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