No More Learning

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. We will have to come back to thiS when we discuss color television.
At the turn of the century around 1800, after chemistry and physics were also established as academic sciences, the chemistry and physics of light - Schulze's photochemical effect and Newton's spectrum analysis - intersected for the first time. No less a person than Friedrich Wilhelm Herschel, the son of a Hannover court musi- cian who had risen to become a British mathematician and court astronomer, introduced the new distinction between light and heat to photochemistry as well: he proved that for the human eye the broken sunlight in Newton's prism actually stops at red and then turns to black, but on a storer of heat like the thermometer it also has measurable effects beyond red. In other words, Herschel discov- ered infrared as a physical embodiment of heat and thus also as a medium on which night vision aids for Waffen-SS tanks in World War II were based, and which is still the basis for tactical anti-aircraft
rocket sensors today.
After Herschel's experiment became known, Johann Wilhelm
Ritter, the physicist among the German romantics, took a mirror- image step. Ritter posed the very methodical question: if the solar spectrum is brightest in the middle but warmest at its end, then why should cold light not also exist beyond the other end of the visible spectrum?
To answer his question, Ritter clearly needed, as he wrote in his 1801 book Bemerkungen zu Herschels neueren Untersuchun- gen iiber das Licht (Remarks on Herschel's Recent Experiments on Light), a chemical "reagent that has its strongest effect beyond the violet in the same way that our thermometer has its strongest effect beyond the red" (Ritter, 1986, p. 119). Thus it was that Newton's solar spectrum and the light sensitivity discovered by Schulze and further researched by the chemist Scheele came together in a single transparent experiment. Ritter was able to show that when a beam of sunlight is split using a prism, the silver chloride is blackened the
most and the deepest by those parts of the spectrum that our eyes can no longer perceive as light. Ritter thus discovered ultraviolet light,
123
? ? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
which provides light without heat - an analog to Herschel's infrared light, which provides heat without light.
As the everyday concept of light expanded symmetrically towards its two invisible edges, however, Newton's particle theory also col- lapsed again. The wave theory posited by Huygens, and still only supported by Euler and Kant in the eighteenth century, was revived in 1802 by Thomas Young, who added the new point that extremely long light waves are infrared and extremely short waves are ultravio- let. This concept of waves or frequencies, which Euler had also Intro- duced in modern music theory, in contrast to Pythagoras, allowed researchers like Fresnel or Faraday to study light interference and its moin'-type pattern around 1830, which would be Important for fundamental film effects.
It is important to explain that such theories were scandalous in an epoch when Germany's prince among poets was working on his theory of colors in total opposition to Newton and all of the natural sciences based on his work. For Goethe, light was an urphenomenon of nature, and Mother Nature could not be reduced to individual parts or waves - this would amount to sadistic incest - but rather always had to be described or worshipped only phenomenally. According to his theory of colors, each of the different colors emerged as a more or less equal mixture of both primary conditions, light and darkness. In other words, colors were dialectical effects of the polarity between God and Mephisto, Goethe the poet and Goethe the civil servant. The prince among poets would never have tolerated the notion that light - like Ritter's ultraviolet - could be at its maximum where natural human organs - like Goethe's beloved eyes - in principle no longer suffice. The romantic physicist Ritter was never able to recognize this death in his discovery. Ritter's essay about ultraviolet concluded with the dramatic formula that it would soon be possible to trace all of the polarities of nature - electricity, magnetism, and heat - back to a single identical principle and to find this principle embodied in light, for "light is the source of any strength that creates life and activity; [light] is the seed that produces everything good on Earth" (Ritter, 1986, p. 127). '
In deed and in truth, Ritter's ultraviolet led to the discovery of X-rays barely a century later, which then showed the protagonist of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain what it means to be already able to see one's own death while one is still alive, namely in X-ray photographs of a tubercular lung. Worse still than Thomas Mann's media consumer panic, however, were an irony of media history and an effect of theory. The irony consisted in the fact that not
124
? OPTICAL MEDIA
only did the fictional Hans Castorp die of tuberculosls, but also the poor romantic physicist Rittel; who discovered ultraviolet. The effect of the theory of invisible light, on the other hand, was the total elimination of the ancient visibility postulate. When the great Viennese physicist Lndwig Boltzmann (whose entropy formula is mathematically identical to Shannon's later information formula) wanted to prove that there is no thought without a correspond- mg material, namely bram-physiological apparatus, he suggested for future research that our thoughts should sImply be projected onto an X-ray screen (Boltzmann, 1979).
Just as Boltzmann's opponents m physics, like Ernst Mach, still had the upper hand durmg his hfetime and his own atomism only tri- umphed posthumously after he shot himself, Goethe's theory of colors also dominated over German optics during his lifetime. Romanticism meant - according to the thesis of these lectures - transferring all of the optical real into the imaginary world of the readers' souls, where it naturally could not be stored.
3. 1. 2. 1 Niepce and Daguerre
This lecture will therefore cut to another new scene - this time imperial or Napoleonic - as we step onto French soil. This requires, thongh, that - quite in the manner of Napoleon - we remain on German soil for a moment longer in order to carry off art treasures and technologies and to destroy the Holy Roman Empire.
As we know, early modern empires were based on printing, which in turn was based on paper for books and older parchment for imperial or royal documents. At the end of the eighteenth century, however, not only did the state experience a great revolution, but paper also experienced a revolution. Following the model of animal hide parchment, which was in principle finite, paper had for centu- ries been created in finite large sheets, which then had to be folded, cut, printed on, and bound together in books. Folios, quartos, and similar old book names all originated from such discrete formats. From 1799 onwards, on the other hand, there existed paper machines that produced endlessly long ribbons, like idealized toilet paper, and since the invention of the high-speed printing press in 1811 there was also a printing technique that corresponded to this new format or unformat: rotary printing. Gutenberg flat relief plates no longer printed letters on an equally flat and limited paper sheet, but rather an endlessly turning print cylinder revolved over an endlessly long paper cylinder, which is unrolled underneath it. To the film scholar in us,
125
? '"
. ,. ",:11
i:' I:,I
'. .
OPTICAL MEDIA
this technical innovation naturally evokes the image of rolls of film, and it reminds us how Orson Welles immortalized the rotary press in his film about a not very fictional newspaper mogul named Charles Foster Kane. In the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the rotary press first ensured that old European empires gradually became democratic states with unlimited paper supplies and newspapers that published an unlimited variety of opinions. Of course, the first rotary presses, in London in 1811, stood in newspaper printing works, and they started modern mass journalism. Heinrich Bosse called it "writing in the age of its technical reproducibility" (Bosse, 1981), a type of writing incidentally, that according to Bosse's proof, also led to the new legal construction of an endless copyright.
But now what had already been demonstrated for the Gutenberg era repeated itself: each historically defined print medium needs a corresponding optical medium. Gutenberg's printed books called for woodcuts and copperplate engravings. The rotary press needed some- thing that was called an illustrated newspaper in the middle of the nineteenth century; today it is simply called an illustrated. To answer this need, before it was finally met by photography, a certain Aloys Senefelder invented lithography in 1796.
With respect to the technical principle of litbography, which first made newspaper illustrations possible in mass editions, it suffices to say here that in contrast to gravure printing with copperplate engrav- . ing and relief printing with woodcuts it is planographic: as with photography there is only a single plane, which is soaked partly with fat and partly with water and then pressed. Because water and fat normally do not mix, Senefelder was already able to distinguish dark and bright places in the image very well. In 1827, his successors even achieved what eighteenth-century copperplate engravers were only able to realize with tremendous effort: hassle-free four-color print- ing, which enabled reproductions of artworks - or kitschy oil paint- ings, to be more precise - to be brought for the first time into every middle-class living room. Walter Benjamin's work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility found its material basis in lithography.
Theoreticians were not the only ones to profit from Senefelder, but also Napoleonic counts. In Munich in 1812, Count Philibert de Lasteyrie-Dusaillant, a son-in-law of the famous General Lafay- ette, studied lithography under the inventor himself. The unfortunate Russian campaign drove him to France, and it was from there that he first succeeded in importing a lithographic machine to Paris under the Bourbon Restoration (just as King Ludwig XI once brought the Gutenberg printing press to his emerging nation-state).
126
? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
And now we have really managed to enter the realm of media studies itself, for the technique of photography was developed around this lithographic machine through the teamwork of two men: Niepce and Daguerre.
Herewith two brief introductions: Joseph Niepce was born near Chalon-sur-Saone. He was originally supposed to become a priest, but as a result of the French Revolution he pursued a carrier as an officer instead. The victors of the Counter-Reformation became com- batants in the national wars. On a whim, Niepce accordingly adopted the very unchristian name Nicephore or "victory bearer" (Jay, 1981, p. 11). One of Niepce's brothers also built an internal combustion engine to power a boat - a motor, incidentally, that despite the patents granted by Napoleon was suspected of being yet another dream for the old phantasm of a perpetuum mobile. You can see from this that the Niepce brothers were already chasing desperately after the dream that Edison first realized: the invention of invention itself. If you would like to know more, go to Chalon-sur-Saone. In the center of the city you will find, in addition to good wine, a museum of photography dedicated to Niepce. There you will also see the construction plan of a pyreolophore or internal combustion engine, which as a precursor to all of our cars and tanks was supposed to have made it possible for the first time ever to put a submarine in the Saone.
Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre, whose war-like name I have already emphasized, was not related to generals, like Niepce, but rather to civil servants. Daguerre himself, on the other hand, began as a painter, and he displayed a particular talent for perspective and lighting. For the sake of the imaginary in painting he changed over to that hybrid mixture of arts and media that was introduced in the nineteenth century. Daguerre first painted so-called panoramas, giant paintings that surrounded their spectators with perspective on all sides of the horizon. In 1822, he personally developed the diorama in Paris. As the name already suggests, this was a panorama that was partly reflective and partly transparent and thus combined tra- ditional painting with a lanterna magica effect. So long as Daguerre's diorama was presented to a paying audience with reflected light, for example, it showed a peaceful daytime view of Vesuvius, but when light shone through the image, then a night-time view of the same volcano appeared suddenly from the back of the canvas - with erup- tions, fire, lightning, and multicolored illuminated clouds. Daguerre thus modernized painting according to that apparent movement that Alberti began with his perspectival day and night views of nature,
127
? ? ? ? ? ,,;':::
',0, ,1'111
'",
"" "" C" '111 ,.
""
OPTICAL MEDIA
and that Schriipfer or Robertson had further developed with the lanterna magica. And finally, because the battle between Enlighten- ment and superstition was still raging during Daguerre's lifetime, the minor miracle occurred that a church of all things bought one of Daguerre's dioramas for its own illusionistic purposes (Eder, 1978, p. 211). Daguerre was therefore predestined from the start, much earlier than Niepce, to implement the phenomenon called photo- graphic world view.
After these brief introductions, we now move on to the collabora- tive teamwork of these two founders. In the beginning, it was Niepce alone who (with more success than his brother, the perpetuum mobile constructor) was simply looking for a method of perpetuating images of nature - with the express goal of automating the production of lithographs, whose existence he had first heard of in 1813. Niepce's heliography, or the art of sun writing, was supposed to serve the same function for the multimedia system of rotary press and lithography as Walgenstein's self-printing of nature served during the Gutenberg era. He furnished the sun with the ability to etch images of illumi- nated objects, which were themselves typically already images, onto a metal plate without the operation or interposition of a painter's hand. These metal plates could then profitably replace Senefelder's slates. In a series of experiments, which really tested all of the light' sensitive materials known at that time, Niepce discovered that the most suitable chemical was asphalt, a substance that in the meantime has successfully covered half of the nation's ground. But even with asphalt, it took hours or days until the copperplate of a Renaissance cardinal was recorded and its black-and-white values were also devel- oped and fixed in Niepce's camera obscura. It was therefore purely a technology for reproducing images, and new recordings of so-called nature, of chance itself, were practically out of the question simply because sunlight aud shadows do not always stand as still as they once did in the Old Testament (Eder, 1978, p. 223).
In place of precisely this deficit came Daguerre - through the intermediary of a Parisian camera obscura dealer, by the way. As a painter and illusion artist, what was important to him was not primarily eternal storage and reproduction, but rather, as with his diorama, the recording of fleeting events or time processes. Through a formal legal contract, Niepce transferred all of his secret technical knowledge to Daguerre, who for his part brought nothing further to the contract than the joy of experimentation and patience, with which he survived Niepce's death in 1833 and was celebrated as the sole inventor of the typically named daguerreotype.
128
I
? OPTICAL MEDIA
Indeed, daguerreotypy in 1839 possessed only the slightest simi- larities to Niepce's original project. According to expert advice, it was an illusion to hope for any model for lithography from it, simply because tlie delicate pliotographs would be "destroyed past redemption" if "subjected to the pressure of a roller" (Eder, 1978, p. 237l. On the other hand, there were two immense advantages that compensated for this lack of robustness and reproducibility. First, Daguerre no longer employed symbolically coded models like copper- plate engravings, in whIch all of the real or the noise then fell on the part of imperfect heliography. Instead, he began with real conditions, which naturally changed with the sunlight, and he therefore had to make substantial improvements to the recording speed: in "midday climate," the great physicist and expert Arago estimated that in the climate of midday two to three minutes would be sufficient to make daguerreotypes of nature. The fundamental trend of modern media technologies to replace static yalues with dynamic values and to replace steadfastness with speed had, after Claude Chappe's optical telegraphy, now also caught up with optical image storage. Accord- ing to Daguerre's contemporaries, his process was "60 to 80 times" faster than Niepce's (Eder, 1978, p. 228).
Even if it appears quite old by today's standards, which are mea- sured in micro- and nanoseconds, Daguerre reportedly accomplished this sensation through two accidental discoveries. The first accident occurred one day during an experiment when a silver spoon lay on an iodized silver plate. When the sun shone on it, an image of the spoon appeared on the plate, whereupon Daguerre naturally said farewell to Niepce's asphalt. The second accident occurred when:
[aJ number of plates he had previously experimented upon in the
camera obscura had been put aside in an old cupboard and had remained there for weeks without being further noticed. But one day, on removing one of the plates, Daguerre to his intense astonishment found on it an image of the most complete distinctness, the smallest details being depicted with perfect fidelity. He had no idea how the picture had come, but he felt sure there must be something in the cupboard which had produced it. The cupboard contained all sorts of things: tools and apparatus, chemical reagents, and among the other things a basin filled with metallic mercury. Daguerre now removed one thing after the other from the cupboard, with the exception of the mercury, and still he regularly obtained pictures if the plates which had previously been submitted to the action of images in the camera obscura were allowed to remain for several hours in the cupboard. For a long time the mercury escaped his notice, and it almost appeared
129
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
to him as if the old cupboard were bewitched. But at last it occurred to him that it must be the mercury to whose action the pictures were due. A drawing made with a pointed piece of wood on a clean pane of glass, remains invisible even to the most acute sight, but comes to light at once when breathed upon. The condensation of the water vapor (deposited in small drops) differs in the parts touched with the wooden point and those left untouched, in the same manner as took place in Daguerre's pictures. (Eder, 1978, p. 228)
As a research method, this mixture of accidents and the systematic elimination of accidents requires a brief comment. First, I hope it is clear how much chemistry must have historically already taken place in order that iodized silver and quicksilver could be accidentally placed in the same cupboard. After all, even the surreal accident that Lautreamont later defined as the encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table presumed the existence of three technical inventions. Once they exist, howeveJ; artificial substances or machines are able to react to one another without human inter- vention, just as today's random processes between silicon and silicon dioxide, which computers ultimately consist of, relieve people of all thinking. Second, like Ritter's discovery of ultraviolet light, the history of Daguerre's invention very clearly shows how methodically theoretically preset values were investigated after 1800. That nature could be brought to create a black-and-white image of itself was a result of sheer will and not an assumption that was already justified elsewhere. Only the preliminary decision to already presuppose this possibility ensured that even apparently bewitched cupboards no longer raised any suspicion of witchcraft or magic at all. In other words, if an accidental effect like the one that occurred in Daguerre's cupboard had taken place 200 years earlier, wbich is not entirely out of the question, the whole matter would have fallen flat again simply because no one would have captured, stored, recorded, and exploited it as a natural technology. Niepce and Daguerre thus represent the beginning of an epoch where tbe duration, the reproducibility, and practically even the success of inventions - and in the end that means historically contingent events - are guaranteed. In 1839, we are still not quite in the epoch where President Reagan could solemnly announce as the emperor of California and in the name of holy Hollywood that in the future American inventors can or must invent a surefire protective barrier to defend against all missiles that want to attack California from the evil empire; but we are also no longer far from this epoch.
130
? OpTICAL MEDIA
This new guarantee of 1l1ventability in general also corresponds to the public reception of Daguerre's invention. Up until now - namely, up until the solitary death of Niepce, the founding hero - these lectures have had to report on more tragedies and testimonials to poverty, but we are now coming to brighter times and the worship of bourgeois geniuses, even if they are only junior partners in inven- tor teams, like Daguerre. The most famous physicists and academ- ICS in France, above all Arago and the gas researcher Gay-Lussac, supported the lllventor and earned him the Cross of the LegiOn of Honor and an annual life-long pension of 6,000 francs as a "national reward" (as it is called in the specially enacted law) from the "Citizen King" Louis Philippe (Eder, 1978, pp. 232-3). Daguerre therefore died as a successful man who not only earned 400 gold francs for each of his cameras and demanded 60 to 120 gold francs for his daguerreotypes (Eder, 1978, p. 253), but who could also make money
by relinquishing his patent rights. This enabled Daguerre to afford a park for his retirement estate, which contained small lakes, water- falls, and above all (as if to prove the thesis of these lectures) the ruins of a castle and a gothic chapel (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 149). For France, on the other hand, all of Daguerre's honors took place with explicit reference to modern copyright law, which the French Revolution (under the overall control of Lahnal, the telegraphy advocate) had invented for "spiritual heroes" and especially for novelists in 1794. By panning from literature to media technology, his invention proved in retrospect to be the invention of invention itself.
The historical goals that were initially prescribed for daguerreo- typy can be gathered from tbe ceremonial speeches about Daguerre that were held in his presence. On the one hand, Arago emphasized that during Napoleon's Egyptian campaign art history and archaeol- ogy already urgently needed daguerreotypes to reproduce artworks and inscriptions without the falsifying hand of the painter. (Even the ten-volume description of Egypt that was edited on Napoleon's behalf by none other than Baron Joseph Fourier, the founder of modern wave theory, was still not a technical medium. ) On the other hand, painters could also employ daguerreotypes as cheaper and at the same time more precise replacements for their usual sketches and models. This was supposed to have far-reaching consequences for the invention of film, but it also already happened, for example, when the famous lngres made his famous painting La Source (The Spring). The painting shows a stylized Greek woman carrying a pitcher; however, the photograph lngres used as a model shows - or rather conceals - an ordinary Parisian prostitute, as they were typically used
131
? ? ? 'Ihl'
OPTICAL MEDIA
as models at that time. So much for the new competitIve relation- ship between art and media technology, painting and daguerreotype, which Arago only touched upon. To the scientist, as expected, tbe "scientific advantages" of invention were far more important (Eder, 1978, p. 237).
In this regard, the first and most dramatic point that Arago emphasized was the possibility of absolutely measuring light and its strength. With human eyes alone there were always only rela- tive estimates of the strength of light, but the daguerreotype did for photometry precisely what the Parisian standard meter did for land surveys and cartography in 1790. Lambert's photometry thus freed itself from all phenomenological or subjective appearance in order to become a technically precise form of measurement. A second point was the sensitivity of the new medium, which made light more intense compared to the eye and which made it possible to force the moon or the rings of Saturn to produce experimental effects. And finally, because their exactness surpassed all other arts, Arago also men- tioned the possibility of measuring daguerreotypes themselves with rulers and compasses to infer the length and angle ratios of the objects represented. From this emerged Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. 's great idea to destroy all artworks (for instance, using gunpowder) immedi- ately after they are photographed, and since the two world wars the even greater idea has emerged of airplane or satellite reconnaissance photographs that finally contribute to the systematic destruction of the photographed object . . .
3. 1. 2. 2 Talbot
According to the honest Arago, there are only two things in the world that balk at daguerreotypes: first, paper, on which all writing and books are based, and second, people, on which all inventions were based according to early capitalist doctrine. Daguerreotypes could therefore only be printed throngh the mediation of a lithographer or copperplate engraver, and people, who are much too restless, could only be captured with extreme difficulty. In 1839, in the land of unlimited possibilities, Professor Draper and Professor Morse simply made a person sit for half an hour in the blazing sun with white face powder and closed eyes until the first portrait photograph was taken or rather waited for (Eder, 1978, p. 271). Their studio in New York was thus the first photographic portrait studio in the world and the first technology for truly storing human faces, and I cannot avoid making special reference to Morse's involvement: Samuel Morse was
132
? OPTICAL MEDIA
the painter who in 1837 had made the electric telegraph - the all- important modern broadcast technology - ready to go into produc- tion. There are no media, but rather always only multimedia systems.
As you can imagine, however, the multimedia system between photochemical storage, on the one hand, and paper and people, on the other hand, wanted to be completed not only in the American sense, like Samuel Morse's telegraph standardizer, but also formally. Gradual changes to Daguerre's process, all of which I cannot deal with here, eventually led to instantaneous photography, which made it possible for the first time to contemplate the storage of moving images, which means film. I will only name the most important of these steps and researchers.
William Henry Fox Talbot, Daguerre's previously underestimated English competitor, produced the first photographs on paper. During his trip to Italy, this rich Englishman repeatedly attempted to capture beautiful romantic images with the camera obscura and then sketch them by hand, as was typical since the time of the Renaissance. But the successful perspectivization of nature, which had filled all of the painters since Durer with pride and contentment, was no longer satisfying after Daguerre made the physically real storable. Talbot, the failed painter, thus sought and found a technical method of pho- tographing directly onto paper soaked in iodized silver and silver nitrate. From the camera obscura he developed the camera in the modern sense of the word. The hands of lithographers, which had previously stood between technical recording and book reproduction, were thus no longer necessary. In the entire operation of new optics there were no longer any arts, but rather only media. Talhot himself, who called his calotypy or "beautiful impression" technology "the pencil of nature" as it allows nature to inscribe images of itself, actu-
ally used it - strictly according to McLuhan's law that the content of media are always other media - for magnificent volumes of beautiful images of European nature or art, but the path to illustrated maga- zines based on photographs and to all the magazines sold under the counter was already mapped out.
Another of Talbot's innovations, the introduction of negatives, was relevant in an entirely different way. Unfortunately, I do not know if the concept of positive and negative in photography was derived from the much older analog concept of mathematics or the concept of positive and negative in the theory of electricity, which was only 50 years old at that time, but this should be clarified at some point. With Daguerre's process, the recording and fixing of the image always produced a positive reproduction of the lighting conditions.
133
? ""t",
OPTICAL MEDIA
Experiments with negative reproductions failed because of their irre- versibility. Talbot resolved this problem by always photographing the negative again just as it had been produced itself in order to obtain as many positive copies as he wanted. This had two far-reaching effects, one hidden and one apparent. The secret effect was that photogra- phy was not only capable of amplifying or magnifying the light, for which Arago had already praised Daguerre, but rather since Talbot it was also capable of magnifying or reducing the size of the image when copying the negative.