The Patron Goddesses of the Layabout Two 14 inch televisions are suspended from the ceiling by a network of cables. The televisions, spaced about five feet apart are facing one another. Between them is an ornately decorated column made of mahogany. At the top of the column are a pair of lenses inviting the viewer to look neither to the screen on the right nor on the left, but straight ahead. Different sets of ambient noises come from each television. A cardboard pyramid extends horizontally from each screen, narrowing into each side of the column, adjacent to each lens. The screens are not visible, but the possibility exists that they can be seen obliquely or by means of mirrors, through the lenses. This is in fact the case. A trail of cloudy vapors, seen in three dimensions, passes before the viewer's gaze. On the white walls, in large white vinyl letters, are the names of the clouds as they originally appeared in Luke Howard's 1802 essay, On the Modifications of Clouds. The Patron Goddesses of the Layabout
Paul Aurele Robert
In the comedic play, The Clouds, Aristophanes critiqued a tendency in Athenian education towards excessive sophistry, pernicious speculation and useless philosophical quibbles. Aristophanes saw such a propensity for thought over action as undermining the foundations of traditional mor.ality and religion, and corrupting justice. The Clouds, who form a chorus, function as a metaphor for metaphysical thought that is not grounded in practical experience but is theoretical, indefinite, and open to possibility. Aristophanes takes the historical Socrates a loose model for his main character, a sophist. The Clouds are portrayed as the sources of the sophists' intelligence, dialectic, and reason, but these are not valorized. Rather, they are associated with laziness, unrealistic daydreaming, and the pursuit of useless, not to mention erroneous, knowledge.1
Paul Robert l This tension between theoretical conjecturing for its own sake and thought applied to predetermined, sensible, and practical ends resurfaced significantly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Scientific rationalism and the reductive, mechanistic conception of the universe put forward by the followers of Newton elicited criticism from natural philosophers and artists less optimistic about a program whose agenda was to rob the world of its mystery. And this position was far more than an unsubstantiated sentiment. Research on perception had moved from the geometry of light to the physiology of the human sense organs, with disturbing philosophical implications for classical models of the mind, the senses, the world, and their relationship to one another. The stereoscope, a "philosophical toy," was an important element in this project, generating an instance of visual depth perception and palpability in the absence of a corresponding spatial referent. The upshot of such play was a quintessentially theoretical proposition, namely the calling into doubt of an objective, independently existing reality. And clouds, while never having left the earth's atmosphere, made a significant cultural re-appearance on this occasion. Clouds, gases, and atmospheric effects presented the senses with ambiguous stimuli, providing Romantic painters with a means of questioning the relation between vision and touch. This line of inquiry suggested similar conclusions as those discovered by the investigators of perception. Additionally, the classification of clouds, occurring early in the nineteenth century, revealed the arbitrary role played by language in constituting the world. In each case, what was disrupted was the common sense belief that human faculties, whether physiological organs or linguistic categories, faithfully relayed the truth of the world. By drawing attention to the mediated nature of experience, natural philosophers and artists opened a space in which the world in its raw, unknown, and untamed state could be glimpsed. Rather than contributing to the
Paul Robert 2 project of explaining the universe through science, these insights threatened to undo it. Mystery then, was reinstated at a level beyond simple metaphor.
In spite of their disruptive potential however, the stereoscope and clouds, both as subject matter and as named "objects," were also amenable to positivist currents, their original, perhaps sophistic value being subverted by discourses of clarity and progress. Once cornrnodified, the stereoscope, with its supposed capacity to mimic the truth of the world, reaffirmed even more strongly the very notion it sought to displace: that of a clear delineation between subject and object, between the internal world of the mind and a pre-existing referential world. Likewise, the clouds, previously symbols of all that eluded the conventions of painting, were eventually harnessed by and made to submit to those earlier conventions, even the rigidity of linear perspective. Cloud names, like all nomenclatures, solidified into accepted truths through general use, concealing the capricious relationship between the senses, language, and the world. Each was eventually made to serve the purposes that it had temporarily displaced.
I
The stereoscope, one of the most popular forms of nineteenth century visual culture, represents a radical shift in the conceptualization of vision. Stereoscopes belonged to a class of instruments often referred to as "philosophical toys" which also included the thaurnatrope, the phenakistiscope, zootrope, and kaleidoscope. These apparatuses provided natural philosophers perspicuous examples of the physiological processes of vision. An interest in motion, afterimages, colour, binocularity, and depth perception separated the work of these researchers from a concern
Paul Robert 3 with geometrical optics, which had dominated the theorization of vision since antiquity. Philosophers and scientists including ,---Euclid, G~n, Al Kindi, Kepler, Descartes, and Leonardo da Vinci had preoccupied themselves with the study of rays of light between objects in the external world and the eye. Whether the eye emitted the light or acted as a receptor, it was agreed that light rays traveled in straight lines between objects and the eye, the visual cone or pyramid being of central importance. The eye was assumed to be an adjunct of the mind, which under normal circumstances registered in an unmediated way the truth about the world. Jonathan Crary has elaborated on how the camera obscura, in the discourse of Locke, Descartes, and others, provided a model of vision that emphasized the separation between observer and observed, between the external world, and the inner world of the mind.2 As Richard Rorty has shown, the mind was conceived as a mirror made up of representations which more or less accurately corresponded to the world "out there".3 According to this model, the eye functioned as a passive receptor of images, a lens between objects and the mind.
It was these suppositions that studies in the physiological processes of perception sought to disrupt. From Goethe's Theory of Colours to Charles Wheatstone's studies in binocular vision, the emerging model emphasized the active and productive role of the perceptual organs, the disparity between stimulus and sensation, and collapsed the division between subject and object, observer and observed, onto a single plane. The stereoscope stressed the role of the body in creating a unified three-dimensional image by reconciling two flat, disparate images. It highlighted the possibility for the sensorium to produce both depth and visual tactility in the absence of a solid, spatial referent. Furthermore, it demonstrated how the physiological condition of organs and the brain preceded the existence of external objects in a self-present world.
Paul Robert 4 But these claims seem grossly inflated when one thinks of the commercialization of the stereoscope in London in the 1850s and 60s, of its role as a form of popular entertainment in parlor culture, and especially of the discourse in popular magazines, which claimed that the stereoscope reproduced reality truly and accurately. In fact, it would seem in this context that the stereoscope reinforced the old model of the camera obscura and preserved the separation between the observer and an independently existing world. This disparity is not merely the result of opposing ideological positions surrounding a stable set of facts, but is rooted in a cultural transformation of the stereoscope. As Laura Burd Schiavo has astutely observed and convincingly argued, "the ideological 'lessons' of the stereoscope changed dramatically as the device moved from scientific instrument to popular amusement, while the technological structure remained, to a great extent, intact."4 In what follows, I will refer to these two competing discourses as critical and positivist, the first denoting the experience of actual researchers, and the second the popular appropriation of their findings.
Schiavo' s main thesis is that the stereoscope served incompatible cultural purposes as it passed from the laboratory to the parlor, while its structure remained virtually unchanged.5 However, she also draws attention to the differences between Charles Wheatstone and Sir David Brewster's stereoscopes, differences that did not so much account for their different purposes as reflect them. The first stereoscope was the result of Wheatstone's explorations of binocular vision and depth perception. It consisted of two boards propped vertically at both ends of a horizontal bar, facing one another. In between them were two plane mirrors set at 45° to the boards, and perpendicular to one another. On the boards, Wheatstone displayed outline drawings that represented views of the same geometric objects (i.e. cubes, pyramids, and cones) from slightly different angles. By
Paul Robert 5. placing his eyes as close to the mirrors as possible, Wheatstone was able to see both images at once, one with each eye, and to test his theory of depth perception through binocular vision. He demonstrated his invention at the 1838 meeting of the British Association. Brewster, the inventor of the kaleidoscope, reacted with enthusiasm, later producing his own version, which was less cumbersome, and hence more marketable.6
In contrast to his own version, roughly eight inches long and five inches wide, Brewster described Wheatstone's model as "a clumsy and unmanageable apparatus, rather than an instrument for general use."7 Brewster replaced Wheatstone's mirrors with lenses spaced about two and a half inches apart, and allowed for the easy insertion of daguerreotypes. Schiavo elaborates, "concealed components produced an instrument that resembled opera glasses more than it did laboratory equipment, a design that anticipated an audience unconcerned with the technicalities of optical convergence."8 Crary notes that because the images were placed in front of the eyes, it was possible for the viewer to believe that he or she was looking forward at something. In this way it supported what Roland Barthes' calls the "referential illusion" .9 By contrast, the Wheatstone model "made clear the atopic nature of the perceived stereoscopic image, the disjunction between experience and its cause."10
The difference between the critical and positivist discourses also reveals itself in Wheatstone and Brewster's designs for stereoscopic cameras. Wheatstone's concern was less with the mimetic replication of the external world than with revealing the nature of physiological optics, whereas Brewster believed in the possibility of recreating the truth of vision. Wheatstone's instructions for generating pictures to be used in his stereoscope suggested the convergence of the optic axes ought to be about 18 degrees:
Paul Robert 6 To obtain the proper projections for this distance [eight inches before the eye], the camera must be placed, with its lens accurately directed towards the object, successively in two points of the circumference of a circle of which the object is the center and the points at which the camera is so placed must have the angular distance of 18° from each other, exactly that of the optic axes of the stereoscope.11
In accordance with Wheatstone's directives, T.H. Powell designed an apparatus upon which a single lens camera could be moved along a groove. Two pictures were taken, one after the other, with a maximum distance of thirteen inches separating the two camera positions. Preserving the 18° convergence of axes, the furthest the object photographed could be from the lens was approximately 40 feet.1 2
In Brewster's binocular camera, by contrast, the distance between the lenses was fixed at 21/2 inches, the average distance between the eyes in humans.13 Light entered two separate lenses, exposing adjacent photographic plates. Brewster not only deemed his invention, like his lenticular stereoscope, to be more efficient and compact, but also more theoretically sound because of its closer correspondence to human biology. Brewster considered its anthropocentric structure to be more natural and objective, to reproduce more accurately the truth of human vision, whereas Wheatstone's constant of 18° was arbitrary. Brewster critiqued, "the picture taken by Mr. Wheatstone's rule is one which no man ever saw or can see, until he can place his eyes at the distance of twenty inches! It is, in short, the picture of a living doll, in which parts are seen which are never seen in society, and parts hid which are always seen."14
Wheatstone, however, had already anticipated this objection. Wheatstone's research concerned itself with objects that were relatively close to the viewer, as it was here that the convergence
Paul Robert 7 between the optic axes was the greatest. Physical proximity brought vision into play as an operation of reconciling disparity.15 Wheatstone deduced from his experiments,
When an object is viewed at so great a distance that the optic axes of both eyes are sensibly parallel when directed towards it, the perspective projections of it, seen by each eye separately, and the appearance to the two eyes is precisely the same as when the object is seen by one eye only.16
Stated otherwise, proximity increased the discrepancy between the images presented to each eye, and it was this discrepancy that was responsible for the production of depth. It was for this reason that Wheatstone insisted on the constant of 18°, to ensure that, regardless of the distance between camera and subject, the illusion of depth would be preserved. Brewster's camera, with its fixed span between the lenses, could have been criticized for its inability to render images of distant objects in depth, making their existence as stereographs absurd as they could only produce effect similar to ordinary flat photographs.
Brewster's rhetoric conformed to that of the "vernacular, camera-based iteration of the stereoscope's significance and purpose."17 Schiavo elaborates,
[P]hotographers and cultural critics proposed a theory of vision that held fast to Crary's classical model of vision with its suppression of subjectivity and its grounding in a faith in human optics as an accurate reflection of the external world. In similarly worded catalogs, trade publications, and editorials, they promised eminently reproducible, truthful depictions of lifelike solidity. This was a far cry from theories being presented in physiological optics about the productive nature of vision.18
Paul Robert 8 To bring into greater relief the discrepancy between the cultural implications of the stereoscope as it was used by scientists and philosophers in the laboratory and its positivist reappropriation in popular culture, we can examine it in relation to a related cultural feature of the nineteenth century, the phantasmagoria.
II
As Terry Castle has written, phantasmagoria is a widely used literary term denoting imaginary figures experienced in dreams or fevered state, but its original meaning has had less currency. Originally, phantasmagoria referred to early nineteenth century exhibitions and public entertainments in which ghosts were produced by means of a magic lantern, the first occurring in London in 1802.19 The discourse that accompanied phantasmagoria was largely one of demystification. Castle has traced the rhetoric behind the magic lantern shows, drawing attention to the context, one in which belief in ghosts was in the process of being replaced by the arguments of scientific rationalism:
Producers of phantasmagoria often claimed, somewhat disingenuously, that the new entertainment would serve the cause of public enlightenment by exposing the frauds of charlatans and supposed ghost-seers. Ancient superstition would be eradicated when everyone realized that so-called apparitions were in fact only optical illusions. The early magic-lantern shows developed as mock exercises in scientific demystification, complete with preliminary lectures on the fallacy of ghost-belief and the various cheats perpetrated by conjurers and necromancers over the centuries ....20
... [R]ecent developments in optics, the new technology of mirrors and lenses, and the refinement of inventions like the magic lantern
Paul Robert 9 itself gave would-be skeptics a technical language with which to debunk, retroactively, many reported spectral appearances, including notorious spirit-raisings performed by ancient pythonesses and necromancers.21
Castle notes however, that in spite of their expressed intentions, these new magicians often delighted in replicating the aura of the supernatural, in creating convincing deceptions without explicitly revealing their mechanisms, thereby reproducing the traditional structures of power.22 Producers of phantasmagorias were surprisingly successful in creating convincing simulations of supernatural appearances, eliciting reactions of shocked amazement in their audiences.
Karl Marx applied the term phantasmagoria to commodities, drawing attention to the way in which their visual presence concealed the trace of the labour that produced them. Like the magic lantern, whose spectral effects drew attention away from its inner workings, so too, capitalist production sought to cover its own trace by foregrounding the consumable properties of manufactured goods.23
At first glance, it would seem that such criticisms would not apply to the stereoscope. It differed from the magic lantern shows in that the spectator was in control of the process, and could experience the illusions that it produced independently of any particular context. Also, the instrument's structure was more agreeable to an examination of its technicalities. While the stereoscope by itself did not dispel any corresponding supernatural phenomena in the way that magic lantern shows did, it nevertheless demonstrated the general power of scientific explanations to account for things that should not be, and was defended in the same way. Brewster's goal, like that of phantasmagoric entertainers, was to liberate people from the
Paul Robert 10 powers of superstition through the popularization of scientific knowledge. By clearly revealing the principles of optics and acoustics which had aided the ruling and priestly classes in deception, Brewster saw the stereoscope strengthening a critical consciousness. As Crary recounts, "his implied program, the democratization and mass dissemination of techniques of illusion, simply collapsed that older model of power onto a single human subject, transforming each observer into simultaneously the magician and the deceived."24
But in both the case of the phantasmagoria and the stereoscope, the alleged demystification is in fact responsible for a deeper level of mystification. The ambitions of educating a gullible public betrayed a positivist conception of truth and deception. Castle notes that while the appeal to tricksters with lenses and mirrors was one explanation for the appearance of supernatural phenomena, a more dominant explanation that emerged was the appeal to mental hallucinations:
The rationalists did not so much negate the traditional spirit world as displace it into the realm of psychology. Ghosts were not exorcised only internalized and reinterpreted as hallucinatory thoughts. Yet this internalization of apparitions introduced a latent irrationalism into the realm of mental experience .... [B]y relocating the world of ghosts in the closed space of the imagination, one ended up supernaturalizing the mind itse1f.2s
The discourse of science versus superstition created a distraction from the more disturbing reality of the human sensorium' s capacity for producing specters, and the terrifying possibility that there was no clear line between thinking and being haunted by one's thoughts.
Paul Robert 11 With the stereoscope, the appeal to a supporting discourse of popular science concealed, in an even more direct way, its most significant and disruptive cultural implications, namely the role of the body in producing visual space. According to the popular account, although the stereoscope deceived the senses, no attempt was made to mislead the intellect. In fact, the stereoscope would set the intellect to work in trying to discover the cause of the incongruence between the images and the illusion of depth. In this regard, the stereoscope was wrapped up in a discourse of truth about vision, about the relation between binocularity and depth perception, the images on the stereographic cards serving as equivalents for the impressions made on the retina by external referents, much as in the model of the camera obscura.26 But the significance of the stereoscope's invention was not the discovery of the truth about vision, as Crary and others have observed, but the production of optical depth without three-dimensional space, thereby insinuating an arbitrary relationship between stimulus and sensation. While the popular story traces a progression from deception and misunderstanding to truth and knowledge, the scientific one moves from a straightforward, objective model of vision to a complex, subjective, and ultimately unknowable process.
Martin Jay notes that the physiological and psychological processes that allow for the integration of two images into one are only partially understood, as are those that allow the inversed image from the retina to be "read" correctly by the mind.27 To a large extent, binocular vision is still a "black-box": the relation between input (two separate images) and output (a single relief image) is relatively straightforward. It is possible to predict the effect two separate images will produce by examining them closely enough. But the mechanism by which the transformation from one to the other takes place remains enigmatic. It is along this axis that positivist and critical conceptions of the stereoscope
Paul Robert 12 can be most clearly read: it was precisely the illusion of scientific clarity that did the most to veil the reality of stereoscopic production. By emphasizing the relation between the paired cards and their three-dimensional effect, the nebulous issue of the body's role in the transformation was effectively downplayed. In this sense, the analogy of the stereoscope to phantasmagoria still applies, although as Schiavo observes, the "illusion ... was one of positivism and avowed transparency" rather than of paranormal phenomena.28
The stereoscope produces its unique quality, its illusion of depth, through the viewer's constant reconstruction of two disparate images. "It's 'realism' presupposes perceptual experience to be essentially an apprehension of differences."29 Crary reasons that, "there never really is a stereoscopic image ... it is a conjuration, an effect of the observer's experience of the differential between two other images."3°Further, it is an effect for which there is no corresponding, substantial referent in the physical world. The stereoscope calls upon the viewer to enact, perform, and reproduce a code learned through binocular experience in the world. This is effected through "saccadic" jumps from one focal point to the other.31 According to Brewster's early account, "the relief is given by the subsequent play of the optic axes varying themselves successively upon, and unifying, the similar points in each picture that correspond to different distances from the observer."32
In spite of claims alleging the correspondence of stereoscopic views to real objects and places, the stereoscopic experience never quite matched a visual encounter with their corporeal presence. Crary deduces that one reason for the obsolescence of the stereoscope was that it was insufficiently "phantasmagoric," that the concealment of the means of illusion was never fully realized. Even in Brewster's lenticular stereoscope and the later Holmes
Paul Robert 13 stereoscope, the physical engagement it required of the viewer became unacceptable. The binocular nature of the stereoscopic image could never be hidden, thereby exposing the ground of vision in the body, in its "pulsings and phantasms".33 Crary argues that photography, on the other hand, reinforced a more traditional conception of the observer:
An apparatus openly based on a principle of disparity, on a 'binocular' body, and on an illusion patently derived from the binary referent of the stereoscopic card of paired images, gave way to a form [photography] that preserved the referential illusion more fully than anything before it. Photography defeated the stereoscope as a mode of visual consumption as well because it recreated and perpetuated the fiction that the 'free' subject of the camera obscura was still viable.34
Whereas in Schiavo' s account, the stereoscope was called upon to support the referential illusion, in Crary' s, it failed to adequately do so and hence lost its status as a favoured visual technology. But in each case respectively, the critical implications of the stereoscope were either subverted or extinguished. To understand more fully the nature of these implications, it will be helpful to examine how the study of physiological optics contributed to a renewed conception of the senses generally.
III
Crary emphasizes the way in which the study of the perceptive organs led to a "separation of the senses."35 In the Classical era, touch had been an integral part of theories of vision: "from Descartes to Berkeley to Diderot, vision is conceived in terms of analogies to touch."36 Both faculties were seen as direct
Paul Robert 14 sources of knowledge, working according to principles unaffected by and transcending their mere physical modes of operation. Crary notes that they were seen "more as adjuncts of a rational mind and less as physiological organs."37 As such they were mutually reinforcing, corroborating one another and confirming to the mind the truth of the world. Descartes acknowledged that the formation of images in the brain occurred by a similar process to the reading of signs that were not perfect representations of reality. For instance, a square could be represented by a diamond, a circle by an oval. He also recognized that the improper functioning of the brain or nervous system could interfere with the obtaining of accurate knowledge. However, as Jay points out,
[W]hereas many later theorists of representation would come to think of sign systems as conventional and self-referential, Descartes was still enough of an ontological realist with a strong correspondence theory of truth to believe that the mind's natural geometry-its intellectual sign system, if you will-was congruent with that of the natural world.38
Robert Mandrou goes further, "until at least the eighteenth century, touch remained therefore the master sense; it tests, confirms what sight could only perceive. It assures perception, gives solidity to the impressions provided by the other senses that do not present the same security."39
In the nineteenth century, theorization and experimentation raised fundamental questions about the nature of vision, about the relation of the senses to one another and to the mind, and about the presence of a world whose existence could be ascertained prior to sensory stimulation. Goethe's Farbenlehre (Theory of Colours) undermined classical models of vision by focusing on optical effects not generated by external referents, but by the eye itself, as in the case of afterimages. Such a view emphasized the
Paul Robert 15 active nature of perception, characterizing the eye not as a passive receptor of stimulus, but as engaged in the production of optical effects. The study of vision was displaced from the geometrical principles governing the transmission of light, to a biological locus. Crary summarizes Arthur Schopenhauer's view:
Knowledge of a phenomenal world begins with the excited condition of the retina and develops according to the constitution of this organ. The positing of external objects, as well as concepts of shape, extension and solidity come only after this founding experience.... [Schopenhauer] repeatedly demonstrated how 'what occurs within the brain,' within the subject, is wrongly apprehended as occurring outside the brain in the world.4D
In this way Schopenhauer collapsed the distinction between external and internal reality, positing the subject as both the site and producer of sensation.41 As Michel Foucault has articulated,
It was found that knowledge has anatomo-physiological conditions, that it is formed gradually within the structures of the body, that it may have a privileged place within it, but that its forms cannot be dissociated from its peculiar functioning; in short; that there is a nature of human knowledge that determines its forms and that at the same time can be manifest to it in its own empirical contents.42
As such, vision and touch no longer occurred on the same field, but were modulated by their respective sense organs.43 A proliferation of optical technologies ensued for the purpose of testing the rtew hypotheses. These differed from instruments like the microscope and telescope in that they were not of direct assistance in the study of nature but served the purpose of instructive entertainment for natural philosophers. As such, "philosophical toys" encouraged reflection on the processes of perception, and the complexity of relationships between the senses. Crary identifies the stereoscope as "one major cultural site
Paul Robert 16 on which [the] breach between tangibility and visuality is singularly evident."44 He elaborates,
The stereoscope ... provided a form in which "vividness" of effect increased with the apparent proximity of the object to the viewer, and the impression of three-dimensional solidity became greater as the optic axes of each diverged. Thus the desired effect of the stereoscope was not simply likeness, but immediate, apparent tangibility. But it is a tangibility that has been transformed into a purely visual experience, of a kind that Diderot could never have imagined. The "reciprocal assistance" between sight and touch Diderot specified in Letters on the Blind is no longer operative.45
By creating a situation in which the eyes perceived depth, solidity, and space, while the hand and the intellect registered only a flat surface, the stereoscope questioned the subordination of vision to touch, an assumption stemming from the belief in an objective, empirically verifiable world existing independently of the observer.46 Furthermore, as the observer could see, prior to looking through the lenses, that the single three-dimensional image was in fact a trick produced by two flat images, the stereoscope also called into doubt the relation of vision to previous experience, and therefore the stability of such a world.
IV
While the stereoscope exemplified this separation in which objects were subjected to the paradox of being made to appear hyper-tangible, more real than real, without actually having any material substance at all, a similar pattern can be detected in the subject matter of the contemporaneous Romantic painters. John Ruskin, in his Modern Painters, contended that what was distinctive about the moderns was their cloudiness.47 And clouds,
Paul Robert 17 often compared to wool, sheep, cauliflower, pillows, cotton batting, wadding, fleece, hair, or veils, also play up the schism between visual weightiness and tactile insubstantiality. Clouds can never deliver concretely that which they promise visually, not only because of their vaporous nature, but also because of the distance required for the illusion of "object-ness" to take effect. Close up, clouds look and feel less and less like clouds and more and more like fog. Cloud then, with its play of opacity and airiness, was an ideal subject from the natural world with which painters could, like the investigators of physiological optics, interrogate the relation of the senses to the mind.
Connor emphasizes that while gases have never been thought to be otherworldly, they provide us with metaphors of it,
The special status of air comes, of course, from its invisibility, or rather its invisible power. Gases, or, as they were known until the late eighteenth century, airs, constituted effect without form. Airs were not immaterial, but provide·d an imaging of the immaterial. The Stoic conception of a cosmos held together by the pneuma, a kind of vital fire, is inherited in the intense and bodily imagination of air. Air, of course, connotes purity, aspiration, the soul itself. There seem to be very few cultures in which the soul or mind is not imaged as some kind of air, breath, or vapour. Air, we might say, is the elastic body of spirit. Air approximates the final, most ethereal condition of spirit, along with the alchemical guarantee that grosser matter may be refined upwards into it.48
For the Romantic painters, clouds carried rich metaphorical associations, from the connotation of open expanses without frontiers, to "their desire for liberty and a nature free from the rule of man" .49 Clouds represented perceptible analogues of the imperceptible and infinite, or, paradoxically, could be employed to present "concealment" and "hiddenness." But the metaphorical
Paul Robert 18 possibilities to which clouds lent themselves provides only one account of their appeal.
Ruskin ~istinguished between the h~ziness of th~ moder~ i?,1/](t){ ", and the clarity of seventeenth century pamters. Speakmg of Jofui I , · · · ' ' " , G Bellini, Leonardo,, Angelico, Durer, Perugino, and Raph~rn:e"' · says, ~()\
Clear, calm, placid, perpetual vision, far and near; endless perspicuity of space; unfatigued veracity of eternal light; perfectly accurate delineation of every leaf on the trees, every flower in the fields, every golden thread in the dresses of the figures, up to the highest point of calm brilliancy which was penetrable to the eye, or possible to the pencil,-these were their glory.so e~,~ (I ' While he notes exceptions (painters like Rembrandt, Salvator, · ·· Claude, and occasionally Correggio, Titian and Tintoretto), Ruskin highlights that the former artists better represented the seventeenth century as an age indignantly hostile to fog and concealment. Damisch summarizes the difference between the classical and modern eras:
Whereas the painters of the past had sought for stability, permanence, clarity, the modern spectator was invited to take pleasure in obscurity, the ephemeral, change, and to derive the greatest satisfaction and instruction from that which was the hardest to fix and understand: wind, light, cloud shadows and so on.s1
Perhaps the abhorrence of murkiness among a majority of painters until the seventeenth century represented a desire to preserve an uncomplicated unity of the senses, their paintings being limited to perspicuous examples of a straightforward relationship between vision and touch. It can be read as an effort to ensure that the ideology of the Renaissance and Enlightenment was not disrupted, an ideology in which the truth about things
Paul Robert 19 could be known through rational and empirical methods. This required a belief in a world independent of the observer, which could be apprehended as it really was, in and of itself. Thus the bias towards clearly delineated forms, the depiction of solid, stable bodies, and the marginalization of haziness and obscurity reinforced the idea that things felt as they looked, underlining a conception of the senses unproblematically connected to the mind.
Conversely, the interest in things mysterious, gaseous, and ephemeral among Romantic painters, beyond metaphorical considerations, signaled a desire to represent optical effects that could not be confirmed by any of the other senses. Damisch describes the paintings of J.M. W. Turner: "this appears to be the specific characteristic of Turner's art, which is differentiated from all other art by its seemingly uncertain execution, to such an extent that this painter often appears to be the primordial representative of 'cloudiness' and of the 'vagueness' so characteristic of a whole section of the painting of the nineteenth century."52 Ruskin claimed that,
[O]f all the modern artists, Turner is the one to whom most people would first look as the great representative of this nineteenth century cloudiness, and 'ingenious speaking concerning smoke;' every one of his compositions being evidently dictated by a delight in seeing only a part of things rather than the whole, and in casting clouds and mist around them rather than unveiling them.s3
Crary ends his Techniques of the Observer with a discussion of the way in which Turner's painting in the 1840s exemplifies the collapse of the perceptual model of the camera obscura: "his painting ... signals the irrevocable loss of a fixed source of light, the dissolution of a cone of light rays, and the collapse of the distance separating an observer from the site of optical experience."54 In particular, Crary elaborates on Turner's
Paul Robert 20 relationship to the sun, in which the distinction between its perception and its afterimage remains nebulous. His paintings illustrate the way in which vision was no longer considered a transparent medium between internal and external, between mind and world, but incorporated them both, producing the world through the physiology of the eye. This goal was benefited by a focus on subject matter that was purely optical, meaning substances whose presence could not readily be confirmed by the other senses. In La Diotropique, Descartes, anticipating Goethe, made a distinction between two modes of seeing, the first apprehending location, distance, size and shape, and the second light and colour. While the former could, the latter could not be verified through other senses, but was unique to vision.55 Turner's contribution to painting, within this particular history, was the isolation of this second mode. And it was in the depiction of atmospheric effects, of gases, of steam, of mists, that this isolation was most complete. While Turner's primary interest was in the representation of light and colour, present in all visual phenomena, these were most clearly segregated from the simultaneous apprehension of location, distance, size and shape in "substances" that did not lend themselves easily to such characterizations.
Philosophically speaking, clouds as linguistic concepts depend on the observer being far enough removed to apprehend them more or less as unities. Ruskin summarized the popular assumptions made about clouds, "people think of the clouds as about as large as they look-forty yards over, perhaps; they see generally that they are solid bodies subject to the same laws as other solid bodies, roundish, whitish, and apparently suspended a great way under a high blue concavity."56 And this conception is reflected in everyday uses of the word "cloud." To be able to speak of a cloud depends on visibility, and the apprehension of form, of "thingness," of boundaries. But all of these qualities are
Paul Robert 21 lost as one approaches a cloud. Its "abjectness" melts into the related, but different concept of fog. To say that one is inside a cloud is not a description of one's direct phenomenal experience, but rather an abstract deduction based on an ability to imagine one's situation from another place. It is, Wittgenstein would say, a secondary use of the word, 57 a use reinforced in relatively modem times by the prevalence of activities like ballooning, mountaineering, skiing, and by our experience of clouds from the vantage afforded by air travel, where moving in and out of clouds happens within a relatively quick span of time. Space photography too has changed our relationship to clouds, enabling us not only to conceive, but also to literally see them as systems. This countering of expectations as one approaches clouds is revealed in John Evelyn's 1644 account of his experience in the Italian Alps:
... [T]hey were dry misty Vapours, hanging undissolved for a vast thicknesse, & altogether both obscuring the Sunn & Earth, so as we seemed to be rather in the Sea than Clowdes, till we having pierc' d quite through, came into a most serene heaven, as if we had been above all human Conversation, the Mountaine appearing more like a greate Iland, than joyn' d to any other hills; for we could perceive nothing but a Sea of thick Clowds rowling under our feete like huge Waves ... this was one of the most pleasant, newe, & altogether surprizing objects that in my life I had ever beheld.58
For Evelyn, to pass right through a cloud was such an unknown and altogether different encounter from his usual experience of clouds that it made most sense to describe it in oceanic terms.
Likewise, and perhaps more obviously, touching hardly seems appropriate to our experience of clouds. To speak of touch in relation to clouds makes the most sense-is least nonsensical when they are the furthest from reach, when the spectator is
Paul Robert 22 distant enough to see them as unities, when the myth of their substantiality is allowed to preside. The incongruity we perceive in clouds lies in a distinction between the haptic sense communicated by an initial visual impression and what we are told about their composition, or what we understand from subsequent reasoning, continued observation, or scientific experimentation. Clouds are necessarily elusive, like the rainbow, an optical, but also linguistic effect whose relation to the body is illusory. At once visually substantial but tactilely insubstantial, clouds create a situation similar to the one produced by the stereoscope, where it is possible to see, and to imagine touching, without ever being able to touch. Without a scientific account of the functioning of clouds, they continue to be that entity that cannot be rationalized, that continues to threaten the classical mind's intuitive sense of physics by functioning according to a logic that does not follow, in any simple way, the laws governing things visible and tangible.
But we must be wary of the tendency to align the moderns' sensibilities exclusively with the critical discourse exemplified by the stereoscope. On the one hand, clouds could function as the epitome of all that the conventions of painting could not accommodate, defying linear perspective with their shapelessness and indefinite borders, disregarding painters' wishes for immobile subjects, and forcing them to paint, or at least sketch, in inclement weather. As such, they functioned well as metaphors for what was beyond knowing, for impenetrable complexity, for all that humanity, in spite of science, could not master. But on the other hand, the opposition between the limits of representation and unrepresentable meteorological mysteries, was also taken as a challenge to representation, a challenge many artists, scientists and philosophers readily and optimistically accepted. As Hamblyn explains, "if the clouds could be rationally and convincingly explained ... then so could anything else in nature,
Paul Robert 23 for clouds represented the most extreme manifestation of the ungraspable."59 Like the stereoscope, clouds were also amenable to a positivist discourse whereby their truth could be studied scientifically and translated into mimetic representations, categories that unproblematically reinforced the presence of a referential world.
John Constable, famous for his cloud studies, wanted painting to be scientific as well as poetic. He saw his landscapes not as products of the imagination, but as deductions.60 In a lecture at the Royal Institution, he claimed, "painting is a science and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature.... Why, then, may not landscape painting be considered a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments?"61 This is the question for which he sought to provide an intellectually satisfying answer throughout his career. Constable wrote, "we see nothing truly 'till we understand it,"62 betraying not only his aspiration to truly see, but also his belief in the possibility of a truthful mode of vision.
Ruskin, conflicted by his admiration of both Turner and the painting of the Pre-Raphaelites, sought to resolve the paradox between obscurity and truthful representations,. between mystery and clarity, throughout Modern Painters. An element illustrating the negotiation of this double allegiance, Damisch explains, was Ruskin's submission of clouds to the order of perspective, "the schemata of celestial perspectives sketched by Ruskin are still governed by the traditional point of view, and the diminution on the checkerboard is in keeping with traditional practice."63 Damisch emphasizes that although Ruskin's valorizing of mystery and indistinctness seems like a shift, "his defense of Turner proves, even in the contradictions into which it leads him, that the author of Modern Painters, at the end of the day, jettisoned none of the ideas that he had nurtured before his travels in Italy,"64 and
Paul Robert 24 further, "there is nothing new about Ruskin's field of thought if · you compare it with, say, Leonardo."65 The classical model of linear perspective and the monocular view of the camera obscura, while disrupted by the odd Romantic gale, reasserts itself even more powerfully in that it is able to accommodate itself to, and assimilate that which threatens it.
V
But the renewed interest in clouds in the nineteenth century was not confined simply to the realm of painting. It also proceeded from advances in science that, like experiments in the processes of vision, were actually more philosophical than scientific. In December of 1802, Luke Howard, an amateur meteorologist, presented his paper entitled "On the Modifications of Clouds" to the Askesian Society, a group of Quakers in Britain with an appetite for the latest in scientific discoveries.66 In this public lecture, Howard proposed that the infinite and endlessly shifting variety of forms assumed by clouds could be described by reference to only three principal types, with all clouds either occupying one or more of these categories, or being in transition from one form to another. Unlike most classificatory systems of that time, in which Latin terms replaced common words in an already established system of naming, the nomenclature of clouds and the system governing the relations between the terms, were introduced simultaneously.67 Thus cumulus, stratus, cirrus, their intermediate terms, cumulo-stratus, cirro-stratus, cumulo-cirrus, and finally nimbus (which was a combination of all three clouds), did not simply describe visible objects in the sky, but also governed how they would be seen.
Paul Robert 25 Despite his humble ongms and simple lifestyle, Howard's classification of clouds attracted the admiration of no less a figure than Goethe who paid him homage in several studies and poems between 1817 and 1822. Goethe had given atmospheric effects considerable attention throughout his life with a view to explanation. His Italian travel diary contained speculations about the influence of mountains' gravitational forces on clouds. Upon reading a Ludwig Wilhelm Gilbert's German translation of Howard's essay in 1815, he was captivated by its power and simplicity, and saw it as providing insight into his ongoing pursuits in science and art. In 1817, Goethe approached Caspar David Friedrich about illustrating his essay on Howard. Friedrich refused, claiming that the project would help to "undermine the whole foundation of landscape painting."68 For Friedrich, the mysterious and unfixed nature of clouds and the limitless freedom they symbolized were endangered values in an age of encroaching rationalization and imposed order. His reaction echoed the sentiments of Keats, the lapsed medical doctor, who had instead devoted his life to the truth of poetry, likewise rejecting what he saw as the increasingly life-denying conventions of the European scientific Enlightenment.69
How are we to account for the difference between Goethe's and Friedrich's responses to the classification of clouds? It is true that Goethe was eager for painting to be informed by rational knowledge, and even had the idea of producing a new art founded on science.70 However, he was also dismissive of any kind of epistemology relying on instrumental data for its conclusions and condemned the materialist bases of Newtonian science.71 Damisch notes that "the science that both [Goethe and Ruskin] were opposed to was that of the physicists who, following Newton, claimed, for example, to reduce light to a material process, whereas colors, like sounds, are sensations and as such are linked to the 'animal frame,' sensations that cannot be explained
Paul Robert 26 and can only be studied by a moral science." 72 Goethe, reacting to Newton's Optics, believed that by emphasizing the human relation to colour, he had "traced the phenomena of colours to their first sources, to the circumstances under which they simply appear and are, and beyond which no further explanation respecting them is possible."73 This distinction between Newtonian science and moral science can also be discerned in the classification of clouds.
Natural history in the 1700s was preoccupied with observing, describing, collecting, and cataloguing every object in nature. As Hamblyn reflects on this era, "the eighteenth century had been the great age of naming and fixing . . .. Both the language of nature and the nature of language were being drawn up and standardized for the benefit of compatible usage."74 Although the attempt at encompassing the whole of the natural world in a lexicography was not new, the vigour with which this goal was pursued was especially acute at this time.
The task of classification is one that raises metaphysical questions, and requires the scientist to discriminate between objects' essences and mere peripheral attributes. A central philosophical question of this time was whether human beings ever could capture nature's true relationships by means of a taxonomic system, or whether these would always be organized according to artificial criteria. This in tum cast doubt upon the very idea that nature indeed had such divisions, suggesting that these existed only in the human mind. Indeed, Foucault's central argument in The Order of Things, as paraphrased by Martin Jay, is that the emblem of the modem epistemological order was a "shift from reading the world as an intelligible text (the 'book of nature') to looking at it as an observable but meaningless object."75
Paul Robert 27 While it was generally agreed that classifying natural phenomena into groups and subgroups would be invaluable, there was no accord on the methodology by which this would be achieved. The Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus had developed a system for classifying plants based on their reproductive parts, openly admitting the artificiality of this system. "('System' was the term used to describe artificial approaches, while those which attempted to be 'natural' were called 'methods'.)"76 The strength of Linnaeus' system was binomial nomenclature, in which each plant was named according to genus and species. The system was not without its weaknesses, however, the primary one being that it assumed that species were distinct and immutable.
In contrast, the French philosopher and naturalist Georges, compte de Buffon, a disciple of Newton, was opposed to confining nature into rigid and arbitrary abstractions. Whereas Linnaean classification was primarily concerned with the logical processes of naming and ordering, Buffon thought that natural history should follow nature, elucidating the anatomical and physiological features of plants and organisms. For Buffon, nature formed a chain of individual beings, related to one another not along a single axis, but in a variety of ways.77 Instead of paying attention to fixed essences (whether they were believed to be divine archetypes or mere human inventions), he studied "the real similarities between organisms, which could only be grasped if the entire animal is considered."78 In this way, Buffon' s approach sought to be more faithful and sensitive to nature as the investigator found it.
As Hamblyn reflects, "meteorology is not an exact science. It is, rather, a search for narrative order among events governed not by laws alone but by the shapeless caprices of the atmosphere. Weather writes, erases, and rewrites itself upon the sky with the endless fluidity of language; and it is with language that we have
Paul Robert 28 sought throughout history to apprehend it."79 He elaborates on how the naming and classification of clouds differs from the naming of fixed entities, 11 clouds present a moving target, so any scientific account of them would have to be true to a dynamic rather than fixed view of the world."Bo
While on the face of it, it would make sense that the classification of clouds should have followed Buffon' s method, which was hostile to fixed essences, one must remember that 11 essences" were put forward as unapologetically artificial categories, established only for the sake of pragmatic convenience. Buffon' s method ran more of a risk of being mystified as the categories generated were predicated on close observation and suggested they could be true to the essence of nature as it really was, in and of itself.
While Howard adopted the Linnaean system of classification as an organizational structure, he emphasized the mutability of the categories. His premise was that,
There are three simple and distinct modifications, in any one of which the aggregate of minute drops called a cloud may be formed, increase to its greatest extent, and finally decrease and disappear, but the same aggregate which has been formed in one modification, upon a change in the attendant circumstances, may pass into another.81
Howard's fixed reference points he referred to not as genera or species (which could potentially imply a correlation to a preexisting property or essence within an object or organism), but as modifications, an enduring reminder of the arbitrary and imposed nature of these terms on a perpetually shifting skyscape.
Paul Robert 29 Although clouds previously had colloquial names such as "mare's tails," "flocks," "anvil," and "mackerel," Howard's terms were more precise than earlier definitions. Louis Hawes observes that, "most important for science, they formed part of a consistent and comprehensive theoretical system concerning the physical laws governing the formation and transformation of clouds."82 What is remarkable about Howard's system is that this was the first language in history that made it possible for observers to interrogate clouds, to analyze them, to make them speak of the processes that governed their seemingly chaotic flows. This fact introduces something of a paradox. On the one hand, it was the eighteenth century obsession with the symbolic domination of nature that motivated this enterprise. On the other, it was an apprehension of the artificial relationship of words to things, and an awareness of the world's flux that made it possible to solve the problem of how language could be applied to transitory entities. Hamblyn repeats, "here was the naming not of a solid, stable thing but of a series of self-canceling evanescences. Here was the naming of a fugitive presence that hastened to its onward dissolution. Here was the naming of clouds."83
To return to the question of Goethe and Friedrich's reactions then, what accounted for the difference was a distinction within science, perceived by Goethe (and Ruskin, incidentally), but not by Friedrich. Friedrich was concerned with the metaphorical implications of the naming of clouds, whereas Goethe saw in this an equal potential for opening up the mysteries of the relationship between mind and world. As Damisch makes clear, the attraction of the "science" of cloud classification for both Goethe and Ruskin can be explained by its phenomenological and nontheoretical nature: "the reason why Goethe, like Ruskin, pays attention only to the external aspect of phenomena is, quite apart from the fact that the rights of 'mystery' are thereby preserved, that the 'meaning' of those phenomena is more important to him than
Paul Robert 30 their structure." 84 Further, "Meteorology, conceived as a strictly phenomenological, nonmaterialist discipline, thus comes to the aid of a symbolic, if not mystical interpretation of natural phenomena."85 He refers to the motivations underlying the ancients' materialistic, atomistic explanations of aerial phenomena. For Lucretius, these served no other purpose than to dispel the fear of the gods. "Both Goethe and Ruskin, each in his own way, strove to restore, in opposition to materialist science, the rights of myth and ideas, if not those of religion and of the 'invisible,' conceived in a mystical fashion."86
VI
As revolutionary as it initially was to think that the infinite variety of cloud formations could be described with reference to only three fixed states, with time, this logic became naturalized, solidified into categories useful for predicting, if not controlling, the whims of the weather. Thomas Mc Evilly defines linguistic reification as, "the na"ive assumption that one's own language, that is, one's conditioned mind-set is an accurate map of the real" and image reification as "the belief that one's culture's conventions of plastic representation accurately portray the universe."87 The naming of clouds, as all exercises in taxonomy, provided an instance in which the relativity of all linguistic categories could be glimpsed, temporarily disrupting the sclerosis to which words are subdued in the interests of stability, security, and identity. Similarly, it could be argued that image reification was challenged by the Romantic painters' emphasis on obscurity over clarity. However, the line of argumentation I have been following suggests yet another kind of reification whose hegemony they were also involved in disrupting, which we can define, following McEvilly' s formula, as sensory reification, the conviction that one's
Paul Robert 31 senses accurately reveal the world to the observer. The stereoscope and the choice of clouds as a subject both called this Cartesian assumption into question, but they did not do so directly.
Jean-Fran<;ois Lyotard (whose 1988 Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event, incidentally, relies heavily on the metaphor of thoughts as clouds) sees a connection between Romanticism and postmodernism in Immanuel Kant's formulation of the sublime.BB In Kant's theorization, the role of the Imagination is to synthesize the raw bits of experience into an intuitive whole, which it then presents to the Understanding. This harmonious "fit" between nature and mind, between disparate data and knowledge, between the Kantian faculties of the Imagination and the Understanding, produces pleasure. The Sublime however, is the result of the Imagination's inability or failure to synthesize. Confronted by objects too large for the Imagination, such as pyramids, looming mountains, deserts, electrical storms, or the universe, the Imagination is unable to produce a coherent form, and recoils in terror. However, in response to the Imagination's impotence to give form to data, the mind creates an Idea of Reason, an Absolute concept of magnitude or power. Examples would include absolute greatness, infinity, freedom. Both pain and pleasure are experienced here in what Lyotard describes as "a cleavage within the subject between what can be conceived and what can be imagined or presented."B9 Natural phenomena whose magnitude or force were beyond the grasp of the Imagination then, were ideal catalysts for the experience of the sublime. The depiction of ruins and storms at sea was the best painters could do to approximate these inner tensions, and presumably to elicit the same response in viewers, between terror and pleasure, the faculty of reason producing a concept of the Absolute as a corollary to the Imagination being overwhelmed.
Paul Robert 32 I propose that atmospheric phenomena, beyond their obvious characteristics as "objects" that were too big for the Imagination or too forceful for the will to synthesize into a totality, also provided instances of a different kind of failure to synthesize, one in which the stereoscope was also implicated. This is none other than the failure of the senses to synthesize a coherent reality from contradictory stimuli. Parallel to the Kantian architectonic, the body would find itself unable to coherently unite the stimuli from the various senses into a single, non-contradictory experience, which could then be presented to the mind. If the senses were truly passive receptors, relaying the truth of an objective world, then the possibility for contradiction between them would be impossible; the mind would always apprehend the world in a unified, coherent fashion. But the nineteenth century was bent on producing perspicuous examples of cases in which the senses disagreed. The consequence was the realization of the productive role of the human sensorium in constructing the world and its truth. Reality was no longer "out there," but was an occurrence that took place in the liminal zone between subject and object, making this distinction irrelevant. 90 The focus on the idiosyncrasies of the perceptive faculties then, on their relativity, could also evoke the feeling that things could be otherwise, that a terrifying infinity of possibilities lurked behind the way things were, that an infinity of possible worlds could result from mere physiological changes. In "Matter and Time," likewise a discussion of perception but at the level of the physics of colour, Lyotard emphasizes the significance of our perceptual apparatuses or transformers,
The reality to be accorded to such-and-such a form of energy, and therefore of matter, clearly depends on the transformers we have at our disposal. Even the transformer that our central nervous system is, highly sophisticated in the order of living creatures, can only
Paul Robert 33 transcribe and inscribe according to its own rhythm the excitations which come to it from the milieu in which it lives.91
Wheatstone's method for taking stereographic pictures then, in which the cameras could be up to thirteen inches apart, relativized human physiology in that it showed that the human perception of space was not absolute but contingent on the distance between the observer's eyes.92
According to McEvilly, the reification of our language and plastic representations into rigid forms is a result of habit. "Habits," he says, "arise as ways to tame the unknowability of experience," and "to tame unknowability is to flee the sublime."93 The cure he suggests is unaccountability; the presentation of situations that confound existing habit-hardened categories:
Unaccountability is important because it stymies attempts to tame and control the rawness of things by corralling them into manageable categories. It is an openness to freedom and mystery, involving as it does a submission to givenness, a relinquishing of the belief in the effectiveness of one's own categories and the fullness of the map of one's language.94
In keeping with the analogy of language and the senses, it is also possible to see binocular perception as a habit. The reason that the stereoscope produces the effect it does is because it calls on the viewer to reproduce the same code that is used in everyday visual experience, that of "unifying," in Brewster's words, "the similar points in each picture that correspond to different distances from the observer."95 If it is at all possible for the sublime to be glimpsed through the lenses of a ViewMaster, it will be as a result of the mind's failure to account for the disparity between the sense of vision, operating according to its usual habit, and the sense of touch, also functioning in a "normal" way.
Paul Robert 34 But the disruptive philosophical implications of any new sciences or techniques will always be held at bay in the name of order. Lyotard contrasts the desire for complexity to the pragmatic need for stability and predictability. According to Lyotard' s logic, when new technologies emerge, they often do so through what he terms, following Lacan, desire (for complexity, indeterminacy), and later may be given a pragmatic turn as techno-scientism in response to the demand for a comfortable, intelligible world. He says,
The comple:xification of the transformer, theoretical and practical, has always had as its effect the destabilization of the fit between the human subject and its environment. And it always modifies this fit in the same direction - it delays reaction, it increases possible responses, increases material liberty and, in this sense, can only disappoint the demand for security which is inscribed in the human being as in every living organism.... [W]e know that scientific or technical (or artistic) discoveries or inventions are rarely motivated by a demand for security and equilibrium.96
This tension between desire and demand accounts for the fates of the three nineteenth century "sciences" examined here, the stereoscope, the rendering of clouds in paint, and the naming of clouds. All had the potential to displace simple, patent, and intelligible models of the relation between the mind and the world, but were also used to reinforce those same models. We are also reminded of the opposition Aristophanes establishes in The Clouds, between intellectual pursuits whose purposes are undetermined, free-floating, and the pragmatic goal of creating a more just, tame, and ordered world. Although Aristophanes' play was not intended to pave the way for the accusation of Socrates as a corrupter of youth, a charge brought against him many years later, its effect on the verdict of the dicasts at the trial is open for speculation.97 We can wonder whether the interests of security,
Paul Robert 35 stability and justice are truly served in a society that derides its layabouts and demotes the clouds.
1 Aristophanes, The Clouds, 419 B.C.E. The Internet Classics Archive, 15 March, 2005,
10 Crary, 129. 11 Charles Wheatstone, "Contributions to the Physiology of Vision-Part the Second. On some remarkable, and hitherto unobserved, Phenomena of Binocular Vision (continued)," (originally published in "Philosophical Transactions" of the Royal Society of London, vol. 142, 1852), 1 - 17. stereoscopy.com - The Library: Wheatstone Paper 1852,
Paul Robert 36 binocular vision," in Brewster and Wheatstone on Vision, ed. Nicholas J. Wade (London, 1983), 65, cited in Crary, 120. 17 Schiavo, 121. 18 Ibid. 19 Terry Castle, "Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie," Critical Inquiry 15 (Autumn 1988): 27. 20 Ibid., 30. 21 Ibid., 54. 22 Ibid., 30. 23 Susan Buck-Morss, "Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered," October 62 (Fall 1992): 25. 24 Crary, 133. zs Castle, 52. 26 Schiavo, 128.
27 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 7-8. 28 Schiavo, 125. 29 Crary, 120. 30 Ibid., 122. 31 Martin Jay, "Scopic Regimes of Modernity," in Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique (New York; London: Routledge, 1993), 116. 32 Brewster, 53 (emphasis in original). 33 Crary, 136.
34 Ibid., 133. 35 Ibid., 19. 36 Ibid., 59. 37 Ibid., 60. 38 Jay, Downcast Eyes, 80. 39 Robert Mandrou, Introduction ala France moderne 1500-1640: Essai de Psychologie historique (Paris 1974), 76, cited in Martin Jay, 35. 40 Crary, 74-75. 41 Ibid., 75. 42 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970), 319.
Paul Robert 37 43 Crary, 90. 44 Ibid., 19. 45 Ibid., 123-24. 46 Schiavo, 116. 47 John Ruskin, Modern Painters (London, 1855), part. 4, chap. 16; citing here from the 1856 ed., vol. III, 254, in Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting, Janet Lloyd, trans. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), note 6, 300. 48 Steven Connor, The Vapours, A paper given at Queen Mary, University of London, December 11, 2003. Steven Connor, School of English and Humanities, Birkbeck College, London. 27 February, 2005,
Paul Robert 38 61 E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Oxford: Phaidon, 1960), 150, cited in Hamblyn, 222. 62 Hamblyn, 225. 63 Damisch, 193.
64 Ibid., 189. 65 Ibid., 189-90. 66 Hamblyn, 1. 67 This is most vividly and humorously illustrated by the fact that when Howard's terms first appeared in scientific journals, some readers complained that the Latin words ought to be accompanied by their English translations as was the custom. What these readers overlooked was the fact that these terms did not have English equivalents, that they did not refer to concepts that had had prior currency, but were new as concepts. 68 Joseph Leo Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape (London: Reaktion Books, 1990), 193. 69 Harnblyn, 176. 70 See the letter from Goethe published by Carl Gustav Carus as an introduction to his Neuen Briefe fiber die Landschaftmalerei (1831), in Kurt Badt, Wolkenbilder und Wolkengedichte der Romantik, 24, cited in Damisch, 95. 71 Hamblyn, 210; Damisch, 195; For an analysis of the Romantic critique of Newton's Optics, in particular the scientific reduction of the rainbow, see M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 303-12. n Damisch, 195. 73 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours, trans. Charles Lock Eastlake (1840; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970), lviii. 74 Hamblyn, 124. 75 Jay, Downcast Eyes, 51. 76 L. J. Jordanova, Lamarck, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 12. 77 Hamblyn, 101. 78 Jordanova, 13. 79 Hamblyn, 11. 80 Ibid., 123.
Paul Robert 39 81 Luke Howard, On the Modifications of Clouds and on the Principles of their Production, Suspension, and Destruction; being the Substance of an Essay read before the Askesian Society in the Session 1802-3, (London: J. Taylor, 1804), 4, cited in Hamblyn, 123. 82 Louis Hawes, "Constable's Sky Sketches," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 32 (1969), 347. 83 Hamblyn, 124. 84 Damisch, 195. 85 Ibid. 86 Damisch, 196. 87 Thomas McEvilly, "I Think Therefore I Art," Artforum 23, 10 (Summer 1985): 77. 88 Jean-Franc;ois Lyotard, Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event, The Wellek Library Lectures (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), see also "The Sublime and the Avant-Garde," The Inhuman, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 98-99, 136-138. 89 Lyotard, The Inhuman, 98. 90 Buck-Morss, 12-13. 91 Lyotard, "Matter and Time," The Inhuman, 43. 92 I am conscious here of the fact that I am making what may seem to be an unjustified leap in comparing the "reality'' of cultural, community based practices such as language and pictorial conventions with the "reality" apprehended through an individual's biological faculties. The latter "reality," properly speaking, cannot be said to constitute a reality at all because it is private. It is like wondering whether a person might experience the sensation you call "red" when looking at objects that you both call "blue" and vice-versa. As Wittgenstein explained, this is fallacious thinking because it assumes not only the hypothetical possibility of comparing psychological "private objects," but also their existence. Variations in the psychological facts of private experience, while they do exist, are irrelevant to the inter-subjective construction of reality (see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Occasions, pp. 231, 342- 346). However, I do not see this objection getting in the way of the point I am making because the stereoscope does not relativize the "transformers" of the individual, but of the entire human race.
Paul Robert 40 93 McEvilly, 80. 94 Ibid. 95 Brewster, 53, cited in Crary, 122. 96 Lyotard, "Matter and Time," The Inhuman, 44. 97 Alfred Bates, ed., The Drama: Its History, Literature and Influence on Civilization, vol. 2 (London: Historical Publishing Company, 1906), 26-7.
Paul Robert 41 Afterword
The preceding paper, as much as it is a presentation of the sources from which I draw in making my studio work, is also an effort to understand what motivates me to make the work that I do, to discern my relationship to illusions. I recognize myself in descriptions of the producers of phantasmagoria. Their preliminary claims that they were scientifically exorcising the supernatural only highlighted the fact that they·had no idea what they were really up to when they lit magic lantern, its phantoms introducing a fog of unforeseen paradoxes. Accompanying my artistic production lurks the dread, held at bay by consciousness and reason, that the work I do does not serve any purpose, ultimate or otherwise, that it does not answer the demand for a more secure, comfortable existence, that it does not reveal general truths, that it does not conform to what is expected of me, but is rather a defiant, if disguised, blow against order, purpose, truth a thundercloud in sheep's clothing. It stems from a desire that is neither self-interested nor philanthropic, but opposes them both,
Paul Robert 42 existing only for itself, ramm.g on everyone indiscriminately. Lyotard: "Is it possible to imagine the following? In the stream of sensitive clouds, no 'I' swims or sails; only mere affections float. Feelings felt by no one, attached to no identity, but making one cloud be 'affected' by another."1
To speak of my "work" is perhaps misleading; the word can only have been devised to legitimize the games artists play, to assign them a place within an economy whose principles they covertly vandalize. I am playing. If I have predetermined goals (i.e. to generate stereoscopic images of clouds), these are part of a larger experiment whose purposes are undetermined and whose structure is openly tautological.
TECHNIQUE
My goal is to create a situation in which the phantasmagoric qualities of the commodified stereoscope are invoked, but not fully realized. My process essentially follows the same principles as those outlined by Charles Wheatstone, that the stereographic depiction of distant objects requires an increased separation between the two cameras producing the paired images. In the case of these stereographic videos of clouds and doudy vapors, the cameras were sometimes up to 150 metres apart. This resulted in dramatic, irreconcilable differences in foreground elements (such as tree-tops when they were present),2 but only minor differences within the clouds themselves, or in their relation one to another. Likewise, the sounds recorded by each camera emphasize this spatial (can we say geographic?) gap. Within the installation, the Wheatstone-like placement of the televisions, to each side rather than directly in front of the viewer, reinforces the body's role in recombining, synthesizing disparate sense data, in actively producing and not just reflecting the wo!1£ in which it lives. This focus on the body's binocular nature\s both downplayed and
Paul Robert 43 accentuated by the "visual pyramids." They at once conceal the stereoscope's inner workings, its mirrors and images, but also illustratively trace-concretize-the invisible, abstract, and wholly separate paths light takes in reaching the eyes. By creating both conflicts and unexpected harmonization amongst the senses of touch, sound and binocular vision, I hope to reawaken the stereoscope to the motivations-the disruptive desires-that originally brought it into being.
CLOUDS
Through the stereoscope, clouds are brought from an indefinite realm into an illusory relation with the viewer's body. Clouds, playing on the line between substance and evanescence, already confound the relation between touch and vision. The desire to understand the clouds, to see them close-up, to come into contact with them, is the obverse of the related desire to see the ground from a distance. Already in the twelfth century, and in contrast to the common sense of his day, Petrarch had ascended Mount Ventoux for no other reason than "the wish to see what so great an elevation had to offer."3 Nadar's aerial photography late in the 1850s was as striking as it was because it made the familiar strangely unfamiliar. Ballooning and mountaineering were both means for drawing near to the distant and becoming distanced from the close at hand. It provided a way to test whether clouds indeed corresponded to their visual appearances, and conversely how the picture of the earth from above differed from its already known texture.
On the plane, when beginning our descent, I secretly hope that we will not pass through that liminal space that transforms the well-formed tufts below us into a wet, shapeless and perfectly uninteresting fogginess, that turns manageable, human-scaled environments into colossal, undefined backgrounds, threatening
Paul Robert 44 to absorb a falling body. Maybe the clouds will be oblivious to our presence today; maybe my being here won't screw it up. Maybe my senses, my sight, will stop giving me contradictory cues and will reveal the clouds up close as they appear from far away.
In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Walter Benjamin sees distance as a requirement for the experience of an object's aura. He says, "if, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch."4 A cloud's aura then, varies with the observer's position, its presence sometimes being contingent on inaccessibility. My demands for a tame, predictable world are quickly overtaken by revelry in the shifting and irreconcilable impressions that pass before the window, in the fleeting glimpses of auras evaporating, and in the sublime realization that it is all an effect of the transformers I have at my disposal.
Goethe said of Luke Howard, "that which no hand can reach, no hand can clasp, / He first has gain' d, first held with mental grasp."5 Representational systems bring clouds closer, but at the same time confirm how tantalizingly out of reach they will always be. Any attempt to contain them relies on illusion, and necessarily omits a certain "something," perhaps their aura. Of thought clouds Lyotard reflects, "the idea that thinking is able to build a system of total knowledge about clouds of thoughts by passing from one site to another and accumulating the views it produces at each site-such an idea constitutes par excellence the sin, the arrogance of the mind."6 It is this misconception, this lie, that I want to foreground, that our representations, mental or otherwise, can actually do what they pretend to, that we can grasp clouds.
Paul Robert 45 1 Jean-Fram;ois Lyotard, Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event, The Wellek Library Lectures (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 34. 2 The video in the installation contains no foreground elements. 3 Petrarch, "The Ascent of Mount Ventoux," Internet Medieval Sourcebook, August 1998, Paul Halsall, 15 March, 2005,
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Paul Robert 51