a UFA film with the obvious title Alpdriicken (Nightmare). At the high point of the film (in every sense of the word) Margarethe Erdmann, the star of all of Gall's productions, is tortured by a dark Grand Inquisitor of the Counter-Reformation (as you could already predict). Immediately afterwards, however, the so-called "jackal men" (disguised Babelsberg extras) come in to ravish and dismember the captive baroness. Von Gall let the cameras run right on. The footage got cut out for the release prints, of course, but (just like the trausfer of the monk's manuscript from the monastery prior to the novelist E. T. A. Hoffmann) the original uncut version found its way into Goebbels' private film collection. Not only did the female star become pregnant at this literal high point of the film - and guessing the identity of the child's father became a popular party game (Pynchon, 1973, p. 461) - but also thousands of female filmgoers and even the girlfriends of filmgoers whose boyfriends were infected by the film. In conclusion, here is the experience of a V2 engineer upon seeing Alpdriicken:
He had come out of the UFA theater on the Friedrichstrasse that
night with an erection, thinking like everybody else only about getting home, fucking somebody, fucking her into some submission . . . God,
115
? ? " ,,"" ",II'"
. "" . . , ,r,""'"
Erdmann was beautiful. How many other men, shuffling out again into depression Berlin, carried the same image back from Alpdriicken to some drab fat excuse for a bride? How many shadow-children would be fathered by Erdmann that night? (Pynchon, 1973, p. 397)
According to the novel, the pin-up girls necessary for soldiers, which in many cases were and are stills from erotic films, delivered precisely these shadow-children to World War II and the Wehrmacht.
After this high point, we must leave ltterature along with all Its illusions and shadow images to fiually make a start on the archaeol- ogy of real images, that is, with the prehistory of photography. Before we do, I wonld only like to add that the holy-unholy pin-up girl III Hoffmann's The Devil's Elixirs, this double exposure of Rosalia and Aurelia, naturally did not yet have the mass media effect char- acteristic of our epoch. On the contrary: after all his failed attempts to sednce and sleep with Aurelia, Medardus becomes an absolute individual, namely a romantic author. He regrets his sinful worldly life, retnrns to the monastery that the temptation of Rosalia-Aurelia once lured him out of, and submits again to the authority of his monastic superior. As a practical act of repentance, however, he orders Medardus to do something that was entirely unheard of and impious in old European times - namely, simply to write the novel of his own antobiography:
"Brother Medardus, I wish to impose on you what will doubtless seem like a new penance. "
I asked humbly what it was. He replied:
"You are to write the story of your life. Do not omit a single inci-
dent, however trivial, that happened to you, particularly during your checkered career in the world. Your imagination will recapture all the gruesome, ludicrous, horrible, comical aspects of that life; it may even be that you will see Aurelia, not as Rosalia, the martyred nun, but as something else. Yet if the spirit of evil has really departed from you and if you have turned away from the temptations of the world, you will rise above these things, and no trace of them will remain. " (Hoffmann, 1963, p. 319)
The prior's order brings the subject full circle for us. At the beginning of the novel, in the editor's foreword, readers were promised that they would see "the horror, the fear, the madness, the ludicrous perver- sity" of the life of Medardus before their own eyes like "glimpses of a camera obscura. " At the end of the novel, the budding author and protagonist Medardus is promised exactly the same if he evolees his
OPTICAL MEDIA
116
? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
own life through writing. The rehgious authority thus paradoxically allows "the fantasy" Aurelia to be visually hallucinated again as a sexual object or pin-up girl, although in the meantime she has died a completely pious death. In other words, the church is no longer a church at all, but rather it has been transformed into romantic literature by internalizing all of the tricks of the camera obscura and the lanterna magica, and it functions as a visual hallucination for both its fictional author and its intended readers. The inner images, which this author sends, so to speak, as a la11terl1a magica, are received by readers as a camera obscura, because romantic literature as such is a magnetic for all eroticism.
Thus ends my short art history of optical media. I hope at least the literary section was entertaining because of all the ghosts and sexuality. But now please open or write a new, dry chapter, which will have to do without eroticism and women for a long time, simply because it concerns the European sciences.
117
? ? ? . ,. ,,"'"
3. 1 Photography 3. 1. 1 Prehistory
From now on, there should be no more talk about lanterna magicas and camera obscuras, which only existed in novels like Hoffmann's as metaphors for poetic effects. To open a new chapter about the pre- and early history of photography, only the technical reality of these devices from the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries onwards is important. The camera obscura was one of the first technologies for receiving images, and the lanterna magica was one of the first tech- nologies for sending images. The only thing that absolutely did not exist before the development of photography was a technology for storing images, which would allow images to be transmitted across space and time and then sent again to another point in space and time. For photography to emerge, it therefore needed an adequate channel (to return to Shannon's functions, although they still seem somewhat out of place here). Romantic literature was founded on the systematic exploitation of this channel's non-existence. If novels succeeded in giving rise to lanterna magica images in solitary readers, in principle these inner images still could not be stored - already proven by the success of novel sales. Since the time of Walgenstein, it was known that real images could only be stored when they - as in the case of plant leaves - were reduced to naked skeletons and then submerged in printer's ink. This demanding process of making nature print itself constituted the only exception to the rnle that the storage of images had to go through the two intermediate stages of the human eye and the human hand and thus become painting and art. And as was shown in the section on theory, the interface called
-3-
OPTICAL MEDIA
118
? OpTICAL MEDIA
the human eye always introduces the imaginary into images because of its ability to pick out shapes in a world view infiltrated by accident and noise. Instead of storing the empirical probability distributions of lights and shadows, modern painting, like modern literature, pre- sented its public with the idea of a subject, and thus of an artist. This is what Heidegger called "the age of the world picture. " And if this idea superimposed the image of a saint and that of a whore on one and the same painting, the imaginary was perfect.
No perfecting of painting would therefore have been able to make the transition from visual arts to optical media. In spite of all beliefs in progress, there is no linear or continuous development in the history of media. The history of technologies is, on the other hand, a history of steps or, as stated in Thomas Pynchon's novel v. , "History is a step-function" (Pynchon, 1990, p. 331). For this reason, Goethe's great fear, which he revealed in a 1797 manuscript with the remark- able title Kunst und Handwerk (Art and Craft), could not happen at all historically: namely, that painting would simply be overrun by machines, that painting techniques would be mechanized, and that countless identical reproductions would replace the unique original. Machines are not just simple copies of human abilities.
3. 1. 2 Implementation
In the case of photography, the historical step amounts rather to a painting mistake or offence that became the foundation of a new scientific media technology through the re-evaluation of all values, as Nietzsche would have said. Do not confuse this literal perversion with Hegel's dialectical negation, where a higher philosophical truth emerged from a double negative and the book of books, Hegel's own philosophy, emerged from the abolition of all other books. The re-evaluation of all values simply means transposing a sign so that a negative becomes a positive or, to formulate it in images of photo- graphy itself, a positive becomes a negative.
The negative of all painting existed in its naked materiality, namely in its colors. It therefore existed neither in symbolic meaning nor in the imaginary effects of red, green, or blue, but rather in the simple reality of pigments, as they have been known since time immemorial. I recall carmine red, Prussian blue, lapis lazuli, etc. I recall above all the last great European novelist, who conceived of himself as a magician or an "illusionist. " Humbert Humbert, the protagonist of Nabokov's most widely read novel, talks about Lolita, himself, and
art in the very last sentence: "I am thinking of aurochs and angels, 119
? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge ot art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita. " (Nabokov, 1958, p. 311)
In other words, pigments only last in art. But in this miserable world, which only becomes even more miserable through reproduc- tion or copying, not only do the Aurelias and Lolitas become older, but so do their images. Because he conceived of this, Nabokov rises above his romantic predecessors.
When and as long as pIgments shone from pamtmgs, as artists had applied them to canvas using OIl-based paints smce 1450, or at tbe very latest since the time of the Van Eyck brothers, everything was aesthetically in order. But paintings do not always hang m mnseums where light, air, and temperature are technically filtered and opti- mized; in unfavorable locations they fall victim to the sun or tbe darkness. Then the aesthetic negative comes into play: many colors become brighter or darker tban when they were first applied, and many of them turn into other colors (like the American color televi- sion standard). Painters knew this from bitter experience, because it made artworks intended for immortality suddenly mortal. Since tbe Renaissance, therefore, warnings against bad pigments or chemi- cal colors, like dragon's blood, lac, vermilion, and carmine, which darken or whiten afterwards (Eder, 1978, p. 85), have stood along- side recommendations for better colors in painting instructions. Bnt it never occurred to any of the painters who had discovered perspec- tive and the camera obscura to turn this handicap into an asset by
taking advantage of the whitening or darkening effect itself. As far as I know, there is not a single fictional painter in a novel or tale who took revenge on an evil client by intentionally using deteriorating pigments so that the image depicted on the painting literally faded away after 30 years. One can therefore venture the thesis that there has been no way to go from aesthetic experience to media technology in the past, nor can there be in the future. This does not make the reverse untrue, however. Rather, there is at the same time a second valid tbesis that there are undoubtedly ways to go from aesthetic handicaps to media technology, even ideal ways. Just as technical media like the telephone and the gramophone were invented in the nineteenth century for and by the deaf, and technical media like the typewriter were invented for and by the blind, so began the first experiments with the darkening or lightening of certain chemicals in the seventeenth century, which directly led to photographic film through the work of Niepce and Daguerre. Cripples and handicaps lie like corpses along the technical path to the present.
120
? OPTICAL MEDIA
What follows oow are some of the highlIghts of the "deeds and sorrows of light," as Goethe called optiCS ill his Theory of Colors. It was already known to the advanced civilizations of antiquity that light can bleach colors as well as canvas (the painterly equivalent of photographic film). But seventeenth-century natural sciences first made it clear that the normally green color of plant leaves, at least before Walgenstein submerged them in printer's ink, is no accident and also does not stem from warmth but rather is produced exclu- Sively through the influence of light. Chlorophyll was thus the first storage device for light ever discovered, yet it worked from nature and was therefore not malllPulable (Eder, 1978, p. 55).
Scientists were not the only people who conducted research on light. Just as magic and secret societies emerged during the twilight of the lanterna magica and its religious propaganda, so were many photochemical discoveries byproducts of alchemy experiments that were neither plarmed nor desired. As you know, absolutism was not based on paper or computer money like today's high-tech empires, but rather it had its gold currency and its newly invented or permit- ted national debts, which were caused by its constant need for pre- cious metals. In practice, alchemy accordingly wanted to make gold or silver out of cheap materials like kaolin, which by an accidental discovery then led to porcelain. For example, a civil servant from Saxony who wanted to "capture the world spirit" long before Hegel, that is, using alchemy rather than philosophy, accidentally discovered a chemical substance that could store light and transmit it again in darkness. An unsuccessful salesman continued the experiment and discovered, with even more luck, the chemical element phosphorus or "carrier of light" (Eder, 1978, p. 58). With phosphorescing sub- stances magicians, secret societies, and con-artists could then make their ghosts or skulls glow.
Another discovery was crucial for the development of photo- graphy: in 1727, Dr. ]. H. Schulze, a professor of Greek and Arab languages in Halle, took up the experiment with phosphorus again, but in the good alchemical tradition he also introduced silver into the experiment. When he accidentally performed his tests in front of a sunlit window, Schulze discovered that the silver salt lying in the sunshine became dark, while the silver salt lying in the shade remained brigbt. And just as Kircher planned to transmit actual secret characters over the head of an unsuspecting enemy with the lanterna magica, so did Schulze use the light sensitivity of silver salts to code data. He wrote dark letters on a piece of glass, placed it between the sun and the silver salt, and in this way achieved the first
121
? -,,"''' ,
OPTICAL MEDIA
photographic negative: all the brightness disappeared from the illu- minated chemicals everywhere where the light was not filtered out hy the letters. Unfortunately, Schulze's experiment also proves at the same time that the idea of photography was still impossible in the eighteenth century: Schulze did not want to store the contin- gent nature of the real (in Lacan's sense of the word) in a technical medium, but rather he wanted to introduce the symbolic, namely a written code, into nature. When historians thus claim that Schulze's light writing already anticipated photography (Eder, 1978, p. 621, this is actually valid for the word "photography" but not for the process itself, which is the object of all technical media.
Due to time constraints, I will not pursue the history of photogra- phy in all its detail, even if such a thing were possible. For our pur- poses, it must only be fundamentally clear that the discovery, use, and optimization of light sensitivities were linked to the general history of the origins of chemistry in the eighteenth century. This research was impossible so long as the four Greek elements of fire, air, water, and earth were considered the only components of all being. To be able to isolate a photochemical effect as such, chemically precise distinc- tions like those between fire and light or between light and heat first had to be made. For example, Beccaria, the great legal reformer who also experimented with silver salts, had to learn with great difficulty that it is not warmth hut rather light that blackens these salts. You can read about other names and chemical discoveries, which I will skip over, in the old-fashioned but positivistically exact history of photography produced by the imperial and royal counsellor Dr. Josef Maria Eder in 1905.
With the development of optical lens systems, as I have previously mentioned, Huygens arrived at the fairly adequate thesis that light consists of waves, which naturally were not defined as electromag- netic waves prior to the work of Maxwell and Hertz, but rather as elastic waves of an undefined medium, as the great mathematician Euler called them. However, after 1700 - since the formation of a Royal Society in London with Sir Isaac Newton as its president - the opposing thesis gained acceptance and light was defined as a mass of tiny bodies or a particle stream. Newton had reconstructed the classi- cal camera obscura experiment with one refinement: he placed a glass prism in the beam of light between the sun, the hole in the chamber wall, and the dark projection wall. Since Descartes had already made the natural rainbow (if not also gravity's rainbow) calculable (see the historical part of Goethe's Theory of Colors), the result of Newton's experiment was the first artificial rainbow. The simple white sunlight
122
'I
? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
dissolves mto countless colors of the spectrum between viOlet and red, from which Newton inferred that light consists of parts or particles and that a convex lens would combine many colors to make white again. The experiment with the lens succeeded, and for the first time it compared scientific color synthesis with painterly color synthe- sis. When mixing oil-based paints the sum always becomes darker because light disappears and consequently a subtractive color synthe- sis takes place; since Newton, however, there is also additive color synthesis where the sum of many colors is brighter than its addends.