Deep Time of the Media ELECTRONIC CULTURE: HISTORY, THEORY, AND PRACTICE Ars Electronica: Facing the Future: A Survey of Two Decades edited by Timothy Druckrey net_condition: art and global media edited by Peter Weibel and Timothy Druckrey Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture by Geert Lovink Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film edited by Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel Stelarc: The Monograph edited by Marquard Smith Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means by Siegfried Zielinski Deep Time of the Media Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means Siegfried Zielinski translated by Gloria Custance The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © 2006 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Originally published as Archäologie der Medien: Zur Tiefenzeit des technischen Hörens und Sehens, © Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 2002 The publication of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any elec tronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. I have made every effort to provide proper credits and trace the copyright holders of images and texts included in this work, but if I have inadvertently overlooked any, I would be happy to make the necessary adjustments at the first opportunity.—The author MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail special_sales@mitpress.mit.edu or write to Special Sales Department, The MIT Press, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, MA 02142. This book was set in Bell Gothic and Garamond 3 by Graphic Composition, Inc., Athens, Georgia. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Zielinski, Siegfried. [Archäologie der Medien. English] Deep time of the media : toward an archaeology of hearing and seeing by technical means / Siegfried Zielinski ; translated by Gloria Custance. p. cm.—(Electronic culture—history, theory, practice) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-262-24049-1 (alk. paper) 1. Mass media—Historiography. 2. Mass media—Philosophy. I. Title. II. Series. P91.Z53813 302.23'0722—dc22 2005047856 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 foreword by timothy druckrey vii acknowledgments xiii 1 introduction: the idea of a deep time of the media 1 2 fortuitous finds instead of searching in vain: methodological borrowings and affinities for an anarchaeology of seeing and hearing by technical means 13 3 attraction and repulsion: empedocles 39 4 magic and experiment: giovan battista della porta 57 5 light and shadow—consonance and dissonance: athanasius kircher 101 6 electrification, tele-writing, seeing close up: johann wilhelm ritter, joseph chudy, and jan evangelista purkyne ̆ 159 7 the discovery of a pit, a camera obscura of iniquity: cesare lombroso 205 8 the economy of time: aleksej kapitanovich gastev 227 9 conclusions: including a proposal for the cartography of media anarchaeology 255 notes 281 bibliography 322 credits 363 index 365 Contents Figure I.i “The problem: At times, when a fact is thrown into the smoothly flowing river of sci entific development that completely contradicts earlier conceptions, one of the strangest trans formations takes place. What is slightly new is either dissolved and assimilated or, if it is too deviant in the present situation, it sinks to the bottom as a foreign body where the deposits of time cover it—it either has an effect much later or never at all. That which is significantly new, how ever, rapidly has a conspicuous influence on the entire state [of things]. A violent perturbation of ideas about and over this commences. . . .” (Text: Ostwald 1896, p. 1f; illustration: Tyndall, 1883, frontispiece) The sense of present which we live each day, as a conflict between the representatives of ideas having different systematic ages and all competing for possession of the future, can be grafted upon the most inexpressive archaeological record. Every shred mutely testi fies to the presence of the same conflicts. Each material remnant is like the reminder of the lost causes whose only record is the suc cessful outcome among simultaneous sequences. —george kubler, THE SHAPE OF TIME An anemic and evolutionary model has come to dominate many studies in the so-called media. Trapped in progressive trajectories, their evidence so often re trieves a technological past already incorporated into the staging of the con temporary as the mere outcome of history. These awkward histories have reinforced teleologies that simplify historical research and attempt to expound an evolutionary model unhinged from much more than vague (or eccentric) readings of either the available canon or its most obvious examples. Anecdotal, reflexive, idiosyncratic, synthetic, the equilibrium supported by lazy linearity has comfortably subsumed the media by cataloguing its forms, its apparatuses, its predictability, its necessity. Ingrained in this model is a flawed notion of sur vivability of the fittest, the slow assimilation of the most efficient mutation, the perfectibility of the unadapted, and perhaps, a reactionary avant-gardism. In this model there is less failure than dopey momentum and fewer ruptures than can be easily accounted for. As a historiography it provides an orthodox Foreword itinerary uncluttered by speculation or dissent, unfettered by difference, dis connected from the archive, averse to heterogeneity. This laissez-faire historiography dominates American writing concerned with the histories of media and has fueled both oversimplification and impreci sion. History is, after all, not merely the accumulation of fact, but an active revisioning, a necessary corrective discourse, and fundamentally an act of in terrogation—not just of the facts, but of the displaced, the forgotten, the disregarded. For some in the media, “archaeology” has come to supplant basic history, re placing it with a form of material retrieval—as if the preservation of material ity was tantamount to preserving history itself. This has led to an archaeology (really more a mere cataloging) of the apparatus itself, rather than an investiga tion of the scenes in which the apparatus found its way into the spheres of research and experience. Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge is defiant in distinguishing archaeology from other forms of historiography. Archaeology is “the system atic description of a discourse-object,” (139) it “tries to establish the system of transformations that constitute change.” (173), it “does not have a unifying, but a diversifying effect,” (160) it “is not supposed to carry any suggestion of anticipation.” (206) It is the analysis of silent births, or distant correspondences, of permanences that per sist . . . of slow formations that profit from the innumerable blind complicities. . . . Genesis, continuity, totalization: these are the themes of the history of ideas. But archaeological description is precisely such an abandonment of the history of ideas, a systematic rejection of its postulates and procedures . . . (Foucault, 138) As such, archaeology is not a substitute for “the history of ideas,” not a proxy for iconography, not an alternative for eccentric discovery or collecting, not a surrogate for rigorous research. With this in mind, it seems imperative to de lineate an approach to “media archaeology” that, on the one hand, avoids idio syncrasies or subjectivities, and, on the other, doesn’t lull itself into isolating media history as a specialized discipline insulated from its discursive histori cal role. There’s little doubt that the multithreaded developments of media have nu merous unresolved histories and that an enormous task of retrieval and concep tualization has yet to be achieved. How a media archaeology can constitute itself viii Foreword against self-legitimation or self-reflexivity is crucial if it is to circumvent the reinvention of unifying, progressive, cyclical, or “anticipatory” history—even as it is challenged to constitute these very vague histories as an antidote to the gaping lapses in traditional historiography. Indeed it is this very problem that afflicts media archaeology. The mere rediscovery of the forgotten, the establish ment of oddball paleontologies, of idiosyncratic genealogies, uncertain line ages, the excavation of antique technologies or images, the account of erratic technical developments, are, in themselves, insufficient to the building of a coherent discursive methodology. In this sense the notion of resurrecting dead media could prove farcical, fu tile, or more hopefully, deeply fertile. A broad accounting of the evolution of the apparatus, of the media image, of the history of the media effect, of excavating the embedded intellectual history, and so on, is surely the precursor of what will be an invaluable reconfiguration of a history largely focused on the device and its illusory images. Similarly, the rediscovery of uncommon or singular appara tuses, novel and fantastic as they might be, is neither decisive nor fully adequate to formulate an inclusive approach that distinguishes it from connoisseurship, or worse, antiquarianism. Merely reconstituting or retrofitting “old” media into “new” contexts could, in this sense, only emerge as techno-retro-kitsch. What is most necessary for the field of media archaeology is to both distin guish it as a nascent discipline and to set some boundaries in order to avoid its trivialization. Archaeology, as Foucault writes, “is not a return to the innermost secret of the origin,” rather it “describes discourses as practices specified in the element of the archive” (p.138 from same source.) Without evolving coherences that are neither reductive nor dogmatic, media archaeology faces numerous is sues: to evolve histories of technologies, apparatuses, effects, images, iconogra phies, and so forth, within a larger scheme of reintegration in order to expand a largely ignored aspect of conventional history. Already some useful examples of this exist, from Siegfried Giedion’s Mecha nization Takes Command or E. J. Dijksterhuis’s Mechanization of the World Picture to Friedrich Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter or Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s Railway Journey or Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the 19th Century, Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge, Laurent Mannoni’s The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema, Norman Klein’s The Vatican to Vegas: A History of Special Effects. Each tackles the apparatus (or its “effects”) as integral to the substantive changes they wrought as modernity emerged. Not under the spell of linearity, these books stand as guidebooks (among many ix Foreword others), for the establishment of diversified approaches to a media history and, more specifically, a media archaeology that stands as a decisive field if it can de velop forms that extrapolate more than missing links. Siegfried Zielinski’s Deep Time of the Media intensifies and extends these studies with a wide range of scholarship from Stephen Jay Gould’s “punctuated equilibrium” to Georges Bataille’s “general economy,” and, more deeply, into the original volumes of Athanasius Kircher, Giovan Battista della Porta, and Giuseppe Mazzolari. Instead of tracking the reverberations, Deep Time of the Media situates the effect in the midst of its own milieu. Though particular ap proaches may represent harbingers, augurs, precursors, they are purposefully rooted and serve particular goals. It is in this context that Zielinski’s Deep Time of the Media comes as a pivotal work challenging the field in a number of ways. In rebridging (perhaps demol ishing) the widening gulf between tekhne and episteme, Deep Time of the Media re fuses the mere instrumentalization of technology as meticulously as it integrates the responsibilities of knowledge. Riding through the stratifications has re vealed far more than the unearthing of new “species” of media, but is leading toward a rethinking of the bleak search for origins by imagining (exposing) intricate topologies that link movement and coincidence, failure and possibil ity, obscurity and revelation. This move through and across the “tectonic” flows suggests a sweeping remapping of the hitherto centralized nodes of learning and that traces the decentralized currents of time, space, and communication as a kind of historical formation in which routes replace nodes and in which east meets west meets north meets south. In this the epistemic centers in the Euro centric canon just don’t hold and nor does a singular rationalistic scientific logos. In its “case studies” Deep Time of the Media provides both a rigorous method ology and a reconceptualization of media studies. For Zielinski only full pri mary sources provide adequate evidence. So in tandem with a rigorous and dedicated teaching and lecturing schedule, his peripatetic research has taken him on the nomadic circuits of his subjects. Here he constructs the new cartog raphy, seizes on the crossed path, the forgotten archive. His lectures, always laden with the trade-mark overhead projector, always trace an adventure into some new facet of the journey—with an obscure archive a decisive discovery. Abandoning historical convention in favor of historical acuity, Deep Time of the Media travels into deep time and discovers not just more remains, but instead neglected constellations. Within these are towering figures of scientific and philosophical investigation—della Porta, Kircher, Ritter, Hutton, Lombroso, x Foreword among many others. These bold personalities demand our attention not because they outdid their times, but rather because they embodied them. With them come the shifting objects of study—less and less material light and shadow, electricity and conduction, sound and transmission, magic and illusion, vision and stimuli—in short, conditional phenomena. Fleeting and contingent, the phenomenal world was lured into visibility by instruments whose ingenuity often eclipsed their discoveries. At least we had been convinced that this is so. Zielinski proves us wrong. Through their instruments the sphere of representation exploded. Its fragments resonate in every future media appa ratus. Through their instruments the interface emerged, through their instru ments a fragile imaginary was brought to light, through their instruments time, sound, reflex, could be seen, through their instruments the world was no longer a paltry given, it was a moving target, a dynamic presence, it was, to put it bluntly, alive. Ever since, our machines have aspired to the “real” and, luckily, have fallen short of their phony virtual utopias. This surely explains why the last chapter of Deep Time focuses on the “artistic, scientific, technical, and magical challenges” that persist in contemporary media praxis. Zielinski’s tenacious role as a histo rian has never restrained his enormous commitment to colleagues and students. His unyielding charge is to relentlessly cultivate “dramaturgies of difference,” to “intervene” into the omnivorous systems from the periphery, to refuse cen tralization, to seize the imagination back from its grim and superfluous engi neers, and to construct an art worthy of its “deep time.” As Deleuze writes: It is not enough to disturb the sensory-motor connections. It is necessary to combine the optical-sound image with the enormous forces that are not those of simply intellectual consciousness, nor of the social one, but of a profound, vital intuition. —Timothy Druckrey xi Foreword My grateful thanks are due to Gloria Custance for her untiring and exceptional work in translating this book. She also translated all quotations from the Ger man, unless noted otherwise. Nils Röller read the greater part of the original manuscript and I thank him for the many fruitful discussions and constructive suggestions, including in the earlier years of our collaboration. I am indebted to Timothy Druckrey, Keith Griffiths, Dietmar Kamper, Anthony Moore, Miklós Peternàk, The Brothers Quay, and Otto E. Roessler for their generous intellectual support and encour agement, which played an essential role in the realization of the project. Werner Nekes I thank for his hospitality and the many visits to his unique archive. Wolfgang Ernst, Thomas Hensel, Angela Huemer, Christine Karralus, Fried rich Kittler, Jürgen Klauke, David Link, Alla Mitrofanova, Morgane, Peter Pancke, Hans Ulrich Reck, Elisabeth von Samsonow, Silvia Wagnermaier, and Sigrid Weigel listened patiently to my expedition reports and provided in valuable aid in the form of material, questions, commentaries, and suggestions. Nadine Minkwitz and Juan Orozco gave generously of her time for the digital processing of illustrations, and I am grateful to Heiko Diekmeier and Claudia Trekel for their skill with reproductions. For his great help with the texts in Latin, I thank Franz Fischer; for translations, Angela Huemer and Rosa Barba (Italian), Peter Frucht and Adèle Eisenstein (Hungarian), Lioudmila Voropai (Russian), and Gloria Custance (English and French), whose assistance with the German edition was, in many respects, completely indispensable. Anke Simon, Daniela Behne, Uschi Buechel, Andrea Lindner, and Birgit Trogemann were Acknowledgments tireless in their efforts to procure all the books and media I required. Patricia Nocera I thank for generously giving me access to the treasures of the Bib lioteca Nazionale di Napoli and guiding me through its labyrinth. In the Her zogin Anna Amalia library in Weimar, Katrin Lehmann provided exceptional assistance for my research. The Staatsbibliothek Berlin and the university li braries in Cologne and Salzburg were very helpful in connection with work on Dee, Fludd, Kircher, Llull, Porta, and Schott. For their help in matters of or ganization, I thank Suse Pachale and Heidrun Hertell. Many thanks to Roger Conover for preparing and overseeing this edition for MIT Press and to Lisa Reeve for her editorial support. My research and the writing of the original text were possible within such a short time period only because the Ministry of Science, North Rhine Westphalia, granted me an additional sabbatical semester. My special thanks go to Burkhard König at Rowohlt for his faith in the project, and his constant and unfailing support for my endeavors. xiv Acknowledgments Our sexuality . . . belongs to a different stage of evolution than our state of mind. —bruno schulz,“an witold gombrowicz.” in: DIE REPUBLIK DER TRÄUME In the early 1980s, the Texan science-fiction author Bruce Sterling invented the phenomenon of cyberpunk, together with the sci-fi writers William Gibson from Canada and Samuel R. Delany of New York, an ex-boxer and professor of literature. Their creation married clean high-tech and dirty rubbish, order and anarchy, eternal artificial life and decomposing matter. Techno- and necro romanticism came together to create a new Lebensgefühl. The inspired collabo ration of Ridley Scott, film director, and Douglas Trumball, designer and set decorator, translated this feeling into cinema in the brilliant Bladerunner (1982). The Matrix (1999), directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski, fulfilled a similar function at the end of the 1990s for the now computer-literate fans of cybercul ture, who by then were all linked via worldwide data networks. The horror that stalks the film Matrix is no longer an individual, amoral machine that operates locally and has taken on human form, as in Bladerunner, but, instead, is a data network that spans the entire globe and controls each and every action, emotion, and expression. When one generation of computer hardware and software began to follow the next at ever shorter intervals, Sterling initiated “The Dead Media Project.” There, he exchanged his wanderings through an imaginary everyday life in the 1 Introduction: The Idea of a Deep Time of the Media future for an energetic movement that traversed the past to arrive in the pres ent. Together with like-minded people, in 1995 he started a mailing list (at that time, still an attractive option on the Internet) to collect obsolete software. This list was soon expanded to include dead ideas or discarded artifacts and systems from the history of technical media: inventions that appeared suddenly and dis appeared just as quickly, which dead-ended and were never developed further; models that never left the drawing board; or actual products that were bought and used and subsequently vanished into thin air.1 Sterling’s project confronted burgeoning fantasies about the immortality of machines with the simple fac ticity of a continuously growing list of things that have become defunct. Ma chines can die.2 Once again, romantic notions of technology and of death were closely intertwined in “The Dead Media Project.” Media are special cases within the history of civilization. They have con tributed their share to the gigantic rubbish heaps that cover the face of our planet or to the mobile junk that zips through outer space. While the USSR was falling apart, the cameraman of Tarkovsky’s legendary Solaris, Vadim Yusov, was teaching astronauts from the MIR space station to take pictures of Earth for Andrei Ujica’s Out of the Present (1995). The 35mm camera they used is probably still orbiting up there over our heads. After the rolls of film had been shot and stunning pictures of the blue planet were in the can, the camera was simply thrown out of the escape hatch. Taking it back to Earth would have been too ex pensive, and it was not considered worthwhile to develop a special program just to destroy a few kilograms of media technology. The stories and histories that have been written on the evolution of media had the opportunity—at least theoretically—to do some recycling, in line with the rubbish theory proposed by Michael Thompson:3 they might have searched through the heaps of refuse and uncovered some shining jewels from what has been discarded or forgotten. Nothing endures in the culture of technology; however, we do have the ability to influence how long ideas and concepts retain their radiance and luminescence. Up to now, media historians have neglected to do anything of the kind, mainly on ideological grounds, and this has also had methodological repercussions. In the extensive literature on the genealogies of telematics (from antiquity’s metal speaking-tube to the telephone; from Aeneas’s water telegraph to the Integrated Service Data Network [ISDN]), or cin ema archaeology (from the cave paintings of Lascaux to the immersive IMAX), or the history of computers (from Wilhelm Schickard’s mechanical calculating apparatus to the universal Turing machine), one thing above all others is refined 2 Chapter 1 and expanded: the idea of inexorable, quasi-natural, technical progress. It is re lated to other basic assumptions, such as the history of political hegemony de veloping from the strictly hierarchical to strictly democratic organization of systems, the rationale of economic expediency, the absolute necessity for simple technical artifacts to develop into complex technological systems, or the con tinual perfecting of the illusionizing potential of media. In essence, such ge nealogies are comforting fables about a bright future, where everything that ever existed is subjugated to the notion of technology as a power to “banish fear” and a “universal driving force.”4 Michelangelo’s ceiling paintings in the Sistine Chapel in Rome do not an ticipate that which today goes by the name of virtual reality and is produced on outrageously expensive computer systems, like the CAVE. What would this ge nius, master of two-dimensional illusions using painted images, colors, and geometry, have found of interest in such an idea, weak and already backward a couple of years after its “invention”? Having said that, there is something akin to a topicality of what has passed. However, if we are to understand history as being present not only when it demands to be accepted as a responsibility and a heavy burden, but also when there is value in allowing it to develop as a spe cial attraction, we will need a different perspective from that which is only able to seek the old in the new. In the latter perspective, history is the promise of con tinuity and a celebration of the continual march of progress in the name of humankind. Everything has always been around, only in a less elaborate form; one needs only to look. Past centuries were there only to polish and perfect the great archaic ideas. This view is primitive pedagogy that is boring and saps the energy to work for the changes that are so desperately needed. Now, if we de liberately alter the emphasis, turn it around, and experiment, the result is worthwhile: do not seek the old in the new, but find something new in the old. If we are lucky and find it, we shall have to say goodbye to much that is famil iar in a variety of respects. In this book, I shall attempt to describe this approach in the form of an (an)archaeological expedition or quest. For Isaac Newton, the great world-mechanic, and his contemporaries, what we call “our” planet was still thought to be not much more than six thousand years old. God’s representatives here below, men like the Anglican prelate James Ussher, had “proved” that this was so in the mid-seventeenth century, and that was that. As more and more evidence of immense qualitative geological changes piled up, their only resort was the trick of compressing the time periods in which the deposits had accreted. In the seventeenth century, Athanasius Kircher 3 Introduction used the same theoretical crutch in his description of the subterranean world. In the eighteenth century, doubts were increasingly voiced about this extremely short chronology, and by the nineteenth century, geologists were calculating in millions of years. It was only in the twentieth century that there was absolute certainty that the history of the Earth spans billions of years. Such numbers surpass our powers of imagination, just as it is almost impossible to imagine the existence of infinite parallel universes or the coexistence of different space-times. At the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, the idea that the Earth was far older than previously supposed became a fashionable topic in the academies and bourgeois salons, just as electrical impulses in the bodies of organisms or between heterogeneous materials already were. Time structures on the large scale began to arouse interest, as well as their peculiarities on the small scale. In addition, the solidity of territories began to lose its dependability and comfortable familiarity as national boundaries were redrawn at ever decreasing intervals and traditional hierarchies were questioned. In Germany, Abraham Gottlob Werner, a mining engineer and lecturer at the famous Bergakademie in Freiburg, pioneered studies on the systematic investigation of minerals and rocks and their origins in the oceans that once covered the Earth. However, he neither could nor wanted to write a history of the Earth. More courageous than the “Neptunist” Werner was the “Vulcanist” James Hutton.5 Son of a wealthy Scottish merchant, Hutton supplemented his already ample income by produc ing useful chemical compounds. His wealth provided him with a comfortable lifestyle in Edinburgh and the means to travel, conduct research, and undertake geological fieldwork for his own intellectual pleasure, entirely independent of any institutions. What is more, he had the time to write up and illustrate his observations. Hutton’s Theory of the Earth of 1778, one thousand pages long, and the two-volume edition published in 1795 no longer explained the history of the Earth in terms of the old theological dogma. Hutton asserted that Earth’s history could be explained exactly and scientifically from the actual state of the “natural bodies” at a given moment in time, which became known as the doc trine of uniformitarianism. Further, Hutton did not describe the Earth’s evolu tion as a linear and irreversible process but as a dynamic cycle of erosion, deposition, consolidation, and uplifting before erosion starts the cycle anew. At localities in Scotland he observed that granite was not the oldest rock, as Werner and his student Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had assumed. Underneath the granite were deep vertical strata of slate, which were much older. These conclu 4 Chapter 1 sions were presented in a powerful illustration that adorned the second edition of Hutton’s Theory of the Earth. Underneath the familiar horizontal line depict ing the Earth’s surface, the slate deposits plunge into the depths, exceeding by far the strata lying above them. John McPhee’s Basin and Range (1980), which first introduced the concept of “deep time,” displays Hutton’s illustration on the cover. This discovery must have been as stunning and important for geology as were the first depictions of the Copernican view of the solar system, which firmly dislodged the Earth from the center of the universe. Hutton’s illustration also introduces the chapter devoted to the Scotsman in Stephen Jay Gould’s Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, his important work on the his tory of the Earth and organic life.6 Gould, the Harvard geologist and zoologist who regarded himself primarily as a paleontologist, says that the idea of geo logical deep time is so foreign to us that we can understand it only as a meta phor. Imagine the age of the Earth as represented by one Old English yard, “the distance from the king’s nose to the tip of his outstretched hand. One stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history.”7 Hutton’s concept of Earth as a cyclic self-renewing machine,8 without beginning or end, is in stark con trast to the time reckoning instituted by humans. Gould takes this concept a step further when, for his field, he rejects all ideas of divine plans or visions of progress. In a specific continuation of uniformitarianism, Gould’s studies on the long chronology are marked by a contemporary concern for the ongoing loss of diversity. In Wonderful Life, which came after Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, he in troduces a new category that runs contrary to linear thinking: “excellence,” which should be measured with reference to diversification events and the spread of diversity.9 Thus, Gould adds to the idea of deep time a quantitative dimension as well as a qualitative one that addresses the density of differences and their distributions. Taken together, these ideas result in a very different picture of what has hitherto been called progress. The notion of continuous progress from lower to higher, from simple to complex, must be abandoned, to gether with all the images, metaphors, and iconography that have been—and still are—used to describe progress. Tree structures, steps and stairs, ladders, or cones with the point facing downwards (very similar to the ancient mythologi cal symbol for the female, which is a triangle with the base above and the point directed toward the Earth) are, from a paleontological point of view, misleading and should therefore be discarded.10 From this deep perspective, looking back over the time that nature has taken to evolve on Earth, even at our current level of knowledge we can recognize past events where a considerable reduction in 5 Introduction diversity occurred. Now, if we make a horizontal cut across such events when represented as a tree structure, for example, branching diversity will be far greater below the cut—that is, in the Earth’s more distant past—than above. In this paleontological perspective, humankind is no longer the hub and pivot of the world in which we live but, instead, a tiny accident that occurred in one of evolution’s side branches. Genetically, the human brain has changed little during the last ten thousand years—a mere blink in geological terms that can hardly even be measured. Humans share the same stasis in their biological de velopment with other successful species. The price that they pay for this is a rel atively short life span and a narrow range of variations in their specific biological traits. At the other end of the scale are the bacteria, with their enormous vari ety and capacity for survival. It was Gould’s own existential experience of ill ness—in 1982 he was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer and the statistical mean predicted he had only months to live—that made him deeply distrustful of any interpretation of living organisms that is based on considerations of the average. In reality, there was no mean for Gould. He took individual variations to be the only trustworthy value and punctuated equilibrium as the mode in which change takes place.11 The paradigm of technology as an organ was a crutch used in the develop ment of mechanics; similarly, the organic becoming technology is now a poor prosthesis in the age of electronics and computation. Technology is not human; in a specific sense, it is deeply inhuman. The best, fully functioning technology can be created only in opposition to the traditional image of what is human and living, seldom as its extension or expansion. All of the great inventions that form the basis of technology, such as clockwork, rotation in mechanics, fixed wings in aeronautics, or digital calculators in electronics, were developed within a relationship of tension to the relative inertia of the organic and what is pos sible for humans. The development of geological and biological evolution on the one hand and that of civilization on the other are fundamentally different. Evolution, which is counted in billions of years, progresses very slowly. The changes that have taken place within the short time span of what we call civil ization have occurred quickly by comparison and now occur at ever shorter intervals. In Gould’s view, this difference is demonstrated by two particular traits, which influence cultural development decisively. The first is topological. Humans are nomadic animals; and our migrations lead to productive mixes of different situations and traditions, which often find expression in subsequent periods of rapid development. The second trait that has influenced the develop 6 Chapter 1 ment of civilization is the culturally acquired ability to collect and store knowl edge and experience and to pass these on to others. This ability can also lead to periods where qualitative developments are extremely concentrated: these could not possibly be achieved via the mechanisms of biological evolution.12 An investigation of the deep time of media attractions must provide more than a simple analogy between the findings of research on the history of Earth and its organisms and the evolution of technical media. I use certain conceptual premises from paleontology, which are illuminating for my own specific field of inquiry—the archaeology of the media—as orientations: the history of civili zation does not follow a divine plan, nor do I accept that, under a layer of gran ite, there are no further strata of intriguing discoveries to be made. The history of the media is not the product of a predictable and necessary advance from primitive to complex apparatus. The current state of the art does not necessar ily represent the best possible state, in the sense of Gould’s excellence. Media are spaces of action for constructed attempts to connect what is separated. There have been periods of particularly intensive and necessary work on this effort, not the least in order to stop people from going crazy, among other reasons. It is in such periods that I make my cuts. If the interface of my method and the following story are positioned correctly, then the exposed surfaces of my cuts should reveal great diversity, which either has been lost because of the ge nealogical way of looking at things or was ignored by this view. Instead of look ing for obligatory trends, master media, or imperative vanishing points, one should be able to discover individual variations. Possibly, one will discover frac tures or turning points in historical master plans that provide useful ideas for navigating the labyrinth of what is currently firmly established. In the longer term, the body of individual anarchaeological studies should form a variantology of the media. The idea for this book originated in the late 1980s, while I was writing Au diovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr’actes in History for Rowohlt’s Encyclo paedia book series. Audiovisions attempted to locate the two most popular audiovisual media of the twentieth century and their parallel development within a wider context of the history of the development of technology and cul ture. My intention was to make cinema and television comprehensible as two particular media events and structures whose hegemonial power is historically limited. At the time of writing, there were already hectic signs heralding a tech nological and cultural transition centered on the digital and computers. I sought to offer a more considered and calm perspective, but by no means a 7 Introduction complacent one. This overhasty orientation on a new master medium toward which all signifying praxis would be directed for a time—until the next one is defined—demanded the delineation of an independent and constructive way of dealing with this new phenomenon as a different possibility. In my under standing, Audiovisions was a plea for the heterogeneity of the arts of image and sound and against the beginning psychopathia medialis.13 Certain attitudes, which one already encountered on a daily basis in the late 1980s, became even more pronounced during the course of the 1990s. The shifts, which had become standard practice, were judged to be a revolution, en tirely comparable in significance to the Industrial Revolution. Hailed as the beginning of the information society and new economy, where people would no longer have to earn a living by the sweat of their brow, the proclaimed revo lution stood wholly under the sign of the present, and it was assumed that the new would lose its terrors. Every last digital phenomenon and data network was celebrated as a brilliant and dramatic innovation. It was this vociferous audac ity, found not only in the daily fare served up by the media but also in theoret ical reflections, that provoked me to undertake a far-ranging quest. In the beginning, it was patchy, with considerable time lapses, and dependent upon the places where I worked. At the University of Salzburg I found a fine stock of books from an excellent Jesuit library. For the first time ever, I held in my hands original books and man uscripts by Giovan Battista della Porta, Athanasius Kircher, Caspar Schott, Christoph Scheiner, and other authors of the sixteenth and seventeenth cen turies. A key experience was when I chanced upon a copy of John Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica of 1591, which had been bound together in one volume with a treatise on alchemy dating from the thirteenth century by Roger Bacon. This discovery coincided with a workshop on John Dee and Edward Kelley, to which I had invited the British filmmaker and producer Keith Griffiths. He encour aged me to delve into the rare texts by Dee, court mathematician to Elizabeth I, to explore the Prague of Rudolf II, and to appreciate as truly exciting texts the alchemists’ writings with their strange worlds of images. Helmut Birkhan, a classical scholar from Vienna who, on his own testimony, is one of the half-dozen people in the world to have actually read the unpublished fifteenth-century Buch der Heiligen Dreifaltigkeit by the Franciscan monk Ulmannus, introduced me to the special hermeticism of alchemistic texts. He is able to interpret this strange material in the way that I “read” films by Jean-Luc Godard or Alain Robbe Grillet with my students and, moreover, with the same enthusiasm. It was from 8 Chapter 1 Birkhan that I first learned that a crucial characteristic of alchemistic writings, in contrast to the published findings of modern science, is the private nature of the elaborated treatises; for this reason, they are replete with cover-up strategies and practices to preserve their secrets. Words conceal one meaning behind others: for example, “a young boy’s urine” can also stand for what we call vine gar—one of the easier examples to decipher. The special language employed by alchemists was regarded by some adepts as “destructive to discourse.” In one of the earliest texts, Turba philosophorum, a meeting of alchemists was convened for the purpose of standardizing linguistic signs to facilitate mutual compre hension. However, “it failed utterly in its goal, for the various participants . . . Greek natural philosophers, such as Anaximenes and Pythagoras, with arabi cised and distorted forms of names . . . scarcely referred to what others had said and contented themselves with making general statements or ones couched in singular language. It did not result in norms for the language of alchemy nor must this ever come about!” Heaven forbid, then anyone could make the lapis and, as Birkhan once made unmistakably clear to his audience during a lecture, for this we lack all the prerequisites. Parallel to studying advanced media technologies, I began to develop a deep affection for several of the early dreamers and modelers. I had never encountered them in the course of my university education, and they have been left out of the discourse of media studies almost entirely. These two fields of interest were vir tually inseparable: forays into forgotten or hitherto invisible layers and events in the historical development of the media, and the fascination exuded by my professional setting, filled with Unix and Macintosh computers, PCs, networks, analogue and digital studios for producing and processing images and sound, and including attempts by artists and scientists to coax new languages from this world of machines or to teach them laughter and tears. During the 1990s, this close mesh of media theory and artistic praxis led me to define two areas that, in my view, represented a pressing challenge: ■ After a brief period of confusion and fierce competition between various systems of hardware and software, there emerged a strong trend toward stan dardization and uniformity among the competing electronic and digital tech nologies. The workings of this contradiction became abundantly clear to those involved with the new technical systems in the example of the international data networks. Telematic media were incorporated very quickly in the globalization strategies of transnational corporations and their political administrators and 9 Introduction thus became extremely dependent on existing power structures. At the other end of the scale, there were individuals, or comparatively small groups, who pro jected great hopes onto these networks as a testing ground for cultural, artistic, and political models that would give greater prominence and weight to diver sity and plurality. This goal of facilitating heterogeneity as before, or even de veloping it further with the aid of advanced media systems, was in direct contradiction to the trend toward universalization being demanded by the cen ters of technological and political power. ■ As so often before, the tension between calculation and imagination, be tween certainty and unpredictability, proved to be an inexhaustible fount of dis cussion about cultural techniques and technological culture. It is a debate where no consensus is possible, and any dogmatic opting for one side or the other can lead only to stasis. However, it is possible to explore the options in experiments that are, in turn, a source of fresh insights. Radical experiments, which aim to push the limits of what can be formalized as far as possible in the direction of the incalculable and, vice versa, to assist the forces of imagination to penetrate the world of algorithms as far as is possible, are potentially invaluable for shed ding light on a culture that is strongly influenced by media and for opening up new spaces for maneuvering. A most important arena where the two sides en gaged, both theoretically and practically, proved to be a specific area of media praxis and theory, namely, the handling and design of the interfaces between ar tifacts and systems and their users. Cutting-edge media theory and praxis be came action at the interface between media people and media machines. My quest in researching the deep time of media constellations is not a con templative retrospective nor an invitation to cultural pessimists to indulge in nostalgia. On the contrary, we shall encounter past situations where things and situations were still in a state of flux, where the options for development in vari ous directions were still wide open, where the future was conceivable as holding multifarious possibilities of technical and cultural solutions for constructing media worlds. We shall encounter people who loved to experiment and take risks. In media, we move in the realm of illusions. Dietmar Kamper, philoso pher and sociologist, used to insist in public debates that the verb illudere not only means to feign or simulate something, but also includes the sense of risk ing something, perhaps even one’s own position or convictions: I think that this is of crucial importance for engaging with media. 10 Chapter 1 If we are to learn from artists who have opted to play the risky game of seek ing to sensitize us for the other through and with advanced technology, then gradually we must begin to turn around what is familiar. When the spaces for action become ever smaller for all that is unwieldy or does not entirely fit in, that is unfamiliar and foreign, then we must attempt to confront the possible with its own impossibilities, thus rendering it more inspiring and worth experi encing. We must also seek a reversal with respect to time, which—in an era characterized by high-speed technologies and their permeation of teaching, research, and design—has arguably become the most prized commodity of all. These excursions into the deep time of the media do not make any attempt to expand the present nor do they contain any plea for slowing the pace. The goal is to uncover dynamic moments in the media-archaeological record that abound and revel in heterogeneity and, in this way, to enter into a relationship of ten sion with various present-day moments, relativize them, and render them more decisive. “Another place, another time”14—I developed an awareness of different periods that we often experience with regard to places: for example, to dis cover Kraków in Palermo, to come across Rome in New York, or to see cities like Prague, Florence, or Jena converge in Wrocl-aw. At times, I was not certain where I actually was. Phases, moments, or periods that sported particular data as labels began to overlap in their meanings and valencies. Wasn’t Petrograd’s early techno-scene in the 1910s and 1920s more relevant and faster than that of London, Detroit, or Cologne at the turn of the last century? Did the Secret Acad emy in the heart of Naples necessarily have to be a sixteenth-century founda tion, or wouldn’t it have flourished better if founded under new conditions in the future? Don’t we need more scientists with eyes as sharp as lynxes and hear ing as acute as locusts, and more artists who are prepared to run risks instead of merely moderating social progress by using aesthetic devices? 11 Introduction Satie bought seven identical velvet suits complete with matching hats that he wore uninterruptedly for seven years. —volta, ERIK SATIE On Things That Emit Their Own Light Bioluminescence is a curious phenomenon: it is the ability of certain plants and animals, independent of all sources of artificial and natural light in their vicin ity, to emit short flashes of light or to glow over a longer period of time without any increase in the organism’s temperature. For this reason, it is also known as cold luminescence. Pliny the Elder was the first to approach it analytically in the first century a.d., and it has continued to fascinate scientists and philosophers of nature ever since. Although there are many intriguing speculations, thus far biological research has not offered a fully satisfactory theoretical explanation for the phenomenon of living organisms that emit their own light. It has been established that biochemical reactions are involved, oxidation processes. In order for organisms to bioluminesce, oxygen has to react with at least two groups of molecules, one of which are luciferins. These light-producing organic substances react very fast with oxygen and release energy in the form of photons. However, this process would be destructive for the luciferins—the molecules would immediately disappear after contact with oxygen and their power to emit light would be too weak to be visible—were it not for the presence of their cat alyzing partner, luciferase. This enzyme coordinates the reaction of luciferin 2 Fortuitous Finds instead of Searching in Vain: Methodological Borrowings and Affinities for an Anarchaeology of Seeing and Hearing by Technical Means with oxygen so that a large number react at the same time and thus, in concert, produce light.1 In nature, bioluminescence has a number of different functions. Fireflies produce their soft intermittent light especially for the purpose of courtship, whereas certain species of fish use light to lure their prey. There is also the uni cellular Pyrocystis noctiluca, one of a group of microscopic marine organisms, dinoflagellates, which belong to marine plankton. The action of luciferin and luciferase can generate many light flashes in their single cells. In warm and quiet summer weather, mass propagation, or blooms, of P. noctiluca can occur. Then, all the light flashes that they produce—only at night—are so strong that the sea glows. Although the cellular mechanisms are understood, little is known about why P. noctiluca puts on light shows. The same applies to the marine fire flies, which the Japanese call umibotaru, that are found in great numbers at the coastlines of their islands. The insects are only two or three millimeters long, yet they produce a strong blue light. A favorite laboratory workhorse of marine biologists is the jellyfish Aequorea Victoria, a coelenterate, of which particularly good specimens are found in the deeper sections of the Bay of Naples at the foot of Vesuvius.2 At the end of the twentieth century, Belgian scientists working on A. victoria discovered a new substance called coelenterazine, which is a submolecule of luciferin. Geneti cally, its function is twofold. First, it acts to guard the cell against superoxides and hydrogen peroxide, so-called free radicals. These molecules are so energetic that the slightest contact is sufficient to destroy the fragile double helices of DNA and cell membranes.3 However, its role as protector against these dan gerous invaders is not enough for the enterprising coelenterazine. It uses its con siderable excess energy to produce aesthetic surplus value. In periods when their microworld is not under threat from any quarter, these submolecules of the luciferins enable the bioluminescing invertebrates in the darkness of the ocean to stage a quasi-poetic release of accumulated energy: a phenomenal economy of squanderous expenditure. Georges Bataille understood his provocative “general economy” as a critique of the productivity mania of the capitalist system that, in principle, commu nism would also perpetuate. As an alternative to this paradigm, he proposes a truly luxurious concept of economy, formulated as a metaphor in An Economy within the Framework of the Universe. In Bataille’s thinking, wealth is equated with energy—“Energy is the reason for and purpose of production”—and the issue is how surplus energy, which results from all production, is used. The pur 14 Chapter 2 pose of a poetic form of expenditure, which he sees as a possible way out of the compulsion to accumulate, he describes in a comparison with the energy of the sun: “The Sun’s rays, which we are, ultimately find nature and the meaning of the Sun again: it has to expend itself, lose itself without calculating the cost. A liv ing system either grows, or it expends itself for no reason.”4 PhysicaSacrorum The anthropologist Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert initially studied theology in Leipzig and later turned to science and theoretical and practical medicine in Jena before gaining his doctorate in medicine in 1803. His dissertation was entitled “On the Use of Galvanism to Treat Persons Born Deaf.” He set up a gen eral practice in the idyllic small town of Altenburg and, at first, flourished. When the paying patients stayed away, he turned to writing to make a living and, in a matter of weeks, produced a lengthy novel in two volumes, Die Kirche und die Götter [The Church and the Gods] (1804). A young physicist and expert on Galvanism, Johann Wilhelm Ritter, arranged for the work to be printed but pocketed Schubert’s advance fee because he needed money urgently for his own experiments.5 Schubert became the editor of the journal Altenburger medizinische Annalen but decided to return to university to qualify as a general science teacher. 1805 found him studying in Freiburg with Werner, a famous mineral ogist and geologist of the period. The year after, he went to Dresden to complete his studies. While in Jena, Schubert had attended Friedrich W. J. Schelling’s lectures, which at that time were a popular social event that provided the philosopher with a good supplementary income. Schubert was also keen to start teaching. The University of Jena invited him, in the winter term of 1807, to lec ture to the “educated upper classes” on a subject that was “of highest general in terest: on the expressions of inner mental life in specific states where the physical disposition is constrained, which are elicited by animal magnetism or mani fested without it in dreams, in premonitions of the future, in mental visionings, etc.”6 In the spring of 1808, Schubert published these lectures under the title Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft [Views from the Night Side of the Natural Sciences]. In this way, Schubert wanted to draw people’s attention to those natural phenomena that, as a rule, were excluded from close examination or analysis. However, “the Other” to which he refers is revealed in the course of his lecture texts as not so much a difference in the objects of his study (these belong to the standard repertoire of natural philosophy of the period) but rather as his 15 Fortuitous Finds instead of Searching in Vain development of a method, which characterizes the specific approach and per ception of the investigator. Citing contemporary astronomers, Schubert defines the “night side” as “that half of a planet, which, as a result of it revolving on its own axis, is turned away from the Sun and, instead of being illuminated by the Sun’s light, an infinite number of stars shine upon it.” This phosphorescent light, which Schubert wanted to distinguish from the brilliant “rose-light” of the sun,7 has the quality of “allowing us to see everything around us only in rather broad and large outlines.” This light addresses, “with the particular ter rors that attend it, above all that kindred part of our being, which exists in semi dark feelings rather than clear and calm understanding; its shimmer always has something ambivalent and indefinable about it.”8 Schubert was by no means an obscurantist or mystic, although he was often labeled as such in later years9 and, for this reason, virtually banished from the history of science. After publishing the anthropological Ahndungen einer all gemeinen Geschichte des Lebens [Presages of a General History of Life] (1806 1807), Schubert wrote introductory texts on specialist fields of research, such as Handbuch der Geognosie und Bergbaukunde [Handbook of Geology and Mining] (1813) and Handbuch zur Mineralogie [Handbook of Mineralogy] (1816), and also lectured regularly on the history of the natural sciences and geology. In essence, however, he did not accept that any hard and fast divisions existed be tween different areas of intellectual activity. For Schubert, clear judgment and scientific analysis are just as capable of leading to understanding and expression as dreaming, somnambulism, clairvoyance, or ecstatic trance. These are merely different modes among which the pursuit of an understanding of nature alter nates. He also wrote a book on the dark side of the psyche that was far ahead of its time: when Sigmund Freud’s Traumdeutung [The Interpretation of Dreams] was first published in 1900, Schubert’s Symbolik des Traums [The Symbolism of Dreams], with a section on “The Language of the Waking State,” was being reprinted for the fifth time. The book was written in 1814. “The language of dreams,”10 he was convinced, could be understood only within the context of its close relationship to mythology, poetry, and physical and mental experience of nature and natural bodies. On the relationship of sexuality, pain, and death, he writes: “This strange, close union appears to have been well understood by former ages, when they placed a phallus or its colossal symbol, the pyramid, on graves as a memento, or celebrated the secret rites of the God of Death by car rying a phallus in procession; although sacrificing to the instrument of carnal lust may have been the primitive expression of a different, deeper insight. In the 16 Chapter 2 midst of the obsequies and laments of the mysteries, there rang out the sound of . . . laughter.”11 Schubert had planned to collect his many individual studies on anthropo logical themes into an all-embracing “physica sacra,” or sacred physics,12 but he did not manage to complete it, though he lived to be eighty. Nevertheless, this man, who had studied with Herder, Schelling, and Werner and was the close friend of the physico-chemist Ritter, at least came close to realizing his project of defining anthropology as a physics of the sacred, in fragments. His strange books and essays can be read as expressions of a single endeavor to write poetry 17 Fortuitous Finds instead of Searching in Vain Figure 2.1 In astrophysics, protuberances are the masses of burning hydrogen, which flare up from the sun’s surface at a speed of ca. 6 miles/sec and reach a height of up to 30,000 miles. Seen through a telescope, at the edges of this extravagantly wasteful star dynamic forms glow against the blackness of space: slender fountains, shapes reminiscent of plants. These phenomena can be observed especially well during a total eclipse of the sun, when the moon shuts out the light from the fiery ball. W. Denker drew this sketch to record his observations of the sun’s eclipse in the sum mer of 1887. specific to nature from the perspective of the latest scientific discoveries in the era of romanticism. The French translation of his lectures on the night side of the natural sciences was published under the title Esprits des choses. In the vol ume of Novalis’s fragments entitled Blütenstaub [Pollen], the poet laments bit terly that in our ardent search for the absolute we find only things. Schubert had begun to turn around his contemporary’s complaint in a direction that does not of necessity lead to despair. Untiringly, he sought the diversity of things and sometimes found in them the absolute, hidden or expressed in a language that we have yet to learn. Although this is a journey that can be full of tricks and dif ficulties, it does enable a passionate relationship with the world rather than one that is characterized chiefly by lamentations. In the 1840 edition of his lectures, Schubert tucked away in the appendix cursory reflections on the progress he had made in his field. He compensates the reader for this disappointing brevity by adding a new preface. There he charac terizes the thirty-year-old lectures as “tents” that have become riddled with holes and are now no more than “stopovers and resting places” during the brisk hike through “the vast area that the contemplation of nature represents,” which is how he understands his own teaching and research. “The wanderer cannot have any possessions; if you own property, you are not free to wander,” said Mas simo Cacciari in his study of the philosopher of wandering, Edmond Jabès.13 And Dietmar Kamper wrote at the end of his history of the imagination, “The true location where reflection takes place is no longer the writing desk or the professorial chair but while on the move, in time. Those who embark on such travels are not able to contribute much to the state of the art and they must needs develop a precarious relationship to knowledge as property. . . . The demand that is currently raised because of the contemporary level of complexity of social de velopments, namely, that any sociological theory must be able to apply the rules it establishes to itself, cannot be met with the mobility that sitting permits.”14 Inverted Astronomy In 1637, Athanasius Kircher was given the unexpected opportunity of going on a journey that was, for the period, a long one. At the time, he had a professorial post in Rome with a heavy workload and commitments. The Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt, who was going to Malta, invited Kircher to accompany him as his father confessor. Kircher accepted immediately, knowing that these light clerical duties would leave him ample time for studies and research. Malta in terested him because of the fossils that had been found there and the opportu 18 Chapter 2 nity for speleological expeditions. The island has many deep caves, which Kircher explored for their geology. When the Landgrave no longer required his services, Kircher fulfilled a long-standing private wish and, on his way back to Rome, visited southern Italy and Sicily. In the ancient ruins of Syracuse, he checked the legend of the listening system known as “the Ear of Dionysus,” and was particularly keen to investigate the veracity of another legend. It was said that when the Roman army under Marcellus attacked Syracuse (214–212 b.c.), to defend the city, Archimedes set some of their galleys on fire with the aid of mirrors. All the foremost writers on theoretical optics, including Ibn al Haytham, Roger Bacon, and Giovan Battista della Porta, had looked into this legend and confirmed its probable truth through calculations involving various mirrors and their focal points. Then, in 1637, Descartes in his Dioptrique flatly denied that the story had any basis in reality. Descartes’s arguments were theo retical. Surprisingly, he linked them to his calculation of the sun’s size in rela tion to the distance of its rays to Earth: a hundredfold focal length in relation to the radius of a mirror would not produce more heat at the focal point than the sun’s rays would produce unaided by any reflecting mirror. Even a great num ber of mirrors would not make any difference; the temperature of the reflected sun rays would remain constant.15 Kircher did not correct Descartes’s position theoretically, but empirically and experimentally. He inspected the fortifica tions of Syracuse harbor, calculated the probable distance to the Roman galleys, and concluded that the distance was considerably less and, therefore, the focal length of the reflected sunrays would be much shorter, than commentators had previously assumed. Additionally, he experimented with different mirrors and proved that rays reflected by several mirrors and concentrated on the same point would indeed produce much more heat than one flat or parabolic mirror; more over, they were capable of igniting wood.16 Kircher’s main interest, however, centered on the volcanoes in the area: the geological triangle of Etna, Stromboli, and Vesuvius, which exerts such an over whelming influence on the whole of southern Italy and the island of Sicily. He was convinced that there were subterranean connections between the three fire-spewing mountains. During his stay in Sicily, Kircher extensively studied Mount Etna, which had been active continuously since the end of 1634. From there, he made a trip to the Aeoliae Insulae, or Lipari Islands, where he explored both Vulcano and Stromboli. He planned to climb the volcano on Stromboli but was denied access for safety reasons.17 On the way back to Rome from Messina, Kircher had planned to visit a number of Jesuit stations in Calabria before 19 Fortuitous Finds instead of Searching in Vain 20 Chapter 2 Figure 2.2 Kircher’s treatise on the legend of Archimedes of Syracuse and his burning mirrors. Bottomright:Kircher’s diagram demonstrates the transmission of writing using a parabolic mir ror. The device can be used both to destroy and to communicate; in this case it was used for de struction, but it could also have been used for prevention. (Kircher, Arsmagnalucisetumbrae, 1671, p. 764). traveling on to Naples, where he intended to study Vesuvius. However, the voy age turned out to be a nightmare experience that had a lasting impact on his thinking. Two results were his works Iter extaticum II [Ecstatic Journey], pub lished in 1657 as a geological sequel to his fictitious journey into space of 1656, and the two-volume Mundus subterraneus [Subterranean World] in 1664–1665, in which the entire second chapter of the introduction is devoted to describing this journey.18 The significance of the experience for Kircher can be gauged by the fact that this text appears again, word for word, in his autobiography.19 The journey began on March 24, 1638. The weather was unsettled but, ini tially, without particular incident. Three days into the voyage, however, heavy seas slowed progress considerably. Both Etna and Stromboli had begun to erupt, sending out massive clouds of smoke and ash, and in the north, Vesuvius had also become active. From port to port, the situation worsened. Wherever the ship put in, they were forced to leave again quickly because of violent earth tremors that sent parts of the coastline plunging into the sea, such as the cliff top village of St. Eusémia on the southwest Calabrian coast. This massive vol canic activity caused the sea’s temperature to rise sharply; in places, it seemed to boil. Kircher described his situation in highly dramatic terms: “I was con vinced that I had reached the end of my days and commended my soul to God unceasingly. Ah! In my distress, how contemptible all worldly pleasures seemed to me. Honour, high office, influential positions, learning—all these disap peared instantly at that time, like smoke or bubbles.” His prayers were heard: miraculously, the party survived the eruptions and earthquakes of March and April 1638 and eventually reached Naples. The very same evening, Kircher en gaged a guide, who needed considerable persuading and demanded a high fee, and climbed Vesuvius. He wanted to retrace the footsteps of Pliny the Elder (Secundus) and inspect the volcano at close quarters, but without sharing the same fate, for Pliny had died near there on August 24, 79 a.d., suffocated by Vesuvius’s poisonous gases. On reaching the crater, Kircher was confronted by “a terrible sight. The eerie crater was entirely lit up by fire and gave off an un bearable smell of sulphur and pitch. It seemed as though Kircher had reached the abode of the underworld, the dwelling place of evil spirits.” Nevertheless, his curiosity proved stronger than his fear. In the early hours of the next morn ing, he had himself let down on a rope to a rock ledge in the crater to examine the “underground workshop” at close quarters: “This wonderful natural phe nomenon strengthened our conviction still further that the interior of the earth 21 Fortuitous Finds instead of Searching in Vain is in a molten state. Thus, we regard all volcanoes as mere safety valves for the subterranean fire source.”20 In the foreword to Mundus subterraneus, Kircher notes with regret that there is a dearth of writing on such wonderful works of God that are hidden from the eyes of most people. It was his ambition to help remedy this state of affairs. For this reason, he had dared to take the steps necessary to research the Earth’s inte rior. In the twelve books that comprise Mundus subterraneus, Kircher undertakes a colossal tour d’horizon of what he terms the “geocosmos,” beginning with a geometrical and philosophical-theological concept of the gravitational center of the earth, which he calls “centrosophia.” In the following twenty chapters he covers the composition of the earth, provides a special treatise on water with re flections on tides, and discusses meteorology, the roots of plants, minerals, and metals. In the final book, he gives a detailed account of alchemy, which finishes with a scathing critique of the forms that the Catholic Church had anathema tized. However, the heart of the work is to be found in the fourth book of the first volume, where Kircher sets down his observations made at the volcano. In the Earth’s interior, a fire burns at the center (“ignis centralis”), from which all things come and to which all return. This fire is usually hidden from view, “something truly wondrous, which seeks to emulate the Divinity (“divinitatis aemulus”) as it were, wherein the greatest almost coincides with the smallest, which joins together all radiant things into the diversity and variety of the whole world, absorbs everything into itself and knows it and develops every thing, which is outside.”21 For Kircher, the fiery core of the earth has become the central phenomenon; it is to geology what the sun is to astronomy. The moon he assigns to water. The myriad forms of interplay between the two, the inner fire and water, give rise to everything that we call nature and life. Baron Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg was also no stranger to the world below ground: he earned his living as an administrative assistant in the Saxony salt works. As a poet, he called himself Novalis. In chapter 5 of his un finished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802), his alter ego in a twofold sense, Friedrich von Hohenzollern, who is an aristocrat and a miner, meets with a her mit in the course of his travels. At one point in their dialogue the Count says: “Our art rather requires us to familiarize ourselves closely with the earth; it is almost as though a subterranean fire drives the miner on.” The hermit replies, “You are almost inverted astrologers. Astrologers observe the heavens and their immeasurable spaces; you turn your gaze toward the ground and explore its con struction. They study the power and influence of the stars, and you examine the 22 Chapter 2 23 Fortuitous Finds instead of Searching in Vain Figure 2.3 Frontispiece of Athanasius Kircher’s Mundussubterraneus,1665. Figure 2.4 Top:Two-page illustration at the end of the second book in the preface to Kircher’s Mundussubterraneus(1665). For the engraving, a wash drawing was used of which Kircher had done most himself (Strasser 1982, p. 364). The original gives a stronger impression than this re production of the drastic impact that climbing Mount Vesuvius had on Kircher. Out of the black interior of the volcano, deep red and sulfurous yellow flames leap high into the sky. At the top, they become white, then dirty gray smoke. Bottom:A similar, not quite so expressive drawing of Mount Etna follows page 186 in Book 7. The drawing is based on Kircher’s observations in 1637. Morello (2001) includes color reproductions of this phylum of illustrations. powers of the rocks and mountains and the many and diverse actions of soil and rock strata. For astrologers the heavens are the book of the future, whereas the earth shows you monuments of the primeval world.”22 “Mittel und Meere” The writer and literary critic Édouard Glissant from Martinique believes that European intellectuals all suffer from a fundamental problem. The lands, which have been constituent for their identity, are all grouped around a single great sea that lies at the center, exuding warmth and light, promising leisure and happi ness. Since classical antiquity, all desires and movements have been directed toward this center, which has also been the driver of conquest. It is from the greater Mediterranean area that all technical inventions and all scientific, philo sophical, aesthetic, and political models have come, which continue to influence our culture through the present day.23 The compelling need to construct uni versal worldviews and theories, which have had devastating effects in our his tory, can only be understood with this in mind: one sea in the middle, one God, one ideology, one truth, which must be binding for all. The old empires, such as ancient Greece and the Imperium Romanum, and the various forms of colo nialism must be understood in the light of this central perspective. The entire gamut of social models, theories, and worldviews that seek to universalize have arisen from this notion of the center: the modern nation-state and democracy, capitalism and communism, Christendom, the notion of the world as a har monic organism or as a single gigantic mechanism. In late medieval times and the Renaissance, with courageous thinkers like Raimundus Lullus from Ma jorca, the Englishman Roger Bacon, or the later proponents of a magical con ception of nature, whose ideas ran at odds to conventional wisdom, there existed theoretically a chance of a radical new departure. However, the compulsion to standardize thought that was exerted by the Catholic Church discriminated against these men and others like them, which made it impossible to realize any alternatives. As Édouard Glissant writes, “What the West will spread around the world, what it will force upon it, are not heresies but systems of thought. . . . After thinking in systems has triumphed, the Universal—initially as Christian and later as rational—will spread and represent the special achievement of the West.”24 According to Glissant, such compulsion to establish the principle of univer salization would be unthinkable for the inhabitants of the Caribbean. They do not live on territory that is enclosed but on fragments of land separated by the 25 Fortuitous Finds instead of Searching in Vain waters of the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea. The absence of something that could unify the islands and their peoples is not felt to be a lack. On the contrary, the only unifying, or standardizing, factor they have ever experienced is an invisible trace running along the sea floor—the chains of the slave trade. The cultural and economic activities of the islanders are characterized by institut ing flexible relations between the land fragments. Attempts to impose univer salization via the language of the colonizers the islanders have countered with creolization, in which the semantics of French, for example, is fractured and subverted through introduction of the speakers’ own rhythms and rule breaking syntax. Their musical expression is song with highly disparate voices. By contrast, the European invention of polyphony is “the uniform and complete dissolution of all differences in tone and voice for these are viewed as being in adequately distinctive in themselves.”25 Rather than be defined by “identity machines,” Glissant opts for the poten tial power of a “poetry of relationships.” For Glissant, magic and poetry are in herently similar and are extensions of creolization and heresies; they are forces that work against globalization’s abolition of potent diversity: “Only heresy keeps the cry of what is special going forcefully, the accumulation of non reducible differences, and, ultimately, the obsession not to understand the un known in order to generalize it in formulas and systems.”26 A poet, playwright, novelist, and critic from Martinique, Glissant teaches in New York but lives mainly in Paris, where he attended university. The main thrust of his critique is directed toward the entirety of European thought, which has given rise to its hegemonial position in the West and Northern Hemisphere. His ideas link him with the work of all thinkers, particularly French intellectuals, who, during the last century of uniformities and terrible destruction, did not abandon the at tempt to give all that is heterologous a chance: Georges Bataille, Maurice Blan chot, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault. As an answer to the strategy of globalization, Glissant introduces the concept of mondialité, in which the players come from the periphery, the niches, and the margins of the territo ries of the world powers: “Those who are gathered here, always come from ‘over there,’ from faraway, and they have decided to bring their uncertain knowledge, which they acquired There, to Here.” By concretizing the type of knowledge that he is concerned about, Glissant takes up one of the most fruitful thoughts from Derrida’s Grammatologie [Of Grammatology]: “Fragmentary knowledge is not mandatory science. We sense things, we follow a trail.”27 The idea is enticing: to see the activity of tracking as something that defies all systematic order. However, trails are not simple phenomena. They are im 26 Chapter 2 pregnations of events and movements, and even prehistoric hunter-gatherers needed to learn much in order to decode, read, and classify the signs.28 The same applies to an even greater degree when we consider history, with its evolved and constructed civilizations, and particularly the history of the media. What can be found there, analogous to spores, broken twigs, feces, or lost fur and feathers, was produced entirely by cultural and technical means. By seeking, collecting, and sorting, the archaeologist attaches meanings; and these meanings may be entirely different from the ones the objects had originally. The paradox that arises when engaged in this work is that one is dependent upon the instruments of cultural techniques for ordering and classifying, while, at the same time, one’s goal is to respect diversity and specialness. The only resolution of this dilemma is to reject the notion that this work is ground-breaking: to renounce power, which one could easily grasp, is much more difficult than to attain a position where it is possible to wield it.29 Reality as a Mere Shadow of What Is Possible The concept of archaiologia, stories from history, comprises not only the old, the original (archaios), but also the act of governing, of ruling (archein) and its sub stantive archos (leader). Anarchos is the nomen agentis to archein, and it means “the absence of a leader,” also “the lack of restraint or discipline.”30 Discussing Fou cault’s concept of an archaeology of knowledge, Rudi Visker used the term “an archéologie” more than ten years ago to describe a method that evades the potential of identifying a “standardized object of an original experience.”31 A history that entails envisioning, listening, and the art of combining by using technical devices, which privileges a sense of their multifarious possibilities over their realities in the form of products, cannot be written with avant gardist pretensions or with a mindset of leading the way. Such a history must reserve the option to gallop off at a tangent, to be wildly enthusiastic, and, at the same time, to criticize what needs to be criticized. This method describes a pattern of searching, and delights in any gifts of true surprises. In his critique of Hitler’s brand of fascism, Bertolt Brecht frequently pointed out that order is a sign of lack, not of abundance. This idea does not apply only to the extreme sociopolitical situation under fascism. For example, the most exciting libraries are those with such abundant resources that it is impossible to organize them without employing armies of staff who would ultimately engineer the loss of this cornucopia. The London Library in St. James Square, founded in 1841 as a private club, is such a library. There, you are less likely to find the book you have long been looking for without success and more likely, in the course of 27 Fortuitous Finds instead of Searching in Vain your explorations of the labyrinthine gangways with their floors of iron grat ings, to chance upon a book that you did not even know existed and that is of far greater value than the one you were actually looking for. Of far greater value, because your find opens up other paths and vistas that you did not even entertain during your focused search. This is a possible course to take: within a clearly defined context, the unsuccessful search for something is balanced by a fortuitous find, and this discovery is acknowledged as a possibility of equal worth. One simply has to try it out. However, it must be stressed that this method has absolutely nothing to do with aimless wandering and meandering. In the first volume of his epic novel The Man without Qualities, Robert Musil wrote: To get through open doors successfully, it is necessary to respect the fact that they have solid frames. This principle, by which the old professor had always lived, is simply a req uisite of the sense of reality. However, if there is a sense of reality—and no one doubts its justification for existing—then there must also be something we might call a sense of possibility. Whoever has it does not say, for example, this or that has happened, will happen, or must happen here; instead, they invent: this or that might, could, or ought to happen in this case. If they are told that something is the way it is, they think: Well, it could just as well be otherwise. Thus, the sense of possibility can be defined as the ability to conceive of everything there might be just as well and to attach no more importance to what is than to what is not.32 In his posthumously published Notes on Philosophy, Wittgenstein—a con temporary of Musil and, like him, a trained engineer—states that “one of the most deeply rooted errors of philosophy” is that it understands possibility as a “shadow of reality.”33 For the people, ideas, concepts, and models that I en countered in the course of this anarchaeological search trajectory, this view is reversed: their place of abode is the possible, and reality, which has actually hap pened, becomes a shadow by comparison. Duration and Moment “Who owns the world?” This was the provocative question asked by the many activists fighting for a better life for the majority after World War I. Bertolt Brecht asked the same question and included it in the title of the film Kuhle Wampe, which he made in 1932 with Slatan Dudow. The question refers to rights 28 Chapter 2 over property and territory in the broad sense—ownership of factories, ma chines, land, even entire countries or continents. It still needs asking today; however, another question is gradually taking over, which will be decisive in the coming decades: Who owns time?34 Between the beginning of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century, there was a marked shift in the quality of political and economic power relations that both involved the media and drove their development: away from rights of disposal over territo ries and toward rights of disposal over time; less with regard to quantity, and more in connection with refining its structure, rhythm, and the design of its in tensity. This shift is not immediately apparent in global relationships, but if one scrutinizes the microstructures of the most technologically advanced nations and their corporations, it is quite apparent. Karl Marx wrote for posterity. Thanks to his care in citing sources, the re mark of an anonymous contemporary (author of a pamphlet) is recorded in his collected works, who, by succinctly summing up his own notion of economy, formulated what later became the touchstone of Marx’s critique of the estab lished bourgeois economic system: “A nation is really rich only if no interest is paid for the use of capital; when only six hours instead of twelve hours are worked. . . . “Wealth . . . is disposable time, and nothing more.”35 At this histor ical juncture where time has been declared the most important resource for the economy, technology, and art, we should not pay so much attention to how much or how little time we have. Rather, we should take heed of who or what has power of disposal over our time and the time of others, and in what way. The only efficacious remedy for a melancholy and resigned attitude toward the world is to appropriate, or reappropriate, the power of disposal over the time that life and art need. Only then is the future conceivable at all—as a permanent thing of impossibility. In Greek mythology, Kronos stands for duration, time’s expanse, which dis poses life by using it up. This is the time of history. Chronology fits us into the temporal order of things. Suffering can be chronic, but passion never is. Chronology cripples us because we are not made of enduring stuff and we shall pass. Machines live longer. At the end of the twentieth century, the computer scientist and engineer Danny Hillis, who was one of the codevelopers of the mas sively parallel architecture of today’s supercomputers, presented prototypes of a clock that was to start running in early 2001 and keep time for the next ten thousand years.36 A group of technology enthusiasts, who call themselves The Long Now Foundation, have ambitions of a time-ecological nature. In reality, 29 Fortuitous Finds instead of Searching in Vain the proponents of these ideas merely reveal themselves as infinitely presumptu ous: the now, the present, is to be extended far into the future and thus, by im plication, preserved for posterity. The idea of preserving the minds of contemporary mortals in artificial and everlasting neural networks for future generations is another example of these rather obscene ideas. The ancient Greeks understood only too well the dilemma resulting from chronology as the dominant time mode. They attempted to solve it by intro ducing two more gods of time, Aion and Kairos, conceived of as antipodes to powerful Kronos, who ultimately devoured his own children. Aion shines at the transcendental dimensions: time that stretches far, far beyond the life span of humans and planet Earth; pure time, like that of machines; or, the fastest way from zero to infinity, as the avant-gard playwright and director Alfred Jarry once defined God. Aion’s time is time that we can reckon with. By contrast, Kairos’s time is doing the right thing at the right moment: he is the god of the auspi cious moment, who in the Greek myth can also prove fatal. He does nothing for us; he challenges us to make a decision. On some ancient reliefs, copies of Lysippus’s statues, Kairos is depicted balancing the blade of a knife on his fin gertips.37 The front half of his head is covered in long wavy locks; the back is bald. Once Kairos has passed by, it is too late. One may still be able to catch up again with the unique moment from behind, but from this position, it is no longer possible to seize hold of it. When an opportunity comes along, one must recognize it as auspicious and take it. Just such a character is the observer in chaos-theoretician Otto E. Roessler’s endophysics, which Roessler understands as the physics of the Now and which I try to comprehend as the physics of uniqueness. As an actor in the world, Roessler’s observer is an activist, not the distanced observer of traditional physics. This observer follows dynamic processes with great presence of mind and visualizes their change from one quality into another. This observer has only the one chance. He or she has absolutely no access to the world’s totality and experiences it only in the form of an interface, via which he or she can know and shape it—for example, by simulating the world in computer models. Due to his association with making decisions, the turning-point character of Kairos is also expressed in Greek in the adverb harmoi (at this precise time, at the ap propriate time), a word that was rarely used. The noun form, harmós, means “seam, slit, or joint,” and the verb harmótto means, among other things, “to submit or comply.”38 As an activist in the world, the endophysical observer is confronted with two options: contribute to the world’s destruction or, for fleeting moments, help to 30 Chapter 2 transform it into paradise.39 This is also the world of media and the art that is produced with and through them. All techniques for reproducing existing worlds and artificially creating new ones are, in a specific sense, time media. Photography froze the time that passed by the camera into a two-dimensional still, not into a moment, for a moment possesses a temporal range that is not cal culable. Telegraphy shrank the time that was needed for information to bridge great distances to little more than an instant. Telephony complemented teleg raphy with vocal exchanges in real time. The phonograph and records rendered time permanently available in the form of sound recordings. The motion picture camera presented the illusion of being able to see the bodies in motion that photography had captured as stills. In film, time that had passed techni cally was rendered repeatable at will; the arrow of time of an event or process could be reversed, stretches of time that had become visual information could be layered, expanded, or speeded-up. Electromechanical television combined all these concepts in a new medium, and electronic television went one step further. Von Braun’s cathode ray tube inscribed images dot by dot and line by line. In the electronic camera, a microelement of the image became a unit of time, which in turn could be manipulated. In electromagnetic recordings of image and sound elements, what can be seen and heard can be stored or processed in the smallest particles or in large packages. Cutting, pasting, and replacing, basi cally invented by the first avant-garde at the beginning of the twentieth cen tury, became advanced cultural techniques.40 Computers represented a more refined and more effective intervention in time structures, as well as—like tel evision—the synthesis of various existing technologies in a monomedium. In the Internet, all earlier media exist side by side. They also continue to exist in dependently of the networked machines and programs and, from time to time, come into contact with each other. For the anarchaeological approach, taking account of the specific character of media with regard to time has two important consequences. The first I touched upon above in relation to the concept of deep time. The field of study cannot encompass the entire process of development; exploring different his torical epochs has the aim of allowing qualitative turning points within the development process to emerge clearly. The historical windows that I have se lected should be understood as attractive foci, where possible directions for de velopment were tried out and paradigm shifts took place. Changes like these have an ambivalent significance. On the one hand, they support and accelerate economic, political, or desired ideological processes, and on the other, they ex clude other alternatives or relegate them to the margins of what is possible. The 31 Fortuitous Finds instead of Searching in Vain second consequence involves a heightened alertness to ideas, concepts, and events that can potentially enrich our notions for developing the time arts. Such ideas do not appear frequently, but they are among the most fortunate finds in this quest. They appear in the guise of shifts, as wholly different from the states of inertia or complacency. To cite another idea from Roessler’s endo physical universe: the cut through the world, which enables it to be experi enced, is similar to Heraclitus’s lightning flash, which is the agent of change—often of change that is initially imperceptible. Here the similarity to the concept of difference, introduced by Derrida to characterize the linguistic and philosophical operation, is obvious.41 In Praise of Curiosities What media could or might be was defined so often in the course of the 1990s that it is no longer clear what this word, used as a concept, actually describes.42 This inflation of definitions has to do with the fact that the economic and po litical powers took the media more and more seriously, and thus the definers found themselves under increasing pressure. Media and future became syn onymous. If you didn’t engage with what was then baptized media, you were definitely passé. By adding media to their curriculum, institutes, faculties, academies, and universities all hoped to gain access to more staff and new equip ment. In the majority of cases, they actually received it—particularly after, in association with the magic word digital, media systems were established that the decision makers did not understand. This was another reason they called the process a revolution. The digital became analogous to the alchemists’ formula for gold, and it was endowed with infinite powers of transformation. All things digital promised to those who already possessed wealth and power more of the same and, to those who possessed nothing, that they could share in this un bloody revolution without getting their hands dirty. Governments and admin istrations opened their coffers when the magic word—even better if coupled with the menetekel Internet—appeared in grant applications. In this manner, a shift in focus took place among literary researchers, sociol ogists, art historians, philosophers, political scientists, psychologists, and also certain “hard” scientists. Over and above studies in their immediate field of research, they increasingly began to develop concepts for media and, in this way, tried to demonstrate to the education policy makers that in fact they were the best in the field of media studies and the right address for competency in media questions. However, the media makers and players continued to concentrate on 32 Chapter 2 the business of making money and were not interested in any academic en hancement, or critique, of their praxis. I write of this in the past tense because I am convinced that this process be longed to the last century, a century that needed media like no other before. It was a century that spawned so many violent caesuras, so much destruction, and so many artificial, that is, humanmade, catastrophes. The twenty-first century will not have the same craving for media. As a matter of course, they will be a part of everyday life, like the railways in the nineteenth century or the intro duction of electricity into private households in the twentieth. Thus, it is all the more urgent to undertake field research on the constellations that obtained be fore media became established as a general phenomenon, when concepts of stan dardization were apparent but not yet firmly entrenched. This undertaking may be of some help to those who have not given up on Rimbaud’s plan to steal the fire and reinvent the worlds of texts, sounds, images, and apparatus each day anew. My archaeology makes a plea to keep the concept of media as wide open as possible. The case of media is similar to Roessler the endophysicist’s relation to consciousness: we swim in it like the fish in the ocean, it is essential for us, and for this reason it is ultimately inaccessible to us. All we can do is to make cer tain cuts across it to gain operational access. These cuts can be defined as built constructs; in the case of media, as interfaces, devices, programs, technical sys tems, networks, and media forms of expression and realization, such as film, video, machine installations, books, or websites. We find them located between the one and the other, between the technology and its users, different places and times. In this in-between realm, media process, model, standardize, symbolize, transform, structure, expand, combine, and link. This they perform with the aid of symbols that can be accessed by the human senses: numbers, images, texts, sounds, designs, and choreography. Media worlds are phenomena of the rela tional. The one or the other may be just as plausible from the way the objects are looked at as the bridges and boundaries that have been constructed between or around them. However, it is not my intention to place a limit on the multi tude of possible linkages by pinning them down. Descartes came in for a lot of criticism because, in his philosophical endeavor to bring more clarity into the world of thought, he made an essential distinc tion between extension and the indivisible, between substance and spirit. How ever, Descartes never suggested that there were no connections between the two. He merely said that these connections were not accessible to his system of 33 Fortuitous Finds instead of Searching in Vain philosophical thinking in concepts. They belong to other realms, primarily that of experience and that is where he, as a philosopher, will leave them. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who was both a sharp critic of the Cartesian system and the one to bring it to completion, also returns to this division in his Monadology, even going so far as to quantify those parts that are not accessible to philosoph ical rationalism: “in three-quarters of our actions we are merely empiricists.”43 By not attempting in any way to standardize the found heterogeneous phe nomena of the in-between, which play a part in media archaeology, I follow the idea of a tension between a reality that is filed away in concepts and a reality that is experienced. This notion of tension is also understood here, as in the rela tionship between calculation and imagination, as not opting a priori for one side or the other. At times, it is appropriate to use arguments that generalize, for ex ample, when addressing artifacts or systems from the familiar canon of media history. However, in the course of our journey to visit the attractions, a certain something must be evoked, a sense of what might be termed media or medium in the various constellations that I describe. Whether it succeeds in this for the reader is the decisive question for the value of my study. It is not a philosophi cal study—this anarchaeology of media is a collection of curiosities. Slightly disreputable then as now, the word was used by Descartes (who had certainly read his Lullus and Porta)44 to refer to those areas of knowledge treated in the appendix to his Discours: optics, geometry, and meteors. By curiosities, I mean finds from the rich history of seeing, hearing, and com bining using technical means: things in which something sparks or glitters their bioluminescence—and also points beyond the meaning or function of their immediate context of origin. It is in this sense that I refer to attractions, sensations, events, or phenomena that create a stir and draw our attention; these demand to be portrayed in such a way that their potential to stimulate can de velop and flourish. The finds must be approached with respect, care, and good will, not disparaged or marginalized. My “deep time” of media is written in a spirit of praise and commendation,45 not of critique. I am aware that this rep resents a break with the “proper” approach to history that I was taught at uni versity. At center stage, I shall put people and their works; I shall, on occasion, wander off but always remain close to them. It does not bother me that this type of historiography may be criticized as romantic. We who have chosen to teach, research, and write all have our heroes and heroines. They are not necessarily the teachers who taught us or the masters they followed. The people I am concerned with here are people imbued with an enduring something that interests us 34 Chapter 2 35 Fortuitous Finds instead of Searching in Vain Figure 2.5 The citizens of Syracuse do not appear to care whether the legend of Archimedes’ setting fire to Roman galleys with parabolic mirrors is feasible according to the laws of physics and geometry. They erected this monument to their inventive defender at the city’s gate. The post card was printed in Milan. passionately. I have by no means made a random selection; their work in reflec tion and experiment in the broad field of media has had enduring, rather than ephemeral, effects. Empedocles is visited for his early heuristics of the interface, and his expan sive and broad-minded approach accompanies us as an inspiration throughout the entire story. Giovan Battista della Porta worked at a time when extremely divergent forces—the beginnings of a new scientific worldview and the tradi tions of magical and alchemistic experiments with nature—still collided with full momentum. The intellectual openness of certain individuals came into severe conflict with power structures that tried to intervene and regulate free, sometimes delirious, thought. In this constellation, there arose a micro-universe of media concepts and models of the most heterogeneous nature that is without parallel in history. In Robert Fludd’s musical monochord, calculation and imag ination meet in a special way. His mega-instrument could also be interpreted as an early device of standardization. The tracking movement of our quest leads from Fludd to Athanasius Kircher, whose view of the world is encoded in a strict binary fashion. Kircher’s media world is an all-embracing attempt to pacify bipolar opposites in a third. This experiment took place within a network that had powerful ambitions for worldwide expansion, yet, at the same time, the Jesuit’s sheer boundless imagination of media evaded being confined through functionalization by the institutions of the Catholic Church. The next chapter focuses on the physicist Johann Wilhelm Ritter, who declared his own body to be a laboratory and a medium, in which he intended to prove experimentally that electrical polarity pervades nature. For many years, Ritter was classified as a romantic natural scientist, but here I focus on him as an indefatigable cham pion of an artistic and scientific praxis that understands itself as art within time. Joseph Chudy and Jan Evangelista Purkyne ̆ [Purkinje] accompany him: the Hungarian as a piano virtuoso who discovered the keyboard as an interface for an audiovisual telegraph that worked on the basis of binary codes; the Bohemian doctor and physiologist, who in his research on vision shifted attention away from the representation of external factors to internal ones, including neuro logical processes, and investigated basic effects for media machines of moving images. The introduction to this section presents the invention of an electrical machine for transmitting written messages over distances in the 1760s at the Jesuit Collegium Romanum in Rome. The development of the media in the nineteenth century has been relatively well researched. Here, with the Italian doctor and psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso, a pivotal figure in a twofold sense, it 36 Chapter 2 is again the subject of inquiry. Lombroso carries to the utmost extremes the strategies and methods of measuring and media techniques as an apparatus for providing true representations. Moreover, his argumentation availed itself of media forms that the nineteenth century appeared to have left way behind it. With Aleksej Gastev we reach the first decades of the twentieth century. His ideas of an economy of time, which derive from a binary code of all mechanical operations, also open up the perspective that leads to the twenty-first century. For the anarchaeologist’s quest, mobility is essential. My research entailed traveling to places that seemed to me, schooled as I am in critique of the hege monial aspect in media history of industrial culture, very remote indeed. I vis ited all the places where the heroes of my anarchaeology labored. Agrigento, where Empedocles lived, I left rather quickly because, as the administrative center for the valley of ancient temples, it did not seem to have much in com mon any longer with the place that I had found in his texts. From Catania, I circled (and ascended) Mount Etna and then went on to Syracuse, following in the footsteps of Kircher and Empedocles. The latter I encountered again in Palermo where he has given his name to the gallery of modern art and to myr iad other facets of everyday life in the city, like the neon sign of a bar. He is revered there like a Sicilian freedom fighter. In Palermo I also came across com pletely unexpected presences from the past: Tadeus Kantor’s death and love machines in the museum of marionettes that have been so influential in the his tory of theater and animation; a dilapidated institute for research on human physiology; the Gemellaro Museum of paleontology, whose treasures are lov ingly displayed in one cramped little room. After Palermo, I retraced Kircher’s movements on his journey through southern Italy, which had inspired him to write of his “subterranean world.” His investigations of this world ended in Naples and Vesuvius, also my next port of call: the city of della Porta, where he wrote his Magia naturalis; beloved of Goethe, Crowley, Benjamin, Sartre, Pasolini, and Beuys; a city that so many of the masters visited at least once. The Biblioteca Nazionale there proved to be a real treasure trove. To my amaze ment, I even found works by the English Rosicrucian Robert Fludd and was allowed to turn the pages myself, without wearing white cotton gloves or hav ing any strict supervision. In the winter, in cold and incessant rain, I visited the Jesuits’ power center—the Collegium Romanum and the surrounding area in Rome, where Kircher did most of his writing and research—the Roman po lice’s criminological museum, and the main Jesuit church Il Gesù. My move ments ended for the time being in Riga, where once Sergei Eisenstein’s father 37 Fortuitous Finds instead of Searching in Vain had built elegant Jugendstil houses and Aleksej Gastev had published his last book of poems before devoting himself wholeheartedly to the Russian “Time League.” Between the stations of Rome and Riga lay many others: Warsaw, Wrocl-aw, Budapest, St. Petersburg, Prague, Weimar, and smaller towns, whose significance will become apparent in the course of my narrative. In this way, a map, a cartography of technical visioning, listening, and—in addition to my original plan—combining came into existence, which is so very different from the geography of media that we are familiar with. It runs through the propo sitions I advance in the final chapter. The mythical hero with the gaze that controls is Argus, whose name derives from the Latin arguere (to prove, to illuminate). He is the all-seeing one with one hundred eyes, of which only a few ever rest; the others move continually, vigi lantly watching and observing. The goddess Hera set Argus to guard her beau tiful priestess Io, who was one of Zeus’ beloved. Supervision is the gaze that can contain envy, hate, and jealousy. Argus was killed by Hermes, son of Zeus, who made him the messenger of the gods. Soon after his birth, Hermes invented the lyre by stretching strings over a tortoiseshell. The ancient Greeks venerated Hermes for his cunning, inventiveness, and exceptional powers of oratory, but also for his agility and mobility. He was given winged sandals and became the god of traffic and travel, of traders and thieves. Because he could send people to sleep with his caduceus, his wand with serpents twined about it, he was also revered as the god of sleep and dreams. Hermes defies simple definition, as does the slippery field of media. In one of the magnificent frontispieces of his books, Kircher honors him with a special meaning: as god of “the fortuitous find.”46 38 Chapter 2 Pleasure and absence of pleasure are the criteria of what is profitable and what is not. —democritus1 At the beginning of the 1990s, two classical scholars, Alain Martin from Bel gium and Oliver Primavesi from Germany, were engaged on an extraordinary project of discovery and decryption. The National Library in Strasbourg had granted the papyrologist Martin permission to select one papyrus for analysis and publication from a collection of around 2,200 unclassified papyri. A com bination of excellent knowledge of the characteristics of ancient papyrus documents and intuition led Martin to select two glass frames, which belonged together, containing fifty-two fragments of a papyrus “written in beautiful lit erary script.”2 Using photographic reproductions of the fragments, Martin spent several years putting the pieces of the puzzle together again. With the help of a computer, he compared the text particles over and over again with ancient Greek texts of known authorship and, in this way, identified the fragments as part of a longer text by Empedocles.3 Working with Primavesi, a philosopher and authority on Empedocles, he managed to decipher the entire text frag ment, which took another three years. In 1997, they presented the results of their labors in Agrigento, Sicily. Because we know the work of the so-called pre-Socratic philosophers primarily through indirect transmission—passages quoted or paraphrased by later authors—the identification of this fragment as being a direct transmission of pieces of Empedoclean text was a tremendous discovery. In 1904 or 1905, an archaeologist representing the Berlin “papyrus 3 Attraction and Repulsion: Empedocles cartel” (formed to prevent German museums from bidding against each other when purchasing objects abroad) bought the fragments for £1 sterling from an Egyptian dealer in antiquities. Possibly their significance would have been rec ognized much earlier had they remained in Berlin where the classical scholar Hermann Diels, an eminent authority on the pre-Socratics, worked. However, the cartel’s procedure of distributing acquisitions by drawing lots resulted in the fragments’ going to Strasbourg, the capital of Alsace-Lorraine, which be longed to Germany at that time. There, it was carefully preserved but its sig nificance remained undiscovered for nearly ninety years. For Primavesi, the fragment’s content was as spectacular as its discovery. In his view, the fragment demands a radical reappraisal of previous scholarship on Empedocles. In the tradition of Aristotelian interpretation, until now the work of this poet-philosopher has been divided into two areas: his didactic poem on nature Peri physeos, and the poem Karthamoi [Purifications], which is concerned with the human soul. Primavesi writes, “The papyrus demonstrates that this ap proach was in error—the physics of the four ‘roots’ on the one side, and crime and punishment of the soul daimon on the other, are so closely intertwined in the new text that these must be seen as integrated elements of one and the same unified theory.”4 The twentieth century was a period of disunity, of terrible explosions, mur derous political systems, and violent splits, punctuated by phases of economic and cultural prosperity. At the end of the century, we were inundated with concepts of artificial bonding, unifying, and reuniting, as though by way of a conciliatory gesture. Universal machines, globalization, and technological net working of geographical regions and identities that are in reality divided were advanced to counter the de facto divisions that have intruded between individ uals and between people and machines because of the unequal distribution of wealth, education, culture, and knowledge. In no way did they serve to dimin ish the real divisions; they merely created the impression that the real gulfs were easy to bridge using market strategies and technology. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the situation has escalated again. People who had nothing apart from their bodies, their pride, their ideas of redemption, and their hate used these bodies as weapons against others who have everything but their bod ies, pride, and ideas of liberation. These unequal opponents, however, do have something in common: feelings of hatred. In the sixth and fifth centuries b.c., the region where Empedocles lived and worked was wealthy and prosperous. Not surprisingly, it was a prize fought 40 Chapter 3 over by many different invaders. Situated between the territories of Asia Minor, North Africa, and the mainland of Europe, it experienced rapid transitions from periods of rich prosperity to military campaigns of destruction. From this extraordinary region bordered by the Ionian Sea, which was a kind of dividing line, an interface, between the spheres of influence of the great powers of the age, came a host of exceptional thinkers: Heraclitus of Ephesus, Parmenides of Elea, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, Democritus of Abdera, and Empedocles of Acragas. Acragas—in Latin, Agrigentum; today called Agrigento—was on the south coast of Sicily, the southernmost outpost of ancient Greek civilization, which faced Carthage in North Africa across the sea. The inhabitants of his city were a rare mix of many cultures. “The men of Agrigentum devote themselves wholly to luxury as if they were to die tomorrow,” Empedocles said of his fellow towns folk, according to Diogenes Laertius, “but they furnish their houses as if they were to live forever.”5 Today Kairos and Kronos are reversed: we construct build ings that will be ruins in a few decades, or even years, and then demolished; what has become chronic now is fun, which has nothing to do with joy, for fun does not require a reason or an occasion.6 The German poet Hölderlin despaired while trying to bring together dis parate things that were poles apart, both in his poetry and in his life. His Der Tod des Empedokles presents the drama of a man who was a tragic failure, an Icarus who soared toward the light but flew too near to the sun, which melted the wax that held his wings together. In this moment of failure, Hölderlin’s Empedocles plunges into the volcano—a fallen angel, an errant daimon—where, finally, he becomes one with the element that fascinated him the most: fire. For me, it is not important whether there is a grain of truth in this legend or any of the others about the death of the poet-philosopher. What interests me most about Empedocles’ fate are his sandals, which, it is claimed, were found at the foot of Mount Etna. They bear witness to his specific and dogged kind of resistance, to the stubbornness of things when confronted by attempts to monopolize and de stroy them, including historical attempts to interpret them. And more than Empedocles’ death, I am interested in the life of this “pilot,” as Panthea calls him in Hölderlin’s tragedy fragment,7 and what has survived of his thought, which is also rendered in fascinating verse by Hölderlin. In my understanding, Empe docles’ philosophy is definitely not a concept of failure, but a worldview oriented toward succeeding, precisely because it is aware of the possibility of failure. At first glance, it may appear somewhat redundant in the age of unlimited reproducibility of things and organisms to study the ideas of a philosopher who 41 Attraction and Repulsion formulated his doctrine in fine hexametric poetry two-and-a-half-thousand years ago. Further, it may seem rather anachronistic to place this discussion at the beginning of a quest to examine the relationship of humans and machines from a specific perspective. Yet, at the end of the 1940s, at approximately the same time as Alan Turing was writing his famous essay on intelligent machin ery and Norbert Wiener was publishing his book on the reciprocal relationship between control and communication using cybernetics, the eminent physicist Erwin Schroedinger gave a series of lectures in Dublin and London on the re lationship of the ancient Greeks to nature, in which he declared the atomist Democritus as his hero. At the time, Schroedinger viewed his own subject, the oretical physics, as in deep crisis, triggered by the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, the growing strength of biology, plus the historical experience of World War II’s destructive violence and force, of which the natural sciences had been co-organizers. For these reasons, Schroedinger thought it appropriate to revisit the origins of systematic thinking about nature. Thus, he took up a committed position that objected strongly to an erroneous understanding of the Enlightenment. Schroedinger cited the opposing position, advanced by the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach, who had claimed in one of his popular lectures that “our culture has gradually acquired full independence, soaring far above that of antiquity. It is following an entirely new trend. It centres around math ematical and scientific enlightenment. The traces of ancient ideas, still linger ing in philosophy, jurisprudence, art and science constitute impediments rather than assets, and will come to be untenable in the long run in the face of the development of our own views.”8 The “supercilious crudeness” of this view Schroedinger countered by arguing for a reorientation backwards in time toward those points in the history of human thought when the divisions that inform the modern scientific view of nature did not yet exist. Dangerous mis conceptions cannot arise “from people knowing too much—but from people believing that they know a good deal more than they do.”9 For his act of back tracking, Schroedinger found a delightful metaphor: “We look back along the wall: could we not pull it down, has it always been there? As we scan its wind ings over hills and vales back in history we behold a land far, far, away at a space of over two thousand years back, where the wall flattens and disappears and the path was not yet split, but was only one. Some of us deem it worth while to walk back and see what can be learnt from the alluring primeval unity.”10 The suggestion is not to attempt a real or imaginary return to the times be fore the great divisions came about; obviously, this is not feasible for the public 42 Chapter 3 or the private sphere. However, it makes good sense to rethink and re-examine the constellations of the period, which were clearly highly conducive to bold and free thought, in spite of the conflicts of the powerful that dominated everyday life. “It was certainly not the numbers or concentration of socially secure edu cated persons that was the decisive factor,” writes Otto Roessler in a text about Anaxagoras, the founder of chaos theory, who was only a few years older than Empedocles. “It was a wave and general mood of courage and freedom from anx iety. The social trend toward consolidation was outshone, for a time, by the intellectual expansive impetus of the few.”11 Empedocles was already a legend in his lifetime, and many popular tradi tions are attached to his figure. Little is known for certain, however. Diodorus of Ephesus writes of his appearance: “swathed in a purple robe, his long flow ing hair decorated with garlands and wreaths . . . shod in iron, he walked about the cities with a serious and stern countenance, accompanied by a retinue of slaves.”12 His skills as a physician earned him the reputation of a miracle worker, and he was accredited with a magical relationship with nature. The inhabitants of Selinus worshipped him almost as a god because, at his own expense, he had constructed channels to divert the water from two neighboring rivers into the city’s marshy and polluted watercourse. Besides stopping the spread of the plague, this intervention also provided Selinus with wholesome fresh water. As a thinker allied with the Pythagorean tradition, he was greatly involved with music, which he invested with healing powers and is reported to have utilized in therapy. Empedocles was above all a public figure. As a “passionate lover of freedom and suppressor of tyranny,”13 he was committed to the democratiza tion of the Greek cities in Sicily. Promoting conciliation, he intervened often in the struggle between Syracuse and Agrigento for domination of the island, and he championed the idea of Sicilian political unity. He refused, however, to assume any political office. It is said that he desired to exert influence by virtue of his reputation and not through exercise of power. Just as Empedocles’ political thought is governed by the idea of a peaceful reconciliation of opposites, he developed his concept of the physical world as an attempt to combine incompatible positions. For the older philosopher Par menides, whose teachings Empedocles studied, “what is” is eternal, uncreated, imperishable, and encapsulated in a homogeneous sphere. On the other hand, Anaxagoras explained all things in the world of phenomena through the prin ciple of mixing: all natural things come into being and pass away through a continual process of mixing elemental substances in varying proportions. 43 Attraction and Repulsion 44 Chapter 3 Figure 3.1 Fritz Kahn’s five-volume Das Leben des Menschen [The Life of Man] is an out standing example of depicting the human organism as a mechanical system. In this illustration of optical perception, the most important nineteenth-century machines of acceleration—the clock and the train—are brought together with electric warning signals, the objects being per ceived here. (Kahn, vol. 4, 1929, plate XXII) Empedocles attempted to combine these two disparate ideas. His concept of na ture is informed by three principles. First, he attributes the plurality of “what is” to four “roots” or elements: fire, earth, water, and air. He also calls them “root clumps,” which can be translated as rhizomata.14 All matter is composed of these elements in varying proportions. The second principle concerns the mode of how the composition comes about. For Empedocles, there is no beginning or end to all that is, and therefore neither creation nor destruction. Some thing can not arise out of no thing, nor can something become nothing. Like Anaxagoras, he conceives all natural processes as types of mixing. The four elements corre spond to the properties hot, dry, wet, and cold. These four operate in all exist ing things and organisms; later, this concept became a basic principle of chemistry. “From them comes all that was and is and will be hereafter—trees have sprung from them, and men and women, and animals and birds and water nourished fish, and long-lived gods too, highest in honour. For these are the only real things, and as they run through each other they assume different shapes, for the mixing interchanges them.”15 Empedocles does not appear to make any clear distinction between the different kinds of natural life; all are animate and ex hibit many similarities. For example, he sees plants as being highly sensitive and having many analogies with humans and animals: leaves are analogous to feathers, hair, or scales.16 He calls plants nature’s “embryos” because they unite both sexes within themselves and are able to propagate without exchanging secretions. The third principle pervades Empedocles’ entire doctrine regarding nature; it is what made his thought so exciting for Plato, Plotinus, and the Neoplatonic philosophers and, later, the magical natural philosophers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is probably also what prompted Aristotle to make his dismissive characterization of the poet-philosopher as “stammering, suspect ing the truth, but unable to express it in the language of philosophy.”17 The forces that drive the mixing of the elements are attraction and repulsion, or, as Empedocles formulates it in his poetry, Love and Strife. These forces generate all motion. Translated into terms employed by modern science, we speak to day of energy, and, with reference to the elements, of matter. With the inter play of energy and matter, which is governed by affinities among the elements, we have arrived at the paradigm, which is regarded today, in both physics and chemistry, as fundamental to the analysis of natural phenomena at the macro and micro-scale. In Empedocles’ cosmology, the degree to which Love or Strife dominates determines the structure of the universe and defines the relationship 45 Attraction and Repulsion between the center and the periphery. The ideal form is the dominion of Love. When Love is at the center and commands all motion, the mixtures are distrib uted equally, the “many” come together into the “one.” This is sphairos, the state of stillness, peace, and happiness. Its form, the ball or sphere, was also the shape of Parmenides’ Entity, the best possible form of what is. However, unlike Par menides, Empedocles does not view this state as eternal or unchanging; it is sub ject to constant motion, is in a continual state of flux. When Strife enters the calm and peace in the sphere, there is separation into the “many” (that is, new mixtures) through its agency, and Love migrates toward the outer edge of the circle. Perhaps the language Empedocles uses to describe this state reflects something of his own fate and that of many of his intellectual contemporaries, like Anaxagoras, who were forced into exile. Love is banished to the outer lim its of the chaos that is besieging Love.18 From the periphery, Love then begins the second half of the cycle anew by advancing again; then mixing takes place under its increasing power. Within this highly flexible framework of the constant motion of elements and their infinite mingling, there is embedded a concept of perception of the one by the other. Empedocles does not make a principal distinction between un derstanding and sensory perception: both are equal, natural processes. “Fortu nate spring-time of the spirit, when Reason still dreamed, and the Dream still thought; when knowledge and poetry were still the two wings of human wis dom.”19 Similarly, the idea of separating all that happens or acts into subjective and objective was foreign to his thought. Empedocles did not see an active agent on the one side, primarily concerned with enjoyment and causing suffering, and a passive body on the other, which mainly suffers and endures: to him, both are active. “Being” in the context of this dynamic mixing process means that there is constant interchange between the one and the other. In order for the others and the other to be active, Empedocles presents all living things with a won derful gift. He wraps them in a fine skin, or film, which not only protects them but is also permeable in both directions. This is effected by the skin’s fine, in visible pores, which have different shapes. Passing back and forth through them is a constant stream of effluences that are not directed at anyone or anything in particular. If there is antipathy, the streams do not meet. When there is sympa thy between the one and the other, there is reciprocal contact and they can “pick up” the effluences of each other, which join successfully to create a sensation. In order for this to take place, the requisite pores must correspond in size and shape; there is “symmetry of the pores, each particular object of sense being 46 Chapter 3 adapted to some sense [organ].” The senses differ; their pores are different in size and shape, and “we perceive by a fitting into the pores of each sense. So they are not able to discern one another’s objects, for the pores of some are too wide and of others too narrow for the object of sensation, so that some things go right through untouched, and others are unable to enter completely.”20 For Empedocles, the eyes are Aphrodite’s work. In the extant fragments, the example of the eyes illustrates most clearly what he means by the work of Love as an essential component for successful perception. One of the finest surviving fragments gives a poetic (and accurate) description of the structure of the eye: “As when a man who intends to make a journey prepares a light for himself, a flame of fire burning through a wintry night; he fits linen screens against all the winds which break the blast of the winds as they blow, but the light that is more diffuse leaps through, and shines across the threshold with unfailing beams. In the same way the elemental fire, wrapped in membranes and delicate tissues, was then concealed in the round pupil—these kept back the surrounding deep water, but let through the more diffuse light.”21 Here, Empedocles combines poetically the anatomical components of the eye—retina, pupil, vitreous humor—with the most important factor for per ceiving the other: the notion of perception as a process of continual flow pre supposes the existence of a rich, burning energy within that is inexhaustible. The same holds true for acoustic perception. For Empedocles, hearing is a sen sation that takes place inside the ear, at the threshold to the outside world. He describes hearing entirely in physiological terms. The perception of sounds stems from the sounds heard within “when (the air) is set in motion by a sound, there is an echo within.” The auricle is “a sprig of flesh.” Empedocles likens the hearing organ to the resonating body of a bell, which produces the same sounds within as the noises produced outside by the sounds of things and living crea tures. To listen is to hear in sympathy; for Empedocles, this presupposes inner motion: “the impact of wind on the cartilage of the ear, which . . . is hung up inside the ear so as to swing and be struck after the manner of a bell.”22 Empedocles does not think of the infinite multiplicity of things in terms of any hierarchical order. Nothing is above anything else; everything exists side by-side, in motion, and with constant interpenetration. Nor does Empedocles propose a hierarchy of the senses; Plato and Aristotle will introduce this idea later. Seeing is not privileged over hearing, nor taste over touch and smell. This lat ter example provides a further illustration that the Agrigentine poet-philosopher understands perception as an active process: he ascribes “the keenest smell” to 47 Attraction and Repulsion 48 Chapter 3 Figure 3.2 “The retina, greatly magnified” (Kahn, Das Leben des Menschen, vol. 5, 1931, plate VII). From the top down, the illustration shows component layers of the eye, from the “vitreous humour in front of the retina (Gl.)” and “control cells (Sch.), which connect the optic nerve cells to the vision cells,” the “cones” (Z.) and “rods” (Stä.). 49 Attraction and Repulsion Figure 3.3 The act of seeing and the articulation of what is seen as a functional cycle com prised entirely of media technology: “The image of the key [Schlüssel] passes through the eye’s lens system to the light-sensitive retina at the back of the eye where it is exposed. . . .” (Kahn, Das LebendesMenschen,vol. 4, 1929, plate VIII). those “whose breath moves most quickly; and the strongest odour arises as an effluence from fine and light bodies.”23 This idea may also represent a transition to the realm of mind, perhaps referring to the nous of Anaxagoras, a fine and light substance of which pure mind is composed and which is the driving force be hind everything, for “all the old words for soul originally meant air or breath.”24 Empedocles’ theory of pores is a doctrine that does not ascribe a privileged place to humankind. The principles of constantly changing combination and exchange apply to all natural phenomena, including inorganic ones. Just as Em pedocles sees vision in organisms with eyes as presupposing an inner fire as the driving force, he also sees this process at work in rocks and metals. He explains the formation of the Earth’s crust by volcanism: boulders, rocks, and cliffs are “lifted up and sharpened by the many fires that burn beneath the surface of the Earth,”25 a process that will continue for as long as the fire burns. He explains reflection as dependent upon fire in a specific way (here it must be remembered that in Empedocles’ day, mirrors were made of polished metal, often copper). Reflection occurs because the inner fire of the metal heats the air on the mirror’s surface, and the effluences, which stream onto it, become visible. He ascribes special powers to stones, which he also conceives of as wrapped in a porous skin. Magnetism appears to be an impressive confirmation of this conception: the attraction exerted by amber on iron functions because it draws the effluences through the metal’s pores toward itself, and the iron follows.26 As far as one can judge from the extant fragments and later sources, Em pedocles does not appear to have proposed that a third natural or artificial en tity should be interposed between the porous skins of the organs of the one and the other during the process of perception. For him, perception comes about when exchange of effluents takes place. The philosopher and student of nature Democritus, who developed his ideas at around the same time as Empedocles but in another, distant city, Abdera in Ionia,27 suggested a different conception: he gave the effluences a structure and attempted to explain their inner rela tionship. Democritus conceived of the world as consisting of two opposing en tities, which need each other: fullness and emptiness. Fullness is not solid but consists of a multitude of the smallest units, which Democritus named atoms. So small that the human eye cannot see them, atoms are elementary substances composed of the same material but with an infinite number of different sizes and shapes. Because they are in a state of perpetual motion, they need space, or the “void.” As substances that cannot be subdivided further, atoms are impene trable. In their eternal random motion, they collide and move in different di 50 Chapter 3 rections. Everything that exists is composed of these multifarious forms in motion, including the human sensory organs. Thus, Democritus expands Empedocles’ theory of pores in two ways: first by introducing a medium, the void, wherein the various configurations can arise, and second by suggesting a concrete—in his terms, material—in-between. The streams that emanate on the one side from the perceiver and on the other from what is perceived com press the air between them. The various constellations of atoms in motion are impregnated on the air and appear there as “idols” (eidolâ), images of real ob jects, which are identified by the sensory organs as different configurations. Ac cording to Democritus’s theory, perception also arises through successful exchange, via the idols, between the organs and what they encounter. This ex change should be imagined as a kind of balancing, a reciprocal scanning of the many forms via the intervening layer of compressed air, which has the status of an interface between the perceiver and the perceived. 51 Attraction and Repulsion Figure 3.4 Empedocles’ pore theory of perception as applied to vision. One aspect of Democritus’s vision of the universe represents a considerable shift compared to that of Empedocles: in introducing the idea of images in the compressed air, Democritus raises a question that does not occur to the Agri gentine (with the caveat, that is, as far as we know from the extant fragments). It is the issue of whether the idol that appears on the compressed air is true or false. The associations and connotations of the Greek word eidolon range from “knowing, recognizing, seeing, and appearance” to “shadow” and “illusion.” For Democritus, perception that takes place is not necessarily true. Of the things that are, only the atoms in motion and the void are true—the material elements and the medium: “Sweet exists by convention, bitter by convention, color by convention; atoms and void [alone] exist in reality.”28 Just as the constellations of things that can be perceived change constantly through perpetual motion and collisions, so too do the organs of perception. They are not a consistent and reliable reality but, instead, permanently changing states. Fragment 100 of Democritus’s texts, reported by Diogenes Laertius, puts the epistemological crux of the theory in a nutshell: “In reality, we know nothing, for the truth lies in the abyss.”29 A great number of later thinkers found enormously convincing the idea that emanations from the changing atomic constellations appear on the compressed air as images and are scanned by the sensory organs. In the first century a.d., Lucretius included a paean to atomist philosophy in his poem De rerum natura [On the Nature of Things]. There he accentuates the Latin word for eidolâ, which came to have central importance for the postmodern discourse on images, lo cated between Schein and Sein (appearance and reality): “nam si abest quod ames, praesto simulacra tamen sunt” [Though she thou lovest now be far away, yet idol images of her are near].30 Lucretius has no doubt that the simulacra, of which there are an infinite number and variety, are true in principle. His only reserva tions in a Democritean sense concern the occasions when the scanning concep tion of vision clashes with the conceptions of reason. In his book on classical theories of vision, Gérard Simon elegantly describes the questions debated by the early philosophers when they turned their atten tion to perception, the complex relations between seeing and what is seen. His critical rereading of the surviving text fragments of the early natural philoso phers led him to the following conclusion: the “beam of vision,” that fascinat ing phenomenon referred to so often by the “old geometers” and geometrized by Euclid, should not be understood as a physical quantity. Their object of study was not light and its radiation, but vision. From a science-historical perspective, 52 Chapter 3 therefore, the field of classical texts does not belong to physics, nor mathemat ics and geometry, but rather to the field of a “theory of the soul.” The classical philosophers’ inquiry was articulated as questions about “the seeing human, his/her relationship to what is visible.”31 While it is certainly correct to insist that we do not do violence to the classical theories by applying our modern cat egories to them, Simon’s unequivocal determination of the competent disci pline, which he undertakes in the terminology of modern science, appears to be self-contradictory. Observations of nature, mind, and the soul, as well as the mathematical calculations made by the early philosophers, cannot be separated. Their conception of physiology encompassed it all.32 This approach had dra matic consequences for Democritus’s theory of atomism, for he also applied it to the soul.33 With the exception of Epicurus, later philosophers did not share this view; particularly, Plato and Aristotle found that it went too far, and they condemned it. Later, the Catholic Church joined in the censure of atomism. They needed the soul as an authority external to matter and the human body, controlled by free will but at the same time in a complex relation of dependence upon Divine Providence and its institutions on Earth. Within such a system of atoms in motion, be it ever so complex, the Fall from Grace is an impossibility; at best, there are only catastrophes for which no one is responsible. Democritus’s vision was not taken up again until the magical natural philosophers of the fif teenth and sixteenth centuries had the courage to do so. And in the hearts of the early romantics of the eighteenth century, both Democritus’s and Empedocles’ unity of nature and soul begin once again to pulse with energy. The two ancient Greece specialists Alain Martin and Oliver Primavesi have put the jigsaw puzzle of papyrus pieces together to reveal a fragment that, more than two thousand years after the ideas of Empedocles originated, will occasion ex tensive reinterpretation of the little we know of his work. My montage of text fragments bears absolutely no comparison to their labors. What I have tried to show is how one can arrange some of the extant text particles of Empedocles and Democritus on perception to extract ideas and statements that have some bear ing upon the frenetic contemporary sphere of activity that is theory and praxis of media: the interface between the one and the other, which can be defined as the interface between media people and media machines. Empedocles’ theory of pores is a theory of perception both in the simplest and deepest form conceivable. Interpreted technologically, it is a theory of double compatibility: size and relative power of the pores and effluents must match so 53 Attraction and Repulsion Figure 3.5 In interface theory, engineers distinguish between user-machine interface and machine-machine interface. Beginning in 1724, Jacob Leupold published an eight-volume work, Theatrummachinarum, with a total of 1,764 pages on the classical interface of the latter type. Top: Illustration of different types of cogwheels, which must mesh exactly in the perfect me chanical interface. Leupold comments: “Wheels and gears are artificial equipment that is most admirable because using only a few wheels and gears, according to the nature of the work, these can be accommodated within a small space and performance can not only be greatly enhanced but, because the motion is continuous, repetition is unnecessary, unlike with levers.” Bottom:This treadmill, dating from 1430, is a hybrid. Here, the function of the second, compatible cogwheel is taken over by human muscle power. (Mattschoss 1940, pp. 34 and 17) that exchange can take place. Physically, it is a theory of affinities, which can be described in psychological terms as a concept of reciprocal giving and receiving of attention. Economically, it is a theory of extravagance. In media-heuristics terms, which draw the above aspects together, it is eminently suitable as a theory of a perfect interface. Yet, because it is perfect, building it will never be possible. However, precisely because it possesses this potential impossibility, the theory is entirely worthy of consideration for dealing with existing inter faces, which purport to have already established compatibility between the one and the other. In actual fact, Empedocles’ theory of pores renders the construction of any interface superfluous. The porous skins are ubiquitous; they are a material ele ment of all things and people and thus move with them. Every person and every thing has received this gift. Democritus introduced a medium, and thus a third quantity, wherein one can contemplate the “idols,” or simulacra, including their truth. With Democritus, though, one can imagine that, in the future, more ar tificial interfaces will have to be constructed in order to bridge the chasm that currently exists between being and appearance. When Empedocles describes the republic in which he would like to live, in which Love is dominant over Strife, he becomes passionately enthusiastic. It is, in Bruno Schulz’s sense, a true republic of dreams. Its beautiful queen is Kypris, to whom lavish gifts are brought: “Her they propitiated with holy images and painted animal figures, with perfumes of subtle fragrance and offerings of distilled myrrh and sweet-smelling frankincense, and pouring on the earth libations of golden honey.”34 Among the few surviving fragments of the Purifi cations that are instructions to his followers is the shortest and most effective for mula for a philosophy of succeeding: “Refrain entirely from partaking of the food of woe!”35 55 Attraction and Repulsion A discovery is premature if its implications cannot be connected by a series of simple logical steps to canonical, or generally accepted, knowledge. —oliver sacks, “scotoma: forgetting and neglect in science” Working Untiringly on the World’s Multifariousness The fourteenth book of Giovan Battista della Porta’s Magia naturalis1 deals with the good things in life, mainly wine and cooking. The interested reader learns how to induce fowl to lay an egg as large as a fist, which dishes and beverages will drive away undesirable bugs from the table, how to make guests get drunk fast, or how to sober them up again. Chapter 9 contains a recipe for which even Salvador Dali, egomaniacal eccentric and esoteric, was moved to express utmost admiration. As a child, Dali had wanted to be a cook, and he is reputed to have attempted this dish several times.2 The recipe gives detailed instructions for roasting a goose, a favorite fowl of ancient Roman cuisine, alive. The goose is plucked, apart from the head and neck, and placed at the center of a ring of fires so that it cannot escape. During the cooking process, the bird’s head must be kept damp with cold water and its body basted. The goose must be kept sup plied with salt water to drink and a mixture of herbs that acts as a laxative, for a goose cooked with full bowels does not taste good. Porta emphasizes that he reports only experiments that he has tried out himself, witnessed as an observer, or has had described to him by absolutely reliable sources. He had cooked this 4 Magic and Experiment: Giovan Battista della Porta dish for friends; however, they were so ravenous that they pounced on the goose before it was properly cooked.3 It sounds paradoxical, but this gruesome cooking recipe expresses in an ex emplary fashion Porta’s attitude to the world, things, and nature: it is charac terized by respect and affection. In everything around him, he discovers marvels that must be tracked down and celebrated. His observations and analyses of living phenomena as well as his physical interventions all have the goal of up holding their attraction and, if possible, enhancing it. From a Pythagorean standpoint, which forbids the eating of anything that has a face, to cook an ani mal alive is immoral and a crime. However, the most immediate exchange of life for life is also the highest form of dining, prized above all other things, for ex ample, in Japanese cuisine. The paradigm of freshness means precisely this: the difference in time between the preparation of food and its consumption must be kept as small as possible and, at the same time, the boundary between the two is dramatized. The fast cut with a very sharp knife that kills a fish for sashimi, for example, differs only temporally from the bird roasted alive. The latter is a cuisine indebted to Kronos, the god of duration, and the former pays tribute to Kairos, a celebration of the unique moment when one quality changes into an other. The relationship of the Japanese to fish can be understood only if one re members that the inhabitants of those slim incrustations in the ocean are permanently confronted by death—in the ocean depths, from the rumbling volcanoes, or from the earthquakes that periodically shake their islands. “Even the dull animals of the mainland become weird beasts here,” Walter Benjamin wrote of Naples in the section on eating houses in his Denkbilder [Thought Figures]: “On the fourth or fifth floors of the tenements, they keep cows. The animals are never taken out and their hooves have grown so long that they can no longer stand.”4 Porta was a Neapolitan. He is said to have been born in Vico Equense, twelve miles to the south of the city, but for the greater part of his life he lived in the port by Vesuvius.5 The people there are proud of him and he was always proud of his city. Vesuvius, which has impressed so many gener ations of travelers to Italy, dominates the Gulf of Naples, “this radiant and pleas antly articulated bay”;6 when the weather is bad, it looms threateningly over the landscape. One can look up and see Vesuvius while poring over the magnificent folios and rare manuscripts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the rare books section of the Biblioteca Nazionale with its splendid but delapidated baroque interior. No other city lives so categorically for the moment as Naples; there is no other place where the quick succession and chaotic whirl of moments 58 Chapter 4 seem so precious. A poet, privy councillor, and naturalist from the German province of Thuringia wandering through the streets of Naples for the first time on March 17, 1787 felt the same way: “To walk through such an enormous and restlessly moving crowd is most curious and salutary. How they all mix and mingle, and yet each finds their way and destination!” Two days later, Goethe noted: “One only has to walk along the streets with an open eye to see the most inimitable sights.”7 As if wishing to concur wholeheartedly with Goethe, the young Jean-Paul Sartre wrote an empathic account of his visit in 1936 with clas sic descriptions of situations, things, and people: . . . in Naples, chance reigns supreme and its effects are everywhere—from the inspired to the horrible: on Sunday, I encountered a girl walking in the blazing sun. The left side of her face was screwed up against the blinding light. Her left eye was closed and her mouth twisted, but the right side of her face was absolutely immobile and looked dead. Her right eye, wide open, completely blue, completely transparent, sparkled and glittered like a diamond, reflecting the sunbeams with the same non-human indifference as a mirror or a window-pane. It was quite awful but also strangely beau tiful—her right eye was made of glass. Only in Naples does chance manage to accom plish this: a dirty girl, blinded and dazzled, with a glittering mineral existing within her poor flesh, almost as though her eye had been torn out deliberately in order to adorn it more splendidly.8 Pier Paolo Pasolini, who was originally from Bologna (a city he once de scribed in “Letter to the young Neapolitan Genariello” as “so big and fat” that it could just as easily be a German or French town),9 liked to compare the denizens of Naples with a tribe of Indians camping defiantly in the middle of a city, who would rather die than submit to the powers that be. It was in Naples that Pasolini made the first film in his trilogy about life, Il Decamerone (1970). The city mourned him as one of her own when he was clubbed to death on the night of All Saints’ Day, November 1–2, 1975—possibly (the case re mains unsolved) by one or more of the ragazzi di vita, “the boy prostitutes whom he had portrayed with such loving care.”10 For Sicilians, Palermo is the Italian city that lies closest to Africa and Naples is the farthest. North of Naples is barbarian territory, which has little or noth ing to do with Italy; it is where the exploiters who profit from the south live. Vesuvius, the volcano that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum under masses of lava and ash, earth tremors, and earthquakes are just the natural catastrophes 59 Magic and Experiment that permanently threaten Naples. In Porta’s time, not only was Naples sub jected to the humiliating dictates of ecclesiastical Rome but, from the early six teenth century, Naples suffered with Sicily for two hundred years under Spanish rule, represented by two viceroys, in The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.11 In the heart of this southern city, which grew at an amazing pace in the sixteenth century to become the largest and most densely populated city of what would later be Italy, the spread of venereal disease was equally swift. Indeed, since 60 Chapter 4 Figure 4.1 This Latin edition of Magia naturalis, which Goethe worked with in Weimar, was published by Gulielmo Rouillio in Venice three years after the first edition of 1558. The inside cover is richly decorated in black, red, and gold. (Photo: Sigrid Geske) 1495 syphilis was an ever-present scourge,12 and epidemics regularly afflicted Neapolitans. In the mid-seventeenth century, these developments peaked in disaster: in 1656, 60 percent of the population died of the plague. In view of the catastrophic hygienic conditions prevailing in the greater part of the city, it is hardly surprising that Porta devotes much attention to the manufacture of sweet-smelling substances in the first edition of Magia naturalis (1558) and, in the expanded edition, adds an entire book on perfumes, “De myropoeia.” Be sides being an early contribution to sexual osphresiology,13 this text represents just one of many facets within Porta’s wide-ranging oeuvre that reflect the close relationship between magical modeling of nature and technology and proactive theory and praxis that aims to heal, not to destroy. Porta was not an academic in any conventional sense. From the viewpoint of media archaeology, in this respect he is in excellent company, particularly with regard to the twentieth century. Many of the seminal texts that have influenced media theory and studies profoundly were not authored by academics spinning their thoughts on comfortable professorial chairs. Dziga Vertov, for example, developed his radical theory of the all-pervasive “Kino-Eye” as a professional filmmaker. Bertolt Brecht’s text fragments that are apostrophized as the first theory of radio are concepts developed by a dramatist and early experimenter with radio plays. Later, the poet, essayist, journalist, translator, dramatist, edi tor, and publisher Hans Magnus Enzensberger took up these ideas in his Bau kasten zu einer Theorie der Medien [Construction Kit for a Theory of the Media]. Walter Benjamin wrote his famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Me chanical Reproduction,” as an independent scholar and professional writer. In the 1950s, Günther Anders published his provocative ideas on The Outdatedness of Human Beings as a freelance writer and activist in the antinuclear movement after returning from exile in the United States, where he had earned his living in soul-destroying industrial jobs. The two most important texts for what came to be known as apparatus theory, which focus on technological and psychoana lytical aspects of film and the media and are today rather ignored (unjustly, to my mind), were written by Jean-Louis Baudry, a Parisian dentist and novelist.14 Thus, it is clear that not only the media apparatus is a phenomenon of interpo sition, of the “in-between”; the most fruitful media discourses also move freely between disciplines. Mobility and the state of being in-between are here of equal importance. Porta was not a disciplined thinker, either by past or present standards. As far as we know, he acquired his wide-ranging fundament of knowledge in his 61 Magic and Experiment maternal uncle’s excellent library, a rich store of books and curiosities that Porta refers to as his “museo” in his book on human physiognomy. This uncle intro duced his young nephew to the texts of the ancient Greeks and instructed him in experimental laboratory work. According to Porta’s own testimony in later editions of Magia naturalis, he performed his first experiments—described in Magia I—at the age of fifteen. All his life Porta pursued his studies as a self taught man. He was proud of being a free spirit, untrammeled by any affiliation to institutions or constraints of a personal nature.15 He managed to maintain his independence even when the financial situation of his aristocratic family became increasingly straitened as a result of their support for the princes of Salerno over the Spanish viceroy. Porta was obliged to seek paid employment, and earned his living as a doctor, engineer, bookkeeper, astrologer, writer, and winegrower. As a youth, he and his two brothers were accepted at the famous Pythagoras school in Naples, even though the study of music, including playing instruments, was a compulsory part of the curriculum. This “trio of tone-deaf young musicians”16 won over the school’s directors by virtue of their lively intelligence, their un bounded curiosity, and above all their knowledge of mathematics. At that time, music, specifically harmonics, was regarded as the handmaid of mathematics. One of their masters, Domenico Pizzimenti, was the translator of Democritus, whose theory of atoms exerted a profound influence on Porta’s thought and, much later, on the physicist Erwin Schroedinger, who declared it “the most advanced epistemological approach” of all the ancient philosophers.17 Porta’s biographers unanimously testify to the young Neapolitan’s anti authoritarian character, which did not defer to classical authorities of philos ophy and science. His greatest strength was a lively “speculative mind that gave small credence to the precepts of the masters unless he had been given tried evidence of their veracity.”18 With certain predecessors, such as Roger Bacon, Ramon Llull, and particularly Giordano Bruno, Porta shared a critical attitude toward the symbiosis of Aristotelian natural philosophy and Christian scholas tic dogma as advanced by Thomas Aquinas. Porta’s polemic against the self styled high priests of an abstract truth that was entirely lacking in passion was sharpest in his plays. In the prologue of one of his early comedies, Duo fratelli rivali [Two Rival Brothers] of 1601, he writes: “Come hither, Doctor of neces sity, you who have failed to devise a law even with six links of the chain; you who claim to know all the sciences, although you know nothing of yourself.” Nor did Porta mince words when dealing with his detractors. In the Italian language translation of Magia naturalis, he calls one of his English critics a “barbaro In 62 Chapter 4 glese.”19 Sadly, the English barbarian is not mentioned by name. When reading Porta’s texts, one cannot fail but get a strong impression of just how much the unwieldy new Latin, the lingua franca of both secular and religious intellectu als, constrained and hampered his expression. In the dialogues of his plays, Porta comes across as a true man of the spoken word and less as one of discursive texts. He had a deep aversion to the obscure, complacent, and exclusive language tra ditionally used by scholars, a feeling he shared with other contemporaries who were seeking new explanations of the world and its phenomena.20 Bruno, for ex ample, conceived and wrote his highly polemical De gli eroici furori [The Heroic Frenzies] in Italian; it was written in London and published in 1584 to 1585.21 Thus the intellectual revolution of premodern times, which also involved a frac turing of established conventions of language, received a tremendous boost from the invention of the printing press, which made it possible to produce a great number of copies of any work. When existing structures hamper and constrain the mind and thought, one must invent new ones or change the old. Porta founded one academy himself and played an important role in another. He named his own society Accademia dei Segreti (or Academia secretorum naturae), the Academy of (Natural) Se crets. It met at a building in the Via Toledo at the Piazza de Carità, at the cor ner where the once magnificent boulevard today forks with the narrow Via Pignasecca. The academy’s premises were likely identical with Porta’s living quarters, laboratory, and library. The Accademia dei Segreti is considered the first modern scientific society primarily dedicated to experiment.22 Aspiring members had to fulfill only one condition before being admitted to the pursuit of study and experiment: they had to have discovered something new about the world and be prepared to share this knowledge with the other members. As a scholar, Porta attached great importance to discussion and cooperation in research as well as fostering the culture of debate. He often quoted in his writ ing Heraclitus’s maxim about the eternal conflict of ideas, which is also a guar antee for the emergence of diversity. For Walter Benjamin, sociability was a characteristic and essential Neapolitan trait: “each and every private attitude or task is permeated by the currents of social life. Existence, which is the most private matter for northern Europeans, is here—like in the Hottentots’ kraal a collective affair.”23 The Accademia dei Segreti was dedicated to “discovering and investigating those unusual phenomena of nature of which the causes are unknown.”24 This is all—no more, no less—that is meant by the title Magia naturalis, which to our 63 Magic and Experiment 64 Chapter 4 Figure 4.2 “I study myself!” said Democritus, thus declaring that he did not accept the author ity of any teacher. Porta’s collaborators in his Accademia dei segreti held “knowledge of oneself” (Belloni 1982, p. 17) in high esteem. The new explanations of the natural world offered by phi losophy and the natural sciences raised fundamental questions about the individual’s identity and self-image. This illustration from the 1607 Nürnberg edition of MagiaII shows the author in the theater of mirrors that was his laboratory, fencing with himself; in the background, the sun heats a distillation apparatus and mixes the elements within. ears sounds rather esoteric: to seek out natural phenomena (for Porta this in cludes inorganic matter, artifacts, and technical devices) whose effects we expe rience but cannot explain, investigate them thoroughly, describe and explain them, and test their effects in experiments. When the experiment is successful, the object of study is divested of its mystery. Only phenomena whose causes are not fully understood deserve to be called secrets.25 This method demonstrates how highly Porta regards an approach to the natural world that is based on the evidence of the senses. Only by practical analysis of experiencable things, how ever small, is it possible, at best, to gain access to greater things, writes Porta in the preface to Magia II. It is of far greater utility to write the truth about small things than to write falsely about large. In principle, however, the infinite diver sity of things is inaccessible and certainly so for any one researcher.26 Porta makes a strong distinction between his concept of magic and that of others who seek rather to increase the mystery of natural phenomena, the most extreme example being so-called black magic, which he condemns. Particularly in his early work, however, he treads a fine line between early scientific experi ments and practices that belong to the tradition of classical and medieval alchemy and hermeticism. The latter term takes its name from Hermes Trisme gistus, ancient Egyptian magus and demiurge, thrice-great Hermes, who be came the messenger of the Greek gods—Mercury in Roman mythology.27 The ideas of Marsilio Ficino, head of the Platonic Academy in Florence, coexist in Porta’s work alongside those of Johannes Trithemius, legendary alchemist and abbot of Sponheim; of Cornelius Agrippa, the great hermeticist and alchemist from Cologne who lectured in Italy in the 1510s; of Albertus Magnus, particu larly from his thirteenth-century book on vegetation and plants; and of Porta’s compatriot Girolamo Cardano, a writer on natural philosophy whom he had met in Naples. In his extraordinary eight-volume work A History of Magic and Experimental Science, Lynn Thorndike makes an interesting distinction between thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: those who concentrated pri marily on physical science (including astronomy), such as Galileo, Descartes, and Newton, tended toward a skeptical and enlightened rationalism, whereas those who focused mainly on biology, organic chemistry, or medicine (broadly, what today goes under the name of the life sciences) persisted far longer and to a greater extent in their adherence to older occult and magic views when faced with the beginning of the modern approach to science.28 To understand the world as a mechanism or as an organism: Porta did not opt for just one of these alternatives. Even today, these views continue to influence 65 Magic and Experiment scientific debate as opposing poles, although now, typically, a reversal has taken place. At the dawn of the modern era, mechanics became the model for life, whereas from the beginning of contemporary culture, which is founded on me chanical principles, it is the organic that has become the model and leading metaphor of machines and programs. Today, the language used in the networks of connected machines and programs is replete with organisms, genetic pro cesses, oceans, rivers, and streams.29 Porta was not a specialist. He was equally interested in mathematics, arithmetic and geometry, mechanical phenomena and physical science,30 as well as the plant and animal kingdoms. In Magia I, he describes pneumatic and hydraulic experiments, a section that he expands to be the entire book 19 of Magia II. In 1601, he published a separate treatise on the laws of levers and propulsion, their calculation, and applications. The three books that comprise his Pneumaticorum31 are also a wonderful reminiscence of Heron of Alexandria and his mechanical theater of special effects machines driven by fire, water, and steam. The same year, Porta published a geometrical treatise on curved lines (Elementorum curvilineorum) with a discourse on squar ing the circle. 1601 was also the year that he produced a study on meteorology (De aeris transmutationibus); however, it was not released by the censor for publi cation until 1610. This work is considered the most advanced of the period on the subjects of geology, weather, and marine research. For Porta, his many studies on the wonders of life served as a springboard to the study of natural philosophy. He returns to this subject again in his attempts to discover structural commonalities between the diverse phenomena of organic nature, yet without robbing them of their individuality. In this understanding of natural magic, he follows an idea of Ficino that, in turn, owes much to Em pedocles: all things are connected by sympathy because they have a deep-seated similarity to each other.32 In a long chain of associations, the eight books of Phy tognomia (1583) lay out with fervent enthusiasm the relationships between the forms of everything that exists under the sun: analogies between plant rhizomes and crowns in human hair, flower petals and fine eyes, fruit pips and embryos, foliage and reptiles. Porta’s study of human physiognomy, De humana physiogno mia, which appeared three years later, continues his inquiry into the relation ship between character and physical traits. In this work, Porta goes a step further and links mental and physical characteristics in such a way that one appears as a reflection of the other. Again, his intention is not to reduce or make the phenomena uniform in any way. On the contrary: using a wealth of ex amples, Porta is at pains to demonstrate that “body and soul sustain each other 66 Chapter 4 and mutually modify each other”33 while at the same time being connected in infinitely different ways. The rather monstrous analogies between the facial fea tures and cranial shapes of humans and beasts dramatically illustrated in the book’s plates34 made this work easy prey for superficial esoteric interpretations and for the biologically inclined criminal anthropology of the nineteenth century. In 1917, when the Gabinetto-Scuola di Antropologia Criminale was founded at the University of Naples, a commemorative plaque was put up in honour of Porta, which still adorns the wall of the building that formerly housed this institute.35 To read the book of nature as a vast collection of signs was habitual among sixteenth-century natural philosophers and also among artists of the period. As one example, the Italian painter Guiseppe Arcimboldo delighted the courts of Europe, including Rudolf II in Prague, with his pictures of combinations of heterogeneous elements taken from nature. In an essay on Arcimboldo, Roland Barthes interprets this fascination with the monstrous thus: “The essence of what was ‘wondrous,’ that is, ‘monstrous,’ consists in crossing the line of de marcation between the species, in the mixing of animal and vegetable, of ani mal and human. It is extravagance, which changes the properties of things that God has given a name to. It is metamorphosis, which allows one order to pass over into another; in short, the transmigration of souls.”36 The Inquisition Paradoxically, Porta’s Phytognomia on similarities in nature, which was part of a long tradition of interpreting external physiognomy as an expression of the emotions within,37 should be interpreted as his attempt to react to the increas ing pressure of censorship and investigation by the ecclesiastical authorities. The book’s radical thesis—that human character traits impress themselves like signatures on the physical body and vice versa—appears at first glance to con tradict his earlier position, in which the metaphysical is a calculable effect of the movements of the stars and planets. Porta does not reconcile the two positions until much later, when in 1603 he returns to this theme in Coelestis physiogno monia [Celestial Physiognomy]: he assumes that both realms of living things, the mental and the physical, are grounded essentially on astrological factors. The reason the Neapolitan aroused the suspicions of the Inquisition is not known for certain; possibly it was connected with the many experiments that he and his fellow members in the Academy of Secrets performed. Like Bruno, Porta believed that only through operating on, and thus changing, nature could 67 Magic and Experiment Chapter 4 68 Figure 4.3 Two details from the frontispiece of the English translation of Magia II, depicting the themes of Book 20, chaos and nature. Nature is contrasted with art in a manneristic por trayal of a woman with six breasts (Porta 1658/1958). Facing page, top: Illustration from Phytognomia(Porta 1583, p. 143). Bottom:Frontispiece of the first translation into English of Euclide’s “The Elements of Geometrie” from 1570 with the famous Preface by John Dee (from Werner Nekes’ private collection). 69 Magic and Experiment the divine powers at work there be developed fully.38 Probably less problem atic were the metamorphoses he proposed for the vegetable kingdom, many of which he patented, such as methods for speeding up or slowing down the growth of grape vines or cultivating fruit without seeds. However, Porta’s basic convictions and adventurous mind led him into several areas that were tabooed by the Catholic Church. He not only provides recipes for aphrodisiacs, hallu cinogens, and other drugs and describes their effects, but in Magia naturalis he discusses how to make natural contraceptives for women (abortions at that time were horrendous tortures often ending in death), describes compounds for ma nipulating the gender of unborn children, and gives instructions on how to cul tivate extralarge fruits. Yet what ultimately led to Porta being investigated in the 1570s and later hauled before the Inquisition in Rome to answer charges were his pronouncements on a subject where mathematics and magic were closely interwoven, astrologia giudiziara.39 Judicial astrology, in contrast to natural astrology, was concerned directly with the influence of celestial bodies on the actions of individual people and involved the making of “judgments” by astrologers. For example, current political constellations were interpreted and future ones predicted by observing and plotting the movements of the planets, which were then assigned as determinants to the parties involved. The papal authorities did not tolerate any incursions into what they regarded as their ex clusive province—heavenly power—and banned summarily all publications resulting from the “deluded science that clings to the stars” (Jakob Burckhardt). Notwithstanding the attitude of the church, many powerful secular rulers were extremely keen to have their fortunes cast astrologically by great mathe maticians because such charts were seen as especially authoritative. Elizabeth I of England, despised by Rome, appointed John Dee, an excellent mathemati cian, as her court astrologer. A specialist in geometry, Dee was an old friend of the Flemish cartographer Gérard Mercator and, in 1570, wrote a famous intro duction to the English translation of Euclid’s Elements, which played an impor tant role in popularizing mathematics and geometry in England. His Monas hieroglyphica was the first work to phrase its arguments in terms of mathemat ics, geometry, and symbols, and put forth the concept of a smallest, ultimate, and indivisible unit that is contained in all things and from whence all devel ops. Even when Dee’s brand of natural philosophy led him to drift more and more into the esoteric world of angels and spirits, Elizabeth continued to ex tend her favor and protection to the man on whom, it is thought, Shakespeare modeled Prospero in The Tempest.40 Another ruler with a passionate interest 70 Chapter 4 in astrology and alchemy was Rudolf II of Prague. He invited artists, such as Arcimboldo, and scientists, such as Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, and also—for a short while—Dee and his erstwhile partner Edward Kelley, to live and work at his court. Rudolf II was also impressed by Porta. A later edition of Porta’s treatise on the interpretation of chirophysiognomy (palm-reading), reprints a letter from Rudolf, dated June 20, 1604, to his “revered, scholarly, and truly esteemed friend” in whose “great science of nature and technology” he takes great pleasure “whenever the weighty affairs of state permit.”41 Porta did not experience the full brutal force of the Inquisition like Bruno, who suffered horrific tortures according to the methods of the Spanish Inquisi tion before being burned publicly as a heretic on February 17, 1600 in Rome’s Campo dei Fiori; or Tommaso Campanella, who was arrested in 1599 and in carcerated for twenty-seven years, during which time he wrote his utopia of a “city of the Sun.”42 However, for at least twenty-five years, Porta lived and worked with the dangerous threat of the Inquisitors hanging over his head. The official investigations began in the mid 1570s, and in 1578 his Academy of Secrets was disbanded. By papal order, Porta was expressly forbidden to engage in any activity related to the arte illecite, the forbidden (divinatory) arts. He was urged strongly to give up all scientific activities and concentrate on works of literature instead. In the years that followed, Porta did in fact write many plays, particularly comedies,43 but he ignored the tribunal’s recommendation to give up research. In April 1592, shortly before Bruno was arrested in Venice, Porta received the order of the Venetian Inquisition forbidding publication of his work on human physiognomy and anything else he had written “that had not received the sanction of the Roman tribunal.”44 This situation continued until 1598, but even afterwards Porta had to fight the censors for the publica tion of each one of his works. He was not always successful. An intriguing late work, Taumatologia [On Marvels], which Porta conceived as a grand summary of all his studies and as a deeper investigation into the power of numbers (virtù dei numeri), remained unfinished because when he submitted the book’s index to the tribunal, it sufficed for the tribunal to refuse a license to print it.45 Gabriella Belloni, the greatest expert on the life of Porta, writes that the Neapolitan scholar was deeply affected by the arrests of Bruno and Cam panella, but at the same time, he had to avoid all mention of their names. Porta had certainly met Campanella in Naples; ironically, it was in the same room of the monastery of St. Domenico Maggiore where Thomas Aquinas had taught that, in 1590, Porta and Campanella held a public discussion on magic.46 He 71 Magic and Experiment had probably encountered Bruno in Venice while on a longer visit to find one of its renowned glass-blowers to help in his experiments with mirrors. In Porta’s book on the art of memory (Ars reminiscendi) of 1602, he reports encountering a person in La Serenissima who had such a phenomenal memory that he could re cite up to one thousand verses without making a mistake. Giordano Bruno, who both published on and taught ars memoria, was famous in intellectual circles of the Italian Renaissance for his amazing powers of recollection. Secret Writing and Ciphers The gradual separation of the message from the body of the messenger carrying it is a process that can be traced from ancient ways of sending communications in ancient China, Asia Minor, and classical antiquity.47 Efforts were directed not only toward speeding up delivery of messages, but also at excluding the 72 Chapter 4 Figure 4.4 Contemporary portrait of Porta. (Original in Magianatu ralis1589; taken here from Mach 1921) messenger from all knowledge of the message. As a rule, messengers were slaves, with their bodies to undertake the journey, their minds to understand the mes sage, and mouths to repeat it accurately to the recipient. In our world of net worked machines and programs, the problem of keeping communications secret has still not been solved. In anthropomorphic metaphors that refer to those ancient slaves’ bodies, we still refer to the header and body of a message. The header (or subject), however brief or cryptic, must remain open and publicly accessible. The supervising postmaster of a server requires access to the headers of messages, if only for the purpose of resolving technical transmission problems. What the body of the message conveys is supposed to remain a secret, although in principle the postmaster or higher instances of control are able to access it. Because the system is not secure, courier services were reintroduced in the lat ter years of the twentieth century—from messengers operating locally on foot, bicycle, motorbike, or car, to worldwide operators using aircraft. The only effi cacious method, at least for a limited period of time, for keeping messages se cret that are sent through the language realm to which computers belong is encryption, the art of cryptology. Thus it is hardly surprising that the Internet, a medium most admirably suited to conspiratorial theories and practices of all kinds, has innumerable sites and projects on the study of the origins of secret languages.48 The passion for encrypting and deciphering texts runs through the sciences like a subhistory, conspicuously so since the thirteenth century. It was a hidden component of the scholastic approach to the world, which was defined by the predominance of letters and the trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic.49 En cryption was essential to the survival of the alchemists: in addition to their habitual hermetic way of writing, they communicated their discoveries about mixtures of forbidden substances, including alcohol, in the form of crypto grams.50 Undoubtedly, one reason for Porta’s intense preoccupation with the art of “criptologia” (this would have been the title of one of his last books, but its publication was not sanctioned) was the ever-present threat of the censors and the Inquisition. As late as 1612, three years before his death, his patron and founder of the Roman Accademia dei Lincei (Academy of the Lynxes), Federico Cesi, wrote in a letter that all communications to Porta should be sent via a go between, “for if one writes to Porta, the letters are not very safe.”51 After Porta completed Magia naturalis, his next major work was a four-book treatise on secret ciphers, De furtivis literarum notis vulgò de zifferis [On Concealed 73 Magic and Experiment Characters in Writing] (1563). In the preface, Porta defines what he means by the title’s concepts: What are secret characters? In the higher branches of learning, secret characters are used for writing, executed with art and ingenuity, which can only be interpreted by the per son to whom it is addressed. This description would seem . . . to correspond exactly to the type of writing that is referred to as zifera in the vernacular of this country. . . . After we have taken brief stock of the achievements of our predecessors, we shall henceforth name only such characters a cipher by which means we may communicate with the ini tiated about those matters of which they must properly be informed in a secret or ab breviated form. Ciphers (notae) we shall name them, because they denote (notare) letters, 74 Chapter 4 Figure 4.5 In BuchvonderWeltpost[Book of the World’s Post], 1885. syllables, and statements . . . characters that have been agreed upon beforehand and call forth these meanings for the readers, which is the reason why the persons who write down these [ciphers] are called notaries (notarii). If we consider their various employ ments, we shall conclude that they are only required in those matters such as we meet with in sacred and occult learning. Namely, in order that they will not be profaned by outsiders and such others, to whom the requisite initiation has not been vouchsafed.52 Porta then proceeds to take great pains to explain, for the benefit of the cen sor, that his work is written in the interests of the powers that be: “For so often it is necessary that we advise kings, when their deputies are absent or privy to a plot, or others in other matters, with our secret knowledge, in order that any message, were it to be intercepted by bandits, spies, or governors, who serve in far-off places (for long is the arm of kings and princes), should not yield up its secret counsel, not even if a great deal of time is lavished upon it . . . it is then that we take advantage of them [ciphers] for our own protection.”53 However, in the revised version of this treatise, which was published thirty years later in a handy, almost paperback-size format that could easily be slipped into a pocket and carried around, Porta reveals in the title what he really means by the long arm of the rulers: “On Secret Ciphers or: On the Art of Conveying One’s Own Opinion (animi sensa) by Other Means in a Secret Way or Finding Out the Meanings in Other Things and Deciphering Them.”54 As early as in Magia II, Porta describes a wide range of procedures for sending messages to friends without third parties being able to detect their existence. These, then, are the two lineages in the the history of telematics, which oc casionally converge but, from the viewpoint of technique and knowledge, are entirely disparate: on the one side are strategic focusing and acceleration of com munication to serve the interests of established institutions, such as the church, the state, the military establishment, or private corporations, and on the other are the development of tactics and a culture for friends to communicate with each other, where it suffices for them to agree formally upon a code. The latter requires mutual sensitivity and respect: the willingness to engage intensely with the other. In a letter to Rudolf II, Porta proposes a bizarre telegraphic pro cedure, which is a fine illustration of this approach, precisely because of its im practicability. He describes the technique in connection with the power of magnetism to work over long distances. In Magia naturalis, Porta had described how the needles of two compasses that are far apart can influence each other and be used to send messages to a friend who is far away or even in prison. In his 75 Magic and Experiment example for the emperor in Prague, Porta describes telecommunication that is based on blood-brotherhood. I shall not go into his meticulous recipe for the sympathicum, a special ointment that is essential to this experiment, but simply cite the mode of this communication over distance: [take] two new knives and smear the salve from the point to the handle. . . . The friends must have wounds on the same part of the body, for example, on the lower part of the arm. The wounds must be kept fresh and bloody . . . above the wound, two circles must be drawn, a greater and a smaller, proportionate to the size of the wound. Around this, the letters of the alphabet are written in exactly the same order and manner, size and scale. If you desire to speak with your friend, you must hold the knife over the circle and the pierce the selected letter with its point . . . your friend will feel the same piercing pain on his wound. . . . I prick the V and he feels it, then I prick the A and he feels it, and so forth, with each separate letter. However, the knives must be smeared each with the blood of the other, mine with his and his with my blood. . . . Now after all the let ters have been assembled, he will know the thoughts of your mind.55 This is a concept of mutual exchange that is wholly in the spirit of Empedo cles, for it is generated by the binding power of sympathy—the notion of com plete compatibility between the bodies of transmitter and receiver and the transmission of their autonomous, local energies. In the above example, possi bility is not the mere shadow of reality, but rather a challenge to it. Separation, held to be “the alpha and omega of the spectacle”56 of telecommunications, is thus called into question. The techniques proposed and analyzed by Porta in his treatises on cryptog raphy focus mainly on secret writing, that is, the transcription of texts, although he does include some simple steganographic devices, or hidden writing, where the existence of the message stays concealed during the period of its transport. A particularly perfidious ancient example of steganography was the practice of scoring messages on the scalp of a slave messenger; the hair acted as a natural means of concealment. Porta also describes the use of invisible inks, which the recipient can render visible by treatment with the appropriate chemicals, and the methods of transcribing texts rhetorically or poetically, which have been practiced since ancient Greek and Roman times: messages concealed within ambiguities, metonyms, metaphors, or allegories. Further, he discovers the po tential of the newly invented printing press for adding to the arsenal of meth ods of concealment by using different typographies or colors of ink. Numerous 76 Chapter 4 examples are cited of ways to encipher by drastically reducing the text body and combining letters, numbers, and invented characters. The initiated were already familiar with the simple substitution method, which goes back at least as far as Julius and Augustus Caesar and is still referred to as the Caesar cipher. In this method, the encrypted messages are written as cryptograms where the position of the letters of the plaintext are shifted one or more places. The complete alphabet stands in the first line of the so-called tableau in the usual order; underneath, in the second line, the ciphertext alpha bet is written according to the number of places shifted. When there is a shift 77 Magic and Experiment Figure 4.6 Theory and praxis of secret languages of three places, for example, the second line begins with the letter D and ends with C; thus A is enciphered as D, and Z as C. The only key that the correspon dents must agree upon is the number of places to shift the alphabet. In monas teries in the late Middle Ages, a great many variations of this cipher were in use.57 A century before Porta’s book appeared, Leon Battista Alberti wrote a trea tise on secret writing that was based on a philological analysis of the Latin lan guage. Alberti describes the cryptographic game of substituting vowels and consonants with other, changing symbols. In 1499, Trithemius, alchemist and abbot of Sponheim, later of St. Jacob’s monastery in Würzburg, wrote his mon umental treatise Steganographia on how to conceal and encipher texts where even the rules for performing these operations are encrypted—theologically. At first the work circulated only in manuscript form; it was not published as a book until 1606, when it landed immediately on the church’s index of censored works. In 1518, Trithemius’s Polygraphia [Multi-alphabets] appeared, in which he develops rudiments of a lingua universalis (universal language). It also con tains his invention of a polyalphabetic cipher with twenty-four different alpha bets, an idea taken up by Athanasius Kircher around 150 years later. The abbot of Sponheim was inclined to dramatic gestures. In the preface to Steganogra phia—“steganography” was often used as a synonym for cryptography in this period—he also provides the ecclesiastical authorities with good ammunition for rejecting outright what he is describing: “Henceforth it may come to pass [if there is wide access to the secrets of steganography] that conjugal fidelity will no longer exist, for any wife could, without the slightest knowledge of Latin but educated through holy and chaste teachings in any other language, gain knowl edge of the despicable and unchaste inclinations of her lover, whereby the hus band might even act as the messenger and praise the contents [of the hidden message]. In this very same way, not needful of concern, the woman could send back her desires in eloquent words.”58 In De furtivis literarum notis vulgò de zifferis, Porta assembles all that was known in his time about secret writing, knowledge that was spread out over centuries and not easily accessible, to produce a proper manual. He obviously received excellent assistance from his publisher and printer, for his special symbols did not exist as type and either had to be entered in each copy by hand in writing or with specially made woodcuts. Particularly striking are the pic tograms, probably designed by Porta himself, which stand for letters, words, or agreed-upon combinations of words and are reminiscent of ancient Egyptian 78 Chapter 4 hieroglyphs. As signs located somewhere between abstraction, mystery, and representation, Egyptian hieroglyphs exerted a fascination on men of learning, from Renaissance scholars to text artists of the baroque. Even today, the arsenal of simple cryptography includes the method of concealing a short, secret mes sage within a longer, seemingly innocuous one (for example, a religious tract); the message is revealed when a specially made template, or grille, is laid over the text and the words of the message appear in the holes of the grille. More important is a system of substitution first suggested by Alberti that has been used widely throughout the history of diplomacy and espionage, which are very closely related. In Porta’s more sophisticated version, thirteen alphabets are listed one above the other in a square tableau, whereby the last thirteen char acters are arranged at random. Each alphabet is assigned a pair of letters (from AB to YZ). The two parties communicating agree upon a password that indi cates which alphabet is to be used to decipher the message. Then it is simply a matter of assigning the letters given in the cryptogram and deciphering them using the appropriate alphabet. From the perspective of media archaeology, two systems described by Porta are especially interesting. In the first, he presents a system for encryption that is based on two discrete elements. Two horizontal and two vertical lines are drawn, which cross each other at right angles (as in a game of tic-tac-toe). In the nine spaces of this framework, the alphabet, which has been reduced to twenty one letters,59 is entered according to a scheme agreed upon by the correspon dents. The three spaces at the top each contain three letters, and the other six fields have two letters apiece. A cryptogram produced by this system is written not as text, but as symbols. The exact arrangement of two, three, or four recti linear lines containing the selected letter is given, and the letter’s position is designated by another geometric form—a dot. As each space can contain up to three different letters, one dot denotes the first, two dots the second, and three dots the third. Thus the code consists simply of combinations of dots and dashes, like the Morse code developed and used centuries later by telegraphy. The only difference is the way in which the two codes are written: the Morse al phabet is written as a continuous sequence of dots and dashes, whereas in Porta’s system the two elements are noted in groups. Reading this code very quickly becomes an exercise in fast and precise pattern recognition. Porta’s second original suggestion concerns a concept for generating and in terpreting texts that has fascinated cryptologists from Trithemius and Alberti to Bruno and Kircher: Ramon Llull’s Ars generalis ultima, also used by Werner 79 Magic and Experiment Künzel and Heiko Cornelius as the title of their pilot study on the Majorcan scholar.60 This system amalgamates the arts of combination and interpretation, of cabalistic and astrological readings, in an attempt to reveal a global, intelli gible scheme for interpreting the complex holy Christian Scriptures. The Majorcan scholar’s most important basic assumption is that the three great 80 Chapter 4 Figure 4.7 An example of a code that uses the substitution method from Porta’s treatise on se cret writing. The tableau containing the letters of the alphabet generates cryptograms, which use only two discrete elements: a line and a dot. (Porta 1563) monotheistic world religions, which are founded on words and texts—Islam on the Koran, Judaism on the Talmud, Christianity on the Bible—are similar in essentials and can be linked with each other. Llull reduces the entire knowledge of the Bible to nine axiomatic concepts (such as goodness, greatness, eternity) to which he assigns nine letters of the alphabet (from B to K, without J). Five different modes (proportions, questions, subjects, virtues, and bonds), which are again subdivided each into nine terms, differentiate the nine axiomatic con cepts further by assigning groups of meanings, which can then be used to con struct manifold internal combinations with the nine-letter alphabet. The idea was to provide scholars well versed in theology with a system for using the Bible as an apparatus and reading the texts like data sets.61 However, such a system can only function if the basic precept of any mechanical system is given; namely, that it is possible to formalize whatever the system is designed to process. Llull recognized this quite clearly: “The subject of this art is to answer all questions, provided that whatever it is possible to know can be formulated as a concept.”62 Apart from the ingeniousness of this design for a late-medieval expertise sys tem, even more fascinating is the fact that Llull translated his system into ac tual artifacts. Each consisted of two rings and a disk on which he wrote the nine letters for the axiomatic terms, the hidden meanings, and possible combina tions with terms from the other classes. The rings and disk, later named a vol velle, could be rotated in either direction around a central pivot. Thus with the aid of a sort of toy, the entire categorized knowledge of the Bible was trans formed into a work of variable combinations. In the long and rich history of ars combinatoria, however, Llull’s invention was not without earlier models. His volvelle also bears a strong resemblance to the astrolabes and devices con structed by Arab astronomers before a.d. 1000 to calculate the movements and positions of stars and planets or to establish connections between astronomical and geological data.63 The design highlight of Porta’s encyclopedic work on cryptography is his presentation of encryption devices that operate with what he called circular writing. He also says that the writing is arranged in the form of a “rota, that is, like a wheel,”64 which again conjures up associations with the circular “wheel like maps” of Arab and medieval cartographers in which the Earth is depicted as a disk with the inscriptions arranged correspondingly.65 Even today, circular ciphers have proved among the most effective in cryptography. Like Llull’s model, Porta’s also consists of two graduated concentric circles with a movable disk in the middle, which can be rotated to the position of choice. However, 81 Magic and Experiment 82 Chapter 4 Figure 4.8 Two of Porta’s decorative deciphering and enciphering volvelles. The central disk can be lifted and turned; it is affixed to the page by a gold-colored thread through the middle where the hand of God, pointing, rests upon a cloud. Top:Cryptography as drama: The smiling figure of a woman on the left side has a sad-looking counterpart on the right. (Porta 1563, p. 73) Porta’s interest in this device was not to encode biblical knowledge for the pur poses of answering questions about the Scriptures. The circles of his instrument contained the letters of the alphabet and Roman numerals, and the disk was in scribed with pictograms of his own invention. According to what is decided upon by the parties communicating, any meaning can be assigned to the three components, which are then written down in a glossary. If the rotating disk has the letters of the alphabet on it, it becomes an instrument for the substitution system described above that makes encryption and decryption of the cipher text easy. Porta took Llull’s hermetic philosophical and theological expertise system and transformed it into an easy-to-use cipher system—potentially, for a wide range of people. His printer’s execution of these text generators in the first edi tion of De furtivis is really beautiful. There are two examples of them: the rotat ing disk is fixed to the page with a fine gold-colored thread, which acts as a pivot and allows the disk to be raised and turned.66 (Porta attached great importance to practical experience, which in this case must have been very expensive for the printer.) The final part of the volume consists of an extensive index of words and various possibilities for substituting them with numbers, letters, or pictograms, as he demonstrates in many examples using the methods described. Porta had stressed an essential feature of the art of cryptology in the introduction: if it is to be at all practical, it makes enormous demands on memory and exactness. Fit tingly, De furtivis was published again in 1566 in one volume with the Italian translation of Porta’s treatise on the art of memory, L’arte del ricordare. Of Glasses and Refraction Glasses as prostheses for the human eye were produced in Europe since the thir teenth century, probably in Venice, the contemporary center of glass blowing. Centuries before, however, glasses of a special kind existed in China. These glasses did not allow the wearer to see better, but instead prevented his eyes from being seen. Judges at the imperial Chinese courts had such glasses made, with lenses of cloudy gray quartz, so that the counsels for the prosecution and the defense could not make any deductions from the judge’s reaction to any thing said during the course of the trial. Thus, long before dark glasses were used to shield the eyes from bright light, they served to hide that feature of the human face which reveals the most about the soul within. In John Cassavetes’ film Faces, for example, or Jean-Luc Godard’s early films, sunglasses identify the 83 Magic and Experiment existentialist characters who set themselves apart from surrounding reality with their eyes hidden behind their shades.67 Why and how certain technical artifacts originated—what interplay of idea, blueprint, exact description, and construction led to their development—are especially difficult to reconstruct when a great number of researchers, from a variety of countries, disciplines, and epochs, have investigated different as pects. Optics is one such example. For over 2,500 years, it has been the subject of physical, biological, and philosphical inquiry. Even if we take only the main concepts, we are dealing with literally dozens of investigators from the ancient cultures of China, Greece, Rome, Arab countries, and modern Europe, who all engaged more or less rigorously with their predecessors in the field and, at best, achieved some small advance in knowledge. Standard reference works, such as encyclopedias or histories of science, have enormous difficulties in offering an overview. In fact, to my knowledge, none was even attempted in the twentieth century.68 I suspect this lack exists for two reasons, which at first glance seem to be contradictory. First, ever since Artistotle the faculty of vision has been privileged over all the other human senses with which we perceive the world. The language of science brims over with metaphors related to vision and the visible because, obviously, science depends crucially on visual experience and observation—an aspect that engaged Michel Foucault intensely in his various archaeologies of power. Second, although little is known with relative certainty about thought processes and their mechanisms, neurobiologists assume that around 60 percent of all information that reaches the brain is of visual prove nance and that the brain uses a considerable proportion of its capacity (about 30 percent) to process this information. Further, the physiological basis of vi sion is by no means fully understood, especially since vision is regarded now as a complex neurophysiological process and no longer primarily as an optome chanical one (a view precipitated by George Berkeley’s theory of vision, formu lated in the early seventeenth century). Progress is slow; much remains unknown about the technical devices for producing visuals and their psycho logical dimensions. Research on processes of perception has not advanced much farther than the findings of Gestalt psychology, which dates from the early twentieth century. On the technical side, the situation is even more astonish ing: all optical systems in cameras, for still or film photography, are still based on the geometrical laws of central perspective, which are over five hundred years old.69 84 Chapter 4 85 Magic and Experiment It will help us to locate Porta within this history of investigating vision in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries if we follow a classification proposed in 1675 by Zacharias Traber, a Jesuit mathematician whose terminology refers to Euclid. Traber’s treatise on the “nervus opticus” is divided into three books: optics, catoptrics, and dioptrics. The first concept covers the entire doctrine of sight and light, which, from a scientific point of view, is subdivided further into biological and physical phenomena. Since classical antiquity, dioptrics has con cerned the refraction of light in transparent bodies, later including the geom etry of lenses. Catoptrics deals with reflections produced by planar surfaces, although it was taught and described together with dioptrics under the name of catadioptrics. In these two subfields of optics, one can pinpoint different foci of researchers’ interest, which can be characterized from a media-archaeologi cal viewpoint as follows: the “diopricians,”—which include the great scientists Kepler, Galilei, Descartes, and Newton whose work promoted a “physics of the visible” in the seventeenth century70—were interested primarily in problems of “looking through,” whereas the “catoptricians” were fascinated by problems of “looking at.” This juxtaposing of the two views, in both senses of the word, continues to have implications and consequences for image technologies today. Figure 4.9 Stylized representation of the sun and the refraction of its rays from Porta’s trea tise on optics, Derefractione(1593, p. 124).