No More Learning

You can read about other names and chemical discoveries, which I will skip over, in the old-fashioned but positivistically exact history of photography produced by the imperial and royal counsellor Dr. Josef Maria Eder in 1905.
With the development of optical lens systems, as I have previously mentioned, Huygens arrived at the fairly adequate thesis that light consists of waves, which naturally were not defined as electromag- netic waves prior to the work of Maxwell and Hertz, but rather as elastic waves of an undefined medium, as the great mathematician Euler called them. However, after 1700 - since the formation of a Royal Society in London with Sir Isaac Newton as its president - the opposing thesis gained acceptance and light was defined as a mass of tiny bodies or a particle stream. Newton had reconstructed the classi- cal camera obscura experiment with one refinement: he placed a glass prism in the beam of light between the sun, the hole in the chamber wall, and the dark projection wall. Since Descartes had already made the natural rainbow (if not also gravity's rainbow) calculable (see the historical part of Goethe's Theory of Colors), the result of Newton's experiment was the first artificial rainbow. The simple white sunlight
122
'I
? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
dissolves mto countless colors of the spectrum between viOlet and red, from which Newton inferred that light consists of parts or particles and that a convex lens would combine many colors to make white again. The experiment with the lens succeeded, and for the first time it compared scientific color synthesis with painterly color synthe- sis. When mixing oil-based paints the sum always becomes darker because light disappears and consequently a subtractive color synthe- sis takes place; since Newton, however, there is also additive color synthesis where the sum of many colors is brighter than its addends. We will have to come back to thiS when we discuss color television.
At the turn of the century around 1800, after chemistry and physics were also established as academic sciences, the chemistry and physics of light - Schulze's photochemical effect and Newton's spectrum analysis - intersected for the first time. No less a person than Friedrich Wilhelm Herschel, the son of a Hannover court musi- cian who had risen to become a British mathematician and court astronomer, introduced the new distinction between light and heat to photochemistry as well: he proved that for the human eye the broken sunlight in Newton's prism actually stops at red and then turns to black, but on a storer of heat like the thermometer it also has measurable effects beyond red. In other words, Herschel discov- ered infrared as a physical embodiment of heat and thus also as a medium on which night vision aids for Waffen-SS tanks in World War II were based, and which is still the basis for tactical anti-aircraft
rocket sensors today.
After Herschel's experiment became known, Johann Wilhelm
Ritter, the physicist among the German romantics, took a mirror- image step. Ritter posed the very methodical question: if the solar spectrum is brightest in the middle but warmest at its end, then why should cold light not also exist beyond the other end of the visible spectrum? To answer his question, Ritter clearly needed, as he wrote in his 1801 book Bemerkungen zu Herschels neueren Untersuchun- gen iiber das Licht (Remarks on Herschel's Recent Experiments on Light), a chemical "reagent that has its strongest effect beyond the violet in the same way that our thermometer has its strongest effect beyond the red" (Ritter, 1986, p. 119). Thus it was that Newton's solar spectrum and the light sensitivity discovered by Schulze and further researched by the chemist Scheele came together in a single transparent experiment. Ritter was able to show that when a beam of sunlight is split using a prism, the silver chloride is blackened the
most and the deepest by those parts of the spectrum that our eyes can no longer perceive as light. Ritter thus discovered ultraviolet light,
123
? ? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
which provides light without heat - an analog to Herschel's infrared light, which provides heat without light.
As the everyday concept of light expanded symmetrically towards its two invisible edges, however, Newton's particle theory also col- lapsed again. The wave theory posited by Huygens, and still only supported by Euler and Kant in the eighteenth century, was revived in 1802 by Thomas Young, who added the new point that extremely long light waves are infrared and extremely short waves are ultravio- let. This concept of waves or frequencies, which Euler had also Intro- duced in modern music theory, in contrast to Pythagoras, allowed researchers like Fresnel or Faraday to study light interference and its moin'-type pattern around 1830, which would be Important for fundamental film effects.
It is important to explain that such theories were scandalous in an epoch when Germany's prince among poets was working on his theory of colors in total opposition to Newton and all of the natural sciences based on his work. For Goethe, light was an urphenomenon of nature, and Mother Nature could not be reduced to individual parts or waves - this would amount to sadistic incest - but rather always had to be described or worshipped only phenomenally. According to his theory of colors, each of the different colors emerged as a more or less equal mixture of both primary conditions, light and darkness. In other words, colors were dialectical effects of the polarity between God and Mephisto, Goethe the poet and Goethe the civil servant. The prince among poets would never have tolerated the notion that light - like Ritter's ultraviolet - could be at its maximum where natural human organs - like Goethe's beloved eyes - in principle no longer suffice. The romantic physicist Ritter was never able to recognize this death in his discovery. Ritter's essay about ultraviolet concluded with the dramatic formula that it would soon be possible to trace all of the polarities of nature - electricity, magnetism, and heat - back to a single identical principle and to find this principle embodied in light, for "light is the source of any strength that creates life and activity; [light] is the seed that produces everything good on Earth" (Ritter, 1986, p. 127). '
In deed and in truth, Ritter's ultraviolet led to the discovery of X-rays barely a century later, which then showed the protagonist of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain what it means to be already able to see one's own death while one is still alive, namely in X-ray photographs of a tubercular lung. Worse still than Thomas Mann's media consumer panic, however, were an irony of media history and an effect of theory. The irony consisted in the fact that not
124
? OPTICAL MEDIA
only did the fictional Hans Castorp die of tuberculosls, but also the poor romantic physicist Rittel; who discovered ultraviolet. The effect of the theory of invisible light, on the other hand, was the total elimination of the ancient visibility postulate. When the great Viennese physicist Lndwig Boltzmann (whose entropy formula is mathematically identical to Shannon's later information formula) wanted to prove that there is no thought without a correspond- mg material, namely bram-physiological apparatus, he suggested for future research that our thoughts should sImply be projected onto an X-ray screen (Boltzmann, 1979).
Just as Boltzmann's opponents m physics, like Ernst Mach, still had the upper hand durmg his hfetime and his own atomism only tri- umphed posthumously after he shot himself, Goethe's theory of colors also dominated over German optics during his lifetime. Romanticism meant - according to the thesis of these lectures - transferring all of the optical real into the imaginary world of the readers' souls, where it naturally could not be stored.
3. 1. 2. 1 Niepce and Daguerre
This lecture will therefore cut to another new scene - this time imperial or Napoleonic - as we step onto French soil. This requires, thongh, that - quite in the manner of Napoleon - we remain on German soil for a moment longer in order to carry off art treasures and technologies and to destroy the Holy Roman Empire.
As we know, early modern empires were based on printing, which in turn was based on paper for books and older parchment for imperial or royal documents. At the end of the eighteenth century, however, not only did the state experience a great revolution, but paper also experienced a revolution. Following the model of animal hide parchment, which was in principle finite, paper had for centu- ries been created in finite large sheets, which then had to be folded, cut, printed on, and bound together in books. Folios, quartos, and similar old book names all originated from such discrete formats. From 1799 onwards, on the other hand, there existed paper machines that produced endlessly long ribbons, like idealized toilet paper, and since the invention of the high-speed printing press in 1811 there was also a printing technique that corresponded to this new format or unformat: rotary printing. Gutenberg flat relief plates no longer printed letters on an equally flat and limited paper sheet, but rather an endlessly turning print cylinder revolved over an endlessly long paper cylinder, which is unrolled underneath it. To the film scholar in us,
125
? '"
. ,. ",:11
i:' I:,I
'. .
OPTICAL MEDIA
this technical innovation naturally evokes the image of rolls of film, and it reminds us how Orson Welles immortalized the rotary press in his film about a not very fictional newspaper mogul named Charles Foster Kane. In the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the rotary press first ensured that old European empires gradually became democratic states with unlimited paper supplies and newspapers that published an unlimited variety of opinions. Of course, the first rotary presses, in London in 1811, stood in newspaper printing works, and they started modern mass journalism. Heinrich Bosse called it "writing in the age of its technical reproducibility" (Bosse, 1981), a type of writing incidentally, that according to Bosse's proof, also led to the new legal construction of an endless copyright.
But now what had already been demonstrated for the Gutenberg era repeated itself: each historically defined print medium needs a corresponding optical medium. Gutenberg's printed books called for woodcuts and copperplate engravings. The rotary press needed some- thing that was called an illustrated newspaper in the middle of the nineteenth century; today it is simply called an illustrated. To answer this need, before it was finally met by photography, a certain Aloys Senefelder invented lithography in 1796.
With respect to the technical principle of litbography, which first made newspaper illustrations possible in mass editions, it suffices to say here that in contrast to gravure printing with copperplate engrav- . ing and relief printing with woodcuts it is planographic: as with photography there is only a single plane, which is soaked partly with fat and partly with water and then pressed. Because water and fat normally do not mix, Senefelder was already able to distinguish dark and bright places in the image very well. In 1827, his successors even achieved what eighteenth-century copperplate engravers were only able to realize with tremendous effort: hassle-free four-color print- ing, which enabled reproductions of artworks - or kitschy oil paint- ings, to be more precise - to be brought for the first time into every middle-class living room. Walter Benjamin's work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility found its material basis in lithography.
Theoreticians were not the only ones to profit from Senefelder, but also Napoleonic counts. In Munich in 1812, Count Philibert de Lasteyrie-Dusaillant, a son-in-law of the famous General Lafay- ette, studied lithography under the inventor himself. The unfortunate Russian campaign drove him to France, and it was from there that he first succeeded in importing a lithographic machine to Paris under the Bourbon Restoration (just as King Ludwig XI once brought the Gutenberg printing press to his emerging nation-state).
126
? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
And now we have really managed to enter the realm of media studies itself, for the technique of photography was developed around this lithographic machine through the teamwork of two men: Niepce and Daguerre.
Herewith two brief introductions: Joseph Niepce was born near Chalon-sur-Saone. He was originally supposed to become a priest, but as a result of the French Revolution he pursued a carrier as an officer instead. The victors of the Counter-Reformation became com- batants in the national wars. On a whim, Niepce accordingly adopted the very unchristian name Nicephore or "victory bearer" (Jay, 1981, p. 11). One of Niepce's brothers also built an internal combustion engine to power a boat - a motor, incidentally, that despite the patents granted by Napoleon was suspected of being yet another dream for the old phantasm of a perpetuum mobile. You can see from this that the Niepce brothers were already chasing desperately after the dream that Edison first realized: the invention of invention itself. If you would like to know more, go to Chalon-sur-Saone. In the center of the city you will find, in addition to good wine, a museum of photography dedicated to Niepce. There you will also see the construction plan of a pyreolophore or internal combustion engine, which as a precursor to all of our cars and tanks was supposed to have made it possible for the first time ever to put a submarine in the Saone.
Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre, whose war-like name I have already emphasized, was not related to generals, like Niepce, but rather to civil servants. Daguerre himself, on the other hand, began as a painter, and he displayed a particular talent for perspective and lighting. For the sake of the imaginary in painting he changed over to that hybrid mixture of arts and media that was introduced in the nineteenth century. Daguerre first painted so-called panoramas, giant paintings that surrounded their spectators with perspective on all sides of the horizon. In 1822, he personally developed the diorama in Paris. As the name already suggests, this was a panorama that was partly reflective and partly transparent and thus combined tra- ditional painting with a lanterna magica effect. So long as Daguerre's diorama was presented to a paying audience with reflected light, for example, it showed a peaceful daytime view of Vesuvius, but when light shone through the image, then a night-time view of the same volcano appeared suddenly from the back of the canvas - with erup- tions, fire, lightning, and multicolored illuminated clouds. Daguerre thus modernized painting according to that apparent movement that Alberti began with his perspectival day and night views of nature,
127
? ? ? ? ? ,,;':::
',0, ,1'111
'",
"" "" C" '111 ,.
""
OPTICAL MEDIA
and that Schriipfer or Robertson had further developed with the lanterna magica. And finally, because the battle between Enlighten- ment and superstition was still raging during Daguerre's lifetime, the minor miracle occurred that a church of all things bought one of Daguerre's dioramas for its own illusionistic purposes (Eder, 1978, p. 211). Daguerre was therefore predestined from the start, much earlier than Niepce, to implement the phenomenon called photo- graphic world view.
After these brief introductions, we now move on to the collabora- tive teamwork of these two founders. In the beginning, it was Niepce alone who (with more success than his brother, the perpetuum mobile constructor) was simply looking for a method of perpetuating images of nature - with the express goal of automating the production of lithographs, whose existence he had first heard of in 1813. Niepce's heliography, or the art of sun writing, was supposed to serve the same function for the multimedia system of rotary press and lithography as Walgenstein's self-printing of nature served during the Gutenberg era. He furnished the sun with the ability to etch images of illumi- nated objects, which were themselves typically already images, onto a metal plate without the operation or interposition of a painter's hand. These metal plates could then profitably replace Senefelder's slates. In a series of experiments, which really tested all of the light' sensitive materials known at that time, Niepce discovered that the most suitable chemical was asphalt, a substance that in the meantime has successfully covered half of the nation's ground. But even with asphalt, it took hours or days until the copperplate of a Renaissance cardinal was recorded and its black-and-white values were also devel- oped and fixed in Niepce's camera obscura. It was therefore purely a technology for reproducing images, and new recordings of so-called nature, of chance itself, were practically out of the question simply because sunlight aud shadows do not always stand as still as they once did in the Old Testament (Eder, 1978, p. 223).
In place of precisely this deficit came Daguerre - through the intermediary of a Parisian camera obscura dealer, by the way. As a painter and illusion artist, what was important to him was not primarily eternal storage and reproduction, but rather, as with his diorama, the recording of fleeting events or time processes. Through a formal legal contract, Niepce transferred all of his secret technical knowledge to Daguerre, who for his part brought nothing further to the contract than the joy of experimentation and patience, with which he survived Niepce's death in 1833 and was celebrated as the sole inventor of the typically named daguerreotype.
128
I
? OPTICAL MEDIA
Indeed, daguerreotypy in 1839 possessed only the slightest simi- larities to Niepce's original project. According to expert advice, it was an illusion to hope for any model for lithography from it, simply because tlie delicate pliotographs would be "destroyed past redemption" if "subjected to the pressure of a roller" (Eder, 1978, p. 237l. On the other hand, there were two immense advantages that compensated for this lack of robustness and reproducibility. First, Daguerre no longer employed symbolically coded models like copper- plate engravings, in whIch all of the real or the noise then fell on the part of imperfect heliography. Instead, he began with real conditions, which naturally changed with the sunlight, and he therefore had to make substantial improvements to the recording speed: in "midday climate," the great physicist and expert Arago estimated that in the climate of midday two to three minutes would be sufficient to make daguerreotypes of nature. The fundamental trend of modern media technologies to replace static yalues with dynamic values and to replace steadfastness with speed had, after Claude Chappe's optical telegraphy, now also caught up with optical image storage. Accord- ing to Daguerre's contemporaries, his process was "60 to 80 times" faster than Niepce's (Eder, 1978, p. 228).
Even if it appears quite old by today's standards, which are mea- sured in micro- and nanoseconds, Daguerre reportedly accomplished this sensation through two accidental discoveries. The first accident occurred one day during an experiment when a silver spoon lay on an iodized silver plate. When the sun shone on it, an image of the spoon appeared on the plate, whereupon Daguerre naturally said farewell to Niepce's asphalt. The second accident occurred when:
[aJ number of plates he had previously experimented upon in the
camera obscura had been put aside in an old cupboard and had remained there for weeks without being further noticed. But one day, on removing one of the plates, Daguerre to his intense astonishment found on it an image of the most complete distinctness, the smallest details being depicted with perfect fidelity. He had no idea how the picture had come, but he felt sure there must be something in the cupboard which had produced it. The cupboard contained all sorts of things: tools and apparatus, chemical reagents, and among the other things a basin filled with metallic mercury. Daguerre now removed one thing after the other from the cupboard, with the exception of the mercury, and still he regularly obtained pictures if the plates which had previously been submitted to the action of images in the camera obscura were allowed to remain for several hours in the cupboard. For a long time the mercury escaped his notice, and it almost appeared
129
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
to him as if the old cupboard were bewitched. But at last it occurred to him that it must be the mercury to whose action the pictures were due. A drawing made with a pointed piece of wood on a clean pane of glass, remains invisible even to the most acute sight, but comes to light at once when breathed upon. The condensation of the water vapor (deposited in small drops) differs in the parts touched with the wooden point and those left untouched, in the same manner as took place in Daguerre's pictures. (Eder, 1978, p. 228)
As a research method, this mixture of accidents and the systematic elimination of accidents requires a brief comment. First, I hope it is clear how much chemistry must have historically already taken place in order that iodized silver and quicksilver could be accidentally placed in the same cupboard. After all, even the surreal accident that Lautreamont later defined as the encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table presumed the existence of three technical inventions. Once they exist, howeveJ; artificial substances or machines are able to react to one another without human inter- vention, just as today's random processes between silicon and silicon dioxide, which computers ultimately consist of, relieve people of all thinking. Second, like Ritter's discovery of ultraviolet light, the history of Daguerre's invention very clearly shows how methodically theoretically preset values were investigated after 1800. That nature could be brought to create a black-and-white image of itself was a result of sheer will and not an assumption that was already justified elsewhere. Only the preliminary decision to already presuppose this possibility ensured that even apparently bewitched cupboards no longer raised any suspicion of witchcraft or magic at all. In other words, if an accidental effect like the one that occurred in Daguerre's cupboard had taken place 200 years earlier, wbich is not entirely out of the question, the whole matter would have fallen flat again simply because no one would have captured, stored, recorded, and exploited it as a natural technology. Niepce and Daguerre thus represent the beginning of an epoch where tbe duration, the reproducibility, and practically even the success of inventions - and in the end that means historically contingent events - are guaranteed. In 1839, we are still not quite in the epoch where President Reagan could solemnly announce as the emperor of California and in the name of holy Hollywood that in the future American inventors can or must invent a surefire protective barrier to defend against all missiles that want to attack California from the evil empire; but we are also no longer far from this epoch.
130
? OpTICAL MEDIA
This new guarantee of 1l1ventability in general also corresponds to the public reception of Daguerre's invention. Up until now - namely, up until the solitary death of Niepce, the founding hero - these lectures have had to report on more tragedies and testimonials to poverty, but we are now coming to brighter times and the worship of bourgeois geniuses, even if they are only junior partners in inven- tor teams, like Daguerre. The most famous physicists and academ- ICS in France, above all Arago and the gas researcher Gay-Lussac, supported the lllventor and earned him the Cross of the LegiOn of Honor and an annual life-long pension of 6,000 francs as a "national reward" (as it is called in the specially enacted law) from the "Citizen King" Louis Philippe (Eder, 1978, pp. 232-3). Daguerre therefore died as a successful man who not only earned 400 gold francs for each of his cameras and demanded 60 to 120 gold francs for his daguerreotypes (Eder, 1978, p. 253), but who could also make money
by relinquishing his patent rights. This enabled Daguerre to afford a park for his retirement estate, which contained small lakes, water- falls, and above all (as if to prove the thesis of these lectures) the ruins of a castle and a gothic chapel (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 149). For France, on the other hand, all of Daguerre's honors took place with explicit reference to modern copyright law, which the French Revolution (under the overall control of Lahnal, the telegraphy advocate) had invented for "spiritual heroes" and especially for novelists in 1794. By panning from literature to media technology, his invention proved in retrospect to be the invention of invention itself.
The historical goals that were initially prescribed for daguerreo- typy can be gathered from tbe ceremonial speeches about Daguerre that were held in his presence. On the one hand, Arago emphasized that during Napoleon's Egyptian campaign art history and archaeol- ogy already urgently needed daguerreotypes to reproduce artworks and inscriptions without the falsifying hand of the painter. (Even the ten-volume description of Egypt that was edited on Napoleon's behalf by none other than Baron Joseph Fourier, the founder of modern wave theory, was still not a technical medium. ) On the other hand, painters could also employ daguerreotypes as cheaper and at the same time more precise replacements for their usual sketches and models. This was supposed to have far-reaching consequences for the invention of film, but it also already happened, for example, when the famous lngres made his famous painting La Source (The Spring). The painting shows a stylized Greek woman carrying a pitcher; however, the photograph lngres used as a model shows - or rather conceals - an ordinary Parisian prostitute, as they were typically used
131
? ? ? 'Ihl'
OPTICAL MEDIA
as models at that time. So much for the new competitIve relation- ship between art and media technology, painting and daguerreotype, which Arago only touched upon. To the scientist, as expected, tbe "scientific advantages" of invention were far more important (Eder, 1978, p. 237).
In this regard, the first and most dramatic point that Arago emphasized was the possibility of absolutely measuring light and its strength. With human eyes alone there were always only rela- tive estimates of the strength of light, but the daguerreotype did for photometry precisely what the Parisian standard meter did for land surveys and cartography in 1790. Lambert's photometry thus freed itself from all phenomenological or subjective appearance in order to become a technically precise form of measurement. A second point was the sensitivity of the new medium, which made light more intense compared to the eye and which made it possible to force the moon or the rings of Saturn to produce experimental effects. And finally, because their exactness surpassed all other arts, Arago also men- tioned the possibility of measuring daguerreotypes themselves with rulers and compasses to infer the length and angle ratios of the objects represented. From this emerged Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. 's great idea to destroy all artworks (for instance, using gunpowder) immedi- ately after they are photographed, and since the two world wars the even greater idea has emerged of airplane or satellite reconnaissance photographs that finally contribute to the systematic destruction of the photographed object . . .
3. 1. 2. 2 Talbot
According to the honest Arago, there are only two things in the world that balk at daguerreotypes: first, paper, on which all writing and books are based, and second, people, on which all inventions were based according to early capitalist doctrine. Daguerreotypes could therefore only be printed throngh the mediation of a lithographer or copperplate engraver, and people, who are much too restless, could only be captured with extreme difficulty. In 1839, in the land of unlimited possibilities, Professor Draper and Professor Morse simply made a person sit for half an hour in the blazing sun with white face powder and closed eyes until the first portrait photograph was taken or rather waited for (Eder, 1978, p. 271). Their studio in New York was thus the first photographic portrait studio in the world and the first technology for truly storing human faces, and I cannot avoid making special reference to Morse's involvement: Samuel Morse was
132
? OPTICAL MEDIA
the painter who in 1837 had made the electric telegraph - the all- important modern broadcast technology - ready to go into produc- tion. There are no media, but rather always only multimedia systems.
As you can imagine, however, the multimedia system between photochemical storage, on the one hand, and paper and people, on the other hand, wanted to be completed not only in the American sense, like Samuel Morse's telegraph standardizer, but also formally. Gradual changes to Daguerre's process, all of which I cannot deal with here, eventually led to instantaneous photography, which made it possible for the first time to contemplate the storage of moving images, which means film. I will only name the most important of these steps and researchers.
William Henry Fox Talbot, Daguerre's previously underestimated English competitor, produced the first photographs on paper. During his trip to Italy, this rich Englishman repeatedly attempted to capture beautiful romantic images with the camera obscura and then sketch them by hand, as was typical since the time of the Renaissance. But the successful perspectivization of nature, which had filled all of the painters since Durer with pride and contentment, was no longer satisfying after Daguerre made the physically real storable. Talbot, the failed painter, thus sought and found a technical method of pho- tographing directly onto paper soaked in iodized silver and silver nitrate. From the camera obscura he developed the camera in the modern sense of the word. The hands of lithographers, which had previously stood between technical recording and book reproduction, were thus no longer necessary. In the entire operation of new optics there were no longer any arts, but rather only media. Talhot himself, who called his calotypy or "beautiful impression" technology "the pencil of nature" as it allows nature to inscribe images of itself, actu-
ally used it - strictly according to McLuhan's law that the content of media are always other media - for magnificent volumes of beautiful images of European nature or art, but the path to illustrated maga- zines based on photographs and to all the magazines sold under the counter was already mapped out.
Another of Talbot's innovations, the introduction of negatives, was relevant in an entirely different way. Unfortunately, I do not know if the concept of positive and negative in photography was derived from the much older analog concept of mathematics or the concept of positive and negative in the theory of electricity, which was only 50 years old at that time, but this should be clarified at some point. With Daguerre's process, the recording and fixing of the image always produced a positive reproduction of the lighting conditions.
133
? ""t",
OPTICAL MEDIA
Experiments with negative reproductions failed because of their irre- versibility. Talbot resolved this problem by always photographing the negative again just as it had been produced itself in order to obtain as many positive copies as he wanted. This had two far-reaching effects, one hidden and one apparent. The secret effect was that photogra- phy was not only capable of amplifying or magnifying the light, for which Arago had already praised Daguerre, but rather since Talbot it was also capable of magnifying or reducing the size of the image when copying the negative. 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
F,,, $1111,
. .
"I<,
134
? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
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
135
? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
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
136
? OPTiCAL MEDIA
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
137
? ? ? ? "
"
OPTICAL MEDIA
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,
138
? OPTICAL MEDIA
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
139
? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
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
140
? OPTICAL MEDIA
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
141
? ? '.
OPTICAL MEDIA
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 . . . "
142
? OPTICAL MEDIA
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.