The criminal, with an example of the revolutionary international
prototype
meter in hand, thus measures himself.
Kittler-Friedrich-Optical-Media-pdf
After all, even the surreal accident that Lautreamont later defined as the encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table presumed the existence of three technical inventions.
Once they exist, howeveJ; artificial substances or machines are able to react to one another without human inter- vention, just as today's random processes between silicon and silicon dioxide, which computers ultimately consist of, relieve people of all thinking.
Second, like Ritter's discovery of ultraviolet light, the history of Daguerre's invention very clearly shows how methodically theoretically preset values were investigated after 1800.
That nature could be brought to create a black-and-white image of itself was a result of sheer will and not an assumption that was already justified elsewhere.
Only the preliminary decision to already presuppose this possibility ensured that even apparently bewitched cupboards no longer raised any suspicion of witchcraft or magic at all.
In other words, if an accidental effect like the one that occurred in Daguerre's cupboard had taken place 200 years earlier, wbich is not entirely out of the question, the whole matter would have fallen flat again simply because no one would have captured, stored, recorded, and exploited it as a natural technology.
Niepce and Daguerre thus represent the beginning of an epoch where tbe duration, the reproducibility, and practically even the success of inventions - and in the end that means historically contingent events - are guaranteed.
In 1839, we are still not quite in the epoch where President Reagan could solemnly announce as the emperor of California and in the name of holy Hollywood that in the future American inventors can or must invent a surefire protective barrier to defend against all missiles that want to attack California from the evil empire; but we are also no longer far from this epoch.
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This new guarantee of 1l1ventability in general also corresponds to the public reception of Daguerre's invention. Up until now - namely, up until the solitary death of Niepce, the founding hero - these lectures have had to report on more tragedies and testimonials to poverty, but we are now coming to brighter times and the worship of bourgeois geniuses, even if they are only junior partners in inven- tor teams, like Daguerre. The most famous physicists and academ- ICS in France, above all Arago and the gas researcher Gay-Lussac, supported the lllventor and earned him the Cross of the LegiOn of Honor and an annual life-long pension of 6,000 francs as a "national reward" (as it is called in the specially enacted law) from the "Citizen King" Louis Philippe (Eder, 1978, pp. 232-3). Daguerre therefore died as a successful man who not only earned 400 gold francs for each of his cameras and demanded 60 to 120 gold francs for his daguerreotypes (Eder, 1978, p. 253), but who could also make money
by relinquishing his patent rights. This enabled Daguerre to afford a park for his retirement estate, which contained small lakes, water- falls, and above all (as if to prove the thesis of these lectures) the ruins of a castle and a gothic chapel (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 149). For France, on the other hand, all of Daguerre's honors took place with explicit reference to modern copyright law, which the French Revolution (under the overall control of Lahnal, the telegraphy advocate) had invented for "spiritual heroes" and especially for novelists in 1794. By panning from literature to media technology, his invention proved in retrospect to be the invention of invention itself.
The historical goals that were initially prescribed for daguerreo- typy can be gathered from tbe ceremonial speeches about Daguerre that were held in his presence. On the one hand, Arago emphasized that during Napoleon's Egyptian campaign art history and archaeol- ogy already urgently needed daguerreotypes to reproduce artworks and inscriptions without the falsifying hand of the painter. (Even the ten-volume description of Egypt that was edited on Napoleon's behalf by none other than Baron Joseph Fourier, the founder of modern wave theory, was still not a technical medium. ) On the other hand, painters could also employ daguerreotypes as cheaper and at the same time more precise replacements for their usual sketches and models. This was supposed to have far-reaching consequences for the invention of film, but it also already happened, for example, when the famous lngres made his famous painting La Source (The Spring). The painting shows a stylized Greek woman carrying a pitcher; however, the photograph lngres used as a model shows - or rather conceals - an ordinary Parisian prostitute, as they were typically used
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as models at that time. So much for the new competitIve relation- ship between art and media technology, painting and daguerreotype, which Arago only touched upon. To the scientist, as expected, tbe "scientific advantages" of invention were far more important (Eder, 1978, p. 237).
In this regard, the first and most dramatic point that Arago emphasized was the possibility of absolutely measuring light and its strength. With human eyes alone there were always only rela- tive estimates of the strength of light, but the daguerreotype did for photometry precisely what the Parisian standard meter did for land surveys and cartography in 1790. Lambert's photometry thus freed itself from all phenomenological or subjective appearance in order to become a technically precise form of measurement. A second point was the sensitivity of the new medium, which made light more intense compared to the eye and which made it possible to force the moon or the rings of Saturn to produce experimental effects. And finally, because their exactness surpassed all other arts, Arago also men- tioned the possibility of measuring daguerreotypes themselves with rulers and compasses to infer the length and angle ratios of the objects represented. From this emerged Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. 's great idea to destroy all artworks (for instance, using gunpowder) immedi- ately after they are photographed, and since the two world wars the even greater idea has emerged of airplane or satellite reconnaissance photographs that finally contribute to the systematic destruction of the photographed object . . .
3. 1. 2. 2 Talbot
According to the honest Arago, there are only two things in the world that balk at daguerreotypes: first, paper, on which all writing and books are based, and second, people, on which all inventions were based according to early capitalist doctrine. Daguerreotypes could therefore only be printed throngh the mediation of a lithographer or copperplate engraver, and people, who are much too restless, could only be captured with extreme difficulty. In 1839, in the land of unlimited possibilities, Professor Draper and Professor Morse simply made a person sit for half an hour in the blazing sun with white face powder and closed eyes until the first portrait photograph was taken or rather waited for (Eder, 1978, p. 271). Their studio in New York was thus the first photographic portrait studio in the world and the first technology for truly storing human faces, and I cannot avoid making special reference to Morse's involvement: Samuel Morse was
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the painter who in 1837 had made the electric telegraph - the all- important modern broadcast technology - ready to go into produc- tion. There are no media, but rather always only multimedia systems.
As you can imagine, however, the multimedia system between photochemical storage, on the one hand, and paper and people, on the other hand, wanted to be completed not only in the American sense, like Samuel Morse's telegraph standardizer, but also formally. Gradual changes to Daguerre's process, all of which I cannot deal with here, eventually led to instantaneous photography, which made it possible for the first time to contemplate the storage of moving images, which means film. I will only name the most important of these steps and researchers.
William Henry Fox Talbot, Daguerre's previously underestimated English competitor, produced the first photographs on paper. During his trip to Italy, this rich Englishman repeatedly attempted to capture beautiful romantic images with the camera obscura and then sketch them by hand, as was typical since the time of the Renaissance. But the successful perspectivization of nature, which had filled all of the painters since Durer with pride and contentment, was no longer satisfying after Daguerre made the physically real storable. Talbot, the failed painter, thus sought and found a technical method of pho- tographing directly onto paper soaked in iodized silver and silver nitrate. From the camera obscura he developed the camera in the modern sense of the word. The hands of lithographers, which had previously stood between technical recording and book reproduction, were thus no longer necessary. In the entire operation of new optics there were no longer any arts, but rather only media. Talhot himself, who called his calotypy or "beautiful impression" technology "the pencil of nature" as it allows nature to inscribe images of itself, actu-
ally used it - strictly according to McLuhan's law that the content of media are always other media - for magnificent volumes of beautiful images of European nature or art, but the path to illustrated maga- zines based on photographs and to all the magazines sold under the counter was already mapped out.
Another of Talbot's innovations, the introduction of negatives, was relevant in an entirely different way. Unfortunately, I do not know if the concept of positive and negative in photography was derived from the much older analog concept of mathematics or the concept of positive and negative in the theory of electricity, which was only 50 years old at that time, but this should be clarified at some point. With Daguerre's process, the recording and fixing of the image always produced a positive reproduction of the lighting conditions.
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Experiments with negative reproductions failed because of their irre- versibility. Talbot resolved this problem by always photographing the negative again just as it had been produced itself in order to obtain as many positive copies as he wanted. This had two far-reaching effects, one hidden and one apparent. The secret effect was that photogra- phy was not only capable of amplifying or magnifying the light, for which Arago had already praised Daguerre, but rather since Talbot it was also capable of magnifying or reducing the size of the image when copying the negative. And because the whole world always only believes in the value of magnification - I am reminded here of Antonioni's Blow Up - it should be emphasized that image reduction also has strategic effects. For example, in 1870, several weeks into the German-French War, Paris was surrounded on all sides by Moltke's telegraphically controlled armies. The urgently needed exchange of messages witb the republican armies, which had repeatedly tried to relieve the sacred heart of France, seemed impossible until they had the idea of using a photograph. They photographed the letters that were supposed to go from Paris to the armies, reduced the size of the copy, photographed the copy, etc. , until the entire text fitted on the foot of an innocent carrier pigeon, which flew to Gambetta's general staff. If German falcons did not intercept the pigeon, the unreadable
text was decoded "with the help of an electrically illuminated magic lantern," which projected a magnification of the photograph on a readable screen (Ranke, 1982, p. 49). Twentieth-century intelligence agencies developed techniques of reducing entire secret messages to the size of a harmless typewriter point.
The obvious effect of Talbot's innovation requires less commen- tary. The consequences of unlimited copying are clear: in a series first of originals, second of negatives, and third of negatives of a negative, photography became a mass medium. For Hegel, the nega- tion of a negation was supposed to be anything but a return to the first position, but mass media are based on precisely this oscillation, as it logically calculated Boolean circuit algebra and made possible nothing less than the computer.
Only Talbot, who had done for optical reproducibility exactly what Gutenberg had done for printing technology, was a British snob who hated copying. Like Gutenberg, who had demanded (because of a Strasbourg trial in which he had become entangled) that a hole should be bored into his printing press, that a large stake should be stuck in the hole, and that the unmovable and unusable machine should then be laid in a grave, Talbot also prosecuted everyone who wanted to copy his method. Only a threatening intervention by the
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Royal SocIety was able to mduce him "to take a less severely obstruc-
tive attitude in the interest of the arts and sciences" and renounce his
patent rights with the lovely exception that commercial uses would continue to remain forbidden (Eder, 1978, p. 321).
For the sake of simplicity, let us assume that it was this immedi- ate brake on exploitation that brought so many other photographic materials into the world between Talbot's paper and the photo- graphic final solution (namely, Eastman's celluloid), such as those terribly heavy and fragile photographic glass plates that a dragoon lieutenant and a cousin of Niepce's developed in 1847. Glass actu- ally plays a fundamental role in photography, but as a lens system rather than as a storage surface. The reason for the low light level of the lenses employed by Daguerre and Talbot was that people had to sit still for half an hour in the blazing sun until their portrait was in the box. To rectify this shortcoming, an experimental search for faster lenses began, which became a true science in Abbe's Zeiss works in Jena. A search for light-sensitive emulsions also began, which did not end until the development of digital photography. To bring abont the conditions necessary to make feature films possible, the new optical medinm eventually had to separate itself again from the traditional printing press, into which it had been so effectively integrated thanks to Talbot. In other words, it had to obtain its own materiality, something besides metal, paper, or glass - namely, that strange half-transparency we call film withont even hearing it as a foreign word at all. I have looked it np, and I am happy to report that the Anglo-Saxon word aegfelma or egg skin and the Old Frisian word filmene or soft skin are joined to the West German felman, meaning skin. The root of all of these words is naturally fell or fur,
bnt since 1891 such animal furs of the parchment variety are gone; the advancement that replaced them was light-sensitive film for pho- tographs and sequences of images. However, Kluge's Etymologisches Worterbuch der deutschen Sprache (Etymological Dictionary of the German Language) unfortunately draws no parallels between film and parchment.
The other happy news concerns the inventor of film, who brought the same rolling process to optics that the endless paper machine provided for the newspaper printing press. Pynchon once wrote about the protagonist of his novel, Slothrop, whose devout American ances- tors were either the founders of a cnlt or paper manufacturers - and paper is now the material basis for dollars, bathrooms, and Bibles, that is, money, shit, and the Word of God. However, according to Pynchon's analysis the same thing is now true of the power of the
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media that historically superseded the word or book: lt was a prIest who bestowed roll film upon us. Celluloid itself had to be invented first, and this was accomplished by three Americans who wanted to use nitrocellulose to reduce the cost of the rather expensive and scarce elephant ivory used in billiard balls at that time. And nitrocellulose or so-called gunpowder must have been bestowed upon us? even earlier than that; instead of the old monastic black powder, which I attempted to correlate with perspective itself, this was done by a Swiss chemist and an Austrian field marshal lieutenant named Franz von Uchatius, who will also be presented m the next lecture as the direct forefather of film technology. As the name already implies, gunpowder was not intended to serve cinematic Or peaceful goals, but after its metamorphosis into the modern billiard ball Reverend Han- nibal Goodwin, an enthusiastic amateur photographer who hated the heavy, unwieldy glass plates, was able to register his patent for roll film on May 2,1887. The government's approval of the patent - along with a reimbursement of several million dollars - was not granted until 11 years later, though, because in the meantime the Eastman- Kodak company had already founded its billion-dollar fortune on the exploitation of Goodwin's patent.
We finally come to the era of high capitalism, and we are ready for the invention of film, which I will address in the next lecture. However, because I do not want to interrupt the technical connec- tions again today, I would like to digress for a moment and outline a side of photography that is often left out: before the actual history of film I would like to examine the impact of photography as a storage medium on nineteenth-century culture and aesthetics.
3. 1. 3 Painting and Photography: A Battle for the Eyeballs
After 1836, there were two possible options available to everyone (and not only Napoleonic general staffs): either to write letters or books or else to send telegraphic signals. After 1839, there were also two options for images: either to paint or to photograph them. Arago's eulogy for Daguerre, which primarily emphasized the pos- sible scientific applications of the first mediumfor storing images and completely denied that it would also exert competitive pressure on painters - particularly portrait painters since the arrival of the photo- graphic portraits of Draper and Morse - was the understatement of the century. As everyone knows by now, the once massive business of painted portraits passed almost entirely over to photography, and under the competitive pressure of technology painters were only left
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wIth two optIOns that essentially differenTIated (to use Niklas Luhmann's term) them from photography. The first option was to change their style by no longer supplying image material from eye- sight or from an old camera obscura, but rather from photographs. The long history of photo-realism - from Ingres (whose La Source, as I mentioned, was based on a nude photograph) to Gerhard Richter - is left to art bistorians. I will only say, as is clearly obvious in the work of Degas and his ballennas, that the photograph as the new source material for painting replaced the imaginary (and there- fore conventional pamting's fixation on recognizing figures) with the reality of absolutely instantaneous contingencies and absolutely asymmetrical image fragments.
When viewed systematically, the problem with this first option is that it is only possible as long as other painters are unable to master the mimicry of certain photographic effects as well as those who introduced the new style. The other and historically more success- ful option for the painter was actually to differentiate between the artistic and the technical medium, and thus to only paint images that could not be photographed, such as images that do not represent any objects at all, but rather the act of painting itself. It is not necessary to emphasize that this option represented the mainstream of so-called modernist painting and historically it had practically no effects on everyday life. .
With respect to everyday life, it is better to return to simple media like lithography, which will further our discussion of the politics of images, which is one of the leitmotifs of these lectures. In 1800, the romantic Navalis demanded - completely without reference to optotechnical media - that the as yet absolntist monarchy, and espe- cially the Prussian monarchy here in Berlin, become more effective through reforms, and to become more effective it must arouse"belief and love" among its subjects. This eliminated baroque portraits that presented the prince's frightening yet also fascinating resplendence, as well as portraits that presented the prince in his lordly seclusion. Pictures of the solitary "Old Fritz" were immediately replaced with pictures of a king shown intimately or familiarly together with his wife, the proverbial queen Luise, as a married couple. And because the king's subjects had in the meantime also been remodelled into happy families, pictures of the rnler coincided with those of the ruled for the first time in history.
It was only later recognized that Flaubert, in his Sentimental Education - a novel about painters, dealers, and the revolution of 1848 relates with all the cynicism available to him how the Prussian
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example became the accepted thing. According to Flaubert, King Louis Philippe (the very king to whom Daguerre owed his life-long pension and the Cross of the Legion of Honor) circulated countless lithographs on which he modestly appeared as a member of one of millions of bourgeois families:
Then the talk came round to the dinner at Arnoux's.
"The picture-dealer? " asked Senecal [in the novel he is initially pas-
sionate about the revolution, but then he becomes its worst traitor], "He's a fine fellow if you like. l )
"What do you mean? " said Pellerin.
Senecal replied:
"He's a man who makes money by political skulduggery. "
And he went on to talk about a well-known lithograph which
showed the entire royal family engaged in edifying occupations: Louis-
Philippe had a copy of the Code in his hand, the Queen a prayer-book;
the Princesses were doing embroidery; the [young] Due de Nemour was buckling on a sword; Monsieur de Joinville was showing his young brothers a map; and in the background could be seen a bed with two compartments. This picture, which was entitled" A Good Family," had been a source of delight to the middle classes, but the despair of the patriots. (Flaubert, 1964, p. 62)
It seems to me that this straightforward text needs no interpreta- tion, but I would like to emphasize two points: first, it shows how effectively the politics of images functioned after the switch to infi- nitely reproducible and printable lithographs, and second it shows that media have repercussions on what they represent. In the mass medium of lithography, the royal family cast off all of its sover- eign attributes and aligned itself with the mass of French bourgeois families.
As an automated form of lithography, photography only strength- ened this trend. In Dessau, in one of the smallest German palaces, portrait photography caused members of the aristocracy to present themselves no longer in full dress with uniform and decorations, as they had for portrait painters, but rather they wanted to appear on their photographs wearing the simple black suits of normal citizens (Buddemeier, 1970, p. 86). Bourgeois realism was thus not only a style in literature and painting, but also in everyday life. From this, one can also infer the complementary need for media, which will compensate the aristocracy for this loss of face in the eyes of their secret bourgeois admirers. A first, harmless example are feature films like Sissy. A second example, which McLuhan brilliantly discovered,
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is the monocle, which became fashionable around 1850: an aristocrat would endure being photographed in the simple black suit of the nineteenth century, rather than portrayed in royal clothing; however, in revenge he wore a type of glasses that ensured even more brutally than the hand-made camera obscura in Brockes' Rahmenschau that in contrast to the monocle wearer, all others were reduced to the sub- iects of an optical media technology. Actors like Erich von Stroheim only needed to export or rather prostitute this trick of aristocratic German officers' eyes to Hollywood and a new film genre was born: the Nazi film (McLuhan, 1964, p. 170).
On the other hand, true bourgeoisation was implemented by the citizens themselves. The role played by photography (in contrast to Diderot's fictional warts) can be seen by looking at literary realism. Balzac, whose novels contributed the most towards the populariza- tion of this new bourgeois realism, wrote in the foreword to The Human Comedy that his entire cycle of novels was like a daguerreo- type of contemporary French society. As usual in the century of sci- ences, literature thus obtained its validation for the first time from a technical medium, which it could do more easily than painting because the medium appeared only as a metaphorical and not a real competitor.
As a metaphorical model, however, photography also appears to have had real effects on writing: Flaubert's equally magnificent and dismal Madame Bovary repeatedly mentions a cure de platre or plaster priest that initially stands intact in the Bovary's garden like a garden gnome, which is similarly mass-produced. It receives a few scratches during the first move, and finally, when the marriage col- lapses, it also falls to pieces. This priest does not serve the slightest function in the narrative other than to prove that the novel has not forgotten any visual detail within its fictional world - a forgetting that, in contrast to the realist Flaubert, actually principally befell his predecessors, such as Goethe and other classical writers. Against the backdrop of photography, literature therefore no longer simply pro- duces inner pictures for the camera obscura that Hoffmann's solitary romantic readers became; rather, it begins to create objective and consistent visual leitmotifs that could later easily be filmed.
This does not mean that realistic writers (like painters) did not describe photography as a threat. The same Balzac who claimed to have drawn up all of his fictional figures like daguerreotypes also said to his friend Nadar, France's first and most famous portrait photo- grapher, that he himself would dread being photographed. Balzac's mystical tendencies led him to conclude that every person consists of
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many optical layers - like an onion peel - and every daguerreotype captures and stores the outermost layel; thus removing it from the person being photographed. With the next photograph, the next layer is lost, and so on and so on until the subject disappears or becomes a disembodied ghost (see Nadar, 1899). Edgar Allan Poe, who also wrote about photography as one of tbe wonders of the world, made this phantasm universal by positing the thesis that images in general are deadly for their object (Poe, 1965, pp. 245-9). Poe's painter creates a portrait of his beloved without noticing that she grows increasingly pale the more that her oil painting acquires the color of human flesh. Painting, with its extensively discussed handicap of aging pigment, thus uses a photochemical effect against people as if it had become photography. As soon as Poe's fictional painting is completed, the painter's beloved drops dead. Media analysis can only emphasize once again how historical phantasms and collective symbols (as Jiirgen Link would say) are directly based on technolo- gies. The fears of Balzac or Poe merely illustrate the fact, as Arnheim theorized, that photography represents the emergence for the first time of a storage medium capable of reproducing the unimaginable materiality of the person being depicted.
This does not mean that the phantasm should be explained away, but rather just that it should be acknowledged as a fact, because the phantasmagorical fears of so-called humans - a category that accord- ing to Foucault was not invented until around 1800 as the subject of all possible fields of knowledge - had definite technological con- sequences. To begin with, all of the ghosts created using the lanterna magica since Schropfer and Robertson, which Balzac eventually iden- tified with the human itself, passed on to the new medium. A favorite pastime of occultism, which emerged around 1850 and which initially mimicked the electric telegraph, was to hunt for spirit photographs. The camera shutter was left open when there was nothing to be seen, such as in the dark, and these non-images were then developed in the Arnheim-like hope, so to speak, that a ghost invisible to the eye had materialized on the photographic film all by itself. This process was more successfnl than one could possibly imagine today, and it proves the half-truth of Adorno's dictum that spirits historically appeared at exactly the same time as the spirit of philosophical ideal- ism was destroyed by media technologies. I say half-truth because the Counter-Reformation ghosts existing since Kircher's lanterna magica did not take a single syllable of Adorno into consideration.
Second, and this is the decisive point, what befell ghosts with so- called ecto-photography could also be applied to humans. An evil
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power, which was not always as fictional as in Chamisso's tale of poor Schlemihl, bought their shadows from them. As photography made advances towards snapshot photography, it became increas- mgly easier to capture people without their permission or even their knowledge. Balzac's nightmare proved well-founded in 1880 at the latest, when Alphonse Bertillon - whose brother, by the way, was notably the director of the statistical bureau of Paris at that time - became director of the Parisian police's identification bureau. Bertillon aslced himself which visible and measurable features of a person remained constant for the remainder of one's life despite the changes caused by age or intentional disguise. He identified the fol- lowing characteristics: the length of the head, the width of the head, the length of the middle finger, the length of the foot, the underarm length, and the length of the little finger. If the police were to store all these measurements on cards along with a careful description of race and any scars, birthmarks, and tattoos, the probability of mistaking the relevant individual for someone else would become virtually zero. Eleven measurements alone would already allow for 177,147 differ- ent combinations.
That is as far as we will go into statistics, and now we return to photography. In the age of literary realism, it Was self-evident that Bertillon replaced these necessarily imprecise descriptions with pho- tographs. From this time onwards, two portrait photographs were immediately taken of every arrested criminal or suspect, one from the front and the other in profile. Originally, the criminal even had to hold a ruler beside his face (Busch, 1995, p. 316).
The criminal, with an example of the revolutionary international prototype meter in hand, thus measures himself. He is transformed into a test device of the new technique, just as Arago predicted. Even if this did not happen voluntarily, it was still an innovation. Photography, accord- ing to Arnheim's excellent definition, means that something real (whatever that may be, criminal or otherwise) leaves its traces in a storage medium. The user, in other words, no longer needed to create imprints, as was unavoidable under aesthetic conditions. Bertillon did not begin in a historical no man's land, but rather through the photographic recording of criminals he replaced older procedures such as the branding of criminals. In 1831, only eight years before Daguerre's invention, the last criminal was reportedly branded in Europe, while the search for new storage technologies had already started. Bertillon's criminalistics was an answer to exactly this search, as it replaced the arbitrary writing of the old European powers with modern scientific reading, which was far more efficient. The writing
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of brands, when they were read again a few years later, only gave the authorities the tautological information that someone had inscribed them, while the reading of criminal photographs, despite its apparent passivity, provided the authorities with non-redundant data about subjects for the first time. In a more realistic way even than Diderot's warts, which allegedly could not have been made up, criml- nal photographs produced identities.
As if this were not enough, Bertillon also successfully pressed for the international standardization of his so-called anthropometry, and he enforced this procedure not only against recidivist criminals, but against everyone: "It also proves useful in regard to law, forensic medicine, etc. as soon as it is a matter of allaying doubt about the identity of a person (legal identification cards, passports, personal descriptions on warrants, the identification of escaped lunatics, casu- alties, fished up corpses, and many others)" ("Bertillonsches System," 1905, p. 732). The model of the criminal nevertheless became part of our everyday life, which prompted Thomas Pynchon, who refuses every photo shoot and interview, to ask his readers: "Is that who you are, that vaguely criminal face on your ID card, its soul snatched by tbe government camera as the guillotine shutter fell? " (Pynchon, 1973, p. 134).
It must he pointed out again how right Manfred Frank is (although probably unintentionally) when he celebrates the human - freely quoting Schleiermacher and Sartre - as a collective individual. In the age of the monopoly of writing, Goethe could explain that individu- als do not exist at all, but rather only genera or types. In spite of all attempts to project the protagonists of novels before the inner eye like a lanterna magica, no one knew what they actually looked like. Because language belongs to everyone, according to Hegel's insight, descriptions always already transform individuals into universals. The most glaring literary example of this transubstantiation was the arrest warrant that Georg Buchner inserted into his comedy Leonce and Lena after his own bitter experiences with the Hessian police in 1835:
FIRST POLICEMAN. Gentlemen, we are looking for someone, a
subject, an individual, a person, a delinquent, an interrogatee, a
rogue. (To the SECOND POLICEMAN. ) Have a look, is either of
them blushing?
SECOND POLICEMAN. Neither of them is blushing.
FIRST POLICEMAN. So we must try something else. Where is the
"wanted" poster, the description, the certificate? (The SECOND POLICEMAN takes a paper from his pocket and hands it to him. ) Scrutinise the subjects while I read: "A man . . . "
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SECOND POLICEMAN. No good, there are two of them.
FIRST POLICEMAN. Numbskull! ". . . walks on two feet, has two arms, also a mouth, a nose, two eyes, two ears. Distinguishing fea-
tures: a highly dangerous individual. "
SECOND POLICEMAN. That fits both of them. Shall I arrest them
both? (Btichner, 1987, p. 129)
So much for the comical aspect of old European warrants. Now for the sad part: the actual warrant for the fugitive Georg Biichner that the Grand Duchy of Hessen pubhshed m the Frankfurter Journal on June 18, 1835 contained little more:
Arrest warrant. Georg Buchner, student of medicine from Darmstadt, has fled the fatherland to evade criminal invesigation of his participa- tion in acts of treason against the state. Public authorities both at home and abroad therefore request that he be arrested and turned over to Councillor Georgi, the examining magistrate appointed by the Grand Ducal court of the province of Upper Hesse. Darmstadt, June 13, 1835. Personal description. Age: 21 years. Size: 6 feet, 9 inches according to new Hessian measurements. Hair: blonde. Forehead: very arched. Eyebrows: blonde. Eyes: grey. Nose: str()ng. Mouth: small. Beard: blonde. Chin: round. Face: oval. Complexion: fresh. Stature: strong, thin. Distinguishing features: near-sighted. (Buchner, 1985, p. 92)
In Biichner's ingenious simplification, the literary warrant reveals how the high absolutist authorities had invented him very literally as a single subject, which means that it conflated so to speak all actual subjects into one subject. In the empirical press, like the Frankfurter Journal, things were only marginally more complicated: Biichner's warrant did not actually describe all the subjects of the Grand Duchy of Hessen, but rather it only pertained to the ideal of a healthy, blond student, and there were at least a few hundred real students who fitted this literary model. Modern forensic evidence, on the other hand, works with media rather than arts - its correlate, therefore, is nothing but statistically singularized individuals who (as in Poe's famous tale The Man in the Crowd) can themselves still be fished out of the masses.
Two photographic examples related to modern forensic evidence now follow. The first is fictional, and the second is its historical confirmation.
The literary and therefore fictional example is taken from a book by Gerhard Plumpe with the entitled Der tote Blick (The Dead Look). In a slightly redundant way, this book shows how nineteenth-century
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photography legally disrupted the copyright law concerning images (at that time, this of course meant hand-painted images), which had only just recently been introduced. Despite this preoccupation with laws (and not with media technologies), Der tote Blick contains several observations for which one can be grateful.
Plumpe summarizes the content of a comedy that the high pros- ecutor and forgotten poet Apollonius von Maltitz produced in 1865 under the title Photography and Revenge:
The arrival of a traveling photographer at a bathing resort causes a disturbance, as the photographed guests feel that their portraits are an imposition in every respect. "That's how I should look? " - complains a young woman - "not simply ugly enough to horrify people, but mali- cious, like an ex-convict [. . . ], That is my poor deceased father's favor- ite child! Could you love these grimaces, my unfortunate Rudolph? - Everyone who looks at me this way must see me as the crooked daughter of a wealthy factory owner, who married an aristocrat only because of his money. " Aod her mothe~ who is also photographed, is appalled: "Led to the altar from the nursery, beautifully named, deified by painters [. . . Jsculpted in marble by Thorwaldsen - now in the hands of a charlatan. " It continues this way for a while longer, and the confused indignation of the bathing guests is made complete when an "art expert" confirms the success of the portraits. "Do you find a faint similarity? " the expert is asked, and he answers: "It is not ideal, but rather perfect. It is not similar, but rather absolutely the same! " The horror of the guests eventually becomes so extreme that the doctor of the resort forbids the photographer from practicing his trade. The story takes its first turn of events when the photographer accidentally succeeds in photographing a criminal who is up to some mischief at the resort and is stealing from the guests. With the help of "realistic" photography, the thief is arrested. Photography is thus rehabilitated and the guests ultimately praise the mastery of his "art. "
(Plumpe, 1990, p. 193)
So much for the comedy Photography and Revenge. Mediocre poets c;n therefore also be good lawyers and even better media theorists. On the one hand, the media technique of photography destroys pre- cisely the "ideal" or imaginary, which sculptors or painters repro- dnced again and again when they dutifully "deified" their models, because it manifests for the first time something real that makes even the noblest daughter suddenly look like an ex-con (guillotine grimaces, as Pynchon said). (For this reason, by the way, there has been a law in the German Reich since 1902 that gives every man and woman the "right to one's own image," which protects them against
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the mIsuse of photography. ) On the other hand, however, photogra- phy also demonstrates the completely new ability to recognize and thus produce real convicts. And third, the fact that it did not become famous as "art" (in the old European understanding of the term) until or rather precisely after this criminalistic success proves - and here I deviate from Plumpe's thesis - that all talk about photography as art actually serves to conceal its strategic functions.
To conclude this digression concerning the cultural effects of the new medium, I would only like to point out that photography as legal retributIOn not only celebrated Its tnumph in literary fiction. As early as 1883, "a rapid photographic printing process" for arrest warrants, which Bertillon reportedly took over and standardized, enabled the arrest of "the dangerous anarchist Stellmacher" in Vienna (Eder, 1978, p. 441). As you may remember, nitrocellulose can be used to make either bombs, like the anarchists, or roll film, like the Viennese police. Between these two barrages, the anarchistic and the photo- graphic, the human as collective individual explodes.
3. 2 Film
3. 2. 1 Preludes
Now we come unceremoniously to the prehistory of film. For the storage of moving images it is just not enough to make a donnish assistant like Morse stand still for half an hour, as Draper did for the first photographic portrait, or to bind a criminal during an anthro- pometric sitting, as Bertillon did. Rather, it involves fixing the object or target precisely while it is fleeing and being able to reproduce this fixed movement again anywhere. For these two reasons, I will begin the prehistory of film with an American ship's boy named Samuel Colt. His history is actually slightly mythical and it will need to be expanded more correctly and precisely in a future lecture on the history of weapons technology, but it will suffice for today. In 1828, the ship's boy went to the East Indies and on the way he had a technical epiphany - namely, the revolver that is now named after him. Colt revolvers, as celebrated and not by accident in all western films, no longer aim their six shots from one man to another, but rather from one white man to six Indians or Mexicans at virtually the same time. This was the reason why Colt, whose factory almost bankrnpted him, did not become a wealthy arms supplier until the American-Mexican War of 1847.
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The colt not only introduced the Innovation of being able to
shoot six moving targets in quick succession at a time when contem-
porary soldiers still needed a full minute to load the next round in their muzzle-loaded rifles, but rather it fundamentally revolutionized the process of industrial manufacturing. For promotional purposes, Colonel Colt was always fond of demonstrating to his astonished visi- tors that it was possible to disassemble six colts on a table, jnmble up their component parts, and in the end - despite this artificial introduc- tion of statistics or noise - reassemble six fully functional colts once again from the individual pieces. I do not need to delve any further into the complicated prehistory of this trick, which can be traced from Ludwig XVI's artillery to the almost forgotten but not unim- portant British-American War of 1812 and the US Army Ordnance Office. It is enough to say that even though Colt did not invent the principle of the industrial serial production of interchangeable parts, he still publicized it very successfully. The series of shots in time and the series of devices in space were two equally important aspects of one single innovation. The arms supplier of Napoleon's great army worked on similar standardizations at practically the same time, as did the English computer pioneer Charles Babbage, particularly with regard to screws and other precision mechanics. As you know, however, Colt's model prevailed in America - and this was actually for the simple reason that every conceivable emigrant with every conceivable occupation that was not demanded elsewhere streamed into the country of unlimited serialism. There were only two groups
of workers who did not emigrate from Europe, where they enjoyed much better working conditions: skilled labor and the military. And behold: the manufacturing technology of Colt's revolver compen- sated for the first shortage and the weapons technology compensated for the second.
Both of these aspects were also crucial for film. First, conceruing the seriality of the production process, film distinguishes itself from photography in that the sender's finished product - the film in reels - is entirely useless if a projector with precisely the same specifications is not available on the receiver side. The purchaser of a photograph does not himself need a camera, but the purchaser of a film needs a projection room and a projection device. While Shannon's channel concept is rather anachronistic and unsuitable for photography, as I have said, film comes considerably closer to this concept and thus requires highly industrial conditions. It is no coincidence that many early film producers carne from the sphere of precision engineering (Faulstich, 1979, p. 159).
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The seriality of shootmg a revolver, on the other hand, naturally corresponds to the serial time in film, into which the movements of the filmed object must be broken down. In terms of pure mathemat- ics, this has not been a problem since Aristotle's theory of movement was adopted in the early modern period. In tbe fourteentb century, as I have mentioned, Nicolas Oresme already sketched the individual phases of the flight of a missile on paper, and Leibniz developed dif- ferential calculus around 1690 in order to calculate the ballistics of cannonballs. dy over dt means analyzing the results of an arbitrary mathematical fnnctlon m extremely small intervals of time t, and these intervals eventually approach zero until the differential quotient indicates the tangent and that means the change of the relevant func- tion itself at all individual points in time.
Technically, however, this border crossing is simply impossible because (according to Shannon) there are no infinite scanning speeds. It was thus replaced with the problem of how small the segments of time must be made in order to provide at least the appearance of such a border crossing. At the same time that Charles Babbage constructed his first proto-computer, which converted Leibniz' differential equa- tions into technically realizable difference equations, the nineteenth century developed a machine that operated even below the smallest difference that would still be physiologically perceptible. But that suddenly changed the technical question into a physiological question and the construction of machines thus changed into the measurement of human senses.
To identify this new physiology of the senses, it will suffice first of all to point out in general that its scientific structure would have been inconceivable prior to the nineteenth century. In his remark- able book about the techniques of the observer, Jonathan Crary even postulated the thesis (inspired by Foucault's historiography) that the turn away from physically natural optics, as represented by Lambert, for example, towards physiologically embodied optics was a veritable scientific paradigm shift. The principle support for Crary's thesis is no less than Goethe, whose theory of colors was fundamentally based on the phenomenon of optical after-images. Someone looks at something red for a few minutes, then closes the eyes - and suddenly the complementary color green appears to these closed eyes. Goethe boldly concluded from this, as I already men- tioned at the very beginning of these lectures, that the eye is like the sun: out of its own creative activity it generates a suitable complement to every passively pre-existing color, and the end sum is always a totality.
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Crary's thesis reduces many events in the history of science that led to photography and film to a hrilliant denominator. Nevertheless, I would like to raise two objections. The first concerns Crary's over- emphasis on the body, which is fashionable among contemporary scholars. There seem to be entire branches of scholarship today that believe they have not said anything at all if they have not said the word"body" a hundred times. There is no doubt that in the nine- teenth century the geometric model of optics, which prevailed from the time of Brunelleschi to Lambert, was replaced with a materialis- tic one, but that by no way means that the material effects of light always impact on human bodies and eyes. It can just as easily be, as we have seen, Schulze's photochemical effect on silver salts and, even more conclusively, Herschel and Ritter's history of infrared and ultraviolet. Crary's thesis would therefore be more precise if he had not spoken about physiology but rather about material effects in general, which can impact on human bodies just as well as on technical storage media.
Second, I do not see how Crary can equate Goethe's gentle experi- ments with the more brutal and in my eyes first true physiological experiments and self-experiments of his successors. Goethe himself boasted of his "delicate empiricism," and he surely never caused pain for the sake of his theory of colors. However, the Weber brothers, to whom the sciences of motion (as they were called in the nineteenth century) owe much, falsified the alleged creative power of Goethe's eye by simply delivering a mechanical blow to their own eyes: what then emerged as an after-image or lighting on the retina was no longer a totality, but rather the trace of a shock (Crary, 1991).
The Leipzig scientist Gustav Theodor Fechner was even worse than the Webers because he first attempted to prove Goethe's pre- cious theory of after-images experimentally. As a physicist, Fechner also wanted to determine the measurable quantities and measurable periods of this after-image effect, and he spent three years reading all the relevant books on the subject and then staring into the sun. At the end of this series of experiments, which exposed his eyes to two rather opposed extremes, he was blind and fit only for a mental institution (see Lasswitz, 1910). You can see that in the nineteenth century the physiology of the senses did not simply ruin experimen- tal rabbits - or rats, like today - but rather it ruined the research pioneers themselves. Media always presuppose disabilities, and thus
optical media also presuppose the blindness of their researchers (in addition to a lack of natural pigments). Enlightenment philosophers like Diderot or Condorcet had only postulated theories about the
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blIndness of others, because the Enlightenment itself was supposed to be pure light. Fechner, on the other hand, was able to write the general mathematical formula of all sensory perception, the so-called basic law of psychophysics, precisely because he sacrificed his eyes to research his subject and then only managed to improve his condition again through sheer force of will. According to this basic law, a linear increase in objective stimulation only corresponds to a logarithmic increase in subjective sensation; by the same token, an exponential increase in stimulation is necessary for a linear increase in sensation - in Fechner's tragic case, therefore, the sun must shine four times hrighter to blind twice as much. With such optimistic and also not undisputed assumptions about sensory resistance, one can imagine how much solar power Fechner exposed his eyes to.
Fechner is admittedly less important for the physiology of film than another hlind man, to whom we will shortly come. Fechner only serves to illustrate a research field that began making numerical state- ments about perceptual processes and above all stimulus thresholds. It is clear that eyes can only believe in the apparent continuity of film movements when the projected images change quickly enough that the sequence of individual frames drops below a certain temporal threshold. The so-called positive after-image then takes effect. In contrast to Goethe's celebrated concept of the negative after-image, the positive after-image occurs when the eye continues to see an object in the same place a moment after it has already disappeared or moved away. This happens because the stimnlation of the nerve fibers only wears off gradually, and the after-image remains in the same color as the original image rather than the complementary color, as with a negative after-image.
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This new guarantee of 1l1ventability in general also corresponds to the public reception of Daguerre's invention. Up until now - namely, up until the solitary death of Niepce, the founding hero - these lectures have had to report on more tragedies and testimonials to poverty, but we are now coming to brighter times and the worship of bourgeois geniuses, even if they are only junior partners in inven- tor teams, like Daguerre. The most famous physicists and academ- ICS in France, above all Arago and the gas researcher Gay-Lussac, supported the lllventor and earned him the Cross of the LegiOn of Honor and an annual life-long pension of 6,000 francs as a "national reward" (as it is called in the specially enacted law) from the "Citizen King" Louis Philippe (Eder, 1978, pp. 232-3). Daguerre therefore died as a successful man who not only earned 400 gold francs for each of his cameras and demanded 60 to 120 gold francs for his daguerreotypes (Eder, 1978, p. 253), but who could also make money
by relinquishing his patent rights. This enabled Daguerre to afford a park for his retirement estate, which contained small lakes, water- falls, and above all (as if to prove the thesis of these lectures) the ruins of a castle and a gothic chapel (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 149). For France, on the other hand, all of Daguerre's honors took place with explicit reference to modern copyright law, which the French Revolution (under the overall control of Lahnal, the telegraphy advocate) had invented for "spiritual heroes" and especially for novelists in 1794. By panning from literature to media technology, his invention proved in retrospect to be the invention of invention itself.
The historical goals that were initially prescribed for daguerreo- typy can be gathered from tbe ceremonial speeches about Daguerre that were held in his presence. On the one hand, Arago emphasized that during Napoleon's Egyptian campaign art history and archaeol- ogy already urgently needed daguerreotypes to reproduce artworks and inscriptions without the falsifying hand of the painter. (Even the ten-volume description of Egypt that was edited on Napoleon's behalf by none other than Baron Joseph Fourier, the founder of modern wave theory, was still not a technical medium. ) On the other hand, painters could also employ daguerreotypes as cheaper and at the same time more precise replacements for their usual sketches and models. This was supposed to have far-reaching consequences for the invention of film, but it also already happened, for example, when the famous lngres made his famous painting La Source (The Spring). The painting shows a stylized Greek woman carrying a pitcher; however, the photograph lngres used as a model shows - or rather conceals - an ordinary Parisian prostitute, as they were typically used
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as models at that time. So much for the new competitIve relation- ship between art and media technology, painting and daguerreotype, which Arago only touched upon. To the scientist, as expected, tbe "scientific advantages" of invention were far more important (Eder, 1978, p. 237).
In this regard, the first and most dramatic point that Arago emphasized was the possibility of absolutely measuring light and its strength. With human eyes alone there were always only rela- tive estimates of the strength of light, but the daguerreotype did for photometry precisely what the Parisian standard meter did for land surveys and cartography in 1790. Lambert's photometry thus freed itself from all phenomenological or subjective appearance in order to become a technically precise form of measurement. A second point was the sensitivity of the new medium, which made light more intense compared to the eye and which made it possible to force the moon or the rings of Saturn to produce experimental effects. And finally, because their exactness surpassed all other arts, Arago also men- tioned the possibility of measuring daguerreotypes themselves with rulers and compasses to infer the length and angle ratios of the objects represented. From this emerged Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. 's great idea to destroy all artworks (for instance, using gunpowder) immedi- ately after they are photographed, and since the two world wars the even greater idea has emerged of airplane or satellite reconnaissance photographs that finally contribute to the systematic destruction of the photographed object . . .
3. 1. 2. 2 Talbot
According to the honest Arago, there are only two things in the world that balk at daguerreotypes: first, paper, on which all writing and books are based, and second, people, on which all inventions were based according to early capitalist doctrine. Daguerreotypes could therefore only be printed throngh the mediation of a lithographer or copperplate engraver, and people, who are much too restless, could only be captured with extreme difficulty. In 1839, in the land of unlimited possibilities, Professor Draper and Professor Morse simply made a person sit for half an hour in the blazing sun with white face powder and closed eyes until the first portrait photograph was taken or rather waited for (Eder, 1978, p. 271). Their studio in New York was thus the first photographic portrait studio in the world and the first technology for truly storing human faces, and I cannot avoid making special reference to Morse's involvement: Samuel Morse was
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the painter who in 1837 had made the electric telegraph - the all- important modern broadcast technology - ready to go into produc- tion. There are no media, but rather always only multimedia systems.
As you can imagine, however, the multimedia system between photochemical storage, on the one hand, and paper and people, on the other hand, wanted to be completed not only in the American sense, like Samuel Morse's telegraph standardizer, but also formally. Gradual changes to Daguerre's process, all of which I cannot deal with here, eventually led to instantaneous photography, which made it possible for the first time to contemplate the storage of moving images, which means film. I will only name the most important of these steps and researchers.
William Henry Fox Talbot, Daguerre's previously underestimated English competitor, produced the first photographs on paper. During his trip to Italy, this rich Englishman repeatedly attempted to capture beautiful romantic images with the camera obscura and then sketch them by hand, as was typical since the time of the Renaissance. But the successful perspectivization of nature, which had filled all of the painters since Durer with pride and contentment, was no longer satisfying after Daguerre made the physically real storable. Talbot, the failed painter, thus sought and found a technical method of pho- tographing directly onto paper soaked in iodized silver and silver nitrate. From the camera obscura he developed the camera in the modern sense of the word. The hands of lithographers, which had previously stood between technical recording and book reproduction, were thus no longer necessary. In the entire operation of new optics there were no longer any arts, but rather only media. Talhot himself, who called his calotypy or "beautiful impression" technology "the pencil of nature" as it allows nature to inscribe images of itself, actu-
ally used it - strictly according to McLuhan's law that the content of media are always other media - for magnificent volumes of beautiful images of European nature or art, but the path to illustrated maga- zines based on photographs and to all the magazines sold under the counter was already mapped out.
Another of Talbot's innovations, the introduction of negatives, was relevant in an entirely different way. Unfortunately, I do not know if the concept of positive and negative in photography was derived from the much older analog concept of mathematics or the concept of positive and negative in the theory of electricity, which was only 50 years old at that time, but this should be clarified at some point. With Daguerre's process, the recording and fixing of the image always produced a positive reproduction of the lighting conditions.
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Experiments with negative reproductions failed because of their irre- versibility. Talbot resolved this problem by always photographing the negative again just as it had been produced itself in order to obtain as many positive copies as he wanted. This had two far-reaching effects, one hidden and one apparent. The secret effect was that photogra- phy was not only capable of amplifying or magnifying the light, for which Arago had already praised Daguerre, but rather since Talbot it was also capable of magnifying or reducing the size of the image when copying the negative. And because the whole world always only believes in the value of magnification - I am reminded here of Antonioni's Blow Up - it should be emphasized that image reduction also has strategic effects. For example, in 1870, several weeks into the German-French War, Paris was surrounded on all sides by Moltke's telegraphically controlled armies. The urgently needed exchange of messages witb the republican armies, which had repeatedly tried to relieve the sacred heart of France, seemed impossible until they had the idea of using a photograph. They photographed the letters that were supposed to go from Paris to the armies, reduced the size of the copy, photographed the copy, etc. , until the entire text fitted on the foot of an innocent carrier pigeon, which flew to Gambetta's general staff. If German falcons did not intercept the pigeon, the unreadable
text was decoded "with the help of an electrically illuminated magic lantern," which projected a magnification of the photograph on a readable screen (Ranke, 1982, p. 49). Twentieth-century intelligence agencies developed techniques of reducing entire secret messages to the size of a harmless typewriter point.
The obvious effect of Talbot's innovation requires less commen- tary. The consequences of unlimited copying are clear: in a series first of originals, second of negatives, and third of negatives of a negative, photography became a mass medium. For Hegel, the nega- tion of a negation was supposed to be anything but a return to the first position, but mass media are based on precisely this oscillation, as it logically calculated Boolean circuit algebra and made possible nothing less than the computer.
Only Talbot, who had done for optical reproducibility exactly what Gutenberg had done for printing technology, was a British snob who hated copying. Like Gutenberg, who had demanded (because of a Strasbourg trial in which he had become entangled) that a hole should be bored into his printing press, that a large stake should be stuck in the hole, and that the unmovable and unusable machine should then be laid in a grave, Talbot also prosecuted everyone who wanted to copy his method. Only a threatening intervention by the
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Royal SocIety was able to mduce him "to take a less severely obstruc-
tive attitude in the interest of the arts and sciences" and renounce his
patent rights with the lovely exception that commercial uses would continue to remain forbidden (Eder, 1978, p. 321).
For the sake of simplicity, let us assume that it was this immedi- ate brake on exploitation that brought so many other photographic materials into the world between Talbot's paper and the photo- graphic final solution (namely, Eastman's celluloid), such as those terribly heavy and fragile photographic glass plates that a dragoon lieutenant and a cousin of Niepce's developed in 1847. Glass actu- ally plays a fundamental role in photography, but as a lens system rather than as a storage surface. The reason for the low light level of the lenses employed by Daguerre and Talbot was that people had to sit still for half an hour in the blazing sun until their portrait was in the box. To rectify this shortcoming, an experimental search for faster lenses began, which became a true science in Abbe's Zeiss works in Jena. A search for light-sensitive emulsions also began, which did not end until the development of digital photography. To bring abont the conditions necessary to make feature films possible, the new optical medinm eventually had to separate itself again from the traditional printing press, into which it had been so effectively integrated thanks to Talbot. In other words, it had to obtain its own materiality, something besides metal, paper, or glass - namely, that strange half-transparency we call film withont even hearing it as a foreign word at all. I have looked it np, and I am happy to report that the Anglo-Saxon word aegfelma or egg skin and the Old Frisian word filmene or soft skin are joined to the West German felman, meaning skin. The root of all of these words is naturally fell or fur,
bnt since 1891 such animal furs of the parchment variety are gone; the advancement that replaced them was light-sensitive film for pho- tographs and sequences of images. However, Kluge's Etymologisches Worterbuch der deutschen Sprache (Etymological Dictionary of the German Language) unfortunately draws no parallels between film and parchment.
The other happy news concerns the inventor of film, who brought the same rolling process to optics that the endless paper machine provided for the newspaper printing press. Pynchon once wrote about the protagonist of his novel, Slothrop, whose devout American ances- tors were either the founders of a cnlt or paper manufacturers - and paper is now the material basis for dollars, bathrooms, and Bibles, that is, money, shit, and the Word of God. However, according to Pynchon's analysis the same thing is now true of the power of the
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media that historically superseded the word or book: lt was a prIest who bestowed roll film upon us. Celluloid itself had to be invented first, and this was accomplished by three Americans who wanted to use nitrocellulose to reduce the cost of the rather expensive and scarce elephant ivory used in billiard balls at that time. And nitrocellulose or so-called gunpowder must have been bestowed upon us? even earlier than that; instead of the old monastic black powder, which I attempted to correlate with perspective itself, this was done by a Swiss chemist and an Austrian field marshal lieutenant named Franz von Uchatius, who will also be presented m the next lecture as the direct forefather of film technology. As the name already implies, gunpowder was not intended to serve cinematic Or peaceful goals, but after its metamorphosis into the modern billiard ball Reverend Han- nibal Goodwin, an enthusiastic amateur photographer who hated the heavy, unwieldy glass plates, was able to register his patent for roll film on May 2,1887. The government's approval of the patent - along with a reimbursement of several million dollars - was not granted until 11 years later, though, because in the meantime the Eastman- Kodak company had already founded its billion-dollar fortune on the exploitation of Goodwin's patent.
We finally come to the era of high capitalism, and we are ready for the invention of film, which I will address in the next lecture. However, because I do not want to interrupt the technical connec- tions again today, I would like to digress for a moment and outline a side of photography that is often left out: before the actual history of film I would like to examine the impact of photography as a storage medium on nineteenth-century culture and aesthetics.
3. 1. 3 Painting and Photography: A Battle for the Eyeballs
After 1836, there were two possible options available to everyone (and not only Napoleonic general staffs): either to write letters or books or else to send telegraphic signals. After 1839, there were also two options for images: either to paint or to photograph them. Arago's eulogy for Daguerre, which primarily emphasized the pos- sible scientific applications of the first mediumfor storing images and completely denied that it would also exert competitive pressure on painters - particularly portrait painters since the arrival of the photo- graphic portraits of Draper and Morse - was the understatement of the century. As everyone knows by now, the once massive business of painted portraits passed almost entirely over to photography, and under the competitive pressure of technology painters were only left
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wIth two optIOns that essentially differenTIated (to use Niklas Luhmann's term) them from photography. The first option was to change their style by no longer supplying image material from eye- sight or from an old camera obscura, but rather from photographs. The long history of photo-realism - from Ingres (whose La Source, as I mentioned, was based on a nude photograph) to Gerhard Richter - is left to art bistorians. I will only say, as is clearly obvious in the work of Degas and his ballennas, that the photograph as the new source material for painting replaced the imaginary (and there- fore conventional pamting's fixation on recognizing figures) with the reality of absolutely instantaneous contingencies and absolutely asymmetrical image fragments.
When viewed systematically, the problem with this first option is that it is only possible as long as other painters are unable to master the mimicry of certain photographic effects as well as those who introduced the new style. The other and historically more success- ful option for the painter was actually to differentiate between the artistic and the technical medium, and thus to only paint images that could not be photographed, such as images that do not represent any objects at all, but rather the act of painting itself. It is not necessary to emphasize that this option represented the mainstream of so-called modernist painting and historically it had practically no effects on everyday life. .
With respect to everyday life, it is better to return to simple media like lithography, which will further our discussion of the politics of images, which is one of the leitmotifs of these lectures. In 1800, the romantic Navalis demanded - completely without reference to optotechnical media - that the as yet absolntist monarchy, and espe- cially the Prussian monarchy here in Berlin, become more effective through reforms, and to become more effective it must arouse"belief and love" among its subjects. This eliminated baroque portraits that presented the prince's frightening yet also fascinating resplendence, as well as portraits that presented the prince in his lordly seclusion. Pictures of the solitary "Old Fritz" were immediately replaced with pictures of a king shown intimately or familiarly together with his wife, the proverbial queen Luise, as a married couple. And because the king's subjects had in the meantime also been remodelled into happy families, pictures of the rnler coincided with those of the ruled for the first time in history.
It was only later recognized that Flaubert, in his Sentimental Education - a novel about painters, dealers, and the revolution of 1848 relates with all the cynicism available to him how the Prussian
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example became the accepted thing. According to Flaubert, King Louis Philippe (the very king to whom Daguerre owed his life-long pension and the Cross of the Legion of Honor) circulated countless lithographs on which he modestly appeared as a member of one of millions of bourgeois families:
Then the talk came round to the dinner at Arnoux's.
"The picture-dealer? " asked Senecal [in the novel he is initially pas-
sionate about the revolution, but then he becomes its worst traitor], "He's a fine fellow if you like. l )
"What do you mean? " said Pellerin.
Senecal replied:
"He's a man who makes money by political skulduggery. "
And he went on to talk about a well-known lithograph which
showed the entire royal family engaged in edifying occupations: Louis-
Philippe had a copy of the Code in his hand, the Queen a prayer-book;
the Princesses were doing embroidery; the [young] Due de Nemour was buckling on a sword; Monsieur de Joinville was showing his young brothers a map; and in the background could be seen a bed with two compartments. This picture, which was entitled" A Good Family," had been a source of delight to the middle classes, but the despair of the patriots. (Flaubert, 1964, p. 62)
It seems to me that this straightforward text needs no interpreta- tion, but I would like to emphasize two points: first, it shows how effectively the politics of images functioned after the switch to infi- nitely reproducible and printable lithographs, and second it shows that media have repercussions on what they represent. In the mass medium of lithography, the royal family cast off all of its sover- eign attributes and aligned itself with the mass of French bourgeois families.
As an automated form of lithography, photography only strength- ened this trend. In Dessau, in one of the smallest German palaces, portrait photography caused members of the aristocracy to present themselves no longer in full dress with uniform and decorations, as they had for portrait painters, but rather they wanted to appear on their photographs wearing the simple black suits of normal citizens (Buddemeier, 1970, p. 86). Bourgeois realism was thus not only a style in literature and painting, but also in everyday life. From this, one can also infer the complementary need for media, which will compensate the aristocracy for this loss of face in the eyes of their secret bourgeois admirers. A first, harmless example are feature films like Sissy. A second example, which McLuhan brilliantly discovered,
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is the monocle, which became fashionable around 1850: an aristocrat would endure being photographed in the simple black suit of the nineteenth century, rather than portrayed in royal clothing; however, in revenge he wore a type of glasses that ensured even more brutally than the hand-made camera obscura in Brockes' Rahmenschau that in contrast to the monocle wearer, all others were reduced to the sub- iects of an optical media technology. Actors like Erich von Stroheim only needed to export or rather prostitute this trick of aristocratic German officers' eyes to Hollywood and a new film genre was born: the Nazi film (McLuhan, 1964, p. 170).
On the other hand, true bourgeoisation was implemented by the citizens themselves. The role played by photography (in contrast to Diderot's fictional warts) can be seen by looking at literary realism. Balzac, whose novels contributed the most towards the populariza- tion of this new bourgeois realism, wrote in the foreword to The Human Comedy that his entire cycle of novels was like a daguerreo- type of contemporary French society. As usual in the century of sci- ences, literature thus obtained its validation for the first time from a technical medium, which it could do more easily than painting because the medium appeared only as a metaphorical and not a real competitor.
As a metaphorical model, however, photography also appears to have had real effects on writing: Flaubert's equally magnificent and dismal Madame Bovary repeatedly mentions a cure de platre or plaster priest that initially stands intact in the Bovary's garden like a garden gnome, which is similarly mass-produced. It receives a few scratches during the first move, and finally, when the marriage col- lapses, it also falls to pieces. This priest does not serve the slightest function in the narrative other than to prove that the novel has not forgotten any visual detail within its fictional world - a forgetting that, in contrast to the realist Flaubert, actually principally befell his predecessors, such as Goethe and other classical writers. Against the backdrop of photography, literature therefore no longer simply pro- duces inner pictures for the camera obscura that Hoffmann's solitary romantic readers became; rather, it begins to create objective and consistent visual leitmotifs that could later easily be filmed.
This does not mean that realistic writers (like painters) did not describe photography as a threat. The same Balzac who claimed to have drawn up all of his fictional figures like daguerreotypes also said to his friend Nadar, France's first and most famous portrait photo- grapher, that he himself would dread being photographed. Balzac's mystical tendencies led him to conclude that every person consists of
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many optical layers - like an onion peel - and every daguerreotype captures and stores the outermost layel; thus removing it from the person being photographed. With the next photograph, the next layer is lost, and so on and so on until the subject disappears or becomes a disembodied ghost (see Nadar, 1899). Edgar Allan Poe, who also wrote about photography as one of tbe wonders of the world, made this phantasm universal by positing the thesis that images in general are deadly for their object (Poe, 1965, pp. 245-9). Poe's painter creates a portrait of his beloved without noticing that she grows increasingly pale the more that her oil painting acquires the color of human flesh. Painting, with its extensively discussed handicap of aging pigment, thus uses a photochemical effect against people as if it had become photography. As soon as Poe's fictional painting is completed, the painter's beloved drops dead. Media analysis can only emphasize once again how historical phantasms and collective symbols (as Jiirgen Link would say) are directly based on technolo- gies. The fears of Balzac or Poe merely illustrate the fact, as Arnheim theorized, that photography represents the emergence for the first time of a storage medium capable of reproducing the unimaginable materiality of the person being depicted.
This does not mean that the phantasm should be explained away, but rather just that it should be acknowledged as a fact, because the phantasmagorical fears of so-called humans - a category that accord- ing to Foucault was not invented until around 1800 as the subject of all possible fields of knowledge - had definite technological con- sequences. To begin with, all of the ghosts created using the lanterna magica since Schropfer and Robertson, which Balzac eventually iden- tified with the human itself, passed on to the new medium. A favorite pastime of occultism, which emerged around 1850 and which initially mimicked the electric telegraph, was to hunt for spirit photographs. The camera shutter was left open when there was nothing to be seen, such as in the dark, and these non-images were then developed in the Arnheim-like hope, so to speak, that a ghost invisible to the eye had materialized on the photographic film all by itself. This process was more successfnl than one could possibly imagine today, and it proves the half-truth of Adorno's dictum that spirits historically appeared at exactly the same time as the spirit of philosophical ideal- ism was destroyed by media technologies. I say half-truth because the Counter-Reformation ghosts existing since Kircher's lanterna magica did not take a single syllable of Adorno into consideration.
Second, and this is the decisive point, what befell ghosts with so- called ecto-photography could also be applied to humans. An evil
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power, which was not always as fictional as in Chamisso's tale of poor Schlemihl, bought their shadows from them. As photography made advances towards snapshot photography, it became increas- mgly easier to capture people without their permission or even their knowledge. Balzac's nightmare proved well-founded in 1880 at the latest, when Alphonse Bertillon - whose brother, by the way, was notably the director of the statistical bureau of Paris at that time - became director of the Parisian police's identification bureau. Bertillon aslced himself which visible and measurable features of a person remained constant for the remainder of one's life despite the changes caused by age or intentional disguise. He identified the fol- lowing characteristics: the length of the head, the width of the head, the length of the middle finger, the length of the foot, the underarm length, and the length of the little finger. If the police were to store all these measurements on cards along with a careful description of race and any scars, birthmarks, and tattoos, the probability of mistaking the relevant individual for someone else would become virtually zero. Eleven measurements alone would already allow for 177,147 differ- ent combinations.
That is as far as we will go into statistics, and now we return to photography. In the age of literary realism, it Was self-evident that Bertillon replaced these necessarily imprecise descriptions with pho- tographs. From this time onwards, two portrait photographs were immediately taken of every arrested criminal or suspect, one from the front and the other in profile. Originally, the criminal even had to hold a ruler beside his face (Busch, 1995, p. 316).
The criminal, with an example of the revolutionary international prototype meter in hand, thus measures himself. He is transformed into a test device of the new technique, just as Arago predicted. Even if this did not happen voluntarily, it was still an innovation. Photography, accord- ing to Arnheim's excellent definition, means that something real (whatever that may be, criminal or otherwise) leaves its traces in a storage medium. The user, in other words, no longer needed to create imprints, as was unavoidable under aesthetic conditions. Bertillon did not begin in a historical no man's land, but rather through the photographic recording of criminals he replaced older procedures such as the branding of criminals. In 1831, only eight years before Daguerre's invention, the last criminal was reportedly branded in Europe, while the search for new storage technologies had already started. Bertillon's criminalistics was an answer to exactly this search, as it replaced the arbitrary writing of the old European powers with modern scientific reading, which was far more efficient. The writing
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of brands, when they were read again a few years later, only gave the authorities the tautological information that someone had inscribed them, while the reading of criminal photographs, despite its apparent passivity, provided the authorities with non-redundant data about subjects for the first time. In a more realistic way even than Diderot's warts, which allegedly could not have been made up, criml- nal photographs produced identities.
As if this were not enough, Bertillon also successfully pressed for the international standardization of his so-called anthropometry, and he enforced this procedure not only against recidivist criminals, but against everyone: "It also proves useful in regard to law, forensic medicine, etc. as soon as it is a matter of allaying doubt about the identity of a person (legal identification cards, passports, personal descriptions on warrants, the identification of escaped lunatics, casu- alties, fished up corpses, and many others)" ("Bertillonsches System," 1905, p. 732). The model of the criminal nevertheless became part of our everyday life, which prompted Thomas Pynchon, who refuses every photo shoot and interview, to ask his readers: "Is that who you are, that vaguely criminal face on your ID card, its soul snatched by tbe government camera as the guillotine shutter fell? " (Pynchon, 1973, p. 134).
It must he pointed out again how right Manfred Frank is (although probably unintentionally) when he celebrates the human - freely quoting Schleiermacher and Sartre - as a collective individual. In the age of the monopoly of writing, Goethe could explain that individu- als do not exist at all, but rather only genera or types. In spite of all attempts to project the protagonists of novels before the inner eye like a lanterna magica, no one knew what they actually looked like. Because language belongs to everyone, according to Hegel's insight, descriptions always already transform individuals into universals. The most glaring literary example of this transubstantiation was the arrest warrant that Georg Buchner inserted into his comedy Leonce and Lena after his own bitter experiences with the Hessian police in 1835:
FIRST POLICEMAN. Gentlemen, we are looking for someone, a
subject, an individual, a person, a delinquent, an interrogatee, a
rogue. (To the SECOND POLICEMAN. ) Have a look, is either of
them blushing?
SECOND POLICEMAN. Neither of them is blushing.
FIRST POLICEMAN. So we must try something else. Where is the
"wanted" poster, the description, the certificate? (The SECOND POLICEMAN takes a paper from his pocket and hands it to him. ) Scrutinise the subjects while I read: "A man . . . "
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SECOND POLICEMAN. No good, there are two of them.
FIRST POLICEMAN. Numbskull! ". . . walks on two feet, has two arms, also a mouth, a nose, two eyes, two ears. Distinguishing fea-
tures: a highly dangerous individual. "
SECOND POLICEMAN. That fits both of them. Shall I arrest them
both? (Btichner, 1987, p. 129)
So much for the comical aspect of old European warrants. Now for the sad part: the actual warrant for the fugitive Georg Biichner that the Grand Duchy of Hessen pubhshed m the Frankfurter Journal on June 18, 1835 contained little more:
Arrest warrant. Georg Buchner, student of medicine from Darmstadt, has fled the fatherland to evade criminal invesigation of his participa- tion in acts of treason against the state. Public authorities both at home and abroad therefore request that he be arrested and turned over to Councillor Georgi, the examining magistrate appointed by the Grand Ducal court of the province of Upper Hesse. Darmstadt, June 13, 1835. Personal description. Age: 21 years. Size: 6 feet, 9 inches according to new Hessian measurements. Hair: blonde. Forehead: very arched. Eyebrows: blonde. Eyes: grey. Nose: str()ng. Mouth: small. Beard: blonde. Chin: round. Face: oval. Complexion: fresh. Stature: strong, thin. Distinguishing features: near-sighted. (Buchner, 1985, p. 92)
In Biichner's ingenious simplification, the literary warrant reveals how the high absolutist authorities had invented him very literally as a single subject, which means that it conflated so to speak all actual subjects into one subject. In the empirical press, like the Frankfurter Journal, things were only marginally more complicated: Biichner's warrant did not actually describe all the subjects of the Grand Duchy of Hessen, but rather it only pertained to the ideal of a healthy, blond student, and there were at least a few hundred real students who fitted this literary model. Modern forensic evidence, on the other hand, works with media rather than arts - its correlate, therefore, is nothing but statistically singularized individuals who (as in Poe's famous tale The Man in the Crowd) can themselves still be fished out of the masses.
Two photographic examples related to modern forensic evidence now follow. The first is fictional, and the second is its historical confirmation.
The literary and therefore fictional example is taken from a book by Gerhard Plumpe with the entitled Der tote Blick (The Dead Look). In a slightly redundant way, this book shows how nineteenth-century
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photography legally disrupted the copyright law concerning images (at that time, this of course meant hand-painted images), which had only just recently been introduced. Despite this preoccupation with laws (and not with media technologies), Der tote Blick contains several observations for which one can be grateful.
Plumpe summarizes the content of a comedy that the high pros- ecutor and forgotten poet Apollonius von Maltitz produced in 1865 under the title Photography and Revenge:
The arrival of a traveling photographer at a bathing resort causes a disturbance, as the photographed guests feel that their portraits are an imposition in every respect. "That's how I should look? " - complains a young woman - "not simply ugly enough to horrify people, but mali- cious, like an ex-convict [. . . ], That is my poor deceased father's favor- ite child! Could you love these grimaces, my unfortunate Rudolph? - Everyone who looks at me this way must see me as the crooked daughter of a wealthy factory owner, who married an aristocrat only because of his money. " Aod her mothe~ who is also photographed, is appalled: "Led to the altar from the nursery, beautifully named, deified by painters [. . . Jsculpted in marble by Thorwaldsen - now in the hands of a charlatan. " It continues this way for a while longer, and the confused indignation of the bathing guests is made complete when an "art expert" confirms the success of the portraits. "Do you find a faint similarity? " the expert is asked, and he answers: "It is not ideal, but rather perfect. It is not similar, but rather absolutely the same! " The horror of the guests eventually becomes so extreme that the doctor of the resort forbids the photographer from practicing his trade. The story takes its first turn of events when the photographer accidentally succeeds in photographing a criminal who is up to some mischief at the resort and is stealing from the guests. With the help of "realistic" photography, the thief is arrested. Photography is thus rehabilitated and the guests ultimately praise the mastery of his "art. "
(Plumpe, 1990, p. 193)
So much for the comedy Photography and Revenge. Mediocre poets c;n therefore also be good lawyers and even better media theorists. On the one hand, the media technique of photography destroys pre- cisely the "ideal" or imaginary, which sculptors or painters repro- dnced again and again when they dutifully "deified" their models, because it manifests for the first time something real that makes even the noblest daughter suddenly look like an ex-con (guillotine grimaces, as Pynchon said). (For this reason, by the way, there has been a law in the German Reich since 1902 that gives every man and woman the "right to one's own image," which protects them against
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the mIsuse of photography. ) On the other hand, however, photogra- phy also demonstrates the completely new ability to recognize and thus produce real convicts. And third, the fact that it did not become famous as "art" (in the old European understanding of the term) until or rather precisely after this criminalistic success proves - and here I deviate from Plumpe's thesis - that all talk about photography as art actually serves to conceal its strategic functions.
To conclude this digression concerning the cultural effects of the new medium, I would only like to point out that photography as legal retributIOn not only celebrated Its tnumph in literary fiction. As early as 1883, "a rapid photographic printing process" for arrest warrants, which Bertillon reportedly took over and standardized, enabled the arrest of "the dangerous anarchist Stellmacher" in Vienna (Eder, 1978, p. 441). As you may remember, nitrocellulose can be used to make either bombs, like the anarchists, or roll film, like the Viennese police. Between these two barrages, the anarchistic and the photo- graphic, the human as collective individual explodes.
3. 2 Film
3. 2. 1 Preludes
Now we come unceremoniously to the prehistory of film. For the storage of moving images it is just not enough to make a donnish assistant like Morse stand still for half an hour, as Draper did for the first photographic portrait, or to bind a criminal during an anthro- pometric sitting, as Bertillon did. Rather, it involves fixing the object or target precisely while it is fleeing and being able to reproduce this fixed movement again anywhere. For these two reasons, I will begin the prehistory of film with an American ship's boy named Samuel Colt. His history is actually slightly mythical and it will need to be expanded more correctly and precisely in a future lecture on the history of weapons technology, but it will suffice for today. In 1828, the ship's boy went to the East Indies and on the way he had a technical epiphany - namely, the revolver that is now named after him. Colt revolvers, as celebrated and not by accident in all western films, no longer aim their six shots from one man to another, but rather from one white man to six Indians or Mexicans at virtually the same time. This was the reason why Colt, whose factory almost bankrnpted him, did not become a wealthy arms supplier until the American-Mexican War of 1847.
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The colt not only introduced the Innovation of being able to
shoot six moving targets in quick succession at a time when contem-
porary soldiers still needed a full minute to load the next round in their muzzle-loaded rifles, but rather it fundamentally revolutionized the process of industrial manufacturing. For promotional purposes, Colonel Colt was always fond of demonstrating to his astonished visi- tors that it was possible to disassemble six colts on a table, jnmble up their component parts, and in the end - despite this artificial introduc- tion of statistics or noise - reassemble six fully functional colts once again from the individual pieces. I do not need to delve any further into the complicated prehistory of this trick, which can be traced from Ludwig XVI's artillery to the almost forgotten but not unim- portant British-American War of 1812 and the US Army Ordnance Office. It is enough to say that even though Colt did not invent the principle of the industrial serial production of interchangeable parts, he still publicized it very successfully. The series of shots in time and the series of devices in space were two equally important aspects of one single innovation. The arms supplier of Napoleon's great army worked on similar standardizations at practically the same time, as did the English computer pioneer Charles Babbage, particularly with regard to screws and other precision mechanics. As you know, however, Colt's model prevailed in America - and this was actually for the simple reason that every conceivable emigrant with every conceivable occupation that was not demanded elsewhere streamed into the country of unlimited serialism. There were only two groups
of workers who did not emigrate from Europe, where they enjoyed much better working conditions: skilled labor and the military. And behold: the manufacturing technology of Colt's revolver compen- sated for the first shortage and the weapons technology compensated for the second.
Both of these aspects were also crucial for film. First, conceruing the seriality of the production process, film distinguishes itself from photography in that the sender's finished product - the film in reels - is entirely useless if a projector with precisely the same specifications is not available on the receiver side. The purchaser of a photograph does not himself need a camera, but the purchaser of a film needs a projection room and a projection device. While Shannon's channel concept is rather anachronistic and unsuitable for photography, as I have said, film comes considerably closer to this concept and thus requires highly industrial conditions. It is no coincidence that many early film producers carne from the sphere of precision engineering (Faulstich, 1979, p. 159).
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The seriality of shootmg a revolver, on the other hand, naturally corresponds to the serial time in film, into which the movements of the filmed object must be broken down. In terms of pure mathemat- ics, this has not been a problem since Aristotle's theory of movement was adopted in the early modern period. In tbe fourteentb century, as I have mentioned, Nicolas Oresme already sketched the individual phases of the flight of a missile on paper, and Leibniz developed dif- ferential calculus around 1690 in order to calculate the ballistics of cannonballs. dy over dt means analyzing the results of an arbitrary mathematical fnnctlon m extremely small intervals of time t, and these intervals eventually approach zero until the differential quotient indicates the tangent and that means the change of the relevant func- tion itself at all individual points in time.
Technically, however, this border crossing is simply impossible because (according to Shannon) there are no infinite scanning speeds. It was thus replaced with the problem of how small the segments of time must be made in order to provide at least the appearance of such a border crossing. At the same time that Charles Babbage constructed his first proto-computer, which converted Leibniz' differential equa- tions into technically realizable difference equations, the nineteenth century developed a machine that operated even below the smallest difference that would still be physiologically perceptible. But that suddenly changed the technical question into a physiological question and the construction of machines thus changed into the measurement of human senses.
To identify this new physiology of the senses, it will suffice first of all to point out in general that its scientific structure would have been inconceivable prior to the nineteenth century. In his remark- able book about the techniques of the observer, Jonathan Crary even postulated the thesis (inspired by Foucault's historiography) that the turn away from physically natural optics, as represented by Lambert, for example, towards physiologically embodied optics was a veritable scientific paradigm shift. The principle support for Crary's thesis is no less than Goethe, whose theory of colors was fundamentally based on the phenomenon of optical after-images. Someone looks at something red for a few minutes, then closes the eyes - and suddenly the complementary color green appears to these closed eyes. Goethe boldly concluded from this, as I already men- tioned at the very beginning of these lectures, that the eye is like the sun: out of its own creative activity it generates a suitable complement to every passively pre-existing color, and the end sum is always a totality.
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Crary's thesis reduces many events in the history of science that led to photography and film to a hrilliant denominator. Nevertheless, I would like to raise two objections. The first concerns Crary's over- emphasis on the body, which is fashionable among contemporary scholars. There seem to be entire branches of scholarship today that believe they have not said anything at all if they have not said the word"body" a hundred times. There is no doubt that in the nine- teenth century the geometric model of optics, which prevailed from the time of Brunelleschi to Lambert, was replaced with a materialis- tic one, but that by no way means that the material effects of light always impact on human bodies and eyes. It can just as easily be, as we have seen, Schulze's photochemical effect on silver salts and, even more conclusively, Herschel and Ritter's history of infrared and ultraviolet. Crary's thesis would therefore be more precise if he had not spoken about physiology but rather about material effects in general, which can impact on human bodies just as well as on technical storage media.
Second, I do not see how Crary can equate Goethe's gentle experi- ments with the more brutal and in my eyes first true physiological experiments and self-experiments of his successors. Goethe himself boasted of his "delicate empiricism," and he surely never caused pain for the sake of his theory of colors. However, the Weber brothers, to whom the sciences of motion (as they were called in the nineteenth century) owe much, falsified the alleged creative power of Goethe's eye by simply delivering a mechanical blow to their own eyes: what then emerged as an after-image or lighting on the retina was no longer a totality, but rather the trace of a shock (Crary, 1991).
The Leipzig scientist Gustav Theodor Fechner was even worse than the Webers because he first attempted to prove Goethe's pre- cious theory of after-images experimentally. As a physicist, Fechner also wanted to determine the measurable quantities and measurable periods of this after-image effect, and he spent three years reading all the relevant books on the subject and then staring into the sun. At the end of this series of experiments, which exposed his eyes to two rather opposed extremes, he was blind and fit only for a mental institution (see Lasswitz, 1910). You can see that in the nineteenth century the physiology of the senses did not simply ruin experimen- tal rabbits - or rats, like today - but rather it ruined the research pioneers themselves. Media always presuppose disabilities, and thus
optical media also presuppose the blindness of their researchers (in addition to a lack of natural pigments). Enlightenment philosophers like Diderot or Condorcet had only postulated theories about the
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blIndness of others, because the Enlightenment itself was supposed to be pure light. Fechner, on the other hand, was able to write the general mathematical formula of all sensory perception, the so-called basic law of psychophysics, precisely because he sacrificed his eyes to research his subject and then only managed to improve his condition again through sheer force of will. According to this basic law, a linear increase in objective stimulation only corresponds to a logarithmic increase in subjective sensation; by the same token, an exponential increase in stimulation is necessary for a linear increase in sensation - in Fechner's tragic case, therefore, the sun must shine four times hrighter to blind twice as much. With such optimistic and also not undisputed assumptions about sensory resistance, one can imagine how much solar power Fechner exposed his eyes to.
Fechner is admittedly less important for the physiology of film than another hlind man, to whom we will shortly come. Fechner only serves to illustrate a research field that began making numerical state- ments about perceptual processes and above all stimulus thresholds. It is clear that eyes can only believe in the apparent continuity of film movements when the projected images change quickly enough that the sequence of individual frames drops below a certain temporal threshold. The so-called positive after-image then takes effect. In contrast to Goethe's celebrated concept of the negative after-image, the positive after-image occurs when the eye continues to see an object in the same place a moment after it has already disappeared or moved away. This happens because the stimnlation of the nerve fibers only wears off gradually, and the after-image remains in the same color as the original image rather than the complementary color, as with a negative after-image.
