The
literature
of the Enlightenment thus paid for the fact that it invented a concept of what objects are worthy of being represented,
97
?
97
?
Kittler-Friedrich-Optical-Media-pdf
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. Instead, it became an all-purpose weapon used by adventurers like Count Cagliostro or Casanova, the seduction artist. The second and third books of Casanova's Memoirs recount how he played a magician at night in Cesena only to cheat an idiot who believed in the hidden treasures of ghosts out of 500 sequins and also naturally to seduce this fool's daughter. Casanova succeeded at this second project quite easily, as usual, but when he attempted to act like a magician a storm interfered. Its lightning frightened the magician himself far more than his artworks frightened the deceived
,
Ii' spectators . . .
Even more dramatic than Casanova's unique experiment is the entire life of a con-artist whose surname already proclaimed his true intentions: the man was simply named Schriipfer. 4 Allow me to cite Schriipfer's swindle directly from Zglinicki's amusing Der Weg des Films, because in this story every word counts:
Schropfer owned a coffee house on the Klostergasse in Leipzig, which enjoyed a certain popularity, especially because there was an excellent punch there. The owner of the establishment understood masterfully how to surround his guests with the halo of a great magician! He discretely made it known that he was "in the possession of the true secrets of the Freemasons. " Many sought this true secret at that time, for they were convinced that unlimited power would then be bestowed on them. There were also such doubters and seekers among the regular guests of the coffee house on the Klostergasse in Leipzig, some of whom were distinguished and held high offices. People of this sort made quite an impression on Schropfer. He approached them care- fully to question them and make them bend to his wishes. He never resorted to empty speech, however, and instead produced "facts. " These "facts" consisted in so-called "necromantic" (today we would say spiritualist) sittings, which distinguished him especially through the
4The German word Schropfer refers to someone who rips off other people. 98
? ? ? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
use of magic lantern effects and sophisticated theatrical make~up. Even those who possessed the most level-headed and critical natures were taken in. The stage for these myserious performances was the billiard room of the guest house of the new "Grosskophta. " Schr6pfer had it built especially for this purpose. All of the spectators first received a large dose of punch. This not only increased his profits, but also his guests' psychological willingness to see miracles. After the punch had fogged their brains enough, Schrop? er moved to the billiard room with his guests and began the performance. To ensure that meddlesome and distrustful spectators would not see through his game, Schropfer made various preparations and established strict rules of behavior. No one was permitted to stir from his place, and only a small lamp burned III the dark room, whose flickering light intensified the gloomy atmosphere. Incense, a skull, and other mystical utensils completed the "magician's" furnishings. Then the conjuration began: accompanied by dreadful rumbling, a preloaded ghost appeared constantly flut- tering back and forth above a kind of altar. It became brighter and then darker again. Of course it was a typical lanterna magica image projected backwards against the rising smoke. Electrified machines ensured that the spectators received invisible and mysterious electric shocks at the high point of the manifestations, assistants imitated otherworldly voices, and much else. In the beginning, Schropfer's bogus machinations were limited to the area around Leipzig, but soon he expanded his area of operations and undertook trips to Berlin, Frankfurt am Main and Dresden. Thanks to his skillful scheming and excellent relationships he soon succeeded in gathering the most prestigious and affluent circles around him. Schr6pfer eagerly began to advertise something new: he wanted to found his own masonic lodge, and he actually received money at once from all sides. Sponsors and friends trustingly granted him enormous credit. In return, Schr6pfer promised them - naming is destiny - high annuities from a fortune in the millions, which was allegedly deposited in a bank in Frankfurt. The magician was able to stave off his patient believers for a long time with all sorts of excuses. Finally - on the evening of October 7, 1774 - he promised to show all of his friends something from his fortune. Spirits were high in the Klostergasse. Everyone showed up, even the serious and wealthy gentlemen with the impressive titles. The punch was better than ever before. People jabbered on about "true wisdom" and "the eternal light. " Schropfer seemed to shine with the brilliance of his knowledge and fame - like a Pied Piper of human souls. He appeared to feel particularly well, and he was more amusing, energetic, spirited, and humorous than ever before. He behaved - as it was later recorded in the report - as if he wanted to go to a ball. It was not until midnight that he began to lose some of his spiritedness. He briefy withdrew and wrote a few letters. In the early morning hours he invited
99
? ? I? "
! ,"
:1"
OPTICAL MEDIA
his guests to go with him to Rosental Park, where he would show them "a wonderful apparition. " Still at dawn, Schropfer went ahead of all the others. He asked his friends to wait a little, and they noticed how he continued along the way alone without looking around. He turned around the corner and was concealed by trees and bushes. His steps became silent, and then there was nothing more to be heard. The unnatural calm weighed over the park like a black cloth; the men looked at themselves, became restless - then there was a sound like the lash of a whip, which broke the silence. Schropfer was found dead lying on the ground in the forest. A bullet in the mouth had ended his life. (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 67)
Compare this ending sometime with the ending of Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus . . . Schriipfer's lovely story reqnires no interpretation, but only a few remarks and some added emphasis.
First, it makes clear what I have already said about the difference between the oral but technical traditions of medieval masons and the just as oral but occult traditions of eighteenth-century Freemasons. The letterpress, the camera obscura, and the lanterna magica automa- tized knowledge, and the drawback is that this results merely in asser- tions about knowledge whose only goal is to obscure the underlying technology, like a lanterna magica, using all means of intoxication.
Second, the story makes clear how the formerly aristocratic or religious night lights became bourgeois: coffee houses, which did not arise until 1683 (after the relief of the Turkish siege on Vienna and the subsequent capture of Turkish coffee supplies, which to Prince Eugene of Savoy's unexpected delight were incidentally mixed with hashish), profited from this new nocturnal brightness.
Third, the story makes clear how various drugs, from coffee to punch to the lanterna magica (not to mention hashish), all acted in combination to bathe such nights in a spiritualistic twilight. These drugs actually only needed to be used one after the other in literature to produce romantic literature, such as E. T. A. Hoffmann's The Sera- pion Brethren with its punch-drinking ritual or even his Nachtstiicke (Night Pieces), which already incorporate the night into their title.
Fourth (and the most important for us), Schriipfer demonstrates that lanterna magica tecbniques made a leap forward in the eighteenth century: in the twilight of tile artificial night it became possible for the first time to breathe technical life into projected spirits and ghosts. Even if this life was not yet created by the mechanism of film, but rather only the flickering of a curtain of smoke on which the lanterna magica projected its virtual images, Schriipfer's arrangemeut of magic lanterns and smoking pans shows very clearly how the desire for film
100
? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
technology was historically generated in the confusion of Enlighten- ment and superstition, inspiration and deception.
What Edison and the Lumieres accomplished a century after Cagliosto and Schrapfer therefore fulfilled neither some timeless need nor some primal dream of humankind, which according to Zglinicki has supposedly been around from time immemorial; rather, it was a technical and thereby definitive answer to wishes that had been historically produced.
To provide evidence of this relay race from Illusionists to engineers, there were actual magicians around 1800 who employed their lanterna magica for money and illusions, exactly like Schrapfer, but who at the same time also worked on scientific improvements of optical media technology. I will only mention one of these magicians: the Belgian Etienne Gaspard Robertson, who became known in the history of film for producing ghost projections that were more elegant or lifelike than Schrapfer's. Robertson was able to accomplish this by placing his lanterna magica on a wagon with large, lightweight and noiseless wheels, which could move around the room unnoticed like future film cameras. To magnify the illusion even more, Robertson particularly liked to appear in old cloisters, as if he wanted to recall the origins of the lanterna magica in the Counter-Reformation, and he filled the exhibition hall with skulls, bones, and memorial slabs, as if he already wanted to make an expressionistic silent film or orchestrate one of the mechanized ghost trains that appear at fairs (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 70). What film histories do not mention, however, is that in a com- pletely different environment - namely, before the French Academy - this same Robertson also made scientific history on March 2,1802. Instead of using electricity to dispense shocks from imaginary ghosts to superstitious spectators, like Schrapfer, or being frightened of the
natural electricity of lightning, like Casanova, Robertson electrified two simple carbon rods using a voltaic battery, which had just been invented. He then gradually pushed the carbon rods closer together and thus triggered a spark between them, which blinded all of the stunned spectators for several seconds until the carbon burned and the light was gone. The carbon arc lamp - the first artificial light source that could compete with sunlight or lightning and that conse- quently became essential for photography and film - was invented.
2. 3. 3. 1 Schiller
After this digression about Robertson as a bridge between the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries or illusionism and science, we return
101
? i''''
::::1 i::::
;,'"
11",
I," ""'"
OPTICAL MEDIA
back to the problem of historically awakened wishes in general. The thesis was that in the battle between the Enlightenment and supersti- tion, moving images were presented for the first time on a massive scale and thus became desiderata on a massive scale. Yet the more that magicians strove to fulfill the demand for moving images, the greater the strategic counter-wish to expose these images as mere illusions became. As the cases of Cagliosto, Casanova, and Schropfer all sadly verify, this Enlightenment almost always succeeded, and in the cold early morning light one more suicide victim lay in the parks of Leipzig. That is why - and now comes the second thesis - the unfulfilled wish for moving images prodnced another medium, which could at least satisfy it in the realm of the imaginary for a period of time before the invention of film: romantic literature. Under this term I also include, in contrast to many Germanists, the so-called German or Weimar classic period.
When this is taken for granted, it is easy to prove the second thesis. Take, for example, the first German ghost novel of all, Schiller's uncompleted The Ghost-Seer, which was published in several thrilling instalments in the Thalia, Schiller's own newspaper, between 1787 and 1789. The hero of the novel is a German Protes- tant prince, who is only separated from the throne by a few senior relatives who are still alive. According to the arch-positivistic proof offered by a Germanist in 1903, this prince may actually have been a prince of Wiirttemberg. It can also be proved that he believed in spiritualism or the practice of seeing ghosts, and after the death of Duke Carl Eugen, Schiller's own pedagogue or despot, he had well- founded prospects for the line of succession for a time. While this hero stops in Venice on the Cavaliers' tour, which was an absolute requisite for members of the nobility at that time, one of his bother- some relatives dies in a mysterious and unnatural way. The prince hears rumors in Venice that a group of mysterious people, including a so-called Armenian, are interested in eliminating these bothersome relatives and thus helping the prince himself achieve the princely line of succession. The first part of the novel, however, mostly deals with a ghost conjuration, which a nameless Sicilian is holding for the prince and his entourage in the hinterland of Venice on the beautiful Brenta.
We found in the middle of the room a large black circle, drawn with
charcoal, the space within which was capable of containing us all very
easily. The planks of the chamber floor next to the wall were taken
up, all round the room, so that we stood, as it were, upon an island.
102
? ? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
An altar, covered with black cloth, was placed in the center upon a
carpet of red satin. A Chaldee Bible was laid open, together with a
skull; and a silver crucifix was fastened upon the altar. Instead of candles some spirits of wine were burning in a silver vessel. A thick smoke of frankincense darkened the room, and almost extinguished the lights. The Sorcerer was undressed like ourselves, but bare-footed; about his bare neck he wore an amulet, suspended by a chain of human hair; round his middle was a white apron, marked with cabalistic characters and symbolical figures. He desired us to join hands, and to observe profound silence; above all, he ordered us not to ask the apparition any question. He desired the Englishman and myself, whom he seemed to mistrust the most, constantly to hold two naked swords crossways, an inch above his head, as long as the conjuration should last. We formed -a half moon round him; the Russian officer placed himself close to the English lord, and was the nearest to the altar. The sorcerer stood upon the satin carpet with his face turned to the east. He sprinkled holy water in the direction of the four cardinal points of the compass, and bowed three times before the Bible. The formula of the conjuration, of which we did not understand a word, lasted for the space of seven or eight minutes; at the end of which he made a sign to those who stood close behind to seize him firmly by the hair. Amid the most violent convulsions he called the deceased three times by his name, and the third time he stretched forth his hand towards the crucifix. On a sudden we all felt, at the same instant, a stroke as of a flash of lightning, so powerful that it obliged us to quit each other's hands; a terrible thunder shook the house; the locks jarred; the doors creaked; the cover of the silver box fell down, and extinguished the light; and on the opposite wall, over the chimney-piece, appeared a human figure, in a bloody shirt, with the paleness of death on its countenance. "Who calls me? " said a hollow, hardly intelligible voice.
(Schiller, 1904-5, II, pp. 248-9)
It later comes to light that the figure rudely chasing away the phan- tasmagorical figure of the spirit conjured by the Sicilian is none other than the Armenian. He has the Sicilian arrested by the Venetian police and forces him in jail to reveal to the prince all the technical tricks involved in producing magic. The readers of the novel then learn, along with the prince, that the ghost of the deceased was projected onto an artificial curtain of smoke using a lanterna magica, and the flash of lightning, which was felt by everyone present, was triggered by a hidden source of electrical energy - presumably a Leyden jar, as voltaic batteries did not yet exist. For those of you attending these lectures, however, this systematic enlightenment is hardly necessary:
103
? ? ? ? ? I'"''
OPTICAL MEDIA
you will have already recognized the simtlarities between the events organized by tbe Sicilian and those organized by Schropfer, and in the fictional Venice you will also have recognized the historical-empirical Leipzig coffee house.
I begin the new year, the last one of this millennium, with the wish that it has begun well for all of you and that it will also continue to go well. Naturally, tbat does not mean that all of the good resolutions you would like to make must also be fulfilled. What will be fulfilled first is only my good resolution to begin the new year by continuing to the second major part of these lectures, whIch deals witb optical media technologies. In today's lecture, the tales from the history of art and literature, witb which I have sought to entertam you up until now, come to an abrupt end.
I have already emphasized that Schiller's novel was published in instalments, which were designed to produce more suspense for the reader. This is the reason why a magical Armenian sud- denly emerged from the circle of ghost conjurers and put a stop to the Sicilian's deceitful game by whipping up a three-dimensional ghost instead of a two-dimensional one. As if to allegorize Hegel's battle between the Enlightenment and superstition, therefore, the
1,1,
I:,? " Armenian hovers between the power of disillusionment and the
1,1"
i,? ? "
power of creating even more remarkable illusions. On the one hand, by handing the Sicilian over to the Venetian police and then system- atically interrogating him in prison, the Armenian provides the prince with a technically pure enlighteument that is above all the tricks that marked the conjuring of ghosts. In the second part of the novel, on the other hand, this apparent enlightenment proves to be a stratagem
",I" under whose protection the Armenian is able to go from exposing first-degree magic to producing second-degree magic without arous- ing any suspicions. It even turns out that the Sicilian was only one of the minions employed by the Armenian himself, and his intentionally transparent deception was supposed to set the stage for the actual deception. The novel is not about ghostly apparitions for their own sake, out of pure curiosity so to speak; rather, it is about a German and thus an enlightened and absolutist prince who is made to believe once again in apparitions. The perfect example of this optical belief is called Catholicism in the novel, and more specifically the Jesuit Order. Only a decade after most Central European states, includ- ing even the Vatican itself, suppressed the Jesuit Order, everything revolves around the machinations of an order that seeks to regain its power over German princedoms by either murdering Protestant heirs to the throne or converting them to the only true church. The early
104
? ? ? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
modern rule cuius reglO, eius religioSwas valid, at least pro forma, until the time immediately preceding Napoleon's dismantling of the old empire. All of the illusionary techniques that Schiller borrowed from his close knowledge of Schriipfer were accordingly transferred from the German swindler to the secret Catholic organization, and the theory of the Counter-Reformation presented here receives a literary support that can also be supplemented with a philosophical one without any difficulty. Kant's Critique of Judgment furnishes proof that for human powers of imagination (and actually without paradox) the most sublime thing is the imageless God - in the sense of Mosaic law - and conversely, every illustratlon of religion is already a governmental abuse of power that can only support the Counter-Reformation:
[W]here the senses see nothing more before them, and the unmistak- able and indelible idea of morality remains, it would be rather neces- sary to moderate the impetus of an unbounded imagination, to prevent it from rising to enthusiasm, than through fear of the powerlessness of these ideas to seek aid for them in images and childish ritual. Thus governments have willingly allowed religion to be abundantly pro- vided with the latter accompaniments, and seeking thereby to relieve their subjects of trouble, they have also sought to deprive them of the faculty of extending their spiritual powers beyond the limits that are arbitrarily assigned to them and by means of which they can be tbe more easily treated as mere passive beings. (Kant, 1951, p. 115)
In Schiller's novel fragment, it is precisely this Counter-Reformation stratagem that triumphs: on the last published page the prince has just attended his first Catholic mass. To work such wonders of con- version, however, it was not enough to pull the wool over the eyes of enlightened aristocrats with lanterna magica gadgets like those of Schriipfer or the Sicilian. Quite apart from a few tricks with telescopes, the Armenian had to supply the prince above all with a woman, with whom a romantic like the prince could not help falling in love. This woman, a so-called Greek woman who naturally spoke German and was of the most noble German descent, tbus appeared to her lover for the first time in disguise and devoutly Catholic in one of Venice's famous baroque churches surrounded by the holy paintings and ceiling frescoes of the Counter-Reformation. It is like
5 A Latin phrase meaning "Whose realm, his religion," which refers to the compromise by which princes were allowed to determine the religion of their territories.
I
105
? ? 1"
. . ''''
! , ? ? ,o,
. , . . ,,'
OPTICAL MEDIA
a stage production of love at first sight, on which romantic love by definition is based, and at first glance it appears to be a novelistic6 relapse from Schriipfer to Tintoretto, from the lanterna magica to the traditional panel. But far from it!
When the prince iustructs his servants and escorts to try to track down the Greek woman, who disappeared again immediately after going to church, the medium that instilled this irresistible romantic love in the prince is finally mentioned. As we are all painfully aware in 1999, there are of course media technologies without love, but there is no love without media technologies. In the case of Schiller's princely ghost-seer, this eroticizing medium is by no means painting, but rather literature. The only reason why it was impossible for his escorts to track down the Greek woman in Venice is that the prince could not describe her at all due to his passion for writing literature. To cite Schiller's words:
[U]nluckily, the description the Prince gave of her [the Greek woman]
was not such as to make her recognizable by a third party. The pas-
sionate interest with which he had regarded her had hindered him from
observing her minutely; for all the minor details, which other people would not have failed to notice, had escaped his observation; from his description, one would have sooner expected to find her prototype in the works of Ariosto or Tasso than on a Venetian island. (Schiller, 1904-5, II, p. 335)
I will come back later to the problem of wanted posters, passport controls, and forensics, which was theoretically as well as practically insoluble before the invention of photography. For the moment, however, it will suffice to ask why the prince could not see or describe the Greek woman he loved. The answer is in the text: he did not perceive the image of this woman at all, but rather he read it in the most famous verse romances by Tasso or Ariosto. His love is the kind of love found in romantic novels, and the Armenian's strategic art lay in replacing the transparent optical illusions of the lanterna magica with the opaque illusions of romantic literature. The explicit villain in the novel thus employs precisely the same medium as the novel's author. And because Schiller does not leave any doubt that his novel is one of the countless enlightened broadsheets against crypto- Catholic and above all Jesuit machinations, this parallel between the
6Here, Kittler employs the term romantechnisch (literally "novel-technical"), which is a play on the word romantisch (romantic).
106
? ? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
novel's villain and the novel's author implies that romantic literature itself proposes to take the place of the techniques of illusion of the Counter-Reformation in the great image war. Schiller's ghost-seeing prince consequently proves that the claim Lessing put forward only as an imperative or objective - that readers were supposed to be more conscious of the author's ideas than the words written down and read - had in the meantime created "real" readers. I could discuss here the new pedagogical techniques used in reading and writing instruction around 1800, which as a historical novelty helped even small children learn to read silently.
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. Instead, it became an all-purpose weapon used by adventurers like Count Cagliostro or Casanova, the seduction artist. The second and third books of Casanova's Memoirs recount how he played a magician at night in Cesena only to cheat an idiot who believed in the hidden treasures of ghosts out of 500 sequins and also naturally to seduce this fool's daughter. Casanova succeeded at this second project quite easily, as usual, but when he attempted to act like a magician a storm interfered. Its lightning frightened the magician himself far more than his artworks frightened the deceived
,
Ii' spectators . . .
Even more dramatic than Casanova's unique experiment is the entire life of a con-artist whose surname already proclaimed his true intentions: the man was simply named Schriipfer. 4 Allow me to cite Schriipfer's swindle directly from Zglinicki's amusing Der Weg des Films, because in this story every word counts:
Schropfer owned a coffee house on the Klostergasse in Leipzig, which enjoyed a certain popularity, especially because there was an excellent punch there. The owner of the establishment understood masterfully how to surround his guests with the halo of a great magician! He discretely made it known that he was "in the possession of the true secrets of the Freemasons. " Many sought this true secret at that time, for they were convinced that unlimited power would then be bestowed on them. There were also such doubters and seekers among the regular guests of the coffee house on the Klostergasse in Leipzig, some of whom were distinguished and held high offices. People of this sort made quite an impression on Schropfer. He approached them care- fully to question them and make them bend to his wishes. He never resorted to empty speech, however, and instead produced "facts. " These "facts" consisted in so-called "necromantic" (today we would say spiritualist) sittings, which distinguished him especially through the
4The German word Schropfer refers to someone who rips off other people. 98
? ? ? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
use of magic lantern effects and sophisticated theatrical make~up. Even those who possessed the most level-headed and critical natures were taken in. The stage for these myserious performances was the billiard room of the guest house of the new "Grosskophta. " Schr6pfer had it built especially for this purpose. All of the spectators first received a large dose of punch. This not only increased his profits, but also his guests' psychological willingness to see miracles. After the punch had fogged their brains enough, Schrop? er moved to the billiard room with his guests and began the performance. To ensure that meddlesome and distrustful spectators would not see through his game, Schropfer made various preparations and established strict rules of behavior. No one was permitted to stir from his place, and only a small lamp burned III the dark room, whose flickering light intensified the gloomy atmosphere. Incense, a skull, and other mystical utensils completed the "magician's" furnishings. Then the conjuration began: accompanied by dreadful rumbling, a preloaded ghost appeared constantly flut- tering back and forth above a kind of altar. It became brighter and then darker again. Of course it was a typical lanterna magica image projected backwards against the rising smoke. Electrified machines ensured that the spectators received invisible and mysterious electric shocks at the high point of the manifestations, assistants imitated otherworldly voices, and much else. In the beginning, Schropfer's bogus machinations were limited to the area around Leipzig, but soon he expanded his area of operations and undertook trips to Berlin, Frankfurt am Main and Dresden. Thanks to his skillful scheming and excellent relationships he soon succeeded in gathering the most prestigious and affluent circles around him. Schr6pfer eagerly began to advertise something new: he wanted to found his own masonic lodge, and he actually received money at once from all sides. Sponsors and friends trustingly granted him enormous credit. In return, Schr6pfer promised them - naming is destiny - high annuities from a fortune in the millions, which was allegedly deposited in a bank in Frankfurt. The magician was able to stave off his patient believers for a long time with all sorts of excuses. Finally - on the evening of October 7, 1774 - he promised to show all of his friends something from his fortune. Spirits were high in the Klostergasse. Everyone showed up, even the serious and wealthy gentlemen with the impressive titles. The punch was better than ever before. People jabbered on about "true wisdom" and "the eternal light. " Schropfer seemed to shine with the brilliance of his knowledge and fame - like a Pied Piper of human souls. He appeared to feel particularly well, and he was more amusing, energetic, spirited, and humorous than ever before. He behaved - as it was later recorded in the report - as if he wanted to go to a ball. It was not until midnight that he began to lose some of his spiritedness. He briefy withdrew and wrote a few letters. In the early morning hours he invited
99
? ? I? "
! ,"
:1"
OPTICAL MEDIA
his guests to go with him to Rosental Park, where he would show them "a wonderful apparition. " Still at dawn, Schropfer went ahead of all the others. He asked his friends to wait a little, and they noticed how he continued along the way alone without looking around. He turned around the corner and was concealed by trees and bushes. His steps became silent, and then there was nothing more to be heard. The unnatural calm weighed over the park like a black cloth; the men looked at themselves, became restless - then there was a sound like the lash of a whip, which broke the silence. Schropfer was found dead lying on the ground in the forest. A bullet in the mouth had ended his life. (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 67)
Compare this ending sometime with the ending of Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus . . . Schriipfer's lovely story reqnires no interpretation, but only a few remarks and some added emphasis.
First, it makes clear what I have already said about the difference between the oral but technical traditions of medieval masons and the just as oral but occult traditions of eighteenth-century Freemasons. The letterpress, the camera obscura, and the lanterna magica automa- tized knowledge, and the drawback is that this results merely in asser- tions about knowledge whose only goal is to obscure the underlying technology, like a lanterna magica, using all means of intoxication.
Second, the story makes clear how the formerly aristocratic or religious night lights became bourgeois: coffee houses, which did not arise until 1683 (after the relief of the Turkish siege on Vienna and the subsequent capture of Turkish coffee supplies, which to Prince Eugene of Savoy's unexpected delight were incidentally mixed with hashish), profited from this new nocturnal brightness.
Third, the story makes clear how various drugs, from coffee to punch to the lanterna magica (not to mention hashish), all acted in combination to bathe such nights in a spiritualistic twilight. These drugs actually only needed to be used one after the other in literature to produce romantic literature, such as E. T. A. Hoffmann's The Sera- pion Brethren with its punch-drinking ritual or even his Nachtstiicke (Night Pieces), which already incorporate the night into their title.
Fourth (and the most important for us), Schriipfer demonstrates that lanterna magica tecbniques made a leap forward in the eighteenth century: in the twilight of tile artificial night it became possible for the first time to breathe technical life into projected spirits and ghosts. Even if this life was not yet created by the mechanism of film, but rather only the flickering of a curtain of smoke on which the lanterna magica projected its virtual images, Schriipfer's arrangemeut of magic lanterns and smoking pans shows very clearly how the desire for film
100
? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
technology was historically generated in the confusion of Enlighten- ment and superstition, inspiration and deception.
What Edison and the Lumieres accomplished a century after Cagliosto and Schrapfer therefore fulfilled neither some timeless need nor some primal dream of humankind, which according to Zglinicki has supposedly been around from time immemorial; rather, it was a technical and thereby definitive answer to wishes that had been historically produced.
To provide evidence of this relay race from Illusionists to engineers, there were actual magicians around 1800 who employed their lanterna magica for money and illusions, exactly like Schrapfer, but who at the same time also worked on scientific improvements of optical media technology. I will only mention one of these magicians: the Belgian Etienne Gaspard Robertson, who became known in the history of film for producing ghost projections that were more elegant or lifelike than Schrapfer's. Robertson was able to accomplish this by placing his lanterna magica on a wagon with large, lightweight and noiseless wheels, which could move around the room unnoticed like future film cameras. To magnify the illusion even more, Robertson particularly liked to appear in old cloisters, as if he wanted to recall the origins of the lanterna magica in the Counter-Reformation, and he filled the exhibition hall with skulls, bones, and memorial slabs, as if he already wanted to make an expressionistic silent film or orchestrate one of the mechanized ghost trains that appear at fairs (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 70). What film histories do not mention, however, is that in a com- pletely different environment - namely, before the French Academy - this same Robertson also made scientific history on March 2,1802. Instead of using electricity to dispense shocks from imaginary ghosts to superstitious spectators, like Schrapfer, or being frightened of the
natural electricity of lightning, like Casanova, Robertson electrified two simple carbon rods using a voltaic battery, which had just been invented. He then gradually pushed the carbon rods closer together and thus triggered a spark between them, which blinded all of the stunned spectators for several seconds until the carbon burned and the light was gone. The carbon arc lamp - the first artificial light source that could compete with sunlight or lightning and that conse- quently became essential for photography and film - was invented.
2. 3. 3. 1 Schiller
After this digression about Robertson as a bridge between the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries or illusionism and science, we return
101
? i''''
::::1 i::::
;,'"
11",
I," ""'"
OPTICAL MEDIA
back to the problem of historically awakened wishes in general. The thesis was that in the battle between the Enlightenment and supersti- tion, moving images were presented for the first time on a massive scale and thus became desiderata on a massive scale. Yet the more that magicians strove to fulfill the demand for moving images, the greater the strategic counter-wish to expose these images as mere illusions became. As the cases of Cagliosto, Casanova, and Schropfer all sadly verify, this Enlightenment almost always succeeded, and in the cold early morning light one more suicide victim lay in the parks of Leipzig. That is why - and now comes the second thesis - the unfulfilled wish for moving images prodnced another medium, which could at least satisfy it in the realm of the imaginary for a period of time before the invention of film: romantic literature. Under this term I also include, in contrast to many Germanists, the so-called German or Weimar classic period.
When this is taken for granted, it is easy to prove the second thesis. Take, for example, the first German ghost novel of all, Schiller's uncompleted The Ghost-Seer, which was published in several thrilling instalments in the Thalia, Schiller's own newspaper, between 1787 and 1789. The hero of the novel is a German Protes- tant prince, who is only separated from the throne by a few senior relatives who are still alive. According to the arch-positivistic proof offered by a Germanist in 1903, this prince may actually have been a prince of Wiirttemberg. It can also be proved that he believed in spiritualism or the practice of seeing ghosts, and after the death of Duke Carl Eugen, Schiller's own pedagogue or despot, he had well- founded prospects for the line of succession for a time. While this hero stops in Venice on the Cavaliers' tour, which was an absolute requisite for members of the nobility at that time, one of his bother- some relatives dies in a mysterious and unnatural way. The prince hears rumors in Venice that a group of mysterious people, including a so-called Armenian, are interested in eliminating these bothersome relatives and thus helping the prince himself achieve the princely line of succession. The first part of the novel, however, mostly deals with a ghost conjuration, which a nameless Sicilian is holding for the prince and his entourage in the hinterland of Venice on the beautiful Brenta.
We found in the middle of the room a large black circle, drawn with
charcoal, the space within which was capable of containing us all very
easily. The planks of the chamber floor next to the wall were taken
up, all round the room, so that we stood, as it were, upon an island.
102
? ? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
An altar, covered with black cloth, was placed in the center upon a
carpet of red satin. A Chaldee Bible was laid open, together with a
skull; and a silver crucifix was fastened upon the altar. Instead of candles some spirits of wine were burning in a silver vessel. A thick smoke of frankincense darkened the room, and almost extinguished the lights. The Sorcerer was undressed like ourselves, but bare-footed; about his bare neck he wore an amulet, suspended by a chain of human hair; round his middle was a white apron, marked with cabalistic characters and symbolical figures. He desired us to join hands, and to observe profound silence; above all, he ordered us not to ask the apparition any question. He desired the Englishman and myself, whom he seemed to mistrust the most, constantly to hold two naked swords crossways, an inch above his head, as long as the conjuration should last. We formed -a half moon round him; the Russian officer placed himself close to the English lord, and was the nearest to the altar. The sorcerer stood upon the satin carpet with his face turned to the east. He sprinkled holy water in the direction of the four cardinal points of the compass, and bowed three times before the Bible. The formula of the conjuration, of which we did not understand a word, lasted for the space of seven or eight minutes; at the end of which he made a sign to those who stood close behind to seize him firmly by the hair. Amid the most violent convulsions he called the deceased three times by his name, and the third time he stretched forth his hand towards the crucifix. On a sudden we all felt, at the same instant, a stroke as of a flash of lightning, so powerful that it obliged us to quit each other's hands; a terrible thunder shook the house; the locks jarred; the doors creaked; the cover of the silver box fell down, and extinguished the light; and on the opposite wall, over the chimney-piece, appeared a human figure, in a bloody shirt, with the paleness of death on its countenance. "Who calls me? " said a hollow, hardly intelligible voice.
(Schiller, 1904-5, II, pp. 248-9)
It later comes to light that the figure rudely chasing away the phan- tasmagorical figure of the spirit conjured by the Sicilian is none other than the Armenian. He has the Sicilian arrested by the Venetian police and forces him in jail to reveal to the prince all the technical tricks involved in producing magic. The readers of the novel then learn, along with the prince, that the ghost of the deceased was projected onto an artificial curtain of smoke using a lanterna magica, and the flash of lightning, which was felt by everyone present, was triggered by a hidden source of electrical energy - presumably a Leyden jar, as voltaic batteries did not yet exist. For those of you attending these lectures, however, this systematic enlightenment is hardly necessary:
103
? ? ? ? ? I'"''
OPTICAL MEDIA
you will have already recognized the simtlarities between the events organized by tbe Sicilian and those organized by Schropfer, and in the fictional Venice you will also have recognized the historical-empirical Leipzig coffee house.
I begin the new year, the last one of this millennium, with the wish that it has begun well for all of you and that it will also continue to go well. Naturally, tbat does not mean that all of the good resolutions you would like to make must also be fulfilled. What will be fulfilled first is only my good resolution to begin the new year by continuing to the second major part of these lectures, whIch deals witb optical media technologies. In today's lecture, the tales from the history of art and literature, witb which I have sought to entertam you up until now, come to an abrupt end.
I have already emphasized that Schiller's novel was published in instalments, which were designed to produce more suspense for the reader. This is the reason why a magical Armenian sud- denly emerged from the circle of ghost conjurers and put a stop to the Sicilian's deceitful game by whipping up a three-dimensional ghost instead of a two-dimensional one. As if to allegorize Hegel's battle between the Enlightenment and superstition, therefore, the
1,1,
I:,? " Armenian hovers between the power of disillusionment and the
1,1"
i,? ? "
power of creating even more remarkable illusions. On the one hand, by handing the Sicilian over to the Venetian police and then system- atically interrogating him in prison, the Armenian provides the prince with a technically pure enlighteument that is above all the tricks that marked the conjuring of ghosts. In the second part of the novel, on the other hand, this apparent enlightenment proves to be a stratagem
",I" under whose protection the Armenian is able to go from exposing first-degree magic to producing second-degree magic without arous- ing any suspicions. It even turns out that the Sicilian was only one of the minions employed by the Armenian himself, and his intentionally transparent deception was supposed to set the stage for the actual deception. The novel is not about ghostly apparitions for their own sake, out of pure curiosity so to speak; rather, it is about a German and thus an enlightened and absolutist prince who is made to believe once again in apparitions. The perfect example of this optical belief is called Catholicism in the novel, and more specifically the Jesuit Order. Only a decade after most Central European states, includ- ing even the Vatican itself, suppressed the Jesuit Order, everything revolves around the machinations of an order that seeks to regain its power over German princedoms by either murdering Protestant heirs to the throne or converting them to the only true church. The early
104
? ? ? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
modern rule cuius reglO, eius religioSwas valid, at least pro forma, until the time immediately preceding Napoleon's dismantling of the old empire. All of the illusionary techniques that Schiller borrowed from his close knowledge of Schriipfer were accordingly transferred from the German swindler to the secret Catholic organization, and the theory of the Counter-Reformation presented here receives a literary support that can also be supplemented with a philosophical one without any difficulty. Kant's Critique of Judgment furnishes proof that for human powers of imagination (and actually without paradox) the most sublime thing is the imageless God - in the sense of Mosaic law - and conversely, every illustratlon of religion is already a governmental abuse of power that can only support the Counter-Reformation:
[W]here the senses see nothing more before them, and the unmistak- able and indelible idea of morality remains, it would be rather neces- sary to moderate the impetus of an unbounded imagination, to prevent it from rising to enthusiasm, than through fear of the powerlessness of these ideas to seek aid for them in images and childish ritual. Thus governments have willingly allowed religion to be abundantly pro- vided with the latter accompaniments, and seeking thereby to relieve their subjects of trouble, they have also sought to deprive them of the faculty of extending their spiritual powers beyond the limits that are arbitrarily assigned to them and by means of which they can be tbe more easily treated as mere passive beings. (Kant, 1951, p. 115)
In Schiller's novel fragment, it is precisely this Counter-Reformation stratagem that triumphs: on the last published page the prince has just attended his first Catholic mass. To work such wonders of con- version, however, it was not enough to pull the wool over the eyes of enlightened aristocrats with lanterna magica gadgets like those of Schriipfer or the Sicilian. Quite apart from a few tricks with telescopes, the Armenian had to supply the prince above all with a woman, with whom a romantic like the prince could not help falling in love. This woman, a so-called Greek woman who naturally spoke German and was of the most noble German descent, tbus appeared to her lover for the first time in disguise and devoutly Catholic in one of Venice's famous baroque churches surrounded by the holy paintings and ceiling frescoes of the Counter-Reformation. It is like
5 A Latin phrase meaning "Whose realm, his religion," which refers to the compromise by which princes were allowed to determine the religion of their territories.
I
105
? ? 1"
. . ''''
! , ? ? ,o,
. , . . ,,'
OPTICAL MEDIA
a stage production of love at first sight, on which romantic love by definition is based, and at first glance it appears to be a novelistic6 relapse from Schriipfer to Tintoretto, from the lanterna magica to the traditional panel. But far from it!
When the prince iustructs his servants and escorts to try to track down the Greek woman, who disappeared again immediately after going to church, the medium that instilled this irresistible romantic love in the prince is finally mentioned. As we are all painfully aware in 1999, there are of course media technologies without love, but there is no love without media technologies. In the case of Schiller's princely ghost-seer, this eroticizing medium is by no means painting, but rather literature. The only reason why it was impossible for his escorts to track down the Greek woman in Venice is that the prince could not describe her at all due to his passion for writing literature. To cite Schiller's words:
[U]nluckily, the description the Prince gave of her [the Greek woman]
was not such as to make her recognizable by a third party. The pas-
sionate interest with which he had regarded her had hindered him from
observing her minutely; for all the minor details, which other people would not have failed to notice, had escaped his observation; from his description, one would have sooner expected to find her prototype in the works of Ariosto or Tasso than on a Venetian island. (Schiller, 1904-5, II, p. 335)
I will come back later to the problem of wanted posters, passport controls, and forensics, which was theoretically as well as practically insoluble before the invention of photography. For the moment, however, it will suffice to ask why the prince could not see or describe the Greek woman he loved. The answer is in the text: he did not perceive the image of this woman at all, but rather he read it in the most famous verse romances by Tasso or Ariosto. His love is the kind of love found in romantic novels, and the Armenian's strategic art lay in replacing the transparent optical illusions of the lanterna magica with the opaque illusions of romantic literature. The explicit villain in the novel thus employs precisely the same medium as the novel's author. And because Schiller does not leave any doubt that his novel is one of the countless enlightened broadsheets against crypto- Catholic and above all Jesuit machinations, this parallel between the
6Here, Kittler employs the term romantechnisch (literally "novel-technical"), which is a play on the word romantisch (romantic).
106
? ? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
novel's villain and the novel's author implies that romantic literature itself proposes to take the place of the techniques of illusion of the Counter-Reformation in the great image war. Schiller's ghost-seeing prince consequently proves that the claim Lessing put forward only as an imperative or objective - that readers were supposed to be more conscious of the author's ideas than the words written down and read - had in the meantime created "real" readers. I could discuss here the new pedagogical techniques used in reading and writing instruction around 1800, which as a historical novelty helped even small children learn to read silently.
