No More Learning

? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
these functions? The answer was quite simple: Lambert removed this burden from their shoulders by spoon-feeding them the calculations. Lambert, wbo was brilliant at inventing new measuring instruments, invented a ruler that would have simply appalled Euclid or Durer. In addition to the venerable linear scale, it also contained four other gradations that made all four trigonometrical functions - at least in the range from -90 to 90 degrees - available at the same time as the linear function. A painter who had obtained Lambert's ruler could cast an eye over tbe open landscape, slide the ruler over the drawing, and an image emerged in perspective entirely without a ground plan or a side elevation. As an amateur art historian, I unfortunately do not know if real or even famous painters employed Lambert's Freye Perspektive other than the Berlin artist Hummel, but hopefully its basic principle already clarifies how modern trigonometrical func- tions are capable of mathematically recreating visual appearance, which means the perspective of a seeing subject.
Lambert also employed the same trigonometrical trick in a branch of optical science that he himself invented: photometry. Before Lambert, nobody would have known how to say how bright or how dark what we see actually is. Photography, which is nothing but automatic Lambertian photometry, conversely made sure that we no longer even know about this prior lack of knowledge. If the light from a light source, whose radiated energy is hopefully constant, falls on a curved surface of the same diffuse color, as in Hoffmann's Jesuit church, then a literal appearance or reflection enters the eye, which depends not only on the brightness of the light itself, but also on the angle that the direction of the light forms with the local perpendicular on the surface. 1= k 'f cos (aJ (Watt, 1989, p. 48).
Both examples, free perspective and Lambert's cosine law (which, incidentally, he himself still wrote up as sine law), were only sup- posed to show how Euler's and Lambert's new trigonometry made it possible to calculate a subjective appearance. All that remained, therefore, was to build this mathematics of the subject into an entire philosophy. Lambert did precisely that in his Neues Organon (New Organon), which was published the year he traveled to Berlin and already revealed the formulation of this new question in its sub- title: Gedanken iiber die Erforschung and Bezeichnung des Wahren und dessen Unterscheidung vom Irrtum und Schein (Thoughts on the Investigation and Designation of Truth and its Distinction from Error and Appearance). You know that all philosophies have always known that there is a gaping abyss between truth and error, which only they were supposed to bridge. The difference between truth
95
? ? oPTICAL MEDIA
and appearance is less venerable, but above all less clear, particu- larly when one realizes, as Lambert himself first explained, that with every perspective or diffuse reflection a visual appearance necessarily emerges. Lambert's New Organon (in contrast to Aristotle's good old one) also makes the point tbat appearance chiefly arises and is more- over chiefly researched in optics. To generalize his concept for all five senses, however, Lambert coins a new word that would go on to make philosophical careers: he establishes a doctrine of appearance in general, that is, a "phenomenology. " As you can imagine, this science is concerned with the struggle between the Enlightenment and super- stition or, in Lambert's words, "with the means of avoiding illusions and penetrating appearances in order to get to the truth" (Lambert, 1990, p. 645). For this reason, the first "examples" that Lambert uses to "explain" his program are taken from his own optics: "The color of a body depends on the light illuminating it. At night, scarlet and black can hardly be differentiated. By the light of a lamp, blue and green are practically the same. The sun affects not only the brightness of a wall, but also its color. The question is thus by which light does a body show its true color? " (Lambert, 1990, p. 674)
To begin with, therefore, phenomenology is the science that inves- tigates the objective nature of things starting with the subject and par- ticularly the subject's visual appearances, and in this respect it does away with all sensory deception or even priests. However, because Lambert deals not only with thought and recognition, but also with the description of this thought, the formulation of the question of phenomenology can also be reversed. As a brilliant mathematician, Lambert already knows that there would be no thought without signs and no calculation without symbols for numbers and operators. For this reason, his phenomenology also ends with a "sixth chapter" that does not undo appearance but rather constructs it: "In its general scope, phenomenology is a transcendental optics [. . . J as it deter- mines appearance from truth and, in turn, truth from appearance" (Lambert, 1990, p. 824). The adjective "transcendental" clearly does not convey its traditional meaning, which denotes God's place outside the world. On the contrary, it is a mathematical term that Lambert takes from his transcendent trigonometrical functions and imports into philosophy. All that is left for Kant, Lambert's younger friend and pupil, is to go back and generalize this "transcendental optics" as something that is now called transcendental philosophy. In other words, which are unfortunately seldom used by philosophers: German idealism also emerged from the history of optical media. Hegel thus bas good reason to treat what he calls the struggle of the
96
? ? ? ? ? ? ? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
Enlightenment with superstition in a book that - both out of loyalty and disloyalty with respect to Lambert - is entitled Phenomenology of the Spirit. At least the early Hegel did not want to confront his readers immediately with God, but rather to construct the absolute as the last perspectival vanishing point after the abolition of all sub- jective appearances. This is all quite wonderful, but it will not be discussed any further in this lecture because transcendental optics forfeits every mathematical ambiguity as it passes from Lambert to Kant to Hegel.
On the other hand, the final chapter of the New Organon, entitled "On the Drawing of Appearance," provides a virtual summary of everything these lectures have dealt with so far. It addresses linear perspective and painting, linear perspective and theater architecture, and finally even linear perspective and the "art of poetry" (Lambert, 1990, pp. 824-8). As if to generalize Brockes' opthalmological advice or Diderot's wart, Lambert claims that the "art of poetry" consists of the art "of painting things for us according to their appearance and evoking the same sensations through these visions that the things themselves would evoke if we saw them from the same viewpoint as the poet's, which he transfers to our thoughts, so to speak. [. . . ] [The poet] paints the aspect of the thing that he himself already entirely imagines from his assumed viewpoint, with all of the insights and desires that these impressions inspire in him and that they are sup- posed to inspire in his readers" (Lambert, 1990, p. 828).
The battle between light and darkness brought all the illumina- tion effects that were formerly available only to aristocratic powers like royal courts or religious powers like the Jesuits into the simple, quotidian night of middle-class people. Artificial lights that shone until midnight were installed everywhere. Secret societies like the Freemasons, who as I mentioned before, could only have come into being after workers' secrets were revealed through print technology, organized their rituals partly in the dark of the night and partly in the illuminated night, and in this twilight it was never possible to discern whether the secret leaders were doing this to follow the goals of the Enlightenment or the Counter-Reformation. In the eighteenth century, therefore, secret associations represented the common ground upon which Catholics, free-thinkers, Jesuits, and enlighteners were able to wage their war. They also represented the gronnd, however, upon which the optical effects of Jesuit propaganda gradually turned into commercial (to avoid using the word frauduleut) practices.
The literature of the Enlightenment thus paid for the fact that it invented a concept of what objects are worthy of being represented,
97
? ? I"
OPTICAL MEDIA
but thereby lost all strategic concept of theIr target. Con-artists who employed optical media to manufacture completely illusionary objects, but who did it before an audience they had strategically and exactly calculated, filled only one of the gaps left or rather provided by the system.
2. 3. 3 Ghost-Seers
The lanterna magica thus stopped projecting the Stations of the Cross or the sufferings of the damned in hell, as it once did for the baroque Athanasius Kircher. Instead, it became an all-purpose weapon used by adventurers like Count Cagliostro or Casanova, the seduction artist. The second and third books of Casanova's Memoirs recount how he played a magician at night in Cesena only to cheat an idiot who believed in the hidden treasures of ghosts out of 500 sequins and also naturally to seduce this fool's daughter. Casanova succeeded at this second project quite easily, as usual, but when he attempted to act like a magician a storm interfered. Its lightning frightened the magician himself far more than his artworks frightened the deceived
,
Ii' spectators . . .
Even more dramatic than Casanova's unique experiment is the entire life of a con-artist whose surname already proclaimed his true intentions: the man was simply named Schriipfer. 4 Allow me to cite Schriipfer's swindle directly from Zglinicki's amusing Der Weg des Films, because in this story every word counts:
Schropfer owned a coffee house on the Klostergasse in Leipzig, which enjoyed a certain popularity, especially because there was an excellent punch there. The owner of the establishment understood masterfully how to surround his guests with the halo of a great magician! He discretely made it known that he was "in the possession of the true secrets of the Freemasons. " Many sought this true secret at that time, for they were convinced that unlimited power would then be bestowed on them. There were also such doubters and seekers among the regular guests of the coffee house on the Klostergasse in Leipzig, some of whom were distinguished and held high offices. People of this sort made quite an impression on Schropfer. He approached them care- fully to question them and make them bend to his wishes. He never resorted to empty speech, however, and instead produced "facts. " These "facts" consisted in so-called "necromantic" (today we would say spiritualist) sittings, which distinguished him especially through the
4The German word Schropfer refers to someone who rips off other people. 98
? ? ? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
use of magic lantern effects and sophisticated theatrical make~up. Even those who possessed the most level-headed and critical natures were taken in. The stage for these myserious performances was the billiard room of the guest house of the new "Grosskophta. " Schr6pfer had it built especially for this purpose. All of the spectators first received a large dose of punch. This not only increased his profits, but also his guests' psychological willingness to see miracles. After the punch had fogged their brains enough, Schrop? er moved to the billiard room with his guests and began the performance. To ensure that meddlesome and distrustful spectators would not see through his game, Schropfer made various preparations and established strict rules of behavior. No one was permitted to stir from his place, and only a small lamp burned III the dark room, whose flickering light intensified the gloomy atmosphere. Incense, a skull, and other mystical utensils completed the "magician's" furnishings. Then the conjuration began: accompanied by dreadful rumbling, a preloaded ghost appeared constantly flut- tering back and forth above a kind of altar. It became brighter and then darker again. Of course it was a typical lanterna magica image projected backwards against the rising smoke. Electrified machines ensured that the spectators received invisible and mysterious electric shocks at the high point of the manifestations, assistants imitated otherworldly voices, and much else. In the beginning, Schropfer's bogus machinations were limited to the area around Leipzig, but soon he expanded his area of operations and undertook trips to Berlin, Frankfurt am Main and Dresden. Thanks to his skillful scheming and excellent relationships he soon succeeded in gathering the most prestigious and affluent circles around him. Schr6pfer eagerly began to advertise something new: he wanted to found his own masonic lodge, and he actually received money at once from all sides. Sponsors and friends trustingly granted him enormous credit. In return, Schr6pfer promised them - naming is destiny - high annuities from a fortune in the millions, which was allegedly deposited in a bank in Frankfurt. The magician was able to stave off his patient believers for a long time with all sorts of excuses. Finally - on the evening of October 7, 1774 - he promised to show all of his friends something from his fortune. Spirits were high in the Klostergasse. Everyone showed up, even the serious and wealthy gentlemen with the impressive titles. The punch was better than ever before. People jabbered on about "true wisdom" and "the eternal light. " Schropfer seemed to shine with the brilliance of his knowledge and fame - like a Pied Piper of human souls. He appeared to feel particularly well, and he was more amusing, energetic, spirited, and humorous than ever before. He behaved - as it was later recorded in the report - as if he wanted to go to a ball. It was not until midnight that he began to lose some of his spiritedness. He briefy withdrew and wrote a few letters. In the early morning hours he invited
99
? ? I? "
! ,"
:1"
OPTICAL MEDIA
his guests to go with him to Rosental Park, where he would show them "a wonderful apparition. " Still at dawn, Schropfer went ahead of all the others. He asked his friends to wait a little, and they noticed how he continued along the way alone without looking around. He turned around the corner and was concealed by trees and bushes. His steps became silent, and then there was nothing more to be heard. The unnatural calm weighed over the park like a black cloth; the men looked at themselves, became restless - then there was a sound like the lash of a whip, which broke the silence. Schropfer was found dead lying on the ground in the forest. A bullet in the mouth had ended his life. (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 67)
Compare this ending sometime with the ending of Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus . . . Schriipfer's lovely story reqnires no interpretation, but only a few remarks and some added emphasis.
First, it makes clear what I have already said about the difference between the oral but technical traditions of medieval masons and the just as oral but occult traditions of eighteenth-century Freemasons. The letterpress, the camera obscura, and the lanterna magica automa- tized knowledge, and the drawback is that this results merely in asser- tions about knowledge whose only goal is to obscure the underlying technology, like a lanterna magica, using all means of intoxication.
Second, the story makes clear how the formerly aristocratic or religious night lights became bourgeois: coffee houses, which did not arise until 1683 (after the relief of the Turkish siege on Vienna and the subsequent capture of Turkish coffee supplies, which to Prince Eugene of Savoy's unexpected delight were incidentally mixed with hashish), profited from this new nocturnal brightness.
Third, the story makes clear how various drugs, from coffee to punch to the lanterna magica (not to mention hashish), all acted in combination to bathe such nights in a spiritualistic twilight. These drugs actually only needed to be used one after the other in literature to produce romantic literature, such as E. T. A. Hoffmann's The Sera- pion Brethren with its punch-drinking ritual or even his Nachtstiicke (Night Pieces), which already incorporate the night into their title.
Fourth (and the most important for us), Schriipfer demonstrates that lanterna magica tecbniques made a leap forward in the eighteenth century: in the twilight of tile artificial night it became possible for the first time to breathe technical life into projected spirits and ghosts. Even if this life was not yet created by the mechanism of film, but rather only the flickering of a curtain of smoke on which the lanterna magica projected its virtual images, Schriipfer's arrangemeut of magic lanterns and smoking pans shows very clearly how the desire for film
100
? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
technology was historically generated in the confusion of Enlighten- ment and superstition, inspiration and deception.
What Edison and the Lumieres accomplished a century after Cagliosto and Schrapfer therefore fulfilled neither some timeless need nor some primal dream of humankind, which according to Zglinicki has supposedly been around from time immemorial; rather, it was a technical and thereby definitive answer to wishes that had been historically produced.
To provide evidence of this relay race from Illusionists to engineers, there were actual magicians around 1800 who employed their lanterna magica for money and illusions, exactly like Schrapfer, but who at the same time also worked on scientific improvements of optical media technology. I will only mention one of these magicians: the Belgian Etienne Gaspard Robertson, who became known in the history of film for producing ghost projections that were more elegant or lifelike than Schrapfer's. Robertson was able to accomplish this by placing his lanterna magica on a wagon with large, lightweight and noiseless wheels, which could move around the room unnoticed like future film cameras. To magnify the illusion even more, Robertson particularly liked to appear in old cloisters, as if he wanted to recall the origins of the lanterna magica in the Counter-Reformation, and he filled the exhibition hall with skulls, bones, and memorial slabs, as if he already wanted to make an expressionistic silent film or orchestrate one of the mechanized ghost trains that appear at fairs (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 70). What film histories do not mention, however, is that in a com- pletely different environment - namely, before the French Academy - this same Robertson also made scientific history on March 2,1802. Instead of using electricity to dispense shocks from imaginary ghosts to superstitious spectators, like Schrapfer, or being frightened of the
natural electricity of lightning, like Casanova, Robertson electrified two simple carbon rods using a voltaic battery, which had just been invented. He then gradually pushed the carbon rods closer together and thus triggered a spark between them, which blinded all of the stunned spectators for several seconds until the carbon burned and the light was gone. The carbon arc lamp - the first artificial light source that could compete with sunlight or lightning and that conse- quently became essential for photography and film - was invented.
2. 3. 3. 1 Schiller
After this digression about Robertson as a bridge between the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries or illusionism and science, we return
101
? i''''
::::1 i::::
;,'"
11",
I," ""'"
OPTICAL MEDIA
back to the problem of historically awakened wishes in general. The thesis was that in the battle between the Enlightenment and supersti- tion, moving images were presented for the first time on a massive scale and thus became desiderata on a massive scale. Yet the more that magicians strove to fulfill the demand for moving images, the greater the strategic counter-wish to expose these images as mere illusions became. As the cases of Cagliosto, Casanova, and Schropfer all sadly verify, this Enlightenment almost always succeeded, and in the cold early morning light one more suicide victim lay in the parks of Leipzig. That is why - and now comes the second thesis - the unfulfilled wish for moving images prodnced another medium, which could at least satisfy it in the realm of the imaginary for a period of time before the invention of film: romantic literature. Under this term I also include, in contrast to many Germanists, the so-called German or Weimar classic period.
When this is taken for granted, it is easy to prove the second thesis. Take, for example, the first German ghost novel of all, Schiller's uncompleted The Ghost-Seer, which was published in several thrilling instalments in the Thalia, Schiller's own newspaper, between 1787 and 1789. The hero of the novel is a German Protes- tant prince, who is only separated from the throne by a few senior relatives who are still alive. According to the arch-positivistic proof offered by a Germanist in 1903, this prince may actually have been a prince of Wiirttemberg. It can also be proved that he believed in spiritualism or the practice of seeing ghosts, and after the death of Duke Carl Eugen, Schiller's own pedagogue or despot, he had well- founded prospects for the line of succession for a time. While this hero stops in Venice on the Cavaliers' tour, which was an absolute requisite for members of the nobility at that time, one of his bother- some relatives dies in a mysterious and unnatural way. The prince hears rumors in Venice that a group of mysterious people, including a so-called Armenian, are interested in eliminating these bothersome relatives and thus helping the prince himself achieve the princely line of succession. The first part of the novel, however, mostly deals with a ghost conjuration, which a nameless Sicilian is holding for the prince and his entourage in the hinterland of Venice on the beautiful Brenta.
We found in the middle of the room a large black circle, drawn with
charcoal, the space within which was capable of containing us all very
easily. The planks of the chamber floor next to the wall were taken
up, all round the room, so that we stood, as it were, upon an island.
102
? ? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
An altar, covered with black cloth, was placed in the center upon a
carpet of red satin. A Chaldee Bible was laid open, together with a
skull; and a silver crucifix was fastened upon the altar. Instead of candles some spirits of wine were burning in a silver vessel. A thick smoke of frankincense darkened the room, and almost extinguished the lights. The Sorcerer was undressed like ourselves, but bare-footed; about his bare neck he wore an amulet, suspended by a chain of human hair; round his middle was a white apron, marked with cabalistic characters and symbolical figures. He desired us to join hands, and to observe profound silence; above all, he ordered us not to ask the apparition any question. He desired the Englishman and myself, whom he seemed to mistrust the most, constantly to hold two naked swords crossways, an inch above his head, as long as the conjuration should last. We formed -a half moon round him; the Russian officer placed himself close to the English lord, and was the nearest to the altar. The sorcerer stood upon the satin carpet with his face turned to the east. He sprinkled holy water in the direction of the four cardinal points of the compass, and bowed three times before the Bible. The formula of the conjuration, of which we did not understand a word, lasted for the space of seven or eight minutes; at the end of which he made a sign to those who stood close behind to seize him firmly by the hair. Amid the most violent convulsions he called the deceased three times by his name, and the third time he stretched forth his hand towards the crucifix. On a sudden we all felt, at the same instant, a stroke as of a flash of lightning, so powerful that it obliged us to quit each other's hands; a terrible thunder shook the house; the locks jarred; the doors creaked; the cover of the silver box fell down, and extinguished the light; and on the opposite wall, over the chimney-piece, appeared a human figure, in a bloody shirt, with the paleness of death on its countenance. "Who calls me? " said a hollow, hardly intelligible voice.
(Schiller, 1904-5, II, pp. 248-9)
It later comes to light that the figure rudely chasing away the phan- tasmagorical figure of the spirit conjured by the Sicilian is none other than the Armenian.
He has the Sicilian arrested by the Venetian police and forces him in jail to reveal to the prince all the technical tricks involved in producing magic. The readers of the novel then learn, along with the prince, that the ghost of the deceased was projected onto an artificial curtain of smoke using a lanterna magica, and the flash of lightning, which was felt by everyone present, was triggered by a hidden source of electrical energy - presumably a Leyden jar, as voltaic batteries did not yet exist. For those of you attending these lectures, however, this systematic enlightenment is hardly necessary:
103
? ? ? ? ? I'"''
OPTICAL MEDIA
you will have already recognized the simtlarities between the events organized by tbe Sicilian and those organized by Schropfer, and in the fictional Venice you will also have recognized the historical-empirical Leipzig coffee house.
I begin the new year, the last one of this millennium, with the wish that it has begun well for all of you and that it will also continue to go well. Naturally, tbat does not mean that all of the good resolutions you would like to make must also be fulfilled. What will be fulfilled first is only my good resolution to begin the new year by continuing to the second major part of these lectures, whIch deals witb optical media technologies. In today's lecture, the tales from the history of art and literature, witb which I have sought to entertam you up until now, come to an abrupt end.
I have already emphasized that Schiller's novel was published in instalments, which were designed to produce more suspense for the reader. This is the reason why a magical Armenian sud- denly emerged from the circle of ghost conjurers and put a stop to the Sicilian's deceitful game by whipping up a three-dimensional ghost instead of a two-dimensional one. As if to allegorize Hegel's battle between the Enlightenment and superstition, therefore, the
1,1,
I:,? " Armenian hovers between the power of disillusionment and the
1,1"
i,? ? "
power of creating even more remarkable illusions. On the one hand, by handing the Sicilian over to the Venetian police and then system- atically interrogating him in prison, the Armenian provides the prince with a technically pure enlighteument that is above all the tricks that marked the conjuring of ghosts. In the second part of the novel, on the other hand, this apparent enlightenment proves to be a stratagem
",I" under whose protection the Armenian is able to go from exposing first-degree magic to producing second-degree magic without arous- ing any suspicions. It even turns out that the Sicilian was only one of the minions employed by the Armenian himself, and his intentionally transparent deception was supposed to set the stage for the actual deception. The novel is not about ghostly apparitions for their own sake, out of pure curiosity so to speak; rather, it is about a German and thus an enlightened and absolutist prince who is made to believe once again in apparitions. The perfect example of this optical belief is called Catholicism in the novel, and more specifically the Jesuit Order. Only a decade after most Central European states, includ- ing even the Vatican itself, suppressed the Jesuit Order, everything revolves around the machinations of an order that seeks to regain its power over German princedoms by either murdering Protestant heirs to the throne or converting them to the only true church. The early
104
? ? ? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
modern rule cuius reglO, eius religioSwas valid, at least pro forma, until the time immediately preceding Napoleon's dismantling of the old empire. All of the illusionary techniques that Schiller borrowed from his close knowledge of Schriipfer were accordingly transferred from the German swindler to the secret Catholic organization, and the theory of the Counter-Reformation presented here receives a literary support that can also be supplemented with a philosophical one without any difficulty. Kant's Critique of Judgment furnishes proof that for human powers of imagination (and actually without paradox) the most sublime thing is the imageless God - in the sense of Mosaic law - and conversely, every illustratlon of religion is already a governmental abuse of power that can only support the Counter-Reformation:
[W]here the senses see nothing more before them, and the unmistak- able and indelible idea of morality remains, it would be rather neces- sary to moderate the impetus of an unbounded imagination, to prevent it from rising to enthusiasm, than through fear of the powerlessness of these ideas to seek aid for them in images and childish ritual. Thus governments have willingly allowed religion to be abundantly pro- vided with the latter accompaniments, and seeking thereby to relieve their subjects of trouble, they have also sought to deprive them of the faculty of extending their spiritual powers beyond the limits that are arbitrarily assigned to them and by means of which they can be tbe more easily treated as mere passive beings. (Kant, 1951, p. 115)
In Schiller's novel fragment, it is precisely this Counter-Reformation stratagem that triumphs: on the last published page the prince has just attended his first Catholic mass. To work such wonders of con- version, however, it was not enough to pull the wool over the eyes of enlightened aristocrats with lanterna magica gadgets like those of Schriipfer or the Sicilian. Quite apart from a few tricks with telescopes, the Armenian had to supply the prince above all with a woman, with whom a romantic like the prince could not help falling in love. This woman, a so-called Greek woman who naturally spoke German and was of the most noble German descent, tbus appeared to her lover for the first time in disguise and devoutly Catholic in one of Venice's famous baroque churches surrounded by the holy paintings and ceiling frescoes of the Counter-Reformation. It is like
5 A Latin phrase meaning "Whose realm, his religion," which refers to the compromise by which princes were allowed to determine the religion of their territories.
I
105
? ? 1"
. . ''''
! , ? ? ,o,
. , . . ,,'
OPTICAL MEDIA
a stage production of love at first sight, on which romantic love by definition is based, and at first glance it appears to be a novelistic6 relapse from Schriipfer to Tintoretto, from the lanterna magica to the traditional panel. But far from it!
When the prince iustructs his servants and escorts to try to track down the Greek woman, who disappeared again immediately after going to church, the medium that instilled this irresistible romantic love in the prince is finally mentioned. As we are all painfully aware in 1999, there are of course media technologies without love, but there is no love without media technologies. In the case of Schiller's princely ghost-seer, this eroticizing medium is by no means painting, but rather literature. The only reason why it was impossible for his escorts to track down the Greek woman in Venice is that the prince could not describe her at all due to his passion for writing literature. To cite Schiller's words:
[U]nluckily, the description the Prince gave of her [the Greek woman]
was not such as to make her recognizable by a third party. The pas-
sionate interest with which he had regarded her had hindered him from
observing her minutely; for all the minor details, which other people would not have failed to notice, had escaped his observation; from his description, one would have sooner expected to find her prototype in the works of Ariosto or Tasso than on a Venetian island. (Schiller, 1904-5, II, p. 335)
I will come back later to the problem of wanted posters, passport controls, and forensics, which was theoretically as well as practically insoluble before the invention of photography. For the moment, however, it will suffice to ask why the prince could not see or describe the Greek woman he loved. The answer is in the text: he did not perceive the image of this woman at all, but rather he read it in the most famous verse romances by Tasso or Ariosto. His love is the kind of love found in romantic novels, and the Armenian's strategic art lay in replacing the transparent optical illusions of the lanterna magica with the opaque illusions of romantic literature. The explicit villain in the novel thus employs precisely the same medium as the novel's author. And because Schiller does not leave any doubt that his novel is one of the countless enlightened broadsheets against crypto- Catholic and above all Jesuit machinations, this parallel between the
6Here, Kittler employs the term romantechnisch (literally "novel-technical"), which is a play on the word romantisch (romantic).
106
? ? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
novel's villain and the novel's author implies that romantic literature itself proposes to take the place of the techniques of illusion of the Counter-Reformation in the great image war. Schiller's ghost-seeing prince consequently proves that the claim Lessing put forward only as an imperative or objective - that readers were supposed to be more conscious of the author's ideas than the words written down and read - had in the meantime created "real" readers. I could discuss here the new pedagogical techniques used in reading and writing instruction around 1800, which as a historical novelty helped even small children learn to read silently. As for the goal of this training, it is sufficient to mention Hegel's famous dictum that only silent reading could serve as the pure foundation for the interiorization of every subject, and this interiorization would then give rise to pictures of the read material. If there should still be any doubt as to whether Schiller's fictional prince serves as a model or role model for all actual readers, it disappears when reading the sentence with which Schiller signalled to the readers of his newspaper that the novel would be temporarily ending, which also unfortunately turned out to be the final end of the novel fragment. Schiller wrote:
To the reader who hoped to see ghosts here, I assure you that some are
yet to corne; but you yourself see that they would not be deployed for
such an unbelieving person as the Prince still is at that time. (Schiller,
1904-5, II, p. 426)
"Here" in this passage clearly meant: here in this newspaper, here in my novel, here on these printed pages, of which hundreds or thousands of identical copies could be manufactured ever since Gutenberg's invention of the printing press. It is a fantastic claim that literature, as far as I see it, had never made either previously in old European times or later under technical conditions. In the classi- cal-romantic epoch, however, this claim was self-evident for writers as well as for readers. Only a few years after Schiller's novel frag- ment, Leipzig scholar Johann Adam Bergk's book entitled Die Kunst, Bucher zu lesen (The Art of Reading Books) was also published in Jena. In its fight against religious superstition, this book was just as resolute as The Ghost-Seer, but it did make one exception: namely, if spirits can appear despite all religious skepticism, then they are only to be found in intellectually stimulating books (Bergk, 1799).
Such comments are not historical plays on words that simply swing back and forth between spirit in the sense of meaning and spirit in the sense of ghost. Rather, they describe a style of fictional
107
? ? "n"" ,,,. ,,
. ",. '"
il,,""
OPTICAL MEDIA
text that is also of the utmost importance, especially for film and television studies. To put it plainly: in contrast to certain colleagues in media studies, who first wrote about French novels before discov- ering French cinema and thus only see the task before them today as publishing one book after another about the theory and practice of literary adaptations - in contrast to such cheap modernizations of the philological craft, it is important to understand which historical forms of literature created the conditions that enabled their adapta- tion in the first place. Without such a concept, it remains inexplicable why certain novels by Alexandre Dumas, like The Three Musketeers, have been adapted for film hundreds of times, while old European literature, from Ovid's Metamorphoses to weighty baroque tornes, were simple non-starters for film. Even when the Odyssey is adapted in Hollywood, it is only adapted the way a nineteenth-century novel- ist would have retold it.
In her book, The Haunted Screen, Lotte Eisner precisely and cor- rectly pointed out how early feature films returned to the themes and techniques of romantic literature (Eisner, 1973, p. 40), but she offered no explanations for this.
If I guess correctly, on the other hand, the difference between filmability and unfilmability, romantic and pre-romantic texts, lies entirely in the media image war that romantic literature won for a time against opponents like the church, which gradually surrendered. The winner in the battle between the Enlightenment and superstition, as in all of history, was the return of the same. In other words, the production of books, otherwise known as the Enlightenment, itself became an image technology.
It is even possible to go one step further and conclude from the visually hallucinatory ability that literature acquired around 1800 that a historically changed mode of perception had entered everyday life. As we know, after a preliminary shock Europeans and North Ameri- cans learned very quickly and easily how to decode film sequences. They realized that film edits did not represent breaks in the narra- tive and that close-ups did not represent heads severed from bodies. Other cultures, however, reportedly had great difficulties in following the syntax of living images (before World War II, that is, when our media companies began to colonize all perception worldwide). For this reason, it seems reasonable to assume that the ability to see image sequences followed from the historically acquired ability to follow not letter sequences as such, but rather letter sequences as imaginary image sequences. With lessons in silent reading, Europeans and North Americans would also potentially become subservient to cinema.
108
? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
SchIller's ghost-seeing prince is obviously not enough to support such a bold thesis. Although he is a novel reader, we know nothing about his actual reading techniques, but rather only about his ideas of women, which sound as if they could only have come from Tasso or Ariosto. To conclude this ride through the history of literature and to provide a transition to chemically pure media technology, therefore, we will now consider Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann and romanticism in the narrowest sense of the word.
2. 3. 3. 2 Hoffmann
Hoffmann's Gothic novel The Devil's Elixirs was published during the same period as the old monastery churches were being filled with ghost projections thanks to Etienne Gaspard Robertson and his silent mobile lanterna magica. The setting for the novel are the same old monastery churches, and it is about the same elixirs or drugs, namely a common visual hallucinosis, which will simply prove to be the correlate of a new silent reading technique. What remained only an empty promise with Schiller - ghosts would still appear to readers, while the author just decided to stop his novel - is taken literally or technically by Hoffmann. Not only do his fictional characters have repeated visions, but the entire novel also functions as an optical vision for all readers. The foreword by the so-called editor, which is de facto naturally that of the novelist Hoffmann, reads from begin- ning to end as follows:
Dearly would I take you, gentle reader, beneath those dark plane-trees
where I first read the strange story of Brother Medardus. You would sit with me on the same stone bench half-hidden in fragrant bushes and bright flowers, and would gaze in deep yearning at the blue moun- tains whose mysterious forms tower up behind the sunlit valley which stretches out before us,
Then you would turn and see scarcely 20 paces behind us a Gothic building, its porch richly ornamented with statues. Through the dark branches of the plane-trees, paintings of the saints - the new frescoes in all their glory on the long wall - look straight at you with bright, living eyes. The sun glows on the mountain tops, the evening breeze rises, everywhere there is life and movement; strange voices whisper through the rustling trees and shrubs, swelling like the sound of chant and organ as they reach liS from afar; solemn figures in broadly-folded robes walk silently through the embowered garden, their pious gaze fixed on the heavens: have the figures of the saints come to life and descended from their lofty cornices? The air throbs with the mystic
109
? 1'". "" I'"
"P''''
"""
>"",,,
,,,,''''
OPTICAL MEDIA
thrill of the wonderful legends which the paintings portray, and will- ingly you believe that everything is really happening before your eyes. It is in such surroundings that you would read the story of Medardus, and you might come to consider the monk's strange visions to be more than just the caprice of an inflamed imagination.
Since, gentle reader, you have now seen the monks, their monastery,
and paintings of the saints, I need hardly add that it is the glorious garden of the Capuchin monastery in B. to which I have brought you. Once when I was staying at the monastery for a few days, the vener- able prior showed me Brother Medardus' posthumous papers, which were preserved in the library as a curio. Only with difficulty did I overcome his objections to letting me see them; in fact, he considered
that they should have been burned.
And so, gentle reader, it is not without fear that you may share the prior's opinion, that I place in your hands the book that has been fashioned from those papers. But if you decide to accompany Medar- dus through gloomy cloisters and cells, through the lurid episodes of his passage through the world, and to bear the horror, the fear, the madness, the ludicrous perversity of his life as if you were his faithful companion - then, maybe, you will derive SOme pleasure from those glimpses of a camera obscura which have been vouchsafed to you. It may even be that, as you look more closely, what seemed formless will become clear and precise; you will corne to recognize the hidden seed which, born of a secret union, grows into a luxuriant plant and spreads forth in a thousand tendrils, until a single blossom, swelling to maturity, absorbs all the life-sap and kills the seed itself.
After I had with great diligence read through the papers of Medardus
the Capuchin - which was extremely difficult because of his minute
and barely legible monastic handwriting - I came to feel that what we
call simply dream and imagination might represent the secret thread that runs through our lives and links its varied facets; and that the man who thinks that, because he has perceived this, he has acquired the power to break the thread and challenge that mysterious force which rules us, is to be given up as lost.
Perhaps your experience, gentle reader, will be the same as mine. For the profoundest of reasons I sincerely hope that it may be so. (Hoffmann, 1963, pp. 1-2)
I have cited this section in full to show how rigorously and systemati- cally a romantic novel turns all questions about book technology into qnestions about image technology. Hoffmann, who neither only edited nor copied The Devil's Elixirs out of old books, bnt who rather first saw these stories, like all of his other tales, as colorful visions before his eyes (as described in his tale The Sandman) - this Hoffmann actually pretends to take the text from an old manuscript, whose
110
? ? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
unreadability refers back to the monastic practice of copying books prior to Gutenberg's invention. Hoffmann's readers, on the other hand, are not supposed to be bothered at all with the problem of decoding letters; the preface does not present them with that monkish manuscript, but rather with the landscape in which Hoffman read the manuscript for the first time. According to a lovely comment hy Freud, "letters of the alphabet [. . . Jdo not occur in nature" (Freud, 1953-74, IV, p. 278); readers, whom Hoffmann can de facto naturally only lead under a dark plane-tree with his letters, therefore do not notice that they are reading. The training of silent and unconscious readers around 1800 won the first victory. The second and strategically crucial victory immediately follows: the landscape into which Hoffmann leads or seduces his readers is none other than the monastery landscape where the story itself will begin and also end. The readers who are transported to this landscape through the power of imagination therefore see the same church paintings and holy pictures that the protagonist himself also saw. And when these images "descend from their high ledge [. . . J to become alive," the readers are in exactly the same drugged or hal- lucinatory condition as the novel's protagonist: they also have "special visions" of a painted saint, who at the same time becomes the sale and incestuous love object of all of the novel's characters.
An optical ecstasy that Hoffmann only needs to acknowledge and award a good mark for: "Since, gentle reader, you have now seen the monks, their monastery, and paintings of the saints, I need hardly add that it is the glorious garden of the Capuchin monastery in B. to which I have brought you. " In the context of these lec- tures, however, it is important to note the following: the fact that the narrative inventory of a romantic novel is exhaustively enumer- ated with "holy pictures, monasteries, and monks" emphasizes like nothing else that it is precisely these powers which allow this novel to become part of the image war. The prior of the monastery where the plot of the novel takes place and from which its autobiographi- cal manuscript also comes wanted to "burn the papers. " Hoffmann, on the other hand - only a decade after the great plundering of all monastic libraries in the Reichsdeputationshauptschluss (decision of the imperial deputation) on Fehrnary 25, 1803, which transformed monastic knowledge into university knowledge and at the same time supplied the university library in Munich with its famous collection of manuscripts - ignores all prohibitions, which are obsolete because they are religious, and uses the self-same papers to create firstly his copyrighted novel and secondly his occupational sideline, which is protected by civil service law. The result is that the individual novel
111
? ? ? i'''''''' ,,,,,
,,""'" ",,,,,,
",""-'
;1,,'-"'"
OPTICAL MEDIA
reader does not actually buy the "book formed from those papers" at all; rather, the reader acquires - and I quote - "the manifold images of the camera obscura that are revealed to you. "
I can only say to that, like the mathematician, quod erat demon- strandum. It is simply written that German romanticism itself inher- ited the successful legacy of all Renaissance camera obscuras and all baroque lanterna magicas. This triumph came at a heavy price, though - namely, the fact that it halted media research m Germany for almost half a century because the historically awakened desire for images already appeared to be fulfilled in the imaginary world of the readers' souls - but I will discuss this later. When, to channel Novalis, "a visible inner world according to the words" of any author unfolds to the "right readers" who are trained in the new elementary school literacy techniques, or when, to channel Hegel, the collected history of western thought is reduced to a "gallery of images" after having rnn the ganntlet of Hegelian description, literature has arrived at the historic end of its monopoly on writing and it has caught up with all of the privileges of the camera obscura and the lanterna magica. Around 1820, the only remaining alternatives were either to perfect or technologize this magic. And technologize meant, as we will discnss in the next session, to remove the one fnndamental deficit that the literary and thns imaginary camera obscura practically lived on. So that readers would continue buying romantic novels, it had to be absolutely impossible to store what Hoffmann called "inner faces" anywhere other than on paper, and they could therefore only be bronght to life and pictured by the perfect literate reader and his inner world. The monopoly of writing was over from the moment that moving images could be transferred onto paper without any literary description or any help from a painter's hand (even if this hand was only tracing sketches made by a camera obscura). This
break occurred with the invention of photography through Niepce
and Daguerre, whose surname already contains the word for "war. "
Post tenebras lux, after darkness comes light, as Niepce's son named one of his polemics. But before we have a look at this light, which will incidentally bring forth its own entirely new types of darkness, infrared and ultraviolet, I would still like to make a few remarks concerning the film history of this romantic reading technique.
2. 3. 4 Romantic Poetry
It appears once more as if Virilio is the only one who recognized the relationship between romantic silent reading and film viewing. It
112
? TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINE ARTS
would never have occurred to any of the Lutheran housefathers, who had to read suitable chapters out of the New Testament to their con- gregations every Sunday, to hallucinate the text like a projection from a lanterna magica. It was the silent and solitary reader who first carried out reading as a perspective on the visual information provided in the text (Virilio, 1989, pp. 36-8). In contrast to the hundreds of specta- tors in the peep show theater, however, this reader was absolutely alone. The reader's perspective could not be disputed by any fellow theater patrons occupying other positions in the audItorium, and for this and only this reason it could be completely beheved, which means the illusion could be. As a French thinker, Virilio chooses the
example of a newspaper reader in the Parisian metro to demonstrate that nobody likes it when others read over his shoulder. As a former Germanist, I should rather choose the classic example from Goethe's Elective Affinities, where this rule as well as its exception was for- mulated for the first time in 1809: Goethe's solitary reader Eduard made an exception to this rule, namely, when the person reading over his shoulder was Ottilie, who was at the same time object of a no less imaginary love.
It should not be too difficult to recognize, with Virilio, that the indisputable and imaginary perspective of solitary reading is a histori- cal study of people's ability to perceive feature films and, to go a small step further, the exception to its rule of exclusivity is at the same time something like a preliminary historical study of the film star. The task that still lies before me is to eventually incorporate the pin-up girl into his concept, which requires a look past Hoffmann's foreword to the text of the novel itself. While reading alone in the monastery garden, the foreword states, holy pictures rise up from their ledges in the inner eye of the reader. It does not give too much away to say that the plot of Hoffmann's novel also talks about nothing else. The monk Medardus, around whose subjective perspective everything in The Devil's Elixirs revolves, in principle only falls in love with women who resemble a painting of Saint Rosalia installed in the monastery church. The historical basis of this confusion between heaven and earth is once more the Counter-Reformation and more specifically a painter who, as an ancestor of the novel's protagonist, took the baroque commission to create holy pictures that would
arouse the sensuality of church visitors so literally that he chose the greatest whore in the world (also known as Venus) as the model for his Saint Rosalia. And even though the church expresses its thanks for this heinous deed by placing a curse on the painter's entire gender, it still does not prevent his holy-whore picture from continuing
113
? . ,. ,. ""
,. )"""
OPTICAL MEDIA
to be exhibited: apparently, even old European powers needed theu pin-up girls.
Unfortunately, however, Medardus, the descendant of the painter and the novel's protagonist, does not reach the obvious conclusion that his entire lust for the flesh is an artefact of historical power. Rather, as a prototype of all romantic readers - and the women among you have surely already registered that Hoffmann's foreword is only addressed to men - the hero wants to make the holy picture of Rosalia congruent with a female co-reader standlllg behind his shoulder. It matters little that this beloved turns out to be his own blood relative. It is more important that Medardus, as the young woman's father confessor and religious instructor, pulls out all the stops to impose a readable underlying erotic meaning on the words of the Christian faith:
[Aurelia's] presence, her nearness to me, even the touch of her dress set my heart aflame; the blood surged into the secret recesses of my mind, and I spoke of the holy mysteries of religion in vivid images whose ulte- rior meaning was the sensual craving of an ardent, insatiable love. The burning power of my words should pierce Aurelia's heart like shafts of lightning, and she would seek in vain to protect herself. Unbeknown to her the images which I had conjured up would grow in her mind, taking on a deeper meaning and filling her heart with intimations of unknown rapture, until at last, distracted with passionate yearning, she threw herself into my arms. (Hoffmann, 1963, p. 71)
In other words, while the novel works as a camera obscura, according to the foreword, the protagonist acts or seduces like a lanterna magica. The reproduction of images thus turns into image production. And this projection of erotic images into a woman's soul succeeds. Aurelia becomes the monk's bride. He is not actually able to seduce his bride in conversation simply because in the moment of embrace a chaste image of her double, Saint Rosalia, appears as a warning before his inner eye. But when Aurelia becomes a romantic solitary reader, there is almost nothing more standing between the plot of the novel and coitus, or between the worship of holy pictures and incest:
For several days I did not see her [Aurelia], as she was staying with the Princess in a country residence not far distant. I could not stand her absence any longer and rushed to the place.