No More Learning

For Loyola, spiri- tual exercises meant exercises for the soul as well as the body, which army reformers like Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange, christened as drill practice around 1600 and which early twentieth-century film theorists eventually called psychotechnics. But unlike Luther and the couutless Protestant housefathers who went to Luther's school, these exercises did not consist of transcribing and reading the Bible or throwing the inkpot at the devil, should he want to disturb their writing work. For Loyola, who had been a soldier, drill practice had nothing at all to do with writing, and he only became interested in reading when he was a critically ill patient. At some point, the eyes of the founder of the Order or the eyes of those students who, according to him, were supposed to endure his spiritual exercises surely came across the letters of a religious book and noted, for example, what was written about hell. (In all Loyola commentaries, from James Joyce to Roland Barthes to myself, hell is naturally the dramatically preferred example, but in light of Athanasius Kircher's smicroscope the passion play could just as easily be used. ) When Loyola or one
of his Jesuit pupils locked himself in a monastic cell for weeks in order to meditate on hell, therefore, the intertwiued legends were
,"
77
? ? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
actually involved, but not the book called the Bible. In other words, the scant information about hell, as it stands in the only true book of the Protestants, was always already overgrown and embellished by religious fantasies. For the Jesuit Order, it was logically important to visualize long and intensively everything that had once been read until it stopped being letter or text and began instead to overwhelm the five senses themselves. Let ns read what Loyola and his pupils did in the fifth exercise. The set topic read: A Meditation on Hell. Here is the run-through:
First heading. To see in imagination those enormous fires, and the souls, as it were, with bodies of fire.
Second heading. To hear in imagination the shrieks and groans and the blasphemous shouts against Christ OUf Lord and all the saints.
Third heading. To smell in imagination the fumes of sulfur and the stench of filth and corruption.
Fourth heading, To taste in imagination all the bitterness of tears and melancholy and a gnawing conscience.
Fifth heading. To feel in imagination the heat of the flames that play on and burn the [damned] souls. (Loyola, 1963, p. 36)
This means that only someone who had personally completed all these hellish spiritual exercises, like Loyola, could and would be permitted to join the Jesuit Order, and above all they must have imagined the torments of the damned Protestants in their hell-hole right up to their bitter end. It was thus almost too obvious what the Counter-Reformation had to offer in reply to the new Protestant medium of the letterpress: a theater of illusions for all five senses (although the sense of vision took absolute priority in all of the spiritual exercises) and a reading practice for readers who did not stick to the letter but rather experienced its meaning immediately as a sensual hallucination. In other words, the search for a medium that could combat Luther's Bible brought back the old religious images in a changed or improved form - no longer as icons or panels on a church wall, no longer as religious miniatures of the Acts of the Saints that even a child could comprehend, but rather as psychedelic visions that could motivate the soldiers of Christ, as the Jesuits called themselves, in the religious war much more effectively, and that means unconsciously, than the old-fashioned painted masterpieces. On the other hand, as you well know, with regard to even the most devout techniques resulting in ecstasy the established church in Rome has been and still is easily and justifiably suspicious of heresy. It is
78
? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
therefore no wonder that in his early days in Spain Loyola landed in the prisons of the Inquisition several times. It is even less surpris- ing that at the last minute, which means after 1540, when the Pope ordered him to come from Spain to Rome in order to have his drills examined, Loyola made or rather had to make his spiritual exercises compatible with the old-fashioned worship of panels. The sixth and eighth rules of these Roman supplements read as follows:
We should approve of relics of the saints, showing reverence for them and praying to the saints themselves; visits to Station churches, pil- grimages, indulgences, jubilees, Crusade bulls, the lighting of candles in churches should all be commended [. . . J We should praise church decoration and architecture, as well as statues, which we should vener- ate in view of what they portray. (Loyola, 1963, pp. 120-1)
We thus come to the end of a short excursion into church history, and find ourselves back with the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher and his optical phase model of the Stations of the Cross - though not without shed- ding new light on the lanterna magica. Loyola's imperative "praise! " established a new kind of image worship, wbich, like the new hal- lucinatory readings, was not directed at the image, but rather at its meaning. It was a kind of image worship, therefore, that could not stand by and simply leave the outward appearance of churches or the Way of the Cross as the architects and painters had arranged them, but rather aimed at transferring the psychedelic effect of the spiritual exercises to the outside. "Outside" here refers to many possibilities: first, the outside of a real projection surface on which the inner image could appear, such as the harmless example of panel painting, or the exciting and innovative case of the lantema magica screen. Second, "outside" also refers to the outside beyond the Jesuit Order, a monas- tic elite whose members had worked over weeks and months with all possible mortifications of the flesh to actually achieve hallucinations. The Jesuits' task, to beat the Reformation's letterpress monopoly with more effective media technologies, was necessarily aimed at the conversion of the lay public, who through time constraints were not
expected to have performed spiritual exercises in the cloister. What Loyola had invented or enforced in his lonely cell had to become simplified, trivialized, mechanized, and mass applied. That is the entire difference between a spiritual exercise, in which Loyola hal- lucinated the Stations of the Cross, and an optical device called the smicroscope, with which Kircher showed rapidly changing images of these stations to the lay public, whom they wished to convert
'"
79
? ? ? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
through the precursors of film. The Counter-Reformation triumphed in Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, and half of southern Germany not only because of the millions of deaths caused by the Thirty Years' War, and therefore not only because of the dark or negative sides of power; it was just as much due to their bright and that means visual aspects, to a new kind of imaging.
This image technology is not only represented in the title of the second edition of Kircher's Ars magna lucis et umbrae, which does not promise to make scientIfic progress with light and shadow but rather to perform great arts. It can also be found in the illustration of a lanterna magica: one sees an oil lamp, and in front of the oil lamp is a horizontal row of painted glass plates that are all waiting to be shown and projected one after the other (almost like film) in the beam of light; but above all, one seeS on the dark facing wall the projection effect of the plate that currently lies in the oil lamp's beam of light: a naked man surrounded by waist-high flames. It would not be wrong to assume that these flames only signal to our modern eyes, which have been trained by McLuhan, that the message of every medium is the medium itself - in this case, tbe oil lamp - but among Kircher's contemporaries and audiences these flames meant something entirely different - namely, the flames of hell. In other words, thanks to the
lanterna magica the solitary hallucination of the founder of the Jesuit Order, who once concentrated all his five senses on imagining the agonies of hell, became technologically simulated for the masses. And the fate awaiting those who failed to find their way back to the only true faith immediately after the presentation was not simply the projected flames of hell. Kircher writes: "The images and shadows presented in dark rooms are much more frightening than those made by the sun. Through this art, godless people could easily be prevented from committing many vices / if the devil's image is cast onto the mirror and projected into a dark place. " (quoted in Ranke, 1982, p. 17). The fact that my source, Winfried Ranke, rejects the conclusion that "this was the beginning of a didactic and perhaps even missionary- indoctrinating deployment of the new demonstration device" (ibid. ), despite all of Schott's assurances about the many Jesuits engaged in lanterna magica experiments, is thus only evidence of blindness.
In our current mania over film and television, this strategy of effects may seem strange for a new optical medium, but it is necessary to realize that the first great entertainment media of the modern era, theater and literature, arose from a centuries-long war over religion and images. That goes for first-rate cultural performances, which are still retained in historical memory, as well as the lost performances
80
? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
of travelmg players, who around 1900 were literally devoured and relegated to oblivion by the technical medium of film.
2. 2. 3. 4 Traveling Players
To start with the simpler category, because I don't need to know any-
thing about their origin and sociology, the so-called traveling players
always took up the escalations of the great religious war astonish-
mgly quickly and systematically. When Gutenberg and later Luther
appeared to triumph over the worship of images with their printed
books, the traveling players discovered the handbill as a medium
for reproducing their street ballads and illustrating them with wood
engravings. After the Counter-Reformation of hallucinated and pro-
jected images came to power, on the other hand, the traveling players
seem to have gone over to Kircher with all flags flying. In any case,
his smicroscope became the immediate precursor of all those peep
show cabinets that were admired at fairs on a massive scale up until
the nineteenth century. Peep show cabinets were small, transportable
devices for presenting images, which had one or two holes for the eyes
and which were often fastened to the backs of traveling entertainers.
For a modest fee, people were permirted to look into the box, just
as people later looked into the kinetoscope, the immediate precur-
sor of our cinema, and they were rewarded with images that could
be mechanically wound on one after the other. Refined models even
contained a miniature stage on which the scenery and the dramatic
figures could each be moved separately so that a rudimentary narra-
tive was allowed to develop. And when the peep show cabinets ran at "
the same speed as a mechanical music box, all that was missing was a technogenic process of storing images and it would have anticipated Edison's kinetoscope. The only obvious difference lay in the repre- sented narratives: while Edison naturally made his money with quint- essentially American boxing matches, the peep show cabinets stored in the Salzburg museum showed scenes from the holy story with Joseph, Mary, Jesus and the disciples. Loyalty to the Counter-Reformation and Jesuit propaganda could hardly be carried any further.
2. 2. 3. 5 Jesuit Churches
But the peep show cabinets displayed at fairs simultaneously also served as a model for what was supposed to be crucial for the elite public, or for court and city, as it was called at that time: the peep show theater. Unified perspectives, changeable backdrops, theater
81
'I: ,I
I I: I
",
? ? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
hghting as 10 the small transportable peep show cabmets - everyth10g that had previously never existed in the theater. I name as the most necessary key words only the sun lighting of the Theater of Dionysus in Athens and the architecture of medieval mystery plays, which also took place outdoors and (like Dante's Divine Comedy) played on three stages or showed parallel narratives at the same time: above in heaven, below in hell and in between them on earth. Anglicists know better than I do how many elements of Shakespearean theater from 1600 were still in line with this old European theater, which was allegorical but for that reason also had no illUSIOns. But after St. Ignatius caught a glimpse of total hell through the art of meditation in his tiny cell in the cloister, and the Counter-Reformation of optical deception was under way, such simplicity was no longer enough. The same wave of innovation influenced both the interior architec- ture of churches and theaters. Namely, strictly following Lacan, it involved projecting pictorial linear perspective back into architecture again. What appeared to spectators and users in three-dimensional space should obey the same principles that Brunelleschi and Alberti had established for the two-dimensional space of the painting. And because the theater was employed as a church for the propaganda of faith, the church conversely also became a theater and the sacred
building was seized by this perspectivization of architecture.
One of the most important innovations of baroque architecture was the well-known use of trompe l'oeil paintings, which provided easy transitions between buildings and paintings, three-dimensional- ity and two-dimensionality; for the deceived eyes the ceiling paintings of heaven,. with all of their saints, became an integral part of the church and the perception of perspective. One becomes aware - and I will return to this later in my discussion of the image technolo- gies of the Romantic period - of the almost cinematic sex appeal of the saints, who, like Bernini's statue of St. Theresa of Avila, seem to be engaged in a love act with the angel of their hallucina- tions even though and precisely because they are part of the church
architecture.
As a matter of fact there is evidence - even if it is only later,
namely Romantic - that this new image technology of church space was connected to the lanterna magica. A story by E. T. A. Hoffmann with the distinctive title The Jesuit Church in Glogau, which just as distinctively comes from the first part of his Nachtstiicke (Night Pieces), can be traced back to his own experiences in the Silesian city of Glogau, where there actually was a large Jesuit church. Hoffmann
begins quite matter-of-factly:
82
? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
JesUIt cloisters, colleges, and churches are built in that Italian style which is based on antique models, and prefers splendour and elegance to ecclesiastical solemnity. (Hoffmann, 1952, p. 70)
A Jesuit professor in the novella rationalizes this deviation from the Gothic, i. e. the supernatural, with the following explanation:
[T]he higher [supernatural] kingdom should indeed be recognized in
this world. But this recognition can be stimulated by symbols of joy, such as life offers, as does the spirit itself when it descends from that other kingdom into OUf earthly existence. OUf horne is there above; but so long as we dwell here, OUf kingdom is also of this world. (Hoffman, 1952, pp. 70-1)
The main character of the novella clarifies what is politically and
technologically meant by this very ambiguous explanation that the
Jesuit kingdom is also of this world. The hero is a painter from 1795
who is hired by the Jesuits in Glogau to restore the church. Because
I'
I ? ' I
? ? ?
? '
real marble is too expensive for the Jesuits, he is supposed to paint the ! I
columns of the church in such a way that it simulates the appearance of marble (Hoffmann, 1952, p. 71). One night, the sleepless narrator walks by the church - Hoffmann is after all narrating one of his night stories (Nachtstiicke) - to eavesdrop on the highly dramatic scene between a lanterna magica, a trompe l'oeil picture, and a technically remote-controlled painter:
[A]s I passed the Jesuit church, I was struck by a dazzling light stream-
ing through one window. The small side-door was ajar, and when I
walked in I saw a wax taper burning before a tall niche. On drawing ? ?
nearer I perceived that a packthread net had been stretched in front of this niche, and that a dark figure was climbing up and down a ladder, apparently engaged in making a design on the niche wall. It was Berthold, and he was carefully tracing the shadow of the net in black paint. On a tall easel beside the ladder stood the drawing of an altar. I was astonished at the ingenuity of the idea. If you have the slight- est acquaintance with the art of painting, you will know immediately what was the purpose of the net whose shadow Berthold was tracing on to the niche. He was going to paint an altar in apparent relief, and in order to get a correct enlargement of the small drawing he had, in the usual way, to put a net both over the sketch and over the surface on which the sketch was to be reproduced. But this surface was not flat; he was going to paint on a semicircular niche. His simple and ingenious contrivance, therefore, was the only possible way of obtain- ing a correspondence between the straight lines of the sketch and the
83
? ? ? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
curved criss-cross ones thrown by the net on the concave surface, and of ensuring accuracy in the architectural proportions which were to be reproduced in perspective. (Hoffmann, 1952, pp. 73-4)
Like the lanterna magica, therefore, the painter Berthold's arrange- ment is precisely a projection of light onto the foil or the background of darkness. The wax torch functions as a light source and the net of threads functions as a pattern, which, exactly like the grid in Durer's instructions for perspectival painting, causes a geometriza- tion of the pattern to be painted, namely the altar, while the semi- circle of the niche functions as a projection surface. But the goal of the entire arrangement is avowedly to solve the geometric problem of how one plane, which is only the two-dimensional illustration of a three-dimensional body, can be depicted on a half-cylinder whose upper end is presumably shaped like a half-sphere - and the whole must be achieved by imaging or mapping without resorting to the non-geometric, namely arithmetic tricks of Cartesian geometry. The painter Berthold thus does not need to solve any quadratic equations, not to mention trigonometric equations, but rather, just as the lecture on Renaissance perspective painters describes, the hand of the painter very simply and automatically follows the preset lines provided by the projected shadows of the net. What emerges through this process, as
the title of the novella says, is a Jesuit church and thus an altar that does not actually exist but whose architectonic three-dimensionality is only simulated through the deception of the very earthly eyes of the churchgoers. The inner hallucinations caused by the spiritual exercises of the order's founder, Ignatius Loyola, were reduced to the earthly realm of optical illusions for the lay public like the painter and the churchgoers he deceived. With reference to Berliner Bauakademie director Johann Albert Eytelwein's two-volume hand- book on perspective (see Hoffmann, 1967, p. 796), Hoffmann's Berthold expressly formnlates:
Because I've drawn this entablature correctly from the point of vision,
I know that it will give the spectator the illusion of relief. (Hoffmann, 1952, p. 77)
Hoffmann had the best historical reasons for attributing the invention of a church trompe l'oeil technique to the Jesuits. As far as I know, the engineer-artists of the Renaissance adhered to the Euclidean right angle - not out of mere laziness, but rather from a love of
84
? ? ? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
mathematical economy. They thus always projected the effects of their linear perspectives or camera obscuras only onto plane surfaces. Baroque architecture, which dreaded the right angle like the devil dreads holy water, first raised the issue of how linear perspective could also be projected onto curved surfaces - the issue, in other words, of how architecture itself could be included in the illusionis- tic game of new paintings. The theoretical solution of this problem appeared in 1693 in the form of a book with the very distinctive title, De perspectiva pictorum atque architectorum, about the perspective of painters and architects. Its author was, just as distinctively, a Jesuit priest named Andrea Pozzo. And the whole reason for the new trompe l'oeil effect became apparent at the very latest when Pozzo added a ceiling painting to the church of the founder of his order, Sant' Ignazio in Rome, which Jacob Burckhardt could not help from celebrating or castigating as a "playground of unscrupulousness. " For this painting not only extended the architecture of the church into the illusionary heights of heaven, but it also subordinated all of its columns and saints, ledges and clouds to a monstrously distort-
ing linear perspective that depended more on the elliptical curvature
of the vaults than the subaltern and earthly vantage point of the
devout. With his half-cylindrical curvature Berthold proves himself
to be a direct pupil of Pozzo. Why the romantic narrator, that is,
Hoffmann himself, also serves his apprenticeship under Berthold's
Jesuits remains an open question that we must defer. So much for
the Jesuits' use of image technology within the space of the church
itself. . ,
2. 2. 3. 6 Jesuit Theater
The Jesuits also attempted to reform the profane or worldly theater using their new media technology: there was Jesuit theater. Like Kircher's optical devices or Hoffmann's church painter, Loyola's hallucinations were supposed to be mediated to a lay public without the strain of meditation. The most famous example from German literature is the Cenodoxus, which was written in 1602 by a Jesuit theology professor named Jakob Bidermann, who later was to become assistant to the Superior General in Rome. Cenodoxus presents a Parisian scholar who merely feigns a belief in Christianity because of his sheer pride of knowledge and is therefore carried off to the flames of hell by an entire horde of demons like the legendary Faust prior to Goethe's critical intervention. It is not difficult to read the drama as the victorious campaign of images and hallucinations
:I . ,
85
? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
against a form of knowledge rooted in the letterpress. But this IS why Bidermann was not content to put placeless and timeless alle- gories on a neutral stage. Rather, his Jesuit stage presented concrete interior spaces that were divided towards the side of the spectators, and at the end of these spaces was a trapdoor in the floor of the stage that also guaranteed the direct entrance to hell (Bidermann 1965, p. 163). In the finale, when countless demons stormed out of this gate with pitch and sulfur and into the scholar's study in order to fetch Cenodoxus's body, his students were also present. For these students, who represented the actual spectators themselves, the Jesuits' spiritual exercise thus became a theatrical and sensorial certainty.
It should also be emphasized that the Jesuit stage and the related Italian opera stage stood as models for all of the new baroque theaters; in other words, the theaters of absolutism. For the first time, stages became peep shows, as we still know them today. These theaters confront us spectators with illusions that are more or less successful depending on the skill of the artisans and the financial framework of the theater technology. Perspective, which in Brunelleschi's time still urgently needed experimental proof, and which in Diirer's time still needed the support of scientific and technical grid constructions, sud- denly became part of everyday life, or really night life, as a peep show stage. In the Silesian baroque, this golden age of German literature around 1670, all of the illusions created using the lanterna magica by Jesuits and traveling entertainers could finally be staged dramatically, which means no longer scaled down: there were painted perspec- tival backdrops that seamlessly extended the interior architectonically constructed stage setting and that were also interchangeable while a performance was in progress; there were costumed actors who transformed into other people on the open stage through a change of clothing (as in Gryphius's Leo Armenius or Lohenstein's Agrippina). It was thus practically tested how much could be asked of the specta- tors without breaking the illusion through effects, transformations, and conjuring tricks. The popular and thus quite underground history of such theatrical techniques leads directly to the nineteenth century, when the peep show even learned proto-cinematic turns and rotations from the lanterna magica: the Unterklassentheater in Josephstadt in Vienna introduced the first moving stage in 1842 in order to convey to the spectators the illusion of a real boat ride along the Danube river; in 1896, Karl Lautenschlager finally installed the first revolv- ing stage in the Residenztheater in Munich, on which Gurnemanz and Parsifal were then able to hold their famous conversation: as
86
? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
we know, both of Wagner's opera characters were on theIr way to
Gralsburg when, according to the director's instructions, "the scene
changes imperceptibly. " The pure fool Parsifal, this prototype of all the pure fools that Wagner's musical drama strategically had in sight as its spectators, did not notice and instead attributed the illu- sion to his own self-perception: "I scarcely move, yet swiftly seem to run. " Whereupon the fatherly spirit or commentator Gurnemanz only needed to explain: "My son, thou seest here space and time are one. " (Wagner, 1938, p. 445)
But we will return in due course to Wagner's feat of going from theatrical sleights of hand to an entire metaphysics and thereby motion pictures. Here, where we are concerned with the baroque and absolutism, the technology of illusions must be limited in a crucial way that will be important for the history of film.
The theater scene that turned into the image technology of the Connter-Reformation could manipulate and simulate nearly every- thing except its light source. For the first time in history - and at exactly the same time as absolutist castles - a closed theater whose narratives mainly took place in interior spaces and whose perfor- mances preferably took place in the evening needed artificial light. Richard Alewyn's Barockes Welttheater (Baroque World Theater) showed once and for all the price of no longer going to bed at the same time as the chickens. In 1650, all that was available to manage this time delay, which remains fundamental for all entertainment media ever since, were wax candles and torches - light sources, therefore, that almost gave off more heat than light and, based on Shannon, also served as involuntary sources of noise: they produced a sensory noise known as smoke and stench, which probably under- mined the theatrical illusion except in scenes depicting hell, such as with Bidermann's. Unlike the backdrops, actors, and costumes, however, the hundreds of candles that were used on the stage as well as in the auditorium could not be changed during a performance. The dramatic but completely forgotten result of this limitation was the fact that none of the famous dramas by Corneille or Racine number more than 3,000 alexandrines. Hermeneutic literary studies has actually found the most beautiful and completely textually imma- nent explanations for this, but they are all worth little, because this aesthetic restriction follows immediately from a technical restriction: namely, the burning time of wax candles. In other words, Racine's Phaedra (who is a granddaughter but in contrast to Greek heroes
only the granddaughter of the "holy sun") must die not because the flame of her incestuous love for her stepson burns so black, as she
87
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
complains, but rather because after two hours the smoky candles m the Paris theaters had burned out.
But apart from the problem of light sources, absolutist theater was a mobilization of the theater machine for the actual deception of spec- tators. This was even true for Racine, whose heroines principally fall in love with an optically beaming vision (Barthes, 1964, pp. 19-20). After kings and princes systematically transformed themselves into optical illusions through their mirrored rooms, festival parades, and fireworks - before which their subjects could only look on in awe - their stages could not be left behind. Absolutism introduced a politics of images, and the effects of images in politics today - the portraits of heads in newspapers and television interviews on Sunday evening, this old absolutist monopoly on light - seem almost weak in comparison.
Within this historical context Bertolt Brecht's attack against what he called Aristotelian theater, which invites spectators to identify with and recognize characters, also appears comparably weak. In the materialistic light of media history, which neither Marx nor Lenin wrote, Brecht's attacks against traditional theater in his Short Organon for the Theater are unfortunately simply misdi- rected: the moments weakened by the deception of spectators do not all come from the open theater under the Greek sun or from Aristotle's Poetics, but rather from the peep show theater of the Counter-Reformation and its image war. Brecht the propagan- dist simply misjudges his historical predecessors. It would even be entirely appropriate to show that his extolled antidote to the theater of illusions - the allegedly scientifically proven alienation effect -
practically coincides with a technologically modernized optics. It was the motion picture, whose arrival finally made the peep show stage of illusions, which had prevailed since the baroque, once and for all look old, and it developed into the great rival of all theaters.
That is all I will say about theater 'studies for the time being, but I will return to this topic when the introduction of new technical light sources comes up. To stick to the chronology, the question arises as to how the new optical media changed literature via theater. The impact on books is important because they are the only things in a position to provide evidence of the real bodily effects of media at times when there were no reader surveys or experimental psychological studies. Witbout knowing how the Romantic period attempted to compete with the precision of images, the preconditions and content of motion pictures will remain in the dark.
88
? ? ? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
2. 3 Enlightenment and Image War
We thus come to the eighteenth century, which was called the Enlight- enment in English and the siecle des lumieres in French, the century of lights, as if it wanted to celebrate the recent optical inventions that had been made. In this century, a technique of writing emerged, or more precisely a technique of description, that, jf you will, made texts compatible with screenplays for the first time, When read cor- rectiy, the letters on the page enabled something to be seen - as if St, Ignatius's solitary Bible readings had been applied on a massive scale.
At the beginning of these developments and at the beginning of this century stood, as the Germanist August Langen recognized long ago, the so-called Rahmenschau. In Langen's terminology, this simply means that from this time on poems also recorded nature using techniques that had already been introduced to painting and theater through the camera obscura, the lanterna magica, and the peep show.
2. 3. 1 Brockes
We will take the most famous and eloquent example: a poem that Hamburg civil servant Barthold Hinrich Brockes published in his nine-volume collection of physical and moral poems beautifully enti- tled Earthly Delight in God (1721-48), which is even more beauti- fully entitled Bewdhrtes Mittel fiir die Augen (Proven Remedy for the Eyes):
When we stand in a beautiful landscape surrounded by loveliness, Stirred by creation, more attentive than ever before,
To observe and actually appreciate its adornments,
To feel reasonable desires once more; so we find that our eyes (Almost blinded and made clumsy by force of habit)
Are not properly suited to see the fine patterns, the colors, the harmony and splendour,
In which they are too scattered.
It appears as if our thoughts are also scattered, like our eyes,
And this is the sad reason why we are not able to delight in the world Or glorify God through His creation with more enthusiasm.
With the bright light in our seeing crystals we are overwhelmed by too
many patterns at once and actually from all sides. Instead, our reason should endeavor to unify them, Observe them one after the other, admire them,
And take pleasure in doing so: thus the spirit returns Just as light and sight suddenly return,
89
? OPTICAL MEDIA
Without bringing adornment and neatness to the body, as is necessary, Without bringing out the delight, gratitude and thanks in us.
To dam the source of disinclination and ingratitude in us, the true
fountain of unhappiness,
And still to do something, to look at the human species,
And to make us able to see: I suggest applying a remedy
Which was inspired by the observations that affected me as I was
recently walking in the field,
And which is not difficult at all to use [. . . J
In a flat, open field, in which you go walking,
And in which you see nothing other than the field and the sky,
I want to point out to you a thousand different beauties instead of a
landscape.
One simply has to fold up one of our hands
And hold it before the eye in the form of a perspective;
Through the small opening, the visualized objects
That are part of the general landscape are transformed into their own
landscape,
From which a nice depiction could be drawn or painted,
If one is able to paint. It is only necessary to turn the hand slightly; A new and entirely different beauty will immediately be seen.
The reason that beauty is so varied for us
Can be explained: the number of patterns in the eyes is so vast
That we are unable to differentiate between them properly,
And we are deterred, and the rays that strike the nerves of the face And convey the figures of bodies onto the reflective crystals of the eyes, No longer become clearer as our spirit notices them more sharply; The gentle darkness of the small shadows formed by the cupped hand Strengthens the eye, and consequently the spirit is sent,
Directed towards things and their details with greater attention and
precision,
To consider the beauty within them with greater emphasis.
It is not contradictory, and it remains a consistent truth
That what Newton wrote about the sense of sight,
Is still hidden for many people, as it also was in the past:
Seeing is an art, like writing or reading.
In order to see properly, reason must be used,
Just as other senses are often used more for all other ends. (quoted in
Busch, 1995, p. 113)
Since Brockes, poets also arm their eyes - not with an actual small telescope aimed at earthly targets (which is what the word perspective implied at that time), but rather with its literally manual replacement. With an absolutely current invocation of Newton's Optics, sight becomes an art that would not exist at all without the artificial aid
90
? ? ? ? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
of devices like the peep show cabinet. But the new art of seemg does not merely position itself at the level of much older arts like writing and reading; it also brings its own innovation to these two sides of literature.
After the nymphs and gods left Greece, poetry was a tedious busi-
ness; for two millennia it was necessary to rewrite a then1e using set rhetorical phrases as if nymphs and gods still existed. Reading accord- ingly meant copying the arts of old texts and practicing with one's own quill for future texts. These rhetorical conditions, which domi- nated all schools and universities with the exception of the Jesuits' spiritual exercises, had nothing to do with writing and reading, but rather (as a commentary on Aristotle in late antiquity already noted) they only dealt with tactical references between senders and receivers, speakers and hearers, writers and readers. Imitating or surpassing an author - that was entirely different from the situation pertaining to writing. Impressing or even overwhelming readers with rhetori- cal effects and arguments until they no longer recognized truth and falsity - also pure cunning.
It is very different with Brockes, whose Physical Poems would not have existed without the lyrical imagination, representation, and even production of natural things. Poetry thus becomes - in the rigorous terms of Heidegger's history of being - an activity performed by subjects on objects, by writers on the beauty of nature, which practi- cally cuts out the address because it relates to nothing but objects. In Proven Remedy for the Eyes poetry readers are only addressed when the writer presents them with his natural optics as a model. He and they do not restrict themselves to the many words about things that have already been made, stored, printed and could have even become mathematical since Pascal or Kircher's combinatorics. Instead, writer and reader adhere to the extra-linguistic, perspectival actuality of objects as such. This imposes a new form of writing on them, which is called (three centuries after Brunelleschi) perspectival. In the future, texts must be written so that it is possible for readers to reconstruct a view of the object written about in the poem even when they have never viewed the object themselves. Indeed, not only must they be able to reconstruct a view of the absent object, but they must also be able to reconstruct the view or perspective taken by the equally absent author with regard to the object. Heidegger rightly calls such image technology "the age of the world picture" or world pictures,
but only in order to be free of it. All that remains in this lecture, which can only support Heidegger's high aims through analyses, is to note that the suppressed rhetoric avenged itself terribly on this
91
? ? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
forgotten writer-reader relationship, abandoned in favor of the new collective object relationship - in the form of ghosts, who will haunt us directly.
For the moment, however, I would still like to add something about how Brockes' manual peep show manufactures the object rela- tionship. Brockes himself says clearly enmfgh that his lyrical process is an artwork, ap,-ffitentional interrupti0;y6f established seeing habits, which normally ensure that our divinely willed and divinely oriented earthly delights do not sufficiently register the many details of this earthly reality. In this respect, a hand cupped in front of an eye to form a telescope creates an alienation effect, long before Brecht, simply because a poet with his armed eye declares war against the unarmed. One need only exchange the meek Brockes with his more aggressive writer colleagues in Ireland and France to understand the keenness of this scientifically enlightened technology of vision. For example, when Swift's Gulliver comes to the land of the giants - which, as we know, lies only a little north of San Francisco - he does not need any perspective or microscope at all, because the giants already appear ten times larger to his hnman eyes. However, the sad result of this microscopy bnilt into nature is that when the giant qneen's most beantiful 16-year-old lady-in-waiting allows Gulliver, like a pet, to climb around her breasts or ride on one of her nipples, he is not aroused at all: he sees not only the nipples themselves, but also the individual skin pores all around them as enormous warts.
The handsomest among these maids of honor, a pleasant frolicsome girl of sixteen, would sometimes set me astride upon one of her nipples, with many other tricks, wherein the reader will excuse me for not being over particular. But I was so much displeased that I entreated Glumdalclitch to contrive some excuse for not seeing that young lady any more. (Swift, 1963, pp. 137-8)
It is precisely such warts that Denis Diderot, the first literary theorist of realism, must use as an excuse to make characters that the writer invented out of nothing nonetheless appear perfectly believable and true-to-life for readers. Diderot argues that when the reader finds a mention of a wart on the face of the literary heroine, he cannot avoid thinking that the writer could not have invented inconspicuous details like warts and must have described them according to so-called life instead. The ugliness that serves as realistic content in Swift's text is thus magnified or abstracted by Diderot into the textual form of realism (Jauss, 1969, p. 237).
92
? ? ? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
To summarize brIefly: SInce the time of Diderot and hIs transla- tor Lessing, literature itself trades under the name of a quasi-optical medium. Lessing's treatise on Laokoon systematically compared poetry to painting and concluded with the following imperative con- cerning the effects of poetry: the poet should make "his subject so palpable to us that we become more conscious of the subject than of his words" (Lessing, 1984, p. 75). Endowed with this mission, but still nevertheless without any guarantee of its automatic realization on the part of the reader, literature abandoned the realm of letters, which had been well-defined SInce the ume of Gutenberg and Luther, and it became a virtual light that fell on the objects it described - in other words, an enlightenment.
In-the field of optical effects, however, another power was already established after the Jesuits' Counter-Reformation. With its new assignment - to place objects before the eyes of a public that needed to be enlightened - literature necessarily assumed a combat position. It became, as Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit so strategically and elegantly formulated, "a battle between the Enlightenment and super- stition. " And, as Jean Starobinski added, this battle was played out between light and darkness. In this respect, the French Revolution was described as an optical medium, as you can read in Starobinski's 1789: The Emblems of Reason. However, Starobinski failed to look beyond the metaphors and to follow the battle between light and darkness taking place right inside his actual concrete devices. That remains to be done, and it will finally take us back to the history of tbe lanterna magica and allow us to understand the reason why the literature of the Romantic period itself became a lanterna magica.
2. 3. 2 Phenomenology from Lambert to Hegel
Tbe battle between the Enlightenment and superstition simply meant wresting optical media away from the Counter-Reformation and giving them a better purpose. Brockes already employed the Rahmen- schau not for the sake of optical illusions, but to provide his readers with a scientifically enlightened way of seeing. The science of optics thus changed its function: from Aristotle to Huygens or Newton it had virtually been a cosmic science, which benefited astronomy in particular. In the eighteenth century, on the other hand, optics sur- rendered to the Cartesian subject that it had produced itself through linear perspective, camera obscura, and lanterna magica. It no longer simply asked how rays of light travel from the world into the eye after all possible reflections and refractions, but rather it posed the
93
? oPTICAL MEDIA
new question of how the optical actuality of the world can be recon- structed from the data available to the eye as sensations (to John Locke's definition of the word). If one could namely explain the differences that exist between the objective world and subjective actuality, the priests' deception that exploited precisely this difference would be completely exposed.
The first philosopher to formulate this question was the Alsatian Johann Heinrich Lambert. Lambert came to Berlin in 1764 to obtain a position at the Royal Academy of Science. At first, Frederick the Great was horrified by Lambert's primitive eating and drinking habits, which valued pasta and overly sweetened wines above all else, until proof of Lambert's brilliant knowledge of mathematics reassured him. It was this knowledge that first made a philosophical- mathematical theory of appearances possible.
Lambert had already submitted a paper in 1759 with the character- istic title Freye Perspektive (Free Perspective). "Free" was supposed to imply that the art of perspective taught to painters by Brunelles- chi and Alberti had been very unfree. With fictional images, which removed the technical mediation of the camera obscura, the painter first had to abandon his inherited two-dimensional medium and think himself into the strange technology of architecture. According to Alberti's instructions, the proportions, lines, and vanishing points would only be correct when the painter was able to draw a ground plan and a side elevation of the space that his painting was then sup- posed to shorten using perspective. Lambert's free perspective wanted to relieve painters of precisely this toil. It could only do this, however, because the mathematician from Miihlhausen understood the greater mathematician from the neighboring city of Basel. Leonhard Euler succeeded in purifying four trigonometrical functions from all table work or empiricism. Because he standardized the radius of a circle as one unit, within whose sine and cosine, tangents and cotangents develop, table values became real mathematical functions that depend
on one single, real variable (or, since Euler, they can also depend on complex variables). In other words, for the first time transcendental functions could be calculated elegantly and in general terms, whiCh was previously only possible with algebraic and therefore polynomial equations.
Lambert applied Euler's mathematical trick to painting. He no longer determined perspectival geometry as relationships or propor- tions between lines, like Euclid or Pythagoras, but rather as transcen- dental functions of an angle of vision. Wonderful, I hear you say, but how were mathematically untrained painters supposed to know
94
? ? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
these functions? The answer was quite simple: Lambert removed this burden from their shoulders by spoon-feeding them the calculations. Lambert, wbo was brilliant at inventing new measuring instruments, invented a ruler that would have simply appalled Euclid or Durer. In addition to the venerable linear scale, it also contained four other gradations that made all four trigonometrical functions - at least in the range from -90 to 90 degrees - available at the same time as the linear function. A painter who had obtained Lambert's ruler could cast an eye over tbe open landscape, slide the ruler over the drawing, and an image emerged in perspective entirely without a ground plan or a side elevation. As an amateur art historian, I unfortunately do not know if real or even famous painters employed Lambert's Freye Perspektive other than the Berlin artist Hummel, but hopefully its basic principle already clarifies how modern trigonometrical func- tions are capable of mathematically recreating visual appearance, which means the perspective of a seeing subject.
Lambert also employed the same trigonometrical trick in a branch of optical science that he himself invented: photometry. Before Lambert, nobody would have known how to say how bright or how dark what we see actually is. Photography, which is nothing but automatic Lambertian photometry, conversely made sure that we no longer even know about this prior lack of knowledge. If the light from a light source, whose radiated energy is hopefully constant, falls on a curved surface of the same diffuse color, as in Hoffmann's Jesuit church, then a literal appearance or reflection enters the eye, which depends not only on the brightness of the light itself, but also on the angle that the direction of the light forms with the local perpendicular on the surface. 1= k 'f cos (aJ (Watt, 1989, p. 48).
Both examples, free perspective and Lambert's cosine law (which, incidentally, he himself still wrote up as sine law), were only sup- posed to show how Euler's and Lambert's new trigonometry made it possible to calculate a subjective appearance. All that remained, therefore, was to build this mathematics of the subject into an entire philosophy. Lambert did precisely that in his Neues Organon (New Organon), which was published the year he traveled to Berlin and already revealed the formulation of this new question in its sub- title: Gedanken iiber die Erforschung and Bezeichnung des Wahren und dessen Unterscheidung vom Irrtum und Schein (Thoughts on the Investigation and Designation of Truth and its Distinction from Error and Appearance). You know that all philosophies have always known that there is a gaping abyss between truth and error, which only they were supposed to bridge. The difference between truth
95
? ? oPTICAL MEDIA
and appearance is less venerable, but above all less clear, particu- larly when one realizes, as Lambert himself first explained, that with every perspective or diffuse reflection a visual appearance necessarily emerges. Lambert's New Organon (in contrast to Aristotle's good old one) also makes the point tbat appearance chiefly arises and is more- over chiefly researched in optics. To generalize his concept for all five senses, however, Lambert coins a new word that would go on to make philosophical careers: he establishes a doctrine of appearance in general, that is, a "phenomenology. " As you can imagine, this science is concerned with the struggle between the Enlightenment and super- stition or, in Lambert's words, "with the means of avoiding illusions and penetrating appearances in order to get to the truth" (Lambert, 1990, p. 645). For this reason, the first "examples" that Lambert uses to "explain" his program are taken from his own optics: "The color of a body depends on the light illuminating it. At night, scarlet and black can hardly be differentiated. By the light of a lamp, blue and green are practically the same. The sun affects not only the brightness of a wall, but also its color. The question is thus by which light does a body show its true color? " (Lambert, 1990, p. 674)
To begin with, therefore, phenomenology is the science that inves- tigates the objective nature of things starting with the subject and par- ticularly the subject's visual appearances, and in this respect it does away with all sensory deception or even priests. However, because Lambert deals not only with thought and recognition, but also with the description of this thought, the formulation of the question of phenomenology can also be reversed. As a brilliant mathematician, Lambert already knows that there would be no thought without signs and no calculation without symbols for numbers and operators. For this reason, his phenomenology also ends with a "sixth chapter" that does not undo appearance but rather constructs it: "In its general scope, phenomenology is a transcendental optics [. . . J as it deter- mines appearance from truth and, in turn, truth from appearance" (Lambert, 1990, p. 824). The adjective "transcendental" clearly does not convey its traditional meaning, which denotes God's place outside the world. On the contrary, it is a mathematical term that Lambert takes from his transcendent trigonometrical functions and imports into philosophy. All that is left for Kant, Lambert's younger friend and pupil, is to go back and generalize this "transcendental optics" as something that is now called transcendental philosophy. In other words, which are unfortunately seldom used by philosophers: German idealism also emerged from the history of optical media. Hegel thus bas good reason to treat what he calls the struggle of the
96
? ? ? ? ? ? ? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
Enlightenment with superstition in a book that - both out of loyalty and disloyalty with respect to Lambert - is entitled Phenomenology of the Spirit. At least the early Hegel did not want to confront his readers immediately with God, but rather to construct the absolute as the last perspectival vanishing point after the abolition of all sub- jective appearances. This is all quite wonderful, but it will not be discussed any further in this lecture because transcendental optics forfeits every mathematical ambiguity as it passes from Lambert to Kant to Hegel.
On the other hand, the final chapter of the New Organon, entitled "On the Drawing of Appearance," provides a virtual summary of everything these lectures have dealt with so far. It addresses linear perspective and painting, linear perspective and theater architecture, and finally even linear perspective and the "art of poetry" (Lambert, 1990, pp. 824-8). As if to generalize Brockes' opthalmological advice or Diderot's wart, Lambert claims that the "art of poetry" consists of the art "of painting things for us according to their appearance and evoking the same sensations through these visions that the things themselves would evoke if we saw them from the same viewpoint as the poet's, which he transfers to our thoughts, so to speak. [. . . ] [The poet] paints the aspect of the thing that he himself already entirely imagines from his assumed viewpoint, with all of the insights and desires that these impressions inspire in him and that they are sup- posed to inspire in his readers" (Lambert, 1990, p. 828).
The battle between light and darkness brought all the illumina- tion effects that were formerly available only to aristocratic powers like royal courts or religious powers like the Jesuits into the simple, quotidian night of middle-class people. Artificial lights that shone until midnight were installed everywhere. Secret societies like the Freemasons, who as I mentioned before, could only have come into being after workers' secrets were revealed through print technology, organized their rituals partly in the dark of the night and partly in the illuminated night, and in this twilight it was never possible to discern whether the secret leaders were doing this to follow the goals of the Enlightenment or the Counter-Reformation. In the eighteenth century, therefore, secret associations represented the common ground upon which Catholics, free-thinkers, Jesuits, and enlighteners were able to wage their war. They also represented the gronnd, however, upon which the optical effects of Jesuit propaganda gradually turned into commercial (to avoid using the word frauduleut) practices.
The literature of the Enlightenment thus paid for the fact that it invented a concept of what objects are worthy of being represented,
97
? ? I"
OPTICAL MEDIA
but thereby lost all strategic concept of theIr target. Con-artists who employed optical media to manufacture completely illusionary objects, but who did it before an audience they had strategically and exactly calculated, filled only one of the gaps left or rather provided by the system.
2. 3. 3 Ghost-Seers
The lanterna magica thus stopped projecting the Stations of the Cross or the sufferings of the damned in hell, as it once did for the baroque Athanasius Kircher.