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3018 lines
201 KiB
Plaintext
Deep Time of the Media
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ELECTRONIC CULTURE: HISTORY, THEORY, AND PRACTICE
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Ars Electronica: Facing the Future: A Survey of Two Decades edited by Timothy Druckrey
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net_condition: art and global media edited by Peter Weibel and Timothy Druckrey
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Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture by Geert Lovink
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Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film edited by Jeffrey Shaw and Peter
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Weibel
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Stelarc: The Monograph edited by Marquard Smith
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Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means by
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Siegfried Zielinski
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Deep Time of the Media
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Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing
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by Technical Means
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Siegfried Zielinski
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translated by Gloria Custance
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The MIT Press
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Cambridge, Massachusetts
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London, England
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© 2006 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Originally published as Archäologie der Medien: Zur Tiefenzeit des technischen Hörens und
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Sehens, © Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 2002
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The publication of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut.
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any elec
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tronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage
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and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
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I have made every effort to provide proper credits and trace the copyright holders of
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images and texts included in this work, but if I have inadvertently overlooked any, I
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would be happy to make the necessary adjustments at the first opportunity.—The author
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MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales
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promotional use. For information, please e-mail special_sales@mitpress.mit.edu or
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write to Special Sales Department, The MIT Press, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, MA
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02142.
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This book was set in Bell Gothic and Garamond 3 by Graphic Composition, Inc.,
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Athens, Georgia. Printed and bound in the United States of America.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
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Zielinski, Siegfried.
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[Archäologie der Medien. English]
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Deep time of the media : toward an archaeology of hearing and seeing by technical
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means / Siegfried Zielinski ; translated by Gloria Custance.
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p. cm.—(Electronic culture—history, theory, practice)
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Includes bibliographical references and index.
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ISBN 0-262-24049-1 (alk. paper)
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1. Mass media—Historiography. 2. Mass media—Philosophy. I. Title. II. Series.
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P91.Z53813 302.23'0722—dc22 2005047856
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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foreword by timothy druckrey vii acknowledgments xiii
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1 introduction: the idea of a deep time of the media 1
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2 fortuitous finds instead of searching in vain: methodological borrowings and affinities for an anarchaeology of seeing and hearing by technical means 13
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3 attraction and repulsion: empedocles 39
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4 magic and experiment: giovan battista della porta 57
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5 light and shadow—consonance and dissonance: athanasius kircher 101
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6 electrification, tele-writing, seeing close up: johann wilhelm ritter, joseph chudy, and jan evangelista purkyne ̆ 159
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7 the discovery of a pit, a camera obscura of iniquity: cesare lombroso 205
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8 the economy of time: aleksej kapitanovich gastev 227
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9 conclusions: including a proposal for the cartography of media anarchaeology 255
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notes 281 bibliography 322 credits 363 index 365
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Contents
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Figure I.i “The problem: At times, when a fact is thrown into the smoothly flowing river of sci
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entific development that completely contradicts earlier conceptions, one of the strangest trans
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formations takes place. What is slightly new is either dissolved and assimilated or, if it is too
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deviant in the present situation, it sinks to the bottom as a foreign body where the deposits of time
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cover it—it either has an effect much later or never at all. That which is significantly new, how
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ever, rapidly has a conspicuous influence on the entire state [of things]. A violent perturbation of
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ideas about and over this commences. . . .” (Text: Ostwald 1896, p. 1f; illustration: Tyndall,
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1883, frontispiece)
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The sense of present which we live each day, as a conflict between
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the representatives of ideas having different systematic ages and all
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competing for possession of the future, can be grafted upon the
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most inexpressive archaeological record. Every shred mutely testi
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fies to the presence of the same conflicts. Each material remnant is
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like the reminder of the lost causes whose only record is the suc
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cessful outcome among simultaneous sequences.
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—george kubler, THE SHAPE OF TIME
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An anemic and evolutionary model has come to dominate many studies in the
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so-called media. Trapped in progressive trajectories, their evidence so often re
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trieves a technological past already incorporated into the staging of the con
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temporary as the mere outcome of history. These awkward histories have
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reinforced teleologies that simplify historical research and attempt to expound
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an evolutionary model unhinged from much more than vague (or eccentric)
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readings of either the available canon or its most obvious examples. Anecdotal,
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reflexive, idiosyncratic, synthetic, the equilibrium supported by lazy linearity
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has comfortably subsumed the media by cataloguing its forms, its apparatuses,
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its predictability, its necessity. Ingrained in this model is a flawed notion of sur
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vivability of the fittest, the slow assimilation of the most efficient mutation,
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the perfectibility of the unadapted, and perhaps, a reactionary avant-gardism.
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In this model there is less failure than dopey momentum and fewer ruptures
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than can be easily accounted for. As a historiography it provides an orthodox
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Foreword
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itinerary uncluttered by speculation or dissent, unfettered by difference, dis
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connected from the archive, averse to heterogeneity.
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This laissez-faire historiography dominates American writing concerned
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with the histories of media and has fueled both oversimplification and impreci
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sion. History is, after all, not merely the accumulation of fact, but an active
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revisioning, a necessary corrective discourse, and fundamentally an act of in
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terrogation—not just of the facts, but of the displaced, the forgotten, the
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disregarded.
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For some in the media, “archaeology” has come to supplant basic history, re
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placing it with a form of material retrieval—as if the preservation of material
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ity was tantamount to preserving history itself. This has led to an archaeology
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(really more a mere cataloging) of the apparatus itself, rather than an investiga
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tion of the scenes in which the apparatus found its way into the spheres of
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research and experience.
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Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge is defiant in distinguishing
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archaeology from other forms of historiography. Archaeology is “the system
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atic description of a discourse-object,” (139) it “tries to establish the system
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of transformations that constitute change.” (173), it “does not have a unifying,
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but a diversifying effect,” (160) it “is not supposed to carry any suggestion of
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anticipation.” (206)
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It is the analysis of silent births, or distant correspondences, of permanences that per
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sist . . . of slow formations that profit from the innumerable blind complicities. . . .
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Genesis, continuity, totalization: these are the themes of the history of ideas.
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But archaeological description is precisely such an abandonment of the history of
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ideas, a systematic rejection of its postulates and procedures . . . (Foucault, 138)
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As such, archaeology is not a substitute for “the history of ideas,” not a proxy
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for iconography, not an alternative for eccentric discovery or collecting, not a
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surrogate for rigorous research. With this in mind, it seems imperative to de
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lineate an approach to “media archaeology” that, on the one hand, avoids idio
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syncrasies or subjectivities, and, on the other, doesn’t lull itself into isolating
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media history as a specialized discipline insulated from its discursive histori
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cal role.
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There’s little doubt that the multithreaded developments of media have nu
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merous unresolved histories and that an enormous task of retrieval and concep
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tualization has yet to be achieved. How a media archaeology can constitute itself
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viii
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Foreword
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against self-legitimation or self-reflexivity is crucial if it is to circumvent the
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reinvention of unifying, progressive, cyclical, or “anticipatory” history—even
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as it is challenged to constitute these very vague histories as an antidote to the
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gaping lapses in traditional historiography. Indeed it is this very problem that
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afflicts media archaeology. The mere rediscovery of the forgotten, the establish
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ment of oddball paleontologies, of idiosyncratic genealogies, uncertain line
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ages, the excavation of antique technologies or images, the account of erratic
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technical developments, are, in themselves, insufficient to the building of a
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coherent discursive methodology.
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In this sense the notion of resurrecting dead media could prove farcical, fu
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tile, or more hopefully, deeply fertile. A broad accounting of the evolution of the
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apparatus, of the media image, of the history of the media effect, of excavating
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the embedded intellectual history, and so on, is surely the precursor of what will
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be an invaluable reconfiguration of a history largely focused on the device and
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its illusory images. Similarly, the rediscovery of uncommon or singular appara
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tuses, novel and fantastic as they might be, is neither decisive nor fully adequate
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to formulate an inclusive approach that distinguishes it from connoisseurship,
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or worse, antiquarianism. Merely reconstituting or retrofitting “old” media into
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“new” contexts could, in this sense, only emerge as techno-retro-kitsch.
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What is most necessary for the field of media archaeology is to both distin
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guish it as a nascent discipline and to set some boundaries in order to avoid its
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trivialization. Archaeology, as Foucault writes, “is not a return to the innermost
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secret of the origin,” rather it “describes discourses as practices specified in the
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element of the archive” (p.138 from same source.) Without evolving coherences
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that are neither reductive nor dogmatic, media archaeology faces numerous is
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sues: to evolve histories of technologies, apparatuses, effects, images, iconogra
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phies, and so forth, within a larger scheme of reintegration in order to expand a
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largely ignored aspect of conventional history.
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Already some useful examples of this exist, from Siegfried Giedion’s Mecha
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nization Takes Command or E. J. Dijksterhuis’s Mechanization of the World Picture
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to Friedrich Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter or Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s
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Railway Journey or Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the 19th
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Century, Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge, Laurent Mannoni’s The Great
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Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema, Norman Klein’s The Vatican to
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Vegas: A History of Special Effects. Each tackles the apparatus (or its “effects”) as
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integral to the substantive changes they wrought as modernity emerged. Not
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under the spell of linearity, these books stand as guidebooks (among many
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ix
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Foreword
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others), for the establishment of diversified approaches to a media history and,
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more specifically, a media archaeology that stands as a decisive field if it can de
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velop forms that extrapolate more than missing links.
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Siegfried Zielinski’s Deep Time of the Media intensifies and extends these
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studies with a wide range of scholarship from Stephen Jay Gould’s “punctuated
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equilibrium” to Georges Bataille’s “general economy,” and, more deeply, into
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the original volumes of Athanasius Kircher, Giovan Battista della Porta, and
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Giuseppe Mazzolari. Instead of tracking the reverberations, Deep Time of the
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Media situates the effect in the midst of its own milieu. Though particular ap
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proaches may represent harbingers, augurs, precursors, they are purposefully
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rooted and serve particular goals.
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It is in this context that Zielinski’s Deep Time of the Media comes as a pivotal
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work challenging the field in a number of ways. In rebridging (perhaps demol
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ishing) the widening gulf between tekhne and episteme, Deep Time of the Media re
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fuses the mere instrumentalization of technology as meticulously as it integrates
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the responsibilities of knowledge. Riding through the stratifications has re
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vealed far more than the unearthing of new “species” of media, but is leading
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toward a rethinking of the bleak search for origins by imagining (exposing)
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intricate topologies that link movement and coincidence, failure and possibil
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ity, obscurity and revelation. This move through and across the “tectonic” flows
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suggests a sweeping remapping of the hitherto centralized nodes of learning and
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that traces the decentralized currents of time, space, and communication as a
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kind of historical formation in which routes replace nodes and in which east
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meets west meets north meets south. In this the epistemic centers in the Euro
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centric canon just don’t hold and nor does a singular rationalistic scientific logos.
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In its “case studies” Deep Time of the Media provides both a rigorous method
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ology and a reconceptualization of media studies. For Zielinski only full pri
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mary sources provide adequate evidence. So in tandem with a rigorous and
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dedicated teaching and lecturing schedule, his peripatetic research has taken
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him on the nomadic circuits of his subjects. Here he constructs the new cartog
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raphy, seizes on the crossed path, the forgotten archive. His lectures, always
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laden with the trade-mark overhead projector, always trace an adventure into
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some new facet of the journey—with an obscure archive a decisive discovery.
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Abandoning historical convention in favor of historical acuity, Deep Time of
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the Media travels into deep time and discovers not just more remains, but instead
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neglected constellations. Within these are towering figures of scientific and
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philosophical investigation—della Porta, Kircher, Ritter, Hutton, Lombroso,
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x
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Foreword
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among many others. These bold personalities demand our attention not because
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they outdid their times, but rather because they embodied them.
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With them come the shifting objects of study—less and less material
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light and shadow, electricity and conduction, sound and transmission, magic
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and illusion, vision and stimuli—in short, conditional phenomena. Fleeting
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and contingent, the phenomenal world was lured into visibility by instruments
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whose ingenuity often eclipsed their discoveries. At least we had been convinced
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that this is so. Zielinski proves us wrong. Through their instruments the sphere
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of representation exploded. Its fragments resonate in every future media appa
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ratus. Through their instruments the interface emerged, through their instru
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ments a fragile imaginary was brought to light, through their instruments time,
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sound, reflex, could be seen, through their instruments the world was no longer
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a paltry given, it was a moving target, a dynamic presence, it was, to put it
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bluntly, alive.
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Ever since, our machines have aspired to the “real” and, luckily, have fallen
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short of their phony virtual utopias. This surely explains why the last chapter of
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Deep Time focuses on the “artistic, scientific, technical, and magical challenges”
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that persist in contemporary media praxis. Zielinski’s tenacious role as a histo
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rian has never restrained his enormous commitment to colleagues and students.
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His unyielding charge is to relentlessly cultivate “dramaturgies of difference,”
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to “intervene” into the omnivorous systems from the periphery, to refuse cen
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tralization, to seize the imagination back from its grim and superfluous engi
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neers, and to construct an art worthy of its “deep time.” As Deleuze writes:
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It is not enough to disturb the sensory-motor connections. It is necessary to combine the
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optical-sound image with the enormous forces that are not those of simply intellectual
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consciousness, nor of the social one, but of a profound, vital intuition.
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—Timothy Druckrey
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xi
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Foreword
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My grateful thanks are due to Gloria Custance for her untiring and exceptional
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work in translating this book. She also translated all quotations from the Ger
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man, unless noted otherwise.
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Nils Röller read the greater part of the original manuscript and I thank him
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for the many fruitful discussions and constructive suggestions, including in the
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earlier years of our collaboration. I am indebted to Timothy Druckrey, Keith
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Griffiths, Dietmar Kamper, Anthony Moore, Miklós Peternàk, The Brothers
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Quay, and Otto E. Roessler for their generous intellectual support and encour
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agement, which played an essential role in the realization of the project. Werner
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Nekes I thank for his hospitality and the many visits to his unique archive.
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Wolfgang Ernst, Thomas Hensel, Angela Huemer, Christine Karralus, Fried
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rich Kittler, Jürgen Klauke, David Link, Alla Mitrofanova, Morgane, Peter
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Pancke, Hans Ulrich Reck, Elisabeth von Samsonow, Silvia Wagnermaier, and
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Sigrid Weigel listened patiently to my expedition reports and provided in
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valuable aid in the form of material, questions, commentaries, and suggestions.
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Nadine Minkwitz and Juan Orozco gave generously of her time for the digital
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processing of illustrations, and I am grateful to Heiko Diekmeier and Claudia
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Trekel for their skill with reproductions. For his great help with the texts in
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Latin, I thank Franz Fischer; for translations, Angela Huemer and Rosa Barba
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(Italian), Peter Frucht and Adèle Eisenstein (Hungarian), Lioudmila Voropai
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(Russian), and Gloria Custance (English and French), whose assistance with the
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German edition was, in many respects, completely indispensable. Anke Simon,
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Daniela Behne, Uschi Buechel, Andrea Lindner, and Birgit Trogemann were
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Acknowledgments
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tireless in their efforts to procure all the books and media I required. Patricia
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Nocera I thank for generously giving me access to the treasures of the Bib
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lioteca Nazionale di Napoli and guiding me through its labyrinth. In the Her
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zogin Anna Amalia library in Weimar, Katrin Lehmann provided exceptional
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assistance for my research. The Staatsbibliothek Berlin and the university li
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braries in Cologne and Salzburg were very helpful in connection with work on
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Dee, Fludd, Kircher, Llull, Porta, and Schott. For their help in matters of or
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ganization, I thank Suse Pachale and Heidrun Hertell.
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Many thanks to Roger Conover for preparing and overseeing this edition for
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MIT Press and to Lisa Reeve for her editorial support.
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My research and the writing of the original text were possible within such
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a short time period only because the Ministry of Science, North Rhine
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Westphalia, granted me an additional sabbatical semester. My special thanks
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go to Burkhard König at Rowohlt for his faith in the project, and his constant
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and unfailing support for my endeavors.
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xiv
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Acknowledgments
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Our sexuality . . . belongs to a different stage of evolution than our
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state of mind.
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—bruno schulz,“an witold gombrowicz.” in: DIE REPUBLIK
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DER TRÄUME
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In the early 1980s, the Texan science-fiction author Bruce Sterling invented
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the phenomenon of cyberpunk, together with the sci-fi writers William Gibson
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from Canada and Samuel R. Delany of New York, an ex-boxer and professor
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of literature. Their creation married clean high-tech and dirty rubbish, order
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and anarchy, eternal artificial life and decomposing matter. Techno- and necro
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romanticism came together to create a new Lebensgefühl. The inspired collabo
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ration of Ridley Scott, film director, and Douglas Trumball, designer and set
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decorator, translated this feeling into cinema in the brilliant Bladerunner (1982).
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The Matrix (1999), directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski, fulfilled a similar
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function at the end of the 1990s for the now computer-literate fans of cybercul
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ture, who by then were all linked via worldwide data networks. The horror that
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stalks the film Matrix is no longer an individual, amoral machine that operates
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locally and has taken on human form, as in Bladerunner, but, instead, is a data
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network that spans the entire globe and controls each and every action, emotion,
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and expression.
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When one generation of computer hardware and software began to follow
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the next at ever shorter intervals, Sterling initiated “The Dead Media Project.”
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There, he exchanged his wanderings through an imaginary everyday life in the
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1
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Introduction: The Idea of a Deep Time of
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the Media
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future for an energetic movement that traversed the past to arrive in the pres
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ent. Together with like-minded people, in 1995 he started a mailing list (at that
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time, still an attractive option on the Internet) to collect obsolete software. This
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list was soon expanded to include dead ideas or discarded artifacts and systems
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from the history of technical media: inventions that appeared suddenly and dis
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appeared just as quickly, which dead-ended and were never developed further;
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models that never left the drawing board; or actual products that were bought
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and used and subsequently vanished into thin air.1 Sterling’s project confronted
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burgeoning fantasies about the immortality of machines with the simple fac
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ticity of a continuously growing list of things that have become defunct. Ma
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chines can die.2 Once again, romantic notions of technology and of death were
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closely intertwined in “The Dead Media Project.”
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Media are special cases within the history of civilization. They have con
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tributed their share to the gigantic rubbish heaps that cover the face of our
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planet or to the mobile junk that zips through outer space. While the USSR was
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falling apart, the cameraman of Tarkovsky’s legendary Solaris, Vadim Yusov, was
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teaching astronauts from the MIR space station to take pictures of Earth for
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Andrei Ujica’s Out of the Present (1995). The 35mm camera they used is probably
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still orbiting up there over our heads. After the rolls of film had been shot and
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stunning pictures of the blue planet were in the can, the camera was simply
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thrown out of the escape hatch. Taking it back to Earth would have been too ex
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pensive, and it was not considered worthwhile to develop a special program just
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to destroy a few kilograms of media technology.
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The stories and histories that have been written on the evolution of media
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had the opportunity—at least theoretically—to do some recycling, in line with
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the rubbish theory proposed by Michael Thompson:3 they might have searched
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through the heaps of refuse and uncovered some shining jewels from what has
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been discarded or forgotten. Nothing endures in the culture of technology;
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however, we do have the ability to influence how long ideas and concepts retain
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their radiance and luminescence. Up to now, media historians have neglected to
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do anything of the kind, mainly on ideological grounds, and this has also had
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methodological repercussions. In the extensive literature on the genealogies
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of telematics (from antiquity’s metal speaking-tube to the telephone; from
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Aeneas’s water telegraph to the Integrated Service Data Network [ISDN]), or cin
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ema archaeology (from the cave paintings of Lascaux to the immersive IMAX),
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or the history of computers (from Wilhelm Schickard’s mechanical calculating
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apparatus to the universal Turing machine), one thing above all others is refined
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2
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Chapter 1
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and expanded: the idea of inexorable, quasi-natural, technical progress. It is re
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lated to other basic assumptions, such as the history of political hegemony de
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veloping from the strictly hierarchical to strictly democratic organization of
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systems, the rationale of economic expediency, the absolute necessity for simple
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technical artifacts to develop into complex technological systems, or the con
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tinual perfecting of the illusionizing potential of media. In essence, such ge
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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). |