Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics: The Gaze of the Flâneur and 19th Century Media 9781628924404, 9781501312205, 9781628924435

Citation preview

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics The Gaze of the Flâneur and 19th-Century Media Marit Grøtta

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 Paperback edition first published 2016 © Marit Grøtta, 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. The Prose Poems and La Fanfarlo translated by Lloyd (2001) 1767w from pp. 30–2, 36–41, 44–5, 49–52, 55–6, 59–63, 73–7, 87, 91, 98–101, 103–5. By permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Grøtta, Marit. Baudelaire’s media aesthetics: the gaze of the Flâneur and 19th century media/Marit Grøtta. pages cm Summary: “Investigates the writings of Charles Baudelaire in light of 19th-century media technology, with perspectives from Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben”– Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-62892-440-4 (hardback) 1. Baudelaire, Charles, 1821-1867–Criticism and interpretation. 2. Mass media and literature. 3. French poetry–History and criticism. 4. Flaneurs. I. Title. PQ2191.Z5G755 2015 841’.8–dc23 2014041009

ISBN: HB: 978-1-6289-2440-4 PB: 978-1-5013-2644-8 ePub: 978-1-6289-2441-1 ePDF: 978-1-6289-2443-5 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

C o n t e nt s

Acknowledgments  vii List of illustrations  viii

Introduction  1 The gaze of the flâneur and nineteenth-century media  3 Paris: Capital of modernity  3 A lyric poet in the age of new media  6 Art and technology: Theories of mediation  10 Media technology and ideology criticism  10 Media technology and aesthetics: Theories of mediation  12 Dispositives: Frames of perception  15 Play in the era of technological reproducibility  17 Baudelaire’s media aesthetics  19

1 Newspapers  23

A duel: Journalism versus poetry  24 Newspaper aesthetics  26 Interaction: The circulation between literature and journalism  27 A dedicated newspaper reader  30 A letter to the editor  33 Making sense of modern life: Between anecdote and allegory  38 Poetry goes incognito  41

2 Photographs  47

The cult of images  48 Framed vision: Windows and photography  54 Reading/developing images  59 Visual desire: Portrait photography and fetishism  62 Traffic in souls: Arresting/escaping identity  66 Making images move  69

vi

Contents

3 Precinematic devices  73

Opening a new field of vision  74 Optical toys as initiation into art  80 The modern experience: Flickering life and movement  86 How to capture movement?  91 Kaleidoscopic vision  96 Virtual images: The visual attraction of modern life  100

4 Corporeality  103

The bodily apparatus: Perception and technology  104 The impulsion to act  107 Violence: Bodies in motion  109 Enjoying the crowd is an art  116 Multitude: Crowds, commonplaces, and mass communication  119

5 Toys  123

Interfaces: Toys, dispositives, and transitional objects  124 The toy fairy: A childhood memory  126 How toys come alive  130 The uncertain status of objects  135 Play and profanation  138

6 Media imagery and modernity  143 Baudelaire’s media aesthetics recapitulated  146 Media imagery in theories of modernity  148 Marx: The phantasmagoria of commodities  150 Benjamin: Paris as a phantasmagoria  152 Freud: The psyche as a photographic apparatus  156 Benjamin: Time as a photographer  159 Benjamin: The stereoscope and the dialectical image  161 Benjamin: The kaleidoscope must be smashed  163 Media aesthetics and modernity  165 Notes  169 Bibliography  193 Index  201

A ckn o w le d gm en t s

My interest in Baudelaire began many years ago. It all started with his prose poems and their relationship to newspapers, and over the years, the scope of my research has expanded to include a wider range of Baudelaire’s writings and a wider range of media. In Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics, my research interests come together: my devotion to Baudelaire’s writings, my fascination with nineteenth-century visual culture, my admiration for the works of Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben, and my interest in the category of “play” in aesthetic theory. I would like to express my gratitude to those who offered support, guidance, and inspiration during my work on this book. I thank the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Oslo for awarding me a postdoctoral fellowship that enabled me to research and write it. My heartfelt thanks to all my colleagues at the University of Oslo for responding to my presentations of the book’s material at various occasions during the writing process. I am especially grateful to Christian Refsum and Ragnhild E. Reinton, who read and commented on parts of the manuscript. Furthermore, I would like to thank Arne Melberg, Jonathan Monroe, and Jonathan Culler for their interest and advice in the early phase of this project. Also, my thanks to Kjetil Jakobsen for sharing his knowledge of intermediality and to Knut Ove Eliassen for sharing his knowledge of Foucault. I would further like to thank my students at the University of Oslo, who followed my seminar on Baudelaire, the flâneur, and the city, in Autumn 2013, and whose dedication and enthusiasm were truly inspirational. In addition to this, I am most grateful to Bloomsbury’s readers Catherine Nesci and Kathrin Yacavone, whose feedback has been invaluable. Lastly, but certainly not least, I would like to thank my editor at Bloomsbury, Haaris Naqvi, and his editorial assistant, Mary Al-Sayed, for their advice and assistance during the publication process. An early version of Chapter 1 was published in Norsk litteraturvitenskapelig tidsskrift, no. 1, 2004. An early version of Chapter 2 was published in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, vol 41, nos. 1–2, Fall/Winter 2012–13 and is reused here with kind permission from the University of Nebraska Press.

List of Illustrations

Figure 1 La Presse, August 26, 1862, comprising a series of prose poems by Baudelaire preceded by a dedication to the newspaper’s editor, Arsène Houssaye (Bibliothèque de France)  36 Figure 2 Portrait of Charles Baudelaire by Nadar (Photo (C) BnF, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/image BnF)  52 Figure 3 Kaleidoscopic images by David Brewster and Charles Wheatstone  75 Figure 4 Joseph Plateau’s phenakistiscope  77 Figure 5 David Brewster’s stereoscope and the optical principle of its operation  78 Figure 6 Phenakistiscope disks by Jean-Baptiste Madou  84 Figure 7 “Galloping horse” by Eadweard Muybridge. Example of chronophotography (Photo © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Patrice Schmidt)  94 Figure 8 “Coupé attelé d’un cheval allant vers la droite” by Constantin Guys. (Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre)/Michèle Bellot)  98 Figure 9 The phantasmagoria of Etienne-Gaspard Robertson. Frontispiece in: Etienne-Gaspard Robertson, Mémoires récréatives, scientifiques et anecdotiques (Paris, 1831)  151

Introduction

Montages, moving images, and three-dimensional (3-D) images are usually considered features specific to twentieth-century aesthetics, developed after the advent of film and the experiments of the avant-garde movements. Yet these aesthetic techniques were also available in the nineteenth century due to the invention of new media technology and the emergence of a new media culture: newspapers presenting disconnected prose pieces on the pages, precinematic toys producing effects of motion and 3-D vision, photographs offering a new perception of the world, as well as numerous other media phenomena. Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) experienced this media culture more intensely than any other writer of his day. Although he maintained ambivalence with respect to the new media, he was fascinated by their techniques and sensitive to the ways in which they changed our perception. My contention is that that Baudelaire’s aesthetics can be conceived, to a large degree, as a media aesthetics, and that montages, moving images, and 3-D images are features that are central to Baudelaire’s aesthetics. Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics is a book about Baudelaire’s writing and its connection to the new media technology emerging in the nineteenth century. It explores not merely the forms of art, but also the forms of media technology, considering the way they shape and guide our perception of the world. It is thus a book that deals with literature, perception, and the configuration of the senses in the first phase of modernity. The book takes as its point of departure the observation that there is a gap between literary and visual approaches to Baudelaire. In literary studies, Baudelaire’s writings have long been recognized as masterpieces of the modernist period—he is a benchmark one cannot overlook and an influence one cannot deny. Yet, in cinema and media studies, Baudelaire is also a prominent figure. Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s remarkable writings on Baudelaire, researchers in these fields have recognized the figure of the flâneur as the emblem of urban spectatorship and a precursor to twentieth-century conceptions of virtual and mediated vision.1 Still, in cinema and media studies, Baudelaire has largely been seen through Benjamin’s perspective, and he has been hailed as Benjamin’s muse and source. Baudelaire “himself” has in fact remained a minor figure whose name tends to appear in opening paragraphs and footnotes.

2

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

Here we are facing a curious situation. Despite Baudelaire’s position in cinema and visual studies as the precursor par excellence of urban spectatorship, research in these disciplines has only sparsely reflected back on Baudelaire as a writer. Yet, it is precisely these visual approaches to the flâneur, taking inspiration from Benjamin’s Baudelaire study, that invite a reexamination of Baudelaire. It is time, therefore, that Baudelaire’s work breaks free from traditional literary perspectives on the one hand, and from footnote references in cinema, visual, and media studies on the other. Baudelaire should be examined in his own right—with an interdisciplinary approach embracing all these perspectives. The aim of this study is to bridge the gap between literary and visual approaches to Baudelaire by introducing perspectives from cinema, visual, and media studies in the reading of his works. More specifically, my intention is to read Baudelaire’s writings in light of the new media of the nineteenth century, such as newspapers, photography, and precinematic devices. Yet, I do not merely consider Baudelaire’s comments on the media technology of his day. Such an approach would actually show that he was truly skeptical of the new media. Rather, my undertaking is to explore to what degree and in what ways his writing and his aesthetics can be seen as responding to the new media situation of the nineteenth century. My hypothesis is that Baudelaire plays with the new forms of perception emerging in the media age, and that the gaze of the flâneur, as conceived by Baudelaire, is mediated, to a large degree, by nineteenth-century media. Addressing these issues, I remain deeply indebted to Benjamin’s work. Benjamin was undoubtedly an insightful reader of Baudelaire and a shrewd critic of nineteenth-century media. Yet, he does not, to any extent, relate his writing on Baudelaire to his writing on the new media. In his essays on Baudelaire, he focuses mainly on the commodity, whereas the references to the new media are in fact quite scarce, and they describe the new media rather negatively. By contrast, other writings by Benjamin offer much more progressive perspectives on the new media. My aim is therefore to complement Benjamin’s work on this issue, exploring perspectives that he might have developed further had he finished his work. Yet, to some degree, I will also challenge his reading of Baudelaire and offer a more positive understanding of Baudelaire’s encounters with the new media. Certainly, Baudelaire’s œuvre is rich enough to comprise various aesthetic features, and his media aesthetics may be considered one of several aspects of his writing. Yet, it is an aspect that is particularly relevant in today’s media-saturated environment. By situating Baudelaire in a media context, I hope to bring to light a body of writing that speaks vigorously to us today. Although Baudelaire has already been canonized as a modernist pioneer, there is every reason to highlight the way he interacted with nineteenth-century

Introduction

3

media technology. Part of Baudelaire’s genius was that he did not fall prey to the new media emerging in the era of high capitalism; he took advantage of them and played with them as sources for new experiences. Even if the media and our experience with media are constantly changing, Baudelaire’s media aesthetics is still illuminating today.

The gaze of the flâneur and nineteenth-century media Paris: Capital of modernity At the center of both Baudelaire studies and modernist studies, we find the figure of the flâneur. It was Benjamin who drew our attention to the importance of this figure in Baudelaire’s work, and ever since, the flâneur has become an increasingly mythological character, hard to grasp and even more difficult to pin down. The flâneur represents the urban experience with all its aspects: he is an urban stroller, a street-artist, an accidental gaze, an amateur detective. With his heightened sensibility, the flâneur became an index of the dramatic changes that occurred as the city of Paris was transformed into a modern metropolis. What were these changes all about? If the flâneur has become the emblematic figure of modernism, it is due to particular historical circumstances. Therefore, a brief recapitulation of the sociopolitical context in which the figure of the flâneur appeared and the context in which Baudelaire produced his works is called for.2 Among the world cities of the nineteenth century, Paris became the cultural capital.3 Due to its accumulation of intellectual talent, writers gravitated to Paris, and it was there that success was ordained.4 Just like London, Berlin, and Vienna, nineteenth-century Paris was a rapidly growing city; during the first half of the century, Paris actually doubled its population, from 547,000 in 1801 to 1,174,000 in 1851.5 With the growing population came class conflict and social upheaval, as well as new ideas about social organization. It is within this context that Charles Fourier, Auguste Blanqui, and Karl Marx wrote their social theories, inspiring socialist, republican, and communist movements. Baudelaire participated in the 1848 revolution, claiming the rights of the people in front of the July Monarchy and Louis Philippe, the “bourgeois king.” He was, however, disillusioned by the outcome of the revolution, and in his diary, he writes abruptly “My wild excitement in 1848” (“Mon ivresse en 1848”) and remarks that “1848 was amusing only because of those castles in the air which each man built for his utopia” (“1848 ne fut amusant que parce que chacun y faisait des utopies comme des châteaux en Espagne”).6

4

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

The election of Louis Napoleon III as president in December 1849, and the coup d’état in December 1851 only increased Baudelaire’s contempt for politics; in his diary he recalls his “fury at the Coup d’Etat” (“Ma fureur au coup d’État”).7 In particular, he was critical to the authoritarian aspects of the new regime and its extensive censorship of the press: “After all, the supreme glory of Napoleon III, in the eyes of History and of the French People, will have been to prove that anybody can govern a great nation as soon as they have got control of the telegraph and the national press” (“En somme, devant l’historie et devant le peuple français, la grande gloire de Napoléon III aura été de prouver que le premier venu peut, en s’emparant du télégraphe et de l’Imprimerie nationale, gouverner une grande nation”).8 It was under the Second Empire (1852–70) and Napoleon III’s rule that Paris was transformed into a modern capital. To promote the glory of the empire and to assure economic and social progress, Napoleon III aimed to replace the old with the new. His main tool in this regard was urban planning, and in 1853, he handed the city over to Baron Haussmann, who started a large-scale renovation of Paris. Haussmannization meant that the old city structure was disappearing and that a new structure was emerging; during a short period of time, narrow streets and semisecluded arcades were removed to give way to wide avenues and huge department stores. Baudelaire expresses his grief over the disappearance of the old Paris in his renowned poem “Le Cygne” (“The Swan”): “The old Paris is gone (the form a city takes / More quickly shifts, alas, than does the mortal heart)” (“Le vieux Paris n’est plus (la forme d’une ville / Change plus vite, hélas! que le cœur d’un mortel)”).9 The new city structure not only facilitated governmental control, but also assured the free circulation of commodities and people. The Second Empire can be seen as an adjustment to capitalist forces; its aim was to liberate capitalist circulation from its previous constraints.10 The number of omnibus passengers in Paris rose from 36 million in 1855 to 110 million in 1860, making high-speed traffic one of the features of the modern city.11 In this manner, Paris was made accessible to a large number of people. Streets were lit with gas lights, cafés opened onto the streets, sidewalks allowed people to walk safely along the streets, shop windows of large department stores invited window shopping, and a proliferation of spectacles, concerts, and theaters attracted the crowds. The city was designed for public life and public consumption, inviting people to spend time in the streets. Accordingly, the boundaries between private and public, between interior and exterior, became fluid. Numerous researchers have been interested in the new intimacy characterizing urban life. Such intimacy was different from the intimacy of family life, because it concerned strangers—people whose faces and

Introduction

5

names one did not know. Close but distant was the new and oxymoronic structure of human relations. Strolling about in streets, one could slide into an anonymous crowd of people, come in very close contact, but still remain a stranger to them. In this manner, urban life engendered a new kind of experience, which came to characterize modernity—the experience of the crowd. Both Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire were fascinated by the possibility of losing oneself in the midst of the crowd, and Poe’s short story “The Man of the Crowd” (1848) and Charles Baudelaire’s prose poem “Les Foules” (“The Crowds”) (1861) have become emblems of this experience.12 The experience of the crowd is also at the center of Georg Simmel’s theory on the conditions of metropolitan life, published in 1903.13 Emphasizing the increased speed of city life and the overload of sensory perception that it created, Simmel described the protective mechanisms that developed in modern sensibilities––dulled senses and a distanced attitude. Taking his cue from Simmel, Benjamin singled out the experience of the flâneur as representative of the modern subject. According to Benjamin, the flâneur was born along with the arcades, which allowed him to loiter around at his own pace. Later, the streets became his “interior”: “The street becomes a dwelling for the flâneur; he is as much at home among house façades as a citizen is within his four walls.”14 However, Benjamin considers the flâneur in terms of historical-material development and asserts that the change of the city landscape and the increased pace of life left the flâneur homeless, so to speak. He claims that Baudelaire “roamed about in the city, which had long since ceased to be home for the flâneur,” and he asserts that “[t]he semblance [Schein] of a crowd with a soul and movement all its own, the luster that had dazzled the flâneur, had faded for him.”15 According to Benjamin, the flâneur of Baudelaire’s day is not at all at home in the city. However, he has two avatars who correspond to the new perceptual environments: the amateur detective (the distant and rational observer) and the gaper (the perplexed observer).16 Describing the characteristics of the flâneur, Benjamin emphasizes two things in particular. The first is that a change in the perceptual apparatus can be detected in this historical figure. For Benjamin, the modern flâneur is associated with the experience of shock, which is inflicted upon him by the rapidly changing urban surroundings—an overload of sense impressions created by the crowds and new technology.17 This is related to Benjamin’s discussions on the destruction of the aura in the age of technological reproducibility. Second, the gaze of the flâneur is for Benjamin an allegorical gaze and a melancholic gaze. This understanding is tied up with Benjamin’s discussion of the impact of the commodity on nineteenth-century culture.18 Allegory has in common with the commodity that it opens up a gap between a representation/a thing and its meaning/value. This means that the allegorical gaze endows things with new meaning and in this manner

6

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

creates new constellations. For Benjamin, this is the disruptive force of allegory. In the wake of Benjamin’s writing, the flâneur has become a disputed figure; he is subject to various approaches and is claimed for different purposes.19 Some of the confusion occurs because different scholars are simply speaking about different phenomena; in this regard, the flâneur should not be considered as “one,” but should be divided into different subcategories.20 As many researchers will agree, the flâneur is first and foremost characterized by a specific optique—a mobile gaze that wanders about randomly, as it were. It could be argued, however, that the gaze of the flâneur has been investigated with too much confidence in the naked eye, and that the influence of the new media emerging in the nineteenth century, to a large degree, has been neglected. Examples are the wide-ranging anthologies The Flâneur, edited by Keith Tester, and The Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire, edited by Rosemary Lloyd, neither of which includes a media perspective.21 By “naturalizing” the gaze of the flâneur, one may actually fail to recognize the specificity—and the historicity—of this particular mode of seeing. My assertion is that the gaze of the flâneur should not be viewed as a “naked eye” making observations in the streets of Paris, but rather as a gaze that is, to some degree, framed, fashioned, and mediated through the visual media of the period. Studies of the flâneur should take as its premise that vision does not objectively represent reality and that visibility is always something created. What is lacking in numerous studies of the flâneur, and especially in studies dealing with Baudelaire’s flâneur, is the recognition of the fact that vision is always mediated. Before dealing more substantially with the question of mediation, however, I will introduce the nineteenthcentury media that will be discussed in this book (newspapers, photography, and optical toys), indicating the processes of mediation they encompassed and the way in which Baudelaire responded to them.

A lyric poet in the age of new media If Baudelaire has been hailed as an advocate of “pure art,” it is partly due to his campaign against new media technology. A few passages from his essays and diaries make it clear that he despised the commerce of newspapers and the industry of photography. However, the myth that he simply rejected the new media is based on very little evidence, and the rhetorical context of the passages in question is often overlooked. It was above all the vulgarity inspired by the new media that caused his fury. Yet Baudelaire was fascinated with everything that was new, and we may suspect that his attitude toward the new media is more complex than it may seem. Rather than taking his word (or rather his outbursts) at face value, we should ask ourselves how Baudelaire’s writing and his aesthetics were responding to new media technology.

Introduction

7

In the midst of today’s advanced media technology, one can easily forget that the nineteenth century was, in fact, the first phase of modern media culture. This is the period when the first mass medium was born in the form of the newspaper and the time when the first modern visual media were invented, such as photographic apparatuses, stereoscopes, and phenakistiscopes. The visual culture that we experience today—with its moving images, virtual images, and montage images—started to take form already in Baudelaire’s day. Acknowledging the importance of nineteenthcentury media in Baudelaire’s surroundings, we may view his writing as a response to a new perceptual regime. In this respect, the rise of the commercial newspaper is of great interest. A shift in the newspaper industry was prepared in 1836, when the newspaper La Presse made room for roman-feuilletons and advertisements. What had been a respectable and serious medium up to that point was transformed into a popular product sold for profit. As a consequence, writers such as Flaubert and Baudelaire turned their backs on the newspapers, claiming literature’s absolute independence. According to Pierre Bourdieu, the antagonism between literature and vulgar newspapers was decisive for the constitution of literature as an autonomous field in the nineteenth century.22 Yet, by focusing chiefly on the manner in which literature distanced itself from newspapers, one risks neglecting another aspect: the numerous ways in which newspapers and literature influenced each other’s discourses, forms, and aesthetics. The questions that should be addressed thus concern the interaction between Baudelaire’s writing and the modern newspaper. How did the rise of commercial newspapers influence Baudelaire’s repertoire of poetic forms, his ideas of poetic language, and his views concerning art and truth? In what ways was he inspired by the newspaper to transcend the ideal of “pure” poetry? Although he despised its commercial grounding, Baudelaire was indeed familiar with the newspaper medium. A devoted newspaper reader from early childhood and a contributor to newspapers throughout his career, he was very familiar with the language and forms of journalism. In particular, his collection of prose poems, Petits Poèmes en prose (which translates as “Short Prose Poems”), published posthumously in 1869, is interesting in this respect. These prose pieces were in fact first published in various newspapers and magazines, and they share many features with newspaper genres such as le tableau and le fait divers. Most importantly, I will argue that Baudelaire played with the forms of the newspaper, conscious that the newspaper shapes the way we see reality. Accordingly, it could be argued that Baudelaire did not merely experience modern life by strolling about in the streets; he was also influenced by the daily reports in the newspaper. In fact, it could be suggested that Baudelaire was just as much a newspaper reader as he was a flâneur. Whereas the modern newspaper grew out of an older tradition, photography was a novelty in the nineteenth-century media landscape. When

8

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

Daguerre’s invention was presented at the Académie des Sciences in Paris in 1839, it was seen primarily as a technology allowing for the reproduction of images, and it was only gradually that it started to intrude into the domain of art. A landmark in this regard was the inclusion of photography at the annual arts exhibition in Paris organized by l’Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1859, which caused vivid protests. As both Baudelaire and Benjamin have shown, this was the beginning of the age of mechanical reproduction in the domain of art. From now on, works of art could be reproduced infinitely by technological means, and their status as unique objects embedded in a tradition was seriously threatened. In Benjamin’s terms, the “aura” of the work of art had begun to wane. As is well known, Baudelaire’s official stance on photography was strictly negative: in the Salon de 1859, he rejected the technique of photography, certain that the strict reproduction of reality could in no way compete with the imaginative potential of art and worried that photography might paralyze the imaginative abilities of the beholder. However, Baudelaire’s attitude toward photography was not always hostile; he was a friend of the photographer Félix Nadar, and he was photographed by Nadar, Etienne Carjat, and Charles Neyt, taking great care in his appearance. My hypothesis is that photography also played a crucial role in Baudelaire’s aesthetics. First, it served as an opposition in his theory of the imagination, making the wonders of the imagination stand out more clearly. Second, it was part of “the cult of images” that instilled Baudelaire with so much passion. Third, and most importantly, the new medium inspired shrewd reflections on the act of seeing, framing, and interpreting images. The newspaper and photography were not the only media technologies transforming the visual culture of the nineteenth century. A number of optical devices that were originally invented for scientific purposes ended up as toys for the masses, and simple optical experiments thus became a matter of concern for everyone. The attraction of the optical toys was that they changed the perception of the world, creating effects of montage, movement, and 3-D vision. Thus, both in scientific circles and in popular culture, vision as such was being drastically reconsidered, and a new field of vision was opened—one rich in possibilities. In cinema and visual studies, the period in question is considered the precinematic age, and the art of cinema is considered the culmination of the changes in visual culture that occurred during the nineteenth century. There is thus a close connection between this new field of vision and the invention of cinema in 1895. How, then, is this new visual field reflected in Baudelaire’s writing, and how should we describe the relationship between Baudelaire’s aesthetics and the aesthetics of precinema? Baudelaire had firsthand experience with optical toys and described them as toys that stimulate children’s imagination and introduce them to the sphere of art.23 What I will show is that such optical instruments are not merely discussed by Baudelaire as sources of

Introduction

9

imaginative experiences; these particular modes of perception are also operative at several levels in his writings. When he describes the experience of the crowd and accounts for a specifically modern perception, he resorts to the aesthetics of optical toys. Likewise, when he pays tribute to Constantin Guys’s sketches, focusing on his manner of capturing movement, Baudelaire draws on the aesthetics of optical toys. Finally, in several passages, Baudelaire adopts the optics of the kaleidoscope, describing modern life in terms of the kaleidoscope. It could thus be argued that Baudelaire was deeply immersed in the new visual culture of the nineteenth century, and that his aesthetics partly stem from his precinematic sensibility. In addition to newspapers, photographs, and optical devices, the nineteenth-century media culture included various visual spectacles that should also be introduced, even if they will not be treated in detail in this book: the panorama, the diorama, the phantasmagoria, and the féerie were all popular art forms trading in visual deception. Among these, the panorama belonged to the field of painting but offered a completely new view to the spectators. The circular, painted canvas would allow them to feel immersed in a landscape, a military battle, or a historical scene. Such canvases were installed in rotundas built particularly for this purpose, and they were viewed from a centrally placed platform, upon which the spectators could walk around. Panoramas first appeared in London at the end of the eighteenth century, whereas the first panorama in Paris—“Le Passage des Panoramas”— opened in 1800. Soon the diorama, invented by Daguerre in 1822, started to compete with the panorama, but both remained popular throughout the nineteenth century. The diorama, to a larger extent, resembled a theatrical experience; remaining seated and immobile, the spectators witnessed a landscape painting that would change its appearance dramatically. This was made possible by means of multilayered, semitransparent panels and the manipulation of light, allowing the diorama to develop in a temporal sequence. As Benjamin has pointed out, the diorama can be seen as a precursor to the cinema.24 The phantasmagoria pretended to present ghosts on stage, and in this manner caused thrill and fear among the spectators. It was produced by means of a magic lantern, which in 1797 was put to a new use by EtienneGaspard Robertson at his show at Pavillon de l’Echiquier in Paris. Contrary to standard magic lantern projections, where the projector was placed among the spectators, the apparatus was hidden behind stage or made invisible in the dark theater. In this manner, the projected images appeared to be without a rational explanation; they appeared supernatural. Similar stage effects were put to use in the féerie, a theater genre based on the world of fairy tales that was popular in the first half of the century and that used complex theatrical machinery to achieve its “magic” effects. Because the féerie excelled at stage tricks, it became a privileged genre in early cinema, notably in Georges Méliès films. It should come as no surprise that this

10

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

was also a theater genre with which Baudelaire was familiar. In the poem “L’Irréparable” (“The Irreparable”), he referred to a féerie he had seen in which Marie Daubrun, his mistress, played the leading role: “Sometimes I’ve seen within a theatre // A Being made of light, and gold, and gauze” (“J’ai vu parfois au fond d’un théâtre banal // Un être, qui n’était que lumière, or et gaze”).25The performance in question included a stage trick in which the actress suddenly disappeared—a puzzling effect that must have excited Baudelaire. With his acute aesthetic sensibility, he was a privileged witness to the new visual environment taking shape in mid-nineteenth-century Paris.

Art and technology: Theories of mediation Media technology and ideology criticism The media technology described above—newspapers, photography, and optical devices—are well known in studies of modernity. Often, however, this technology has been considered from the perspective of ideology criticism, as part of a capitalist regime that deeply changed the conditions of life in the second half of the nineteenth century. This school of thought stems from Marx’s analysis of the abstract value of the commodity. According to Marx, the commodity created an abstract relationship to things and removed them from the human sphere. In a similar manner, the new media are seen as contributing to an “unreal” perception of reality; they create a reality that is a mere illusion, whereas “real” life and “true” experiences become inaccessible. The status of this illusion is a paradox, for it is true and false simultaneously. It is true insofar as it is effective and has truly imposed its power, but false insofar as it is the product of an ideology. In this situation, art is in constant danger of being infected by capitalist ideology; aesthetic semblance risks adopting the semblance produced by capitalism—without any critical distance. Thus, the question that comes to the fore is what relationship art should or could bear with the new media technology. Theodor W. Adorno’s response was to advocate the autonomy of art, claiming that art should keep its distance from society—including media and entertainment culture (“the culture industry”)—and only reflect it negatively. This would be achieved through a critical use of forms. Art would appropriate some of the aesthetic principles of capitalism, such as “the fragmented” and “the new,” but use them with a critical distance. For Adorno, modernist art was thus characterized by a profound ambiguity, since it both negated and reflected the capitalist regime.26 Although Benjamin shared Adorno’s basic views on capitalism, he had a more progressive view on the role of the new media. In “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” he outlined a theory of perception based on shock, using film as his main example. According to

Introduction

11

Benjamin, the perceptual shock imposed by the montage techniques of film could contribute to the destruction of the aura and potentially break the “mythic” spell of capitalism.27 Consequently, film could be used for radical purposes. As is well known, his perspectives were not well received by Adorno, who considered Benjamin’s positive assessment of film a dangerous alliance with capitalist forces.28 Yet, Benjamin’s progressive views on the new media are hardly perceivable in his writing on Baudelaire and the flâneur. Although in “Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” he discusses a change in the human apparatus of perception caused, to a large degree, by new technology (the telephone, the camera, the cinema), he considers it mainly in negative terms, as a process of mechanization, and he does not develop his views on media technology to any extent. Still, he makes an observation that bears witness to his profound insight into these processes. He asserts that technology subjects the human sensorium to a complex kind of training, and that “perception conditioned by shock” is established as a formal principle in film.29 Another point of interest is what Adorno considered to be the methodological deficiencies of Benjamin’s writing on Baudelaire. In his essay “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” Benjamin describes Baudelaire’s poems as expressions of the material conditions of the period. Adorno’s objection was that Benjamin did not proceed dialectically, as Marxist criticism should, and that his analysis thus lacked mediation (Vermittlung) between base and superstructure. In short, Benjamin failed to account for the relationship between Baudelaire’s motifs (such as the ragpicker) and the material conditions they—allegedly—reflected. Yet, as several critics have argued, Adorno failed to recognize the specificity of Benjamin’s approach and his faith in the expressive capacity of images. Although Benjamin disagreed with Adorno’s response, he acknowledged that the theoretical framework for his essay remained to be developed, and to meet Adorno’s objections, he revised the essay, the result being “Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” It is only in this revised version—which was to some extent inspired by Freud—that Benjamin includes reflections on the experience of shock imposed on the modern subject by new technology. In this manner, he outlined a theory of perception, which accounted for the process of mediation to a certain degree. How, then, should we assess Benjamin’s views on new media technology?30 To be sure, Benjamin’s stance was ambivalent, and his radical aspirations seem to have been modified under the influence of Adorno. Some essays are marked by techno-utopianism, some are marked by techno-pessimism, and some play these positions against one another. Thus, if we consider only “Some Motifs in Baudelaire” and fail to include other essays and fragments in our reading, Benjamin’s stance may easily be perceived as an overly negative estimation of technology. Furthermore, the extraordinary complex publication history of Benjamin’s writings complicates the matter.31 In view

12

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

of this, it seems crucial to highlight the progressive perspectives offered by Benjamin with respect to new technology, thus complementing his reflections on Baudelaire. It is certain that Benjamin was conscious of the impact of the new media on the nineteenth-century culture, and that he recognized that there was no such thing as a “naked eye.” In a passage in One-Way Street, he asserts that “[t]he ‘unclouded,’ ‘innocent’ eye has become a lie.”32 Furthermore, Benjamin was intrigued by the various visual technologies of the nineteenth century— from panoramas and dioramas to photography and stereoscopy—and appears to see them as central for the understanding of nineteenth-century culture.33 Yet he refers to such technology mainly in brief passages, and his work on Baudelaire focuses on the category of the commodity rather than nineteenth-century visual technologies. The relation between Baudelaire’s writings and nineteenth-century media therefore remains, to a large degree, to be explored.

Media technology and aesthetics: Theories of mediation In previous studies of the flâneur, the question of mediation and technology has been addressed to various degrees, and the issue has been treated differently in various disciplines. In literary studies, it has been generally acknowledged that the gaze of the flâneur is filtered through language, so in this sense, it would be commonsensical to claim that the gaze of the flâneur is mediated. In particular, the gaze of the flâneur has been considered in relation to previous literary drifters in French literature, as described in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Rêveries, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, and Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris, as well as the plethora of nineteenthcentury typologies and physiologies. However, the relationship between the flâneur and other nineteenth-century media technologies has been explored to a lesser degree. Although a number of books and articles on modernism have discussed the relationship between modernist literature and media technology, they have given priority to twentieth-century literature, whereas nineteenth-century literature remains, to a larger degree, to be explored.34 A significant contribution in this regard is Françoise Meltzer’s book, Seeing Double: Baudelaire’s Modernity (2011), which considers the changes in the visual field in the nineteenth century. Although Meltzer’s main concern is not nineteenth-century media culture, but rather the general phenomenon of seeing double, she provides interesting reflections on the role of stereoscopy and “optical gaps.”35Also, Andrea Goulet’s Optiques: The Science of the Eye and the Birth of Modern French Fiction (2006) should be mentioned.36 Goulet’s analysis of the role of optics in the shaping of nineteenth-century

Introduction

13

prose from Balzac to the detective story and science fiction is illuminating as to the interaction between literary and visual registers. In cinema studies and visual studies, the situation is somewhat different; here the question of mediation is a main focus, and the influence of technological, social, and popular forces has long been acknowledged. Consequently, a number of studies in these disciplines have considered the visual regime of the nineteenth century in relation to new technology: Jonathan Crary has analyzed the “techniques of the observer,” revealing how they transformed the visual field.37 Anne Friedberg has studied the mobile gaze of the flâneur, showing how it was instrumentalized in technology and architecture before it was transformed into a “cinematic gaze.”38 Tom Gunning has highlighted the importance of nineteenth-century technology for the modernist sensibility, exploring various visual positions, including that of the flâneur.39 Stanley Cavell has even brought attention to Baudelaire’s precinematic sensibility, albeit in a brief passage.40 These authors have all illuminated the relationship between vision and nineteenthcentury technology and in this manner have made shrewd and substantial contributions to the study of the flâneur. However, a general difficulty with many of the approaches to the flâneur in the visual disciplines is that he is often seen as prefiguring the media age, not as a part of it. A trajectory is established, where the gaze of the flâneur supposedly exists prior to its instrumentalization through certain technological devices, which again prefigures the advent of cinema. Even if this trajectory is not usually described directly, it seems to underlie discussions of the phenomenon where the question of mediation is not addressed and the processes of influence remain unclear. With this approach, the gaze of the flâneur risks being naturalized, so to speak, and considered the “natural” counterpart to the cinematic gaze. The question thus remains: to what degree and in what manner did nineteenth-century media contribute to the shaping of the gaze of the flâneur? Obviously, this is a complex question that cannot be easily answered. Historical forms of perception are difficult to register, and our objects of investigation must necessarily be various representations of the flâneur, and not the flâneur as such. Presumably, the issue may be illuminated through the use of theoretical frameworks that describe the relationship between perception, media technology, and art in a satisfactory manner. Omitting, for obvious reasons, simple deterministic and mimetic approaches, we may outline four theories of mediation that seem particularly relevant to our purposes. The first is Benjamin’s “theory” of mediation, which has already been introduced. Benjamin attempted to describe a change in the human perceptual apparatus that can be dated to the period of early modernity. In this manner, he aspired to establish aesthetics as a theory of perception,

14

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

seeing perception as socially, historically, and technologically conditioned. According to Benjamin, technology affects our perception; it inflicts a shock upon the subject, in this manner fragmenting his experience. But even if technology in this manner imposes a radical break with previous forms of perception, new possibilities also open up. Since technology trains our senses, teaching them to process new experiences, it may in fact reconfigure our senses. This means that technology may serve to break the spell of capitalist society and initiate social change.41 Benjamin’s main example is film, but other media can also be considered in this double perspective. Even though the new media inflict an experience of shock, thereby contributing to a loss of experience, they also construct new experiences, thereby displaying a radical potential. A more radical theory of mediation is provided by Friedrich A. Kittler, who in many respects is influenced by Benjamin, in Discourse Networks 1800/1900.42 For Kittler, the hardware is decisive in the mediation process because it determines what is possible to say, and our communication is merely a function of the discourse networks that are available. Accordingly, he sees modernist literature as the consequence of the new media situation in which the old medium of writing (representing the Gutenberg era) was challenged by new media technology (film, the phonograph, and the typewriter). Even if Kittler’s theory is eye-opening and instructive, it could be argued that it is also too deterministic; it puts too much confidence in the shaping power of technology while placing too little confidence in the human factor. By contrast, Bruno Latour’s position could be described as both humanist and socially oriented; he discards the position that views technology as an agent of change and revalues the social networks that both give rise to technology and put it to use.43 In opposition to a simple diffusion model, Latour advocates what he calls the translation model, stressing that users are active interpreters and not passive receivers. Rejecting determinist perspectives, he emphasizes that the future of new technology is always dependent on how it is used. W. J. T. Mitchell provides us with a much more complex understanding of the notion “the media.” Taking issue with the notion of the purity of the various media, as well as the purity of the five senses, he underscores the way each sense is supported by and translated through other senses, and the way each medium is supported by and translated through other media—through a perpetual process of criss-crossing and intertwinement. (Painting is not merely a visual phenomenon, but draws also on tactile and material elements; texts are not merely symbolic, but also draw on visual and auditory conventions.) On this basis, Mitchell asserts, “all media are mixed media, combining different codes, discursive conventions, channels, sensory and cognitive modes.” 44 Accordingly, he does not address the question of media specificity through reified labels such as “visual” or “aural” media,

Introduction

15

but rather sees it as a question of “specific sensory ratios that are embedded in practice, experience, tradition and technical inventions.” 45 This means that our senses and the media interact with each other, albeit in complex ways, and that the notion of “natural perception” must give way to the notion of “mediated perception.” Furthermore, it means that we should not see any medium or sense as “pure,” but rather as collaborating with other media and senses. All of these theories are valuable insofar as they contribute to highlighting crucial aspects of the mediation process. They actually have a lot in common, although they emphasize different aspects of the process: Benjamin sees perception as the decisive element, Kittler makes media technology the core of his theory, Latour stresses the importance of use, whereas Mitchell underscores the composite nature of all mediation processes. To a certain extent, these theories should probably be considered complementary rather than mutually exclusive. Furthermore, I think they are, to a large degree, compatible with the main theoretical framework that will be used in this book, and which allows us to get quite specific concerning the way the new media impinges on human perception, behavior, and thought, and the way the mediation processes are responded to in works of art and literature.

Dispositives: Frames of perception To account for the process of mediation between technology and aesthetics, I propose to use the concept of dispositive—or apparatus, as the word is often translated in English.46 This concept allows us to consider the process of mediation as a complex process of perception in which various dispositives (such as newspapers, photography, and optical devices) shape and guide the way the world is seen. In this sense, perception will always be seen as mediated and filtered through the dispositives of the period. What, then, is a dispositive? It is a device, an apparatus, or an arrangement—the word refers both to the technical apparatus used to arrange certain components in a certain order and to the disposition, order, or assemblage resulting from such an arrangement. As a theoretical concept, the word has a complex genealogy, but it seems to have emerged in the 1970s in two somewhat different contexts.47 First, it appeared in the writing of Jean-Louis Baudry, who introduced “apparatus theory” in cinema studies.48 Critical of the cinema’s cultural impact, Baudry used the term dispositive (dispositif) to describe cinema’s ideological underpinnings; the way the apparatus produced a specific viewer position. Although the context here is restricted to cinema, it is significant that the word is used to articulate a connection between technology and psychology. Only a few years later, the word dispositive appeared in Foucault’s work on the history of sexuality, and from this context, the word has gained

16

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

currency.49 Foucault’s main concern was not technology or the media as such, but rather the disciplinary techniques emerging from the eighteenth century onward. Foucault drew our attention to the way modern subjects were disciplined by means of panopticons, prisons, and hospitals, which again were supported by a set of discourses, practices, and ideas about normality. Although he never elaborates a theory of dispositives, Foucault uses the term to describe all these disciplinary arrangements and ideas (discourses, laws, administrative measures), understood as “heterogenous ensembles,” serving a “strategic function” and responding to “an urgent need.”50 In particular, Foucault pointed out the “dual action” of disciplinary processes; they not only served to control and restrict, but also contributed to the formation of the subject. As the disciplinary principles were internalized, they brought about processes of “subjectification” through which free but docile citizens were produced.51 Even though Foucault does not address questions concerning media technology to any extent, his thinking easily lends itself to such purposes. Among others, Foucault has influenced the work of Jonathan Crary, who considers the “techniques of vision” invented in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as “disciplinary techniques.”52 In the wake of Crary’s work, the disciplinary model has been used in numerous studies of the new media. More recently, Giorgio Agamben has given the term dispositive (dispositivo) a broader significance, taking his cue from Foucault. For Agamben, a dispositive is “literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings.”53 His examples are not only prisons and hospitals, but also cell phones, computers, and in a certain sense, language as well. In this manner, Agamben explicitly includes communication technology in the concept of the dispositive, and even seems to give it a privileged role. This means that we are actually surrounded by dispositives in our everyday lives and that we interact with them continuously—for better and for worse. Acknowledging the ubiquity of dispositives, Agamben proposes to make a basic distinction between two categories of beings: living beings on the one side, and the dispositives in which they are “incessantly captured” on the other.54 The outcome of the interaction between living beings and dispositives would be a third category labeled as subjects, according to Agamben. Here, he is very much in line with Foucault’s ideas about the processes of subjectification. Yet, to a large degree, Agamben’s thinking on this matter is informed by Heideggerian thoughts on man’s way of being in the world, and his overall project in this respect differs from Foucault’s. As we understand from Agamben’s definition, the dispositives are not something we can escape in order to be “free.” On the contrary, it is through the dispositives that our world takes form and we recognize ourselves as human beings. According to Agamben, man colonizes his existence with dispositives (“instruments,

Introduction

17

objects, gadgets, odds and ends, and various technologies”) and through these dispositives, he attempts to nullify his “animalistic behaviours.”55 Thus, in a certain manner, it is through the dispositives that our human existence opens up and is revealed to us. Accordingly, the dispositives could be considered in a slightly different perspective from the one offered by Foucault; they could be seen as frames of perception, tools of interaction, or as “interfaces” between man and the world.56 The question that arises in this context is what strategy one should adopt with respect to the dispositives in a capitalist society. According to Agamben, capitalist society has captured the dispositives (notably language and images) and withdrawn them from “free use.” Just like religion confines certain things and practices in a holy sphere that is inaccessible to humans, capitalism lays claim to certain things and practices, captures them within a certain logic, and, in this manner, precludes their free use. In this sense, capitalism could be described as a “massive accumulation and proliferation” of dispositives.57 What is required in this situation, Agamben observes, is a recuperation of the dispositives; that which has been separated and withdrawn must be made available for free and common use through a process of profanation. How, then, can this process of profanation come about? Interestingly, Agamben asserts that play is an organ of profanation.58 For Agamben, play implies a profanization of the sacred, where that which has been separated is made available for common use. “In play, man frees himself from sacred time and ‘forgets’ it in human time,” he contends.59 In this way, play is seen as a liberating activity: as an act of resistance against all kinds of separation and segregation. The task is thus to play with the dispositives and make them available for free use.

Play in the era of technological reproducibility If we consider nineteenth-century media technology in this perspective, two things become clear. First, newspapers, photography, and optical devices should not be considered merely media technology, but should also be seen as dispositives that guide and shape our perception of the world. Second, even if this media technology is at the outset part of a commercial and technological enterprise (emerging in the period of “high capitalism,” to use Benjamin’s expression), then it also has a certain potential that should be acknowledged: a potential for play and for free use. This is, as we might expect, a potential that may be explored by poets and artists, and it could be argued that the possibilities for play in art increase in the era of technological reproducibility. In a rarely quoted passage, Benjamin in fact acknowledges that the shattering of the aura entails an increased potential for play: “[W] hat is lost in the withering of semblance and the decay of the aura in works

18

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

of art is matched by a huge gain in the scope for play [Spiel-Raum].”60 He is referring specifically to the possibilities of film, which, because it is based on the principle of montage, lends itself to infinite forms of play. However, Benjamin’s interest in the category of play was not restricted to film. As Miriam Bratu Hansen has showed, the term Spiel was central to Benjamin’s cinema aesthetics, but it also played a significant role in his aesthetics generally.61 Acknowledging Benjamin’s broad interest in the dynamics of play, we can thus generalize his argument regarding the gain in the scope of play in film. The new possibilities opened up in the era of technological reproducibility entail that artworks generally are no longer treated as icons and fetishes, bolstering the cultural tradition and the existing power relationships, but instead lend themselves to free play. In this way, the age of technological reproducibility opens up new possibilities in art; it allows for change, mobility, and reconfiguration, for both the producer and the recipient. A similar view on play is offered by art historian Rosalind Krauss, an astute reader of Benjamin. In an article entitled “The Originality of the Avant-Garde,” she disentangles the myth of originality in modernism and the avant-garde, asserting that this myth is based on the repression of the copy: the avant-garde movements founded themselves on the claim of absolute originality, and modernism pretended to start at point zero—thus repressing every notion of copy or repetition. Questioning these discourses, Krauss asks what it would look like if we did not repress the copy, and she gives a tentative answer: “The answer to this, or at least one answer, is that it would look like a certain kind of play with the notions of photographic reproduction that begins in the silkscreen canvases of Robert Rauschenberg.”62 Both Benjamin and Krauss thus recognize that the loss of authenticity and the possibility for infinite copies increase the scope of play in art; Benjamin relates this phenomenon to the invention of film (notably surrealist film in the 1920s), whereas Krauss relates it to pop art in the 1960s. To be sure, the loss of authenticity and the proliferation of copies were the premises both of avant-garde art and of postmodernist art. Yet, as both Benjamin and Krauss point out, there was also an awareness of the copy in nineteenthcentury art, even if it was, to some degree, repressed. There seems to be an intriguing connection between new techniques allowing for reproduction and the discourses of originality that started to flourish in this very period, both countering and repressing the new dominance of the copy. Benjamin and Krauss thus outline some of the most central problems of modernist art: its conditions in the age of capitalism or the age of technological reproducibility. With their perspectives in mind, we may assert that the age of technical reproduction actually increases the scope of play in art. Further, with Agamben, we may assert that the dispositives of capitalism may in fact be countered by profanation and play. Yet, the mechanisms involved here are extremely complex and hard to disentangle. If they operate according to

Introduction

19

similar principles, how can we distinguish between disciplinary forces and liberating forces, between the capitalist aesthetic and art’s aesthetic? Here, a number of questions arise, all of which need to be considered in relation to Baudelaire.

Baudelaire’s media aesthetics The aim of this book is to explore Baudelaire’s writings in light of the new media dispositives emerging in the nineteenth century. My contention is not merely that Baudelaire was generally influenced by the media dispositives but that he responded to them; he played with the media dispositives, exploring them as perceptual tools and as “interfaces” between man and the world. This method is, in fact, the most basic of all methods within poetry: seeing something as or through something else. Through various techniques and by means of certain metaphors and structures Baudelaire allows us to see things in a specific manner or through a specific “lens.” In this way, he invites us to approach reality through the dispositives of nineteenth-century media, or he uses the dispositives of nineteenth-century media to create ambivalence with respect to what we actually see. This should not be considered merely in terms of the duality between reality and illusion, as has often been done; it should also be recognized as a sophisticated media aesthetics.63 However, the investigation of media imagery and structures in Baudelaire’s writing raises a series of methodological problems; for what status can we legitimately grant them, and what function may we assume they have? Is it possible that Baudelaire was unconsciously influenced by the media dispositives, integrating them in his writing quite unaware of their impact on his creative processes? Or was he simply using them as literary devices—as metaphors and analogies—in much the same way he used other metaphors and analogies, without giving them any privileged role? Or was he, in fact, playing with these dispositives, conscious of their central role in shaping our perception of the modern world? Although I do not wish to consider this issue merely from a psychological perspective, making my argument dependent on Baudelaire’s intentions, it seems to me that the traces of nineteenth-century media dispositives in Baudelaire’s writing stem from a deliberate strategy and a highly conscious poet. Baudelaire was concerned with the new media technology and with new modes of perception throughout his carrier as a writer, and he was highly sensitive to their impact on the aesthetic domain. His persistent preoccupation with the new media supports the thesis that Baudelaire deliberately played with the media dispositives, exploring them as perceptual tools and as a means of experiencing the world. In this context, it is crucial that Baudelaire’s work, to an astonishing degree, transcended the boundaries between the various arts and media and

20

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

should be considered cross-disciplinary at its core. A poet and an art critic, he reflected upon the various arts and media, as well as the relationships between them, including poetry, painting, caricature, drawing, sculpture theater, and pantomime. As Rosemary Lloyd has showed, he was also committed to “the art of transposition” and frequently sought to emulate other artists in the medium of writing.64 Accordingly, Baudelaire’s interest in the new media—newspapers, photography, and precinematic devices—can be seen as an extension of his interest in the various aesthetic forms and genres, spanning from the traditional art forms to popular art and culture. Yet, in some respect the new media differ from the conventional art forms because they belong to everyday life and in that sense make up our living environment. They are at the same time quasi-invisible and pervasive, and keen consciousness is thus required to discern their impact. If anyone was sensitive to the media-saturated environment, it was Baudelaire. My investigation draws upon recent work in media aesthetics and the wider aesthetic field exploring questions of intermediality and remediation. The concept of intermediality implies that the various media constantly interact with one another; they observe, “think,” and respond to one another.65 A more specific concept is remediation, which describes the ways in which the conventions of one medium are paraphrased, reused, or realized in another medium.66 A media aesthetic approach is especially well suited for the study of Baudelaire because it allows for a broad investigation of his encounters with the various media. As he responds to the different media in different ways, a narrow approach would not have given a sufficiently comprehensive picture. It is also essential that the media aesthetic approach allows us to go beyond the perspectives offered by the Frankfurt School, which has often adhered to an overly strict separation of art and popular culture, as well as an overly strict distinction between “good” and “bad” aesthetic forms. Investigating the relationship between the gaze of the flâneur and nineteenth-century media in Baudelaire’s writings, I emphasize three aspects in particular. First, I examine the ways in which media technology—notably newspapers, photography, and optical devices—is explicitly thematized in his writings, and I provide a media historical context for the understanding of his encounters with the media. Second, I investigate the gazes that are at work in Baudelaire’s writings. The aim is to explore to what degree he plays with the nineteenth-century media dispositives and to what degree the gaze of the flâneur, as it is depicted in Baudelaire’s prose poems and essays, appears to be mediated by nineteenth-century media. Third, I discuss the importance of the new media for Baudelaire’s aesthetics generally, highlighting the role of movement, montage, and mediation processes. Exploring these three aspects in relation to one another, I outline the characteristics of Baudelaire’s media aesthetics.

Introduction

21

I would like to underscore that my approach to Baudelaire is aesthetic rather than hermeneutical, and that my interpretation of Baudelaire’s texts, to a great extent, support and complement previous readings. My aim is to situate Baudelaire in the media landscape of the nineteenth century and to demonstrate that his aesthetics took shape in a media-saturated environment. In this manner, I hope to alter the understanding of Baudelaire’s stance toward the new media, showcasing him as a poet who was capable of coming to terms with the new media technology and used it productively in his writings. My examination focuses, to a large degree, on Baudelaire’s prose poems and essays, whereas the verse poems in Les Fleurs du mal (“The Flowers of Evil”) will be discussed to a lesser degree. The last chapter of this book extends the perspective and discusses the relationship between nineteenth-century media and modernity. Of interest in this context is not merely the role nineteenth-century media played in Baudelaire’s aesthetics, but also their roles as metaphors and models in early theories of modernity. As we will see, the kaleidoscope, the phantasmagoria, the photographic apparatus, and the stereoscope all continue to live on as metaphors in the writings of Marx, Freud, and Benjamin. Indeed, nineteenthcentury optical technology appears to be privileged metaphors in theories of modernity. How do these metaphors work? In what ways have such metaphors shaped our understanding of modernity? In what ways have they restricted our understanding of modernity? These are questions that will be addressed in the closing chapter of this book. Of particular interest is the question of how we should relate to images in a media-saturated world— without falling victim to fetishism and without endorsing iconoclasm. The book is organized as follows: Chapters 1–3 examine Baudelaire’s writing in light of newspapers, photographs, and precinematic devices, respectively. Chapter 4 addresses the ways these media impinge on corporeal behavior, and Chapter 5 connects the discussion of the media dispositives to a discussion of toys and play. Chapter 6 extends the perspective by discussing the afterlife of nineteenth-century media as metaphors in theories of modernity, and more precisely the use of media imagery in the writings of Marx, Freud, and Benjamin.

1 Newspapers

What is a newspaper? First of all, it is a very ordinary object susceptible to passing unnoticed in most situations. We tend to forget that the newspaper was the first modern mass medium and a highly complex one. The various discourses and genres, the mixed ideology of truth-telling and entertainment, and the composite layout of the page make the newspaper a fascinating universe. If media studies did not have more up-to-date and modern technologies to explore, the newspaper could provide rich material for research. The newspaper was probably even more fascinating for the generations that saw it develop from its noble eighteenth-century origins into the commercial mass medium it became in the mid-nineteenth century. This development led to a schizophrenia that has haunted the newspaper industry ever since. Baudelaire’s generation witnessed this transformation and experienced its consequences within the fields of art and poetry; as journalism became the dominant discourse of the nineteenth century, poetry became altogether marginalized. And yet, the newspaper was a captivating medium for poets as well. Not only did this medium bring news from the modern world; the form, genres, and aesthetics of the newspaper were highly innovative. Given its superbly modern features, it is not surprising that poets took inspiration from the newspaper, even if they despised its commercial basis. How is this inspiration from newspapers articulated in Baudelaire’s writings? Baudelaire contributed to newspapers throughout his career as a writer, making the newspaper institution a central part of his literary life. From his writings, it appears that he recognized the way the newspaper influenced the gaze of the newspaper reader. As a dominating medium, the newspaper provided frames for the interpretation of reality and thereby contributed to the production of visibility. Of particular interest in this regard is the collection of prose poems entitled Petits Poèmes en prose (also referred to as Le Spleen de Paris). Not only were these prose poems published in newspapers and reviews, but they also bear witness to Baudelaire’s dialogue with the newspaper’s form and genres.

24

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

A duel: Journalism versus poetry The rise of the commercial newspaper in the nineteenth century was a media revolution heralding today’s media situation in every aspect. Within a short period of time, the newspaper became the dominant discourse of the period and an incarnation of modern life. The increase in circulation numbers gives an idea of the large-scale consequences the commercial press had for nineteenth-century culture; from 1830 to 1880, the daily newspapers in Paris increased their circulation forty times.1 This triumph of the newspaper goes hand in hand with the development of a broader reader audience and new reading habits.2 Soon reading newspapers became the new, daily habit of the working classes as well as the bourgeoisie. The popular and commercial press experienced its beginnings when, in 1836, Emile de Girardin launched the newspaper La Presse. This newspaper had lower subscription rates than other newspapers and compensated for this through the invention of a soon-to-be popular genre, le roman-feuilleton. A new journalistic regime began that catered to a broader public, welcomed fiction in its columns, and was devoted to the depiction of everyday life.3 In this manner, 1836 prepared for the shift from elitist and opinion-based newspapers to popular and industrial newspapers.4 The coming victory of the popular and commercial press is exceptionally well symbolized by a duel that was fought between the editor Girardin and one of his critics. Three weeks after La Presse was launched, an editor from one of the conservative newspapers accused him of having reduced the noble mission of the press to vulgar commerce. Girardin shot from the hip and dispatched his opponent with a single shot.5 When Pierre Bourdieu describes how the world of literature during this period was constituted as a separate field, with its own rules and boundaries, he refers to the antagonism between poetry and journalism. Using Baudelaire as one of his chief examples, he asserts that literature was constituted in opposition to the rapidly expanding newspaper press, which was seen as corrupting the value of cultural production.6 Many of the literary authors fought against the rise of the commercial press, and the antagonism between literature and newspapers was deeply felt. Important in this regard is the fact that popular literature—especially le roman-feuilleton—had found its way to the newspaper and thus consolidated literature’s place within the market. This more or less commercially oriented literature was despised by elitist authors such as Baudelaire and Flaubert. In this respect, Flaubert’s expression of his disgust is illustrative: “But, I maintain that a work of art (worthy of that name and conscientiously done) is beyond appraisal, has no commercial value, cannot be paid for.”7 Further, he asserted that, “[w] hen you want to earn money with your pen, you have to do journalism, serials [feuilleton], or the theatre.”8 Accordingly, a hierarchy of genres was established: le feuilleton at the bottom and poetry at the top. And although

Newspapers

25

certain novelists (notably Flaubert) had achieved literary prestige, the novel itself was associated with le feuilleton, journalism, and industrial literature.9 We find a shrewd comment on the conflict between vulgar journalism and noble poetry in Honoré de Balzac’s novel Illusions perdues (“Lost Illusions”), published in three parts from 1837 to 1843. Here, Balzac tells us the story of Lucien, a young boy who sets off to Paris with a pure heart and the ambition to be a poet, but is corrupted little by little by life in the big city. As a result, he ends up making his living as a journalist. Throughout the novel, journalism is associated with lies and corruption, whereas poetry is associated with truth and purity. What is interesting is that Balzac shows how poetry actually makes alliances with journalism. Although Lucien fails in the marketplace as a poet, his success as a journalist is—ironically enough—made when he starts writing a series of semiliterary sketches in an effortless kind of poetic prose: Lucien then read to them one of those delightful articles which ensured success for this petit journal: in two columns it depicted one of the minor facets of Parisian life, a figure, a type, an everyday event or something out of the ordinary. This sample, entitled “People one sees in the streets of Paris” [“Les Passants de Paris”] was written in a new and original style, so that thought was provoked by the mere clash of words and the reader’s attention stimulated by the jingle of adverbs and adjectives.10 A footnote in the Pléiade edition of the novel informs us that this semiliterary form was widespread in the press; it is described as one of the many “studies of manners from Paris [études de mœurs parisiennes]” which proliferated the press during this period.11 Given Balzac’s own financial situation, it is particularly significant that he stages a disillusioned and corrupted poet as its author. Although it is a novel, Illusions perdues provides us with a description of the relationship between literature and journalism that is typical of the period. In 1839, another attack on journalism was launched, this time in the form of an article entitled “De la littérature industrielle” (“On Industrial Literature”), written by the literary critic Sainte-Beuve. Severely criticizing the commercial development of the press, Sainte-Beuve proclaims that, “The situation of the daily press today, as far as literature is concerned, is, to put it bluntly, disastrous.”12 He points to two particular problems. First, “industrial”—or commercial—literature did not confine itself to its proper domain and did not respect the distinction between commercial and “serious” literature. Second, the proliferation of advertisements in the newspapers influenced the “serious” genres, and it had become difficult to separate commercial from noncommercial genres. As an example, SainteBeuve refers to la réclame, a sort of book review, which appeared to belong

26

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

to the genre of editorial writing, but actually was paid for by the book’s publisher. Thus, la réclame opened a connection between commercial and noncommercial genres, branching the typographically marked dividing line—le filet—between the two.13 What Sainte-Beuve is actually criticizing is the fact that the field of literature was becoming less distinct and more difficult to read, as the strict differentiation between high and low and commercial and noncommercial no longer held. As Bourdieu points out, the editors of Le Figaro and Le Petit Journal soon started to make room for semifictitious, commercial, and popular genres.14 In the modern newspaper, journalistic, commercial, and literary genres were thus juxtaposed, and the outcome was a miscellaneous compilation of genres, most of them characterized by brevity and discontinuity.

Newspaper aesthetics The newspaper in mid-nineteenth century can be seen as a part of a fast growing, visually oriented print culture that rapidly changed the visual field. To understand its influence, it is crucial that the newspaper should not only be seen as a textual phenomenon, as the site of journalistic writing, but also be recognized as a visual phenomenon characterized by experiments in layout and typography. On a single page, different headlines, fonts, and font sizes could be seen, and a variety of brief pieces of prose, without any apparent connection, were presented to the reader. This fragmented form gave rise to a new mode of reading; linear reading was now abandoned in favor of discontinuous reading, browsing, and zapping on the page. Just as the flâneur let his gaze flicker in the street, the newspaper reader let his gaze flicker over the newspaper page. What is interesting is that the aesthetics of the modern newspaper resemble, to a certain extent, modernist aesthetics. The juxtaposition of texts that have no apparent connection is based on the same principle that will later be crucial to the avant-garde: montage. The montage of the nineteenthcentury newspaper precedes the collages of Picasso and Braque, as well as the montages of avant-garde film. Furthermore, the typographical exploration of the newspaper page parallels the poetic exploration of the white space of the book page. The ultimate reference here is Stéphane Mallarmé, who scattered words all over the page in his poem Un coup de dés (“A Throw of the Dice”) (1897), using a variety of fonts and sizes. This pioneering poetic work should be seen in relation to Mallarmé’s experiments with typography and layout in the one-man journal La Dernière Mode: Gazette du Monde et de la Famille (“The Latest Fashion: A Gazette of High Society and of the Family”) in 1874. Presumably, his experience with the white surface of the newspaper page had an impact on his later typographical experiments as a poet.

Newspapers

27

Yet, the relation between modernist aesthetics and newspaper aesthetics is complicated. From an aesthetic perspective, it could be argued that poetry belonged to the autonomous sphere of literature, whereas the newspaper belonged to the capitalist universe. How should we then describe the relationship between fragmented art and fragmented newspapers? Here, as always, Benjamin gives ambiguous answers. On the one hand, he disavows the newspaper, claiming that its fragmented layout contributed to the loss of experience that characterized modernity: If it were the intention of the press to have the reader assimilate the information it supplies as part of his own experience, it would not achieve its purpose. But its intention is just the opposite, and it is achieved: to isolate events from the realm in which they could affect the experience of the reader. The principles of journalistic information (newness, brevity, clarity, and, above all, lack of connection between the individual news items) contribute as much to this as does the layout of the pages and the style of writing.15 Benjamin here outlines the ideals of journalism: newness, brevity, comprehensibility, and above all, disconnectedness. Although these features are easily recognizable as typical features of modernist literature (clarity exempted), they belong to the capitalist media culture and are hence judged in negative terms. On the other hand, Benjamin recognizes that fragmentation and disconnectedness have a revolutionary potential when they appear in art; in particular he praises the principle of montage (in film) insofar as it contributes to a new kind of perception. However, the dichotomy between “negative” fragmentation in newspapers and “positive” fragmentation in art is transgressed when Benjamin comments on forms and genres akin to the newspaper in the opening piece of One-Way Street (1928). There, he speaks in favor of “leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards” circulating on the streets, whereas the old genres are dismissed as impotent.16 With Benjamin’s dialectical perspective in mind, we may thus see newspaper aesthetics as profoundly ambiguous; it both contributes to the loss of experience and inspires new forms of literature.

Interaction: The circulation between literature and journalism Even if there was an expressed antagonism between journalism and literature in the nineteenth century, there was also an important interaction between these fields, which is underestimated in Bourdieu’s study. As Marie-Eve Thérenty has argued, literary forms played a considerable role in the newspapers of

28

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

the nineteenth century, and there was an important circulation and a mutual influence between literary and journalistic forms.17 Journalists and writers in this period were undertaking the same enterprise; they attempted to capture the essence of modern life and sketch out the poetics of everyday life—le quotidien. Especially under the Second Empire and its increased censorship, the newspaper more and more dedicated itself to fiction and entertainment, often with satirical undertones, ironic twists, and polyphonic strategies.18 There is thus every reason to look closer at the semiliterary and semijournalistic genres that flourished on the newspaper pages. Essential for the understanding of the role of literature in the nineteenthcentury newspaper is the feuilleton section, i.e. the lower segment of the newspaper page, separated from the above section with a dividing line (le filet). Around 1800, it had been devoted to literary varia, such as art criticism, book reviews, and gossip from mundane life.19 However, after the success of La Presse in 1836, the feuilleton became synonymous with le romanfeuilleton, associated with commercial literature.20 Here novels of various quality were parceled out and presented with the promise “to be continued.” This was the main venue for literature in nineteenth-century newspapers, and Balzac, Maupassant, and others contributed to its reputation, whereas a number of minor writers rather contributed to its disrepute. However, above le filet, one could also find numerous brief prose pieces bearing a semiliterary status. An important genre in this regard was la chronique, and especially la chronique parisienne, which became a major newspaper genre under the Second Empire. Specializing in urban motifs, the chronique parisienne was devoted to the city and the city dwellers. Its aim was to give reports from daily life in Paris, providing each day a mirror of urban life.21 They were often executed as literary sketches capturing a moment of modern life. Further, a genre that was not actually published in the newspaper, but that Benjamin refers to as the haute-école of the feuilleton, was the physiologie, which peaked in the 1840s. It provided literary descriptions of all types of people one could encounter in the city landscape and hence made navigation easier for the newspaper reader/city dweller. The physiologie was a kind of panoramic literature taking in all of Paris through its descriptions. Benjamin associates la physiologie with the activity of the eye at the marketplace and the idle strolling of le flâneur: They [the physiologies] investigated types that a person taking a look at the marketplace might encounter. From the itinerant street vendor of the boulevards to the dandy in the opera-house foyer, there was not a figure of Paris life that was not sketched by a physiologue…. After each human type had been covered, the physiology of the city had its turn. There appeared Paris la nuit, Paris à table, Paris dans l’eau, Paris à cheval, Paris pittoresque, Paris marié.… The leisurely quality of these descriptions fits the style of the flâneur who goes botanizing on the asphalt.22

Newspapers

29

Another group of genres is le bruit and l’écho, which reported rumors from urban life, collected on the streets, at cafés, and in the theaters. They usually had the form of a witty reply or a short dialogue, phrased to convey a paradox or une pointe. In Balzac’s Illusions perdues, these forms appeared as the journalists’ instrument for plotting and intrigue and were a compilation of rumors, allusions to contemporary issues, and witty sayings.23 Brief, scornful, and witty, these forms have an aphoristic quality. This genre combining entertainment and criticism especially became fashionable under the Second Empire.24 Yet the most interesting newspaper genre in our context is le fait divers, a brief story or a note reporting an incident of miscellaneous quality. While fait indicates a truthful event and thus a brief narrative, divers indicates the anecdotal character of the narrative, i.e. its lack of importance. When the first tabloid paper, Le Petit Journal, was launched in Paris in 1863, le fait divers played a prominent role. Because the newspaper was not sold by subscription, but copy by copy on the street, it had to sell itself every day, and the commercial pressure consequently increased. Whereas the feuilleton had been the sales-promoting genre in La Presse, Le Petit Journal concentrated on le fait divers—with its great potential for reader-friendly anecdotes detached from any context.25 The main ingredients of le fait divers were curiosities, gossip, and bloody events rooted in crime journalism and the kind of unverified, sensational messages from foreign countries that are often referred to as canards (in German, Ente). For instance, in Illusions perdues, le canard is described as a fictitious note designed to spice up the column of fait divers from Paris when the actual events to be reported were considered dull.26 Thus, the boundaries between a truthful fait and a fictitious event were quite fluid. Even the sober account of le fait divers in Histoire générale de la presse française indicates its spicy character and calls attention to the way it was usually distributed in between the more serious genres.27 Le fait divers unites the sensational and the ordinary, revealing the extraordinary dimension of ordinary lives.28 But the most intriguing feature of le fait divers is its literary quality. As Roland Barthes has pointed out, le fait divers does not refer to anything but itself—it is an immanent and total form. In this manner, it differs from other brief news articles, having the familiar and well-known world as their reference, and thus resembles literature. According to Barthes, le fait divers consists of two components that are bound together by either causality or coincidence. These relating principles work in strange ways; while the causality is often undermined, the coincidence seems to follow a certain order. [W]e might say that the causality of fait-divers is constantly subject to the temptation of coincidence, and, inversely, that coincidence here is constantly fascinated by the order of causality. Aleatory causality, organized coincidence—it is at the junction of these two movements that the fait-divers is constituted: both ultimately refer to an ambiguous zone

30

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

where the event is experienced as a sign whose content is none the less uncertain.29 The outcome is something paradoxical, ambiguous, and inexplicable—the hallmarks of literature. However, Barthes acknowledges that this genre is poorly appreciated. Even though he claims that “the fait-divers is literature,” he underlines that it has a bad reputation and concludes that it is “a mass art” (“un art de masse”). Knowledge of the newspaper genres of the nineteenth century may allow us to better understand how Baudelaire responded to the new media situation of his day. Not only did Baudelaire contribute to the newspapers, as did many of his contemporaries, but he also invented a genre that is, in fact, closely connected to the regime of the newspaper: the prose poem.30 Baudelaire’s prose poems were originally published in newspapers and journals of various kinds, from full-scale newspapers such as La Presse and Le Figaro to literary journals.31 Although he planned to have the prose poems published as a book (under various working titles), this was not achieved during his lifetime.32 Most noteworthy is the publication in the feuilleton section of La Presse in 1862 in three sequences. There, Baudelaire’s prose pieces are surrounded by a variety of genres, including brief news articles, a “Faits divers” column, stock market prices, and advertisements. Reading Baudelaire’s prose poems in this context, one discovers that they borrow the key features from newspaper genres and testify to the circulation between literary and journalistic genres.33 In fact, Parisian scenes, paradoxical retorts, and bizarre anecdotes are elements that are widely recognized as main characteristics of Baudelaire’s prose poems, but the connection to the newspaper genres is rarely mentioned and seldom stressed. Above all, the anecdotic, semifictitious, and puzzling form of le fait divers appears to have been an inspiration for Baudelaire. As an art of the masses, this genre had the same appeal as other popular forms, for which Baudelaire had a soft spot. Indeed, Paul Claudel was right when he described Baudelaire’s style as a mixture of Racine’s style and the journalistic style of his day.34

A dedicated newspaper reader In Baudelaire’s diaries, there are many passages that give evidence of his contempt for the commercial newspaper, for example: “I don’t understand how a pure hand could touch a newspaper without a convulsion of disgust.” (“Je ne comprends pas qu’une main pure puisse toucher un journal sans une convulsion de dégoût.”)35 Some of these outbursts are addressed directly to Emile de Girardin, the editor of La Presse, who became the very personification of the commercial press.36 Still, Baudelaire was a dedicated

Newspapers

31

newspaper reader, fascinating by the speedy reports from modern life. In Le Peintre de la vie moderne (“The Painter of Modern Life”), when he praises Constantin Guys’s sketches as paintings of modern life, he in fact praises sketches that were published in British newspapers. Baudelaire’s comments on the qualities of the sketch are noteworthy in this regard as they depict an “aesthetics of speed” that also applies to the newspaper. He claims that because ordinary, daily life passes so quickly, it requires that the artist puts the same swiftness into the execution of his work: “[T]here is in the trivial things of life, in the daily changing of external things, a speed of movement that imposes upon the artist an equal speed of execution.” (“[I]l y a dans la vie triviale, dans la métamorphose journalière des choses extérieures, un mouvement rapide qui commande à l’artiste une égale vélocité d’exécution.”)37 As the sketches Baudelaire discusses were printed in newspapers, they were imbued with a double swiftness: both the artist and the newspaper press availed themselves of a “speed of execution.” In this light, both the newspaper and the sketch can be seen as incarnations of modernity. On several occasions, Baudelaire acknowledges that he was influenced by the newspapers, including La Presse. Discussing a painting in a letter to his father in 1838, Baudelaire admits that his opinion may be considered the fruits of his reading of La Presse.38 Furthermore, a note in the Pléiade edition of his collected works informs us that he often consulted the Gazette des tribunaux, a newspaper that specialized in giving details from courtroom scandals.39 This inclination is confirmed when Baudelaire comments on the plot of a play he is intending to write: “How often have I been struck by similar cases in reading la Gazette des tribunaux!” (“Que de fois j’ai été frappé par des cas semblables en lisant la Gazette des tribunaux!”)40 Here, a direct connection between Baudelaire’s newspaper reading and his writing is established. In other cases, we have detailed information demonstrating that the newspapers provided Baudelaire with material for his writing. At least two of his prose poems can be related to specific newspaper stories. In “Les Bons Chiens” (“The Bad Dogs”), Baudelaire refers explicitly to a feuilleton from La Presse, from which he extracted significant passages.41 Another prose poem, “Mademoiselle Bistouri,” is modeled on a tableau figuring in the “Chronique parisienne” of the newspaper L’Epoque.42 However, the newspapers not only served as a source; they had an even greater significance for Baudelaire. Of particular interest in this respect is a passage in the last section of Salon de 1846 entitled “De l’héroisme de la vie moderne” (“Of the Heroism of Modern Life”) where he discusses the motifs of modern poetry. There, Baudelaire asserts that contemporary Paris is full of poetic motifs. This passage is renowned because Baudelaire in this manner expands the field of poetry, inaugurating an era where “prosaic” motifs will also have a place in poetry. But more importantly in our context is his claim, a few paragraphs above, concerning the role of the newspapers

32

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

in this respect. There, Baudelaire asserts that it is the newspaper that opens our eyes to these modern motifs: Scenes of high life and of the thousands of uprooted lives that haunt the underworld of a great city, criminals and prostitutes, the Gazette des Tribunaux and the Moniteur are there to show us that we have only to open our eyes to see and know the heroism of our day.43 Le spectacle de la vie élégante et des milliers d’existences flottantes qui circulent dans les souterrains d’une grande ville,—criminels et filles entretenues,—la Gazette des tribunaux et le Moniteur nous prouvent que nous n’avons qu’à ouvrir les yeux pour connaître notre héroïsme.44 A few lines later, Baudelaire underlines that we do not usually see these motifs because they are so close to us, enveloping us like the atmosphere: “Parisian life is rich in poetic and wonderful subjects. The marvellous envelops and saturates us like the atmosphere; but we fail to see it.” (“La vie parisienne est féconde en sujets poétiques et merveilleux. Le merveilleux nous enveloppe et nous abreuve comme l’atmosphère, mais nous ne le voyons pas.”)45 Emphasizing how we tend to overlook that which surrounds us too closely, Baudelaire in fact implies that Parisian life must be mediated to be noticed. Moreover, he asserts that this act of mediation is performed by the newspaper. Thus, he clearly acknowledges the decisive role of the newspaper with respect to our perception of reality: the newspaper guides and shapes our gazes and thus contributes to the production of visibility. Accordingly, there are strong indications that the newspaper contributed to Baudelaire’s conception of modernity. It could indeed be argued that Baudelaire not only experienced life in Paris when strolling about in the streets, but that his experience was—at least partly—mediated through the newspaper. In this respect, Baudelaire may have learned something from Edgar Allan Poe, whom he translated into French. Poe’s stories, as well, were in dialogue with the newspapers. In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” Poe’s detectives consistently use Paris newspapers, such as La Presse and the Gazette des tribunaux, as sources for information in their quests for the perpetrator, taking advantage of witness reports and the “psychology” of journalism. A remark in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) aptly demonstrates the way the newspaper influences the newspaper reader’s perception of reality. Arriving at the crime scene, the narrator-detective declares, “I saw nothing beyond what had been stated in the ‘Gazette des Tribunaux.’”46 Another case in point is Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), a story that has reached mythological status with respect to the figure of the flâneur. What is rarely emphasized, however, is the fact that the narrator is actually a man reading a newspaper at a café, dividing his interest among

Newspapers

33

the newspaper, the people in the room, and the street outside the smoky window: “With a cigar in my mouth and a newspaper in my lap, I had been amusing myself for the greater part of the afternoon, now in poring over advertisements, now in observing the promiscuous company in the room, and now in peering through the smoky panes into the street.”47 Poe carefully describes how the narrator’s gaze oscillates between the newspaper and the street outside, which is viewed through smoky windows. It is easy to imagine that these fields of vision start to blur in his consciousness, the one melting into the other. When he narrates that he spots “the man of the crowd” outside on the street, on the other side of the smoky window, the following question comes to the fore: from where does the idea of “the man of the crowd” originate? From observation of the streets through smoky windows? From reading newspapers? Is it possible to distinguish clearly between the two? In 1840, newspapers were full of reports from urban life, in the form of physiologies, tableaux, and fait divers, and Poe’s newspaper reading narrator may well have been predisposed to spotting “the man of the crowd” on the street. Or, if we focus instead on Poe as a writer, it is possible that he based his fiction on a modern phenomenon that he knew very well from the newspapers. The issue here is how the newspaper contributes to shaping our visible world; how it, so to speak, produces visibility. The newspapers shape, manipulate, and educate the eyes of the beholder, and then, we recognize what we see live as “truths.” Accordingly, we may assume that Baudelaire did not learn everything he knew about Paris from strolling about the streets. As a dedicated newspaper reader, he took inspiration from the newspaper’s reports of modern life; he even acknowledged that modern life must be mediated in order to be noticed. In view of this, the following question could be put forward: perhaps Baudelaire was just as much of a newspaper reader as a flâneur?

A letter to the editor Today, when we read Baudelaire’s prose poems in book volumes, their relationship to the newspaper medium is easily lost. My contention is that an awareness of the original publication context may influence the way we understand the prose poem as a form. Not the least, it may change the way we read the renowned “preface” to prose poems, which has been granted, to a certain extent, the status of a poetics of the prose poem. Baudelaire there describes the ideal of the prose poem, asserting that it is a miracle he dreams of and an ideal that obsesses him.48 In spite of the clearly ironic undertone of the piece, and Baudelaire’s confession in the last paragraph that he has not been able to fulfill his ideal, but in fact has written something entirely different, this ideal description of the prose poem has to a large extent influenced the understanding of the genre. Accordingly, the prose poem has

34

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

often been associated with romantic literary ideals; it has been considered a miraculous blend of prose and poetry, a supreme piece of poetic prose. However, the context in which the piece is written can provide a different understanding: the prose poem appears to be deeply influenced by the form and genres of the modern newspaper. It is well known that the “preface” was originally sent by Baudelaire as a letter to his publisher/editor (the terms vary), Arsène Houssaye, to whom he also dedicated the prose poems. Subsequently, it has become customary to print the text as a preface to the prose poems, and it is alternately referred to as a preface, letter, or dedication. What is less frequently emphasized is that this is not a letter to a book publisher regarding the publication of a book, but a letter to a newspaper editor concerning the possibility of having a series of prose poems published in the newspaper. This is a circumstance that, in my opinion, changes the understanding of the text. If we read the preface-letter with this background in mind, it becomes clear that Baudelaire situates the prose poem within the context of the modern newspaper. Thus, the preface should not be read as a poetics for the prose poem per se, but as a rhetorical and ironical depiction of how the prose poem would function within the framework of the modern newspaper. When Baudelaire wrote the preface-letter, his financial situation was poor.49 After the prosecution of Les Fleurs du mal in 1857, he was stigmatized and held in low esteem in the serious press. When the censored second edition of Les Fleurs du mal was published in 1861, the press ignored it altogether, even though Baudelaire was at the top of his literary career at the time and enjoyed great literary prestige. According to Baudelaire’s biographers, this is the time when the ideal of art for art’s sake truly takes form.50 A letter from Baudelaire to Flaubert dated January 31, 1862, bears witness to this commitment. There, he reproaches his colleague with the following remark: “How could you not know that Baudelaire means … pure literature?” (“Comment n’avez-vous pas deviné que Baudelaire, ça voulait dire: ... littérature pure?)”51 The man to whom the dedication letter was addressed, Arsène Houssaye, was at the time a highly influential critic and literary editor of La Presse, the newspaper that epitomized the commercial press, and which Baudelaire had scorned. Houssaye represented an intermediate position between commercial and literary interests, as he had a background as a poet and was considered to be un homme de lettres. Baudelaire’s biographers characterize him as a powerful and vain person whose prose is limp (molle) and whose poetry is sweet as sugar (guimauvée).52 In his book about the literary scene in Paris in the nineteenth century, Bourdieu describes Houssaye as something of a renegade; he is one of those who have entered the ranks of the powerful littérateurs.53

Newspapers

35

Baudelaire already knew Houssaye as a bohemian poet from earlier years. According to Baudelaire’s biographers, he could not stand Houssaye and called him “the miller” (“le Meunier”) because he filled his landscape poems with windmills, a choice of motif that did not appeal to Baudelaire at all.54 In his diary, Baudelaire puts Houssaye in the same category as Girardin in a “liste de canailles”—a list of rascals, which in reality was comprised of newspaper editors.55 What their relationship was in 1861 is not entirely clear, but from the correspondence, it seems, above all, to be professional. From the end of 1861 to the summer of 1862, Baudelaire wrote to Houssaye several times, asking—even begging—the mighty editor to print his prose poems in La Presse.56 Eventually, twenty prose poems divided into three series were printed in La Presse, on August 26 and 27, and then on September 24 in 1862. More prose poems were meant to be published; however, Houssaye claimed they were not genuinely new texts but revisions of earlier texts and he refused to print them.57 The well-known dedication letter was printed in La Presse as a prologue to the first series of prose poems. It is not included in Baudelaire’s published correspondence, a fact that testifies to its uncertain status. In the following, I will comment on a few elements in the first and lengthiest paragraphs of the dedication letter (reproduced below) and show how it situates the prose poems in the context of the newspaper. To Arsène Houssaye My dear friend, I’m sending you a little piece of work of which it would be quite unjust to say that it has neither head nor tail, since everything, on the contrary, is both head and tail, alternatively and reciprocally. Just think what admirable advantages such a combination offers to everyone, to you, to me, and to the reader. We can interrupt wherever we wish, I, my reverie, you, the manuscript, the reader, his reading; for I am not tying a reader’s recalcitrant will to the unending thread of a superfluous plot. Remove one vertebra, and the two halves of this torturous fantasy will have no difficulty in reuniting. Chop it into a number of fragments and you will see that each can exist on its own. In the hope that some of these stumps will be lively enough to please and amuse you, I’m taking the liberty of dedicating to you the entire snake.58 A Arsène Houssaye Mon cher ami, je vous envoie un petit ouvrage dont on ne pourrait pas dire, sans injustice, qu’il n’a ni queue ni tête, puisque tout, au contraire, y est à la fois tête et queue, alternativement et réciproquement. Considérez, je vous prie, quelles admirables commodités cette combinaison nous offre à tous, à vous, à moi et au lecteur. Nous pouvons couper où nous voulons,

36

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

Figure 1.1  La Presse, August 26, 1862, comprising a series of prose poems by Baudelaire preceded by a dedication to the newspaper’s editor, Arsène Houssaye (Bibliothèque de France).

Newspapers

37

moi ma rêverie, vous le manuscrit, le lecteur sa lecture; car je ne suspends pas la volonté rétive de celui-ci au fil interminable d’une intrigue superflue. Enlevez une vertèbre, et les deux morceaux de cette tortueuse fantaisie se rejoindront sans peine. Hachez-la en nombreux fragments, et vous verrez que chacun peut exister à part. Dans l’espérance que quelques-uns de ces tronçons seront assez vivants pour vous plaire et vous amuser, j’ose vous dédier le serpent tout entier.59 Three elements must be highlighted here. First, Baudelaire actually emphasizes the way the prose poems suit the newspaper form and the newspaper reader.60 He points especially to the fragmentary form of the prose poems, which fits the fragmentary form of the newspaper perfectly, and highlights the convenience this form offers to the reader. He can interrupt his reading at will, as one usually does when one reads newspapers. In an early draft for the dedication letter, he in fact describes the prose poems as having a kaleidoscopic quality.61 Second, Baudelaire compares the prose poems to the main genre of commercial literature—the feuilleton. When he rejects the “unending thread of a superfluous plot,” the reference is to the newspaper feuilleton, which, according to Baudelaire, is burdened by an endless plotline that restrains the reader against his will. Emphasizing the fragmentary form of the prose poems, Baudelaire makes it clear that he will himself do without such a plot line. Thus, Baudelaire argues—scornfully—that the prose poems are better suited for the fragmented newspaper than the plot-based feuilleton. In doing so, he makes it clear what kind of texts the prose poems are competing with, and it is significant that his argument concerns form and function, not quality or status. When the prose poems were eventually printed in La Presse, they figured precisely in the feuilleton section (i.e. the bottom of the first and second pages). Where one would usually find a roman-feuilleton, one now finds a series of prose poems by Baudelaire, accompanied by the feuilleton jargon “la suite à demain”—to be continued. Looking at the texts surrounding the prose poems, we find a variety of genres. Apart from brief news articles (mostly quoting other newspapers), there is a “Faits divers” column, along with stock market prices and advertisements for weapons, the lottery, and a medicament against hemorrhoids. These surrounding texts inevitably impress themselves on the prose poems and remove them from the sphere of an ideally “pure” poetry. In this light, the prose poems can be seen as radically questioning the (typographically marked) dividing line between the alleged “truthful” news stories and the “fictitious” feuilleton section at the bottom of the page. Third, the metaphor Baudelaire uses for his work when dedicating it to Houssaye is of crucial importance: “I’m taking the liberty of dedicating to

38

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

you the entire snake [serpent].” At first sight, the French word “serpent” seems to be a metaphor used to describe the form of the prose poems and it has been interpreted as such in previous readings of the preface. However, the metaphor does convey a larger potential for meaning. In the nineteenth century, a “serpent de mer” (a sea serpent) was a well-known concept in newspaper circles, designating a story of obscure origin and doubtful truth. The term originally referred to sensational reports of sea serpents such as the mysterious creature of Loch Ness, and subsequently, it came to designate apocryphal stories of a similar kind.62 When Baudelaire describes his prose poems as a “serpent,” it seems probable that this particular connotation is also in play. In this manner, Baudelaire attributes a fictitious and deceitful quality to the prose poems—a deceitfulness that, through the metaphor, is directly connected with the medium of the newspaper.63 The formulation Baudelaire uses a few lines before the word “serpent” supports this interpretation: there, the work is described as “this tortuous fantasy.” Both the monstrous form of the sea serpent and its fictitious status are embodied in his choice of words. By the use of the metaphor “serpent,” Baudelaire thus forms a connection between his prose poems and the tall tales of the newspaper.64 In this manner, he reveals his ambivalent stance toward this modern medium; although he dissociates himself from the newspaper, he takes inspiration from it and plays with its forms and genres. Baudelaire’s interaction with the newspaper could in fact be interpreted as the strategy of an avant-garde poet making use of popular forms in his writing. With this strategy, he questions the traditional boundaries of art.

Making sense of modern life: Between anecdote and allegory When newspapers, advertisements, and posters in the nineteenth century invaded public space, a new visual and textual landscape arose that was increasingly difficult to read.65 As we have seen, the nineteenth-century newspapers presented the reader with a variety of genres having a semiliterary status. The boundary between fiction and nonfiction was often uncertain and so was the very purpose of the texts. Were they meant to inform, were they simply meant to entertain, or did they also convey a more profound meaning? The journalistic genre labels and the typographical apparatus were not always reliable tools for navigation, and the reader was thus left with the task of making sense of all these texts. Similar to the newspaper genres, Baudelaire’s prose poems report a series of bizarre incidents and impressions from modern life, although they do not pretend that these events are real. However, Baudelaire does not focus on the

Newspapers

39

events as such, but rather brings attention to the question of how to perceive, interpret, and understand them. In this undertaking, he is drawing on the genre signals of two genres: the literary fable—la moralité—and the journalistic fait divers. These genres correspond to two prototypical forms of literature: allegory and anecdote, each prompting different reading strategies. Whereas an allegory spurs an interpretation process that aims at establishing meaning and truth, an anecdote is usually considered an insignificant curiosity that is to merely entertain the reader. The genre signals thus influence the way such events are understood. Read within the context of literature, an event most often appears allegorical; read within the context of the newspaper, however, it seems merely entertaining. Accordingly, the universal stands against the singular, the significant against the minor, lasting truth value against shortlived entertainment.66 Or, put differently, the honorable tradition of poetry stands against the new, capitalist entertainment industry. In his prose poems, however, Baudelaire superimposes la moralité and le fait divers, creating tension between the different modes of reading. Thus, Baudelaire plays with different genre signals, taking advantage of the uncertain textual landscape and a new media situation to create a new literary form. Although numerous studies of Baudelaire’s prose poems have acknowledged their allegorical qualities, their anecdotic qualities are recognized to a lesser degree. Or rather, allegoric readings tend to overshadow readings that pay attention to their anecdotic qualities. In keeping with this, the prose poems are often described as short fables or moralités from the modern world.67 Baudelaire’s description of the prose poems in a letter to SainteBeuve in 1866 is illuminating as to his use of allegory. There, he writes that his intention is to present a poetic subject who relates his “rhapsodic thought” (“pensée rapsodique”) to every accident of his flânerie, drawing from everything a “disagreeable morality” (“morale désagréable.”)68 In this manner, Baudelaire transfers the question of truth and morality to a modern, urban context where singular and accidental cases are in fact countless. Yet, the attempt to extract a moral from the accidental—to extract truth from chance—proves to be a futile enterprise. There seems to be a gigantic clash between Baudelaire’s old-fashioned morality and the confusing modern world of the flâneur. It seems that the allegorical form is in the prose poems used to destabilize common standards of truth and morality rather than to confirm them. The prose poems could be seen as a series of deceptive interpretation processes where the poetic subject attempts to make sense of various incidents from modern life, but repeatedly gives up and abandons his interpretation. We find explicit comments on this process in numerous prose poems. In “Chacun sa chimère” (“To Each his Monster”), for instance, the poetic subject abandons his interpretation, suddenly struck by indifference in respect to the question of meaning: “And for a few instants I persisted in trying to understand this mystery; but soon unconquerable Indifference

40

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

swooped down upon me.” (“Et pendant quelques instants je m’obstinai à vouloir comprendre ce mystère; mais bientôt l’irrésistible Indifférence s’abbatit sur moi.”)69 In “La Fausse monnaie” (“The Counterfeit Coin”), the interpretation process actually constitutes the main part of the text; here, the poetic subject struggles to make sense of a curious incident—his friend’s giving a counterfeit coin to a beggar: “And so my imagination wandered along, lending wings to my friend’s mind and drawing all possible deductions from all possible hypotheses.” (“Et ainsi ma fantaisie allait son train, prêtant des ailes à l’esprit de mon ami et tirant toutes les déductions possibles de toutes les hypothèses possibles.”)70 Further, the prose poems play with the reader’s temptation to allegorize and attribute meaning to what he reads. As we know, allegory is a particular mode of reading — and an enticing one. In “L’Horloge” (“The Clock”), the narrator sabotages the reader’s process of interpretation by a sarcastic comment on the story’s fictitiousness: “Well, madam, isn’t that a truly meritorious madrigal, as emphatic as you yourself are. In truth, I had so much pleasure embroidering this pretentious piece of gallantry, that I’ll ask nothing from you in exchange.” (“N’est-ce pas, madame, que voici un madrigal vraiment méritoire, et aussi emphatique que vous-même? En vérité, j’ai eu tant de plaisir à broder cette prétentieuse galanterie, que je ne vous demanderai rien en échange.”)71 In this manner, the project of drawing a moral from the curious incidents of modern life proves to be a difficult undertaking. Rather than using allegory in a conventional manner, Baudelaire seems to use the allegoric tradition ironically. Over and over, Baudelaire’s prose poems play with the reader’s quest for meaning. They undermine the reader’s attempts to make sense of strange incidents, casting them instead as incomprehensible, bizarre, and singular incidents from modern life. In this undertaking, Baudelaire is drawing on the genre signals of the anecdote and its prototypical form in newspaper, le fait divers. Unlike allegory, an anecdote does not claim to have a great significance and does not call for interpretation; it merely aims to entertain and puzzle the reader. Therefore, it is usually allowed to remain in the sphere of the singular and the nonassimilated. For instance, in “Un plaisant” (“A Prankster”), a man pays tribute to a donkey with great ceremony. In “Le Mauvais vitrier” (“The Bad Glazier”), a man furiously throws flowerpots on a glazier. In “Assommons les pauvres!” (“Let’s Beat up the Poor!”), a man beats up a beggar without any provocation. In “Le Joujou du pauvre” (“The Poor Child’s Toy”), a man offers cheap toys to poor children on the street. These incidents hardly contain material for novels. They are presented either as bizarre events that are observed from the outside, or as self-experienced—even self-induced—anecdotes, where the poetic subject takes part in the action. Instead of developing lengthy plot lines, which would usually imply a causal chain, the prose poems focus on the way such incidents are experienced by the poetic subject. They appear to be presented

Newspapers

41

to the reader as mere anecdotes, as material for pleasure and surprise.72 In this regard, Baudelaire’s prose poems differ from the short stories of Edgar Allen Poe. Although Baudelaire and Poe shared a fascination for the mysteries of modern life, Poe’s protagonists pursue the mysterious incidents in longer narratives (the detective’s mode), whereas Baudelaire’s prose poems, to a larger degree, remain in the sphere of the inexplicable—in the sphere of the anecdote and le fait divers. By superimposing the genre signals of allegory and anecdote, Baudelaire questions the manner in which we read the bizarre incidents from urban life. He explores allegory and anecdote as conventions for making sense of singular cases; they frame events in a certain manner, offer specific optics to the reader, and could thus be seen as producing visibility. The allegoric mode—well known in literature—invites the reader’s reflection and promises that there is a truth waiting at the end of the line. By contrast, the anecdotic mode does not offer any truth to the reader; it is merely an entertainment service provided by the entertainment industry, requiring nothing from the reader. Baudelaire makes the reader hesitate between these two reading strategies, and, as it turns out, neither of them proves to be satisfactory; the allegorical reading is undermined, and the anecdotic reading leaves too much to ponder. The reader is thus confronted with his reading conventions and—ultimately—with his inability to make sense of modern life.

Poetry goes incognito The impact of modern life on poetry is an issue in many of Baudelaire’s texts, and one of the most intriguing ones is the prose poem “Perte d’auréole” (“Loss of a Halo”). This prose poem tells the story of an old-fashioned, romantic poet who loses his halo (a concrete object) in the turmoil of the city and is thus forced to become a “commoner.” At first sight, the text seems to be a comic fable—highly allegorical—in prose, revealing the fate of poetry in the modern world. But on closer inspection, one discovers that the content of the story is not the only aspect worth investigating; the prose poem actually consists of various discourses and genres. In this way, the text demonstrates—in a cunning manner—the new verbal—as well as moral— conditions characterizing the age of mass media. In the prose poem, the poet reports the story of how he lost his halo to a friend, whom he meets accidentally at a brothel, just after the incident: A moment ago, as I was crossing the boulevard, in great haste, and hopping over the mud, through that moving chaos where death arrives at the gallop from all directions at once, my halo, in a sudden movement, slipped from my head and fell into the mire of the tarmac.73

42

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

Tout à l’heure, comme je traversais le boulevard, en grande hâte, et que je sautillais dans la boue, à travers ce chaos mouvant où la mort arrive au galop de tous les côtés à la fois, mon auréole, dans un mouvement brusque, a glissé de ma tête dans la fange du macadam.74 Here, the modern world is represented by the boulevard, by vehicles passing at full speed and by dirty asphalt (macadam). It is the chaotic traffic that makes the poet lose his halo, and he is forced to let go of it to save his life. Discussing the incident and his new status with his friend, the poet confesses that he was forced to make a choice: “I thought it would be less disagreeable to lose my insignia than to break my bones.” (“J’ai jugé moins désagréable de perdre mes insignes que de me faire rompre les os.”) Further, he discovers that the new situation is not without advantages: “Now I can stroll about incognito, perform despicable acts, indulge in the pleasures of the scum, like ordinary mortals.” (“Je puis maintenant me promener incognito, faire des actions basses, et me livrer à la crapule, comme les simples mortels.”) The prose poem is usually read as an allegory of the fate of romantic, or lyrical, poetry, with Walter Benjamin’s allegorical reading as a model. For Benjamin, the story illustrates that the halo is a discarded object in the modern world and that the poet has been made superfluous: “To Baudelaire, the lyric poet with his halo is antiquated. In a prose piece entitled ‘Perte d’auréole’ (Loss of a Halo), which came to light at a late date, Baudelaire presents such a poet as supernumerary.”75 Benjamin further argues that the poetic subject in “Perte d’auréole” is an ironic version of the disillusioned poet, pushed around by the crowd, reduced to a supernumerary. On the basis of this reading, he concludes that Baudelaire was no flâneur bedazzled by the crowd, but rather, a disenchanted poet who battled the crowd. Although this reading is altogether plausible and has many convincing aspects, it is my contention that it implies an overly simplistic account of the story and an overly negative description of Baudelaire’s relation to the crowd, neglecting the irony and the complexity of the story. If we read the prose poem carefully, we see that its allegoric potential is disturbed in several ways, and that Baudelaire’s views on the fate of poetry are anything but clear. Baudelaire is, in fact, playing with different genre signals, making us vacillate between several modes of reading. What complicates the reading of the text is its mixture of different linguistic codes. Besides prose, three other codes are brought into play, and the first of these could be described as commonplace language. We know Baudelaire’s intentions in this regard. He claimed that there was “nothing as beautiful as the commonplace” (“rien de plus beau que le lieu commun”) and expressed his desire to “invent a cliché” (“créer un poncif”).76 In “Perte d’auréole,” the poetic subject in fact finds himself at a common place, “a den of iniquity” (“un mauvais lieu”), presumably a brothel, where everyone

Newspapers

43

is allowed to pass incognito. And when the poetic subject, who has lost his halo, enters such a common place incognito, he immediately sprinkles his language with commonplace expressions. Recounting his misfortune to his friend, he stresses the advantages of the new situation by means of a commonplace expression : “[I]t’s an ill wind that blows no one any good [[A] quelque chose malheur est bon.]” What, then, is the advantage of the new situation? In the next lines, it is the very possibility of passing incognito in a common place that is seen as advantageous: “Now I can stroll about incognito, perform despicable acts, indulge in the pleasures of the scum, like mortals.” However, it may seem that the advantage of the new situation includes not only the possibility of passing incognito in public places, but also the possibility of using commonplace language. Another commonplace expression appears right after the first one. As he discovers the advantages of the new situation, i.e. the freedom that follows having lost his halo, the poetic subject envisions that someone—a bad poet—might find it and rejoice at putting it on. “What pleasure it would give me to make someone happy!” (“Faire un heureux, quelle jouissance!”) he exclaims. However, it is not the unselfish act of making someone happy that excites the poetic subject, but rather the act of making a bad poet look stupid—by putting on a discarded, outmoded object. Thus, the commonplace expression of “making someone happy” is here used to cover up the malice he himself feels in respect to this possibility, or one could say the commonplace is used ironically. The malice displayed here could in fact be read as the first indication of the poetic subject’s new identity as a “commoner.” With this remark, he allows himself to “indulge in the pleasures of the scum just like ordinary mortals.” The second code we encounter in the prose poem could be described as “poster language.” Along with newspapers and advertisements, posters were part of the new textual/visual culture of the nineteenth century, and Baudelaire had scorned them in his diary, where he proclaimed his “[i]mmense nausea for posters” (“[i]mmense nausée des affiches.”)77 In “Perte d’auréole,” it is the poet’s friend who explicitly refers to posters, when he suggests that the poet should put up a poster and in this manner advertise the loss of the halo: “You should at least advertise the loss of your halo or ask the police to find it for you again.” (“Vous devriez au moins faire afficher cette aureole, ou la faire réclamer par le commisaire.”) He thus treats the halo as a concrete, material object that can be reclaimed by addressing the public through a poster. Although the poetic subject refuses to do this, as he does not want the halo back, the reference to the poster resonates in the title of the prose poem: “Perte d’auréole”—which should actually be translated as “Halo lost,” not as “Loss of a Halo”—reads like the heading of a poster (cf. “Perte des clés” [Lost Keys] and “Perte de portefeuille” [Lost Wallet]). Taking this “poster title” seriously, we may see the prose poem as making a

44

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

public announcement; it announces that the poetic halo is now a discarded object, and that a new poetic practice has taken its place. A third code emerges in the prose poem, a quasi-poetic code implying that the poetic subject has not lost his poetic ambition altogether. The sentence that finishes off the poetic subject’s narration of his accident has a peculiar staccato rhythm and could be read as a limping alexandrine, which can be divided into three sections marked by two caesuras (as the line has thirteen syllables, not twelve, a small adjustment must be made when reading it). This rhythm is not sufficiently rendered in the English translation, so here the French original must be studied: And here I am, just like you, as you see. Et me voici, tout semblable à vous, comme vous voyez! Et-me-voi-ci/(tout) sem-bla(ble)-à-vous/comme-vous-voy-ez! Surely, this instance of quasi-lyric poetry cannot be accidental. As is well known, Baudelaire was highly conscious of metrics and rhythm. Thus, it would seem that the poet’s claim that he is just like anyone else is immediately undermined by his quasi-poetic language. Further, his next reply bears the same unmistakable marks of bad poetry. His reply to the friend’s suggestion to put up a poster and reclaim the halo also sounds like rhyming verses. The reply could be read as three rhyming octosyllables (the first line really consists of nine syllables, so here an adjustment must be made), or as three rhyming hexasyllables, to which oral and somewhat redundant exclamations are added: Good Lord, no! I feel perfectly happy here. You’re the only one who recognized me. Moreover, dignity bores me. Ma foi! non. Je me trouve bien ici. Vous seul, vous m’avez reconnu. D’ailleurs la dignité m’ennuie. (Ma foi! non.) Je (me) trouve bien ici. (Vous seul,) vous m’avez reconnu (D’ailleurs) la dignité m’ennuie The poet thus refuses to have the halo back and proclaims that dignity bores him in limping and rhyming verses. This suggests that we should not pretend to know exactly where we have him. As both these instances of quasi-lyric or bad poetry occur immediately after his story on the loss of the halo, we could suspect that lyric poetry did not disappear completely with the sign of it (i.e. with the halo). It appears that the poet actually continues to make verses, but that he mixes them up with prose and commonplaces. Thus,

Newspapers

45

from now on, lyric poetry as well passes incognito, adapted to a freer, oral expression, and perhaps also to a more prosaic message. In fact, the poetic subject is likely to pick up the halo himself, but in order to use it as a poetic accessory, not a poetic uniform. In light of this, I think it would be too simple to read the prose poem as an allegory of the decline of lyric poetry, as Benjamin does. The prose poem not merely depicts lyric poetry as antiquated and portraits the lyric poet as a supernumerary; it also reveals the way new possibilities have opened up in the modern world. Thus, rather than a swansong of poetry, “Perte d’auréole” should be read as a poster-poem announcing that a new and less predictable poetry is in town. Baudelaire reveals here that he was well aware of the new conditions imposed on poetry in the age of mass media. As newspapers, posters, and clichés make their impact on the textual and visual culture of the nineteenth century, poetry can no longer be considered merely a language of correspondences or a language of truth; it is disturbed by a more prosaic code. Far from being paralyzed by these new conditions, Baudelaire takes advantage of the situation to experiment with the forms and motifs of poetry. Playing with different genre signals, he confronts the reader with different modes of reading and reveals to him the difficulty of “reading” modern life. Further, in the age of the new media, Baudelaire makes us aware that the ideals of authenticity and originality are on the vane. Making the poet lose his halo, he indicates that the traditional poetic signs have been worn out. Making the poet a commoner, he undermines the authenticity—the uniqueness—of the poet. What’s more, he reveals that lyric poetry, with its “signs” of authenticity and originality, is a uniform, too—a costume, or a dispositive, that can be put on—and taken off. However, this does not mean that poetry has become antiquated altogether or that the poet has become superfluous. As the prose poem illustrates, the old poetic forms do not disappear with the new era; they are merely reconfigured and mixed with elements from other discourses. Instead of a genuinely new poetic language, we are thus presented with a poetic jumble, a mixture of various discourses and genres.

2 Photographs

When photographic technology was first introduced in 1839, it created a sensation. After decades of experiments with various technological solutions, photography achieved what painters had never accomplished: the reproduction of reality with almost total verisimilitude. From that point on, the idea of realism was altogether transformed, the conflict between idealism and realism was intensified, and the visual arts—painting, drawing, lithography—were presented with an entirely new situation. And yet, in its early years, photography did not really challenge the cultural standing of the visual arts. Having many drawbacks from a technological point of view, it had not quite reached its potential and remained first and foremost a practical art. In the nineteenth century, photography’s greatest success was with portraiture, and a swarm of bourgeois clients had their portraits taken with stiff postures and solemn faces. For Baudelaire, photography was merely sterile technology with no future in the fine arts. As he saw it, photography conflicted with the superior faculty of the artist: the imagination. Furthermore, it appealed to the most contemptible characteristics of the petty bourgeoisie: vanity. Accordingly, Baudelaire favored splendid imagination over sterile reproduction, idealism over realism, the beautiful over the true and identical. At the same time, however, Baudelaire seemed to recognize that there are many possibilities between these extremes and many layers within a picture. Although he warned that photography may paralyze the imagination of the beholder, he acknowledged that the mediated vision offers more to see than the naked eye. Thus, Baudelaire’s stance toward photography is worthy of closer investigation. Especially interesting are the ways in which the technique of photography is treated by him poetically and the way photography inspired reflections concerning the process of seeing, framing, and disposing images. As we will see, Baudelaire plays with the visual possibilities of photography.

48

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

The cult of images It is well known that Baudelaire was obsessed with images. In his diary, he states it clearly: “To glorify the cult of images (my great, my unique, my primitive passion).” (“Glorifier le culte des images (ma grande, mon unique, ma primitive passion).”)1 But, of course, Baudelaire was not the only one who was obsessed with images in nineteenth-century Paris. In the middle of the century, the visual arts took advantage of the development of the industrialized printing press and extended their domain considerably. In particular, the technique of lithography changed the conditions of the visual arts as it allowed for reproduction in numerous copies. Furthermore, older techniques such as caricatures and sketches saw an increase in popularity as they could be reproduced in newspapers and widely distributed. As for photography, the early technique launched by Daguerre in 1839—the daguerreotype—was based on individual prints on silver plates, and it was only when the negative was invented some years later that photography joined the other techniques of reproduction, thus allowing for multiple copies. The images created with these reproductive techniques belonged, to a large degree, to popular culture and in many respects were considered inferior to the art of painting. In particular, photography enjoyed an ambiguous status in the nineteenth century and only slowly gained access to the domain of the fine arts. Whereas photography was presented as an industrial art at the Universal Exhibition in London in 1855, it was partly included in the annual art exhibition in Paris arranged by l’Académie des Beaux-Arts (although as a separate exhibition adjoining the official exhibition of paintings). By this time, Baudelaire had made a name for himself as an art critic, and he gave his opinion on this new “art” in his review of the exhibition entitled Salon de 1859, in a section called “Le Public moderne et la photographie” (“The Modern Public and Photography.”) In this piece he launched an attack on photography, calling it “a new industry” (“une industrie nouvelle”) and rejecting its artistic potential.2 Indeed, this verdict has become well known: Baudelaire is renowned for his antipathy toward photography. Still, this condemnation of a brand-new medium may seem surprisingly conservative for the ever-so-modern Baudelaire. It is crucial to understand that Baudelaire’s point of departure in Salon de 1859 was the art of painting, an art form that he saw as superior. It could even be argued that he had learned to see through the study of paintings, and that his passion for paintings was formative in regard to his preferences within visual aesthetics. Yet Baudelaire did not approve of all kinds of painting, but was particularly committed to Romantic art that gave free rein to the imagination. He admired the vibrant colors of Delacroix, whereas he disfavored bleak realism, tactful art, and the well-ordered lines of Ingres. In Salon de 1846, he asserts that colors make lines vibrate and

Photographs

49

confirm  of perpetual and universal motion” (“la loi du mouvement éternel et universel.”).3 This movement and trembling of colors would preclude static and dull images; it would stimulate the imagination of the beholder and be a road to truth.4 To Baudelaire, Delacroix’s colors actually appeared to “think by themselves” (“pense par elle-même”) transcending the objects they gave shape to.5 Here, the ideal was not reality, but beauty, and the method was not plain imitation, but a kind of remembrance of an ideal (a “mnémotechnie” of beauty).6 Seeing this beauty, however, required aesthetic sensibility, and Baudelaire was concerned with the decline he perceived in this domain. Not only did Delacroix have no true successors, but there was also a general decline in people’s sensibility to imaginative art. The spread of photography only aggravated this situation, since its aim (allegedly) was to reproduce images identically. The public seemed no longer able to appreciate true and beautiful art, but preferred petty, vulgar images. Furthermore, the term “daguerreotype” had become a loaded word in the quarrel between the idealist and realist camps. An advocate of the realist style in painting, Champfleury asserted that paintings should be “daguerreotypes” of everyday life. The idealist camp, on the other hand, accused the realist painters (and writers) of being mere “daguerreotypeurs,” that is, imitators—and even machines. When Champfleury wrote his defense of realism, Le Réalisme (1857), he observed that this kind of “insult” was in vogue.7 These views were all familiar to Baudelaire, who was a friend of Champfleury—in spite of their differences with respect to realism. Indeed, Champfleury’s manifest on realism was published the same year as Les Fleurs du mal, which was accused of—and put to trial for—vulgar realism and obscenity. Thus, for Baudelaire, both photography (as an industry) and the daguerreotype (as a metaphor for realism) were associated with the wrong aesthetic camp. It is within this framework that Baudelaire’s attack on photography should be understood. Parodying those who regarded photography as a superior art, and saw in Daguerre a Messiah, Baudelaire summarizes their aesthetic credo. First: “I believe that art is, and can only be, the exact reproduction of nature” (“Je crois que l’art est et ne peut être que la reproduction exacte de la nature.”) Second: “Thus if an industrial process could give us a result identical to nature, that would be absolute art” (“Ainsi l’industrie qui nous donnerait un résultat identique à la nature serait l’art absolu.”) And third: “Since photography provides us with every desirable guarantee of exactitude (they believe that, poor madmen!), art is photography!” (“Puisque la photographie nous donne toutes les garanties désirables d’exactitude (ils croient cela, les insensés!), l’art, c’est la photographie.”)8 We should note Baudelaire’s parenthetical protest against the claim that photography guarantees exactitude, indicating that he believed otherwise. Continuing his attack, Baudelaire asserts that photography should be granted a rather restricted role. It should be considered the servant of the arts and sciences

50

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

and humbly assume the same role as the printing press. For, if photography was allowed to enter the domain of art, art would soon be corrupted, due to the dangerous alliance between photography and the vain crowd.9 Further, photography was not alone in its encouragement of mimetic effects at the expense of true aesthetic beauty; the stereoscope also had this appalling effect. The virtue of the stereoscope was that it made two-dimensional images appear to be three dimensional, and in this manner created an astonishing “reality effect.” Invented as early as 1838, this device reached its full potential only after the spread of photography. Because the stereoscope actually enhanced the reality effect produced by photography, it saw a massive increase in popularity in the second half of the century after photography had been widely disseminated. Especially popular were erotic motifs in 3-D. Referring to this trend, Baudelaire asserted that stereoscopes appealed to man’s taste for obscenity: “[T]housands of pairs of greedy eyes were glued to the peepholes of the stereoscope, as though they were the skylights of the infinite” (“[D]es milliers d’yeux avides se penchaient sur les trous du stéréoscope comme sur les lucarnes de l’infini”.)10 Thus, Baudelaire knew very well that he was not the only person obsessed with images in nineteenth-century Paris, however his aesthetic preferences differed considerably from those of the masses: where he saw images as an inspiration for the imagination, the public was more fascinated with their verisimilitude, and the technique of photography obviously catered to this particular preference. Yet, in Baudelaire’s day, photography was associated not only with realism and technology but also with the supernatural. The duplication of faces and bodies in portrait photography was considered a mysterious practice, and having one’s picture taken was considered a dangerous enterprise in which one risked losing one’s soul. The blurred and hazy look of early portrait photographs reinforced this view because it made the depicted persons appear with a spectral presence. Thus, a nonrealist view of photography was highly present in popular culture in the mid-nineteenth century. As we will see, this association between photography and the supernatural may well have influenced Baudelaire. On a personal level, Baudelaire was no stranger to photography. During his lifetime, a number of photographic portraits were taken of him; he posed for his friend, the photograph Nadar, as well as for Etienne Carjat and Charles Neyt, looking the camera straight in the eye. Although his friendship with Nadar was marked by their different views on progress and technology (Baudelaire considered Nadar a man of progress), they remained fond of each other.11 Furthermore, a letter Baudelaire wrote to his mother in 1864, in which he pleaded with her to have her photograph taken, reveals that he was well acquainted with the techniques of individual photographers. Even more important in this context is the fact that this letter reveals a different attitude toward photography than the one presented in Salon de 1859:

Photographs

51

I would very much like to have a photograph of you. It is an idea which now obsesses me. There is an excellent photographer in Havre. But I feel it is not possible at the moment. I must be there. You know nothing about them, and all photographers, even the best, have ridiculous mannerisms. They think it a good photograph if warts, wrinkles, and every defect and triviality of the face are made visible and exaggerated; and the HARDER the image is, the more they are pleased. Also, I want the face to measure at least one or two inches. It is only in Paris they succeed in doing what I want, that is, an exact portrait, but having the softness of a drawing. But in any case you will think of it, will you not?12 Je voudrais bien avoir ton portrait. C’est une idée qui s’est emparée de moi. Il y a un excellent photographe au Havre. Mais je crains bien que cela ne soit pas possible maintenant. Il faudrait que je fusse présent. Tu ne t’y connais pas, et tous les photographes, même excellents, ont des manies ridicules; ils prennent pour une bonne image une image où toutes les verrues, toutes les rides, tous les défauts, toutes les trivialités du visage sont rendus très visibles, très exagérés; plus l’image est DURE, plus ils sont contents. De plus, je voudrais que le visage eût au moins la dimension d’un ou deux pouces. Il n’y a guère qu’à Paris qu’on sache faire ce que je désire, c’est-à-dire un portrait exact, mais ayant le flou d’un dessin. Enfin, nous y penserons, n’est-ce pas?13 The letter demonstrates Baudelaire’s passion for photography; he acknowledges that he is “obsessed” with the idea of having a photograph of his mother. Further, it displays his aesthetic preferences. Expressing his contempt for the “realist” look, he describes a photographic style in which the portrait has the softness, that is, the blurriness, of a drawing. Reading this passage, we are reminded of Baudelaire’s capacity to see the arts in relationship to one another and we learn that Baudelaire actually appreciated some of the aesthetic possibilities of portrait photography. How then should we today assess Baudelaire’s stance toward photography, the latest trend in technology, and an object of desire for the masses? Often, Baudelaire’s views on photography are simply dismissed as reactionary and considered a part of his defense of “pure” art. Yet, several critics have contributed to a more nuanced picture. Susan Blood has read the sonnet “A une passante” (“To a Woman Passing By”) in light of changing technological environments, highlighting the passing woman’s flashy appearance, her “spectral” presence as well as the “reproducibility” of her figure.14 Furthermore, several critics have read the sonnet “Le Rêve d’un curieux” (“Dream of a Curios Man”), which is dedicated to Nadar, as a comment on photography, stressing the association between photography, death, and sudden illumination.15 These readings indicate that photography played a

52

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

Figure 2.1  Portrait of Charles Baudelaire by Nadar (Photo (C) BnF, Dist. RMNGrand Palais/image BnF).

role in Baudelaire’s aesthetics, even if his explicit view on the technique—as it was used and seen in his day—was hostile. Today’s understanding of Baudelaire’s attitude toward photography is influenced by Benjamin’s perspectives on photography, and the connections between them are intriguing. Benjamin’s reflections on photography as an art of mechanical reproducibility is actually anticipated by Baudelaire in Salon de 1859, where he considers photography a technique for the identical reproduction of reality. The main difference is that Baudelaire primarily highlighted the negative consequences this had for art, whereas Benjamin (almost a century later) considered the possibilities the reproductive techniques created in the aesthetic domain in a much more positive manner. Further, in “Little History of Photography,” Benjamin comments on Baudelaire’s socalled pessimism with respect to photography, explicitly distancing himself from Baudelaire’s position.16 It may be, however, that Benjamin parts with

Photographs

53

Baudelaire too soon. In fact, Benjamin’s own reflection on photography may provide a key to a different interpretation of Baudelaire’s stance toward photography. Central to Benjamin’s views on photography is his recognition that the camera, because it arrests time and enlarges details, sees more than the naked eye. According to Benjamin, the camera gives us access to the “optical unconscious,” i.e. that which is not visible to unaided vision. This access can potentially provide us with a different perception of reality and contribute to a process of disenchantment in which we recognize the deceptive character of perception in the capitalist era. As is well known, Benjamin’s views on photography were indebted to the writings of the photographer László Moholy-Nagy, who in 1925 published Photography, Painting, Film, claiming that photography allowed us to see the world with different eyes, supplementing our natural gaze and giving our vision a new degree of objectivity. Thus, it is crucial that Benjamin recognized both the existence of “images” (or visual data) that we do not perceive directly and the capacity of photography to make these “images” visible. Yet, in his essay on photography, Benjamin asserts that if photographs are to become effective and reach their full potential, they must be followed by “inscription,” which assures that our associative mechanisms are not paralyzed: The camera is getting smaller and smaller, even readier to capture fleeting and secret images whose shock effect paralyzes the associative mechanisms in the beholder. This is where inscription [Beschriftung] must come into play, by means of which photography intervenes as the literarization [der Literarisierung] of all the conditions of life, and without which all photographic construction must remain arrested in the approximate.17 Although these lines are certainly open to interpretation, we may assert that Benjamin is here concerned with the revival of our associative mechanisms, and that he asserts that this requires writing or inscription. Taking his cue from Moholy-Nagy, Benjamin continues with the following prediction: “Isn’t inscription bound to become the most essential component of the photograph?”18 According to Benjamin, then, the relationship between image and text, photograph and caption, or “secret” and interpretation will be the crux of photography in the future. This prediction is actually of great interest with respect to Baudelaire. Long before Benjamin, Baudelaire was concerned with the “reading” of images, and he learned a great deal about seeing, framing, and interpreting images from the technique of photography. To achieve a more nuanced understanding of Baudelaire’s views on photography, we must thus look beyond his condemnation of the technique in Salon de 1859 and examine how the subject of photography is treated by him poetically.

54

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

Framed vision: Windows and photography Both as a poet and an art critic, Baudelaire was concerned with different “ways of seeing” and with different ways of framing the view of the beholder. He favored paintings over sculptures because paintings offer a specific view, whereas a sculpture can be seen from various angles: “Painting has only one point of view; painting is exclusive and despotic, and, in consequence, the painter’s message is much more forceful.” (“La peinture n’a qu’un point de vue; elle est exclusive et despotique: aussi l’expression du peintre est-elle bien plus forte.”)19 In a similar manner, he notes the difference between a restricted view and a panoramic view: “Have you ever noticed that a section of the sky seen through a vent or between two chimneys or two rocks, or through an arcade, gives a more profound idea of the infinite than a great panorama seen from a mountaintop?” (“Avez-vous observé qu’un morceau de ciel, aperçu par un soupirail, ou entre deux cheminées, deux rochers, ou par une arcade, etc., donnait une idée plus profonde de l’infini que le grand panorama vu du haut d’une montagne?”)20 Interestingly, this latter comment is meant to illustrate the deficiency of long poems. Inspired by Poe, Baudelaire claims that restriction and construction are necessary in order to create an effective aesthetic form. Baudelaire seems to have a consistent way of thinking about art: he recognized that the beholder’s vision must be fashioned and framed by the artist or the poet in order to be forceful—to be “true.” The painter or poet cannot leave everything open to the idiosyncrasies of the beholder; he must cut out a specific view, focus on a detail, and in this manner suggest the infinite. Although Baudelaire is here discussing framing and restriction in relation to painting and poetry, the same is also true of photography, and perhaps to a greater extent. The construction of a viewpoint, focus on detail, and the omission of context are indeed the central aesthetic principles of photography. There is, thus, a feature common to “true” paintings, short poems, views through arcades and photography; they all create a specific, framed view, highlighting in this manner a detail, detached from its context. This way of framing reality is central not only to art, but also to visual perception generally. From a perspective influenced by Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, a frame can be described as a cut into the flow of reality, a cut that is actually necessary in order to give form to any visual perception.21 If framing has become a central topic both in theories of photography and of cinema, it is because frames are constitutive of what we actually see. In light of this, it is intriguing that Baudelaire’s prose poems repeatedly make use of a specific framing device: windows. In particular, the prose poem called “Les Fenêtres” (“The Windows”) is an interesting case. In this poem, the visual possibilities of the window are addressed in the most

Photographs

55

fascinating manner, implicitly referring to the vision experienced through photography. In this prose poem, Baudelaire shows that he in fact produces his own images, and that he also provides them with “captions,” thereby bringing a kind of “inscription” into play. In this manner, he could be seen as commenting on the visual conditions of the modern world—and as foreshadowing Benjamin’s views on photography. “Les Fenêtres” opens with a maxim that apparently gives the rule of vision: “Someone who looks in from the outside through an open window never sees as much as someone who looks through a closed window.” (“Celui qui regarde au dehors à travers une fenêtre ouverte, ne voit jamais autant de choses que celui qui regarde une fenêtre fermée.”)22 In this maxim, a paradox is created in which the values of transparency and opaqueness are reversed: the open window offers less to see than the closed window. In both cases, the vision in question is from the outside looking in, not the other way around. Accordingly, the viewer is situated in the street; he is not confined to the gloomy interior of an apartment, as a prototypical romantic poet would have been. Already at this point, we may spot a modern feature in the text; Baudelaire is describing the gaze of the flâneur, having made the streets his interior. Next, the poetic subject asserts that the closed window offers a specific advantage to the beholder. The glass establishes distance between the viewer and the object, thus making the object more interesting: “What one can see in sunlight is always less interesting than what happens behind a pane of glass.” (“Ce qu’on peut voir au soleil est toujours moins intéressant que ce qui se passe derrière une vitre.”) Here, what is being disavowed is not so much daylight as naked reality, that which offers itself to the gaze without mediation, i.e. without the glass. Just like Benjamin, Baudelaire’s protagonist thus claims that the mediated vision offers more to see than unaided vision. Although Baudelaire does not go as far as Benjamin, with his concept of the “optical unconscious,” he clearly recognizes that unaided vision is deficient, and he speaks in favor of mediated vision, which offers more to see than the naked eye. The poetic subject further describes the way the window appears to the eye, highlighting that it presents itself as a “hole” in the building: “In that dark or glowing hole life lives, dreams, suffers.” (“Dans ce trou noir ou lumineux vit la vie, rêve la vie, souffre la vie.”) The window, seen from outside, thus offers a view that is framed, illuminated, and latent with life. What the prose poem describes is actually the transformation that takes place in the urban landscape after dark. At night, Parisian windows turn into a gallery of still images offering themselves to the gaze of the flâneur.23 And as the plural form in the prose poem’s title—“Les Fenêtres”—indicates, Baudelaire is not merely concerned with one particular window-image, but with a general phenomenon: the window-images that become visible after

56

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

dark—the visual “secrets” of intimate life, which correspond to something like the optical “unconscious” of the modern city. Here, I would like to suggest that Baudelaire’s idealization of the framed, semitransparent, and illuminated view may have been inspired by photography and that it paraphrases the visual conventions of photography. Just like the framing of the camera, the framing of the window functions as a visual machine, producing a specific visibility by omitting context. In this regard, his “dark or glowing hole” could be seen as corresponding to— and perhaps also as influenced by—the view of the camera. This similarity is reinforced by the fact that Baudelaire’s wording when he describes the window-image echoes his comment on the stereoscope and photography in Salon de 1859. As we have seen, Baudelaire there commented on the many pairs of eyes that were “glued to the peepholes [trous] of the stereoscope, as though they were the skylights [lucarnes] of the infinite.” Here, as well as in the prose poem, the word “hole” (trou) is used to describe a specific kind of framed view. Further, the passage from Salon de 1859 actually provides an explicit comparison between the “holes” (trous), or the lens of the apparatus, and the windows (lucarnes) toward the infinite. This phrasing is then echoed in the prose poem, where Baudelaire describes the window as a “dark or glowing hole” latent with life. The relationship between these two texts could be thus described in the following manner: where the Salon de 1859 describes visual technology (stereoscopy) in terms of the window, the prose poem actually describes the window in terms that are reminiscent of visual technology. In both cases, the view offered is described as a hole and a dazzling light is evoked (glowing hole/skylight), with a more or less explicit reference to a world beyond (dreams/infinity). It would seem that the window—viewed from outside at night—and the stereoscope used with photography offer a similar kind of view; both offer a framed view to a “secret” world, full of promise. In this regard, it is significant that the word camera simply means room, and that the technique of photography is founded on the idea of sculpting with light within a secluded space. Furthermore, we should keep in mind that due to the long exposure time required in early photography, it in fact shares the mysterious, dreamy look of Baudelaire’s nocturnal window. In the second half of the prose poem, the poetic subject zooms in on a particular window and describes the woman he sees there: “Beyond waves of roofs I can see a mature woman, already wrinkled, poor, constantly bending over something, a woman who never goes out.” (“Par-delà des vagues des toits, j’aperçois une femme mûre, ridée déjà, pauvre, toujours penchée sur quelque chose, et qui ne sort jamais.”) Interestingly, the observer’s description emphasizes the woman’s immobility. She appears to be frozen in a position, and accordingly, the words “constantly” and “never” can be seen as absolutes. This would imply that the woman is captured in the observer’s

Photographs

57

gaze—immobile as the motif of a photograph. Especially interesting is the way the poetic subject focuses on the woman’s face and gestures, using these as a point of departure for his imagination: From her face, her clothes, her gestures, from almost nothing at all, I have reforged the life story of that woman, or rather her legend, and sometimes I recount it to myself, sobbing as I do. … Perhaps you will say to me: “Are you sure that that legend is the right one?” What does external reality matter, if it has helped me to live, to feel that I am and what I am? Avec son visage, avec son vêtement, avec son geste, avec presque rien, j’ai refait l’histoire de cette femme, ou plutôt sa légende, et quelquefois je me la raconte à moi-même en pleurant. … Peut-être me direz-vous: “Es-tu sûr que cette légende soit la vraie?” Qu’importe ce que peut être la réalité placée hors de moi, si elle m’a aidé à vivre, à sentir que je suis et ce que je suis? The word “gestures” is especially interesting here. A gesture is body language that is specific to a person, yet it is a movement that does not have a specific purpose. According to Agamben, gestures do not belong to the domain of action, but should rather be seen as “pure mediality.” For Agamben, gestures embody the ontological condition of man as being without a specific purpose and they reveal the “being-in-a-medium of human being.”24 Further, for our context, it is important to note that gestures have a particular relationship to photography insofar as photographs capture man’s intimate gestures, expose them, and make them visible to us. With Agamben, we may assert that a photograph charges a gesture with destiny and in this manner allows the instant to transcend chronological time: “In the supreme instant, man, each man, is given over forever to his smallest, most everyday gestures. And yet, thanks to the photographic lens, that gesture is now charged with the weight of an entire life; that insignificant or even silly moment collects and condenses in itself the meaning of an entire existence.”25 It is precisely this function of exposing and making visible a gesture that is demonstrated in the prose poem. In the framed, mediated, and illuminated window-image, the woman’s gesture is arrested, and by the same token, it is endowed with a temporality that transcends the instant. Thus, what is at stake here is the temporality and truth of the image. The prose poem reveals that the truth of the image lies not in its realism, but in its ability to reveal a secret to the beholder, and to transcend chronological time.

58

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

Of course, the prose poem could be read simply as a tribute to the imagination, in which the window-image serves as a point of departure for a poetic rêverie. Indeed, the poetic subject discloses that he makes up the story of the woman without any concern for its veracity. The prose poem thus appears to advocate a Romantic aesthetics, favoring the activity of the imagination over reality.26 In fact, this attitude concerning images appears to be the one Benjamin warned against in his essay on photography, where he maintained that an image should not merely serve “the participatory rêverie of the beholder,” but instead reveal to him the “optical unconscious.” Yet, it seems to me that the prose poem plays these two “ways of seeing” against one another—the revelatory gaze of the camera and the illuminating gaze of the poet-rêveur. In this context, we should also consider the use of the word “legend” (légende) in the quoted passage. The poet-flâneur asserts that he makes up the woman’s “legend” based on the window-image and the woman’s arrested gesture. Often, this word is taken to mean a story of some mythical dimension, but if we consider the text in light of photography, the word takes on another meaning: “Légende” is also the French word for caption, a short, explicatory text serving as a key to an image’s “reading” or interpretation. Thus, in the prose poem, when the poetic subject claims that he makes up the woman’s “legend,” he could be seen as creating a caption for her frozen image, literally allowing his imagination to “fill in the picture.” This interpretation is supported by Baudelaire’s similar use of the word “légende” in “Quelques caricaturistes français” (“Some French Caricaturists”  ), which demonstrates that he was highly conscious of the complex relationship between an image and its caption. Commenting on a caricature by Gavarni, he urges the reader to notice the caption, using the term “legend”: “[N] ote that the best part of it is the caption, the drawing itself being unable to convey so much.” (“Remarquez, en outre, que le plus beau est dans la légende, le dessin étant impuissant à dire tant de choses.”)27 At this point, we may recall Benjamin’s comment on the importance of inscription, a feature of the photograph he predicted would be essential in the future. Inscription, which most commonly takes the form of a caption, serves to explain, interpret, or literalize the photograph, and for Benjamin, it represented a “reading” of the image that revealed its “secret.”28 Yet, as Rosalind Krauss has claimed, the caption is actually the very element that robs photography of its autonomy and precludes it from being a self-contained art object.29 In this sense, the caption should be seen as a parergonal element, a supplement that is not part of the image proper but is still constitutive of the image as such.30 This is why the ontological status of the caption is altogether ambiguous, and why it is difficult to separate an image from its caption. For who is to say where the image ends and the caption begins, where the objective representation stops and the imagination takes over?

Photographs

59

With Benjamin’s and Krauss’s perspectives in mind, we may thus observe a fascinating aspect of Baudelaire’s prose poem. The “window-image” of the woman and the poet’s musings upon it can be seen as corresponding to a woman’s photograph and its caption. Here the title of the prose poem—“Les Fenêtres”—comes into its own: a border between inside and outside and an intermediate between transparency and nontransparency, the window draws attention to a transgression that is actually all but clear. At stake here is the capacity for “reading”—or developing—what one sees with one’s own eyes. It appears that “what is there” is not simply given; it requires an effort on the part of the beholder. The viewer needs to frame what he sees to make the image perceivable and provide it with a caption to make it conceivable. Accordingly, it could be suggested that Baudelaire is playing with the dispositive of photography, testing out its visual potential. Adopting the visual apparatus of photography, the poet-flâneur sees more than he does with only the naked eye, and allowing his imagination to fill in the picture, he provides the image with a caption. Just like Benjamin, Baudelaire is concerned with the “secret” of the image, which is revealed by way of inscription. Thus, although Baudelaire is clearly more committed to aesthetics whereas Benjamin is more committed to politics, the difference between them is not as great as it may at first seem. In many respects, Baudelaire’s insight was the same as Benjamin’s: in the age of technological reproducibility, everything depends on our ability to read images.

Reading/developing images The reading of images is a central subject in Benjamin’s theories on art and it is also the subject of a short text he wrote on Baudelaire, which is rarely quoted. In a fragment written in 1921 or 1922, at the time when he was translating Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal into German, Benjamin describes Baudelaire’s genius as a talent for reading images. What is intriguing here is that Benjamin, in order to describe Baudelaire’s poetic method, uses the technique of photography as a metaphor (the German original should also be consulted here): An image to characterize Baudelaire’s way of looking at the world. Let us compare time to a photographer—earthly time to a photographer who photographs the essence of things. But because of the nature of earthly time and its apparatus, the photographer manages only to register the negative of that essence on his photographic plates. No one can read these plates; no one can deduce from the negative, on which time records the objects, the true essence of things as they really are. Moreover, the elixir that might act as a developing agent is unknown. And there is Baudelaire: he doesn’t possess the vital fluid either—the fluid in which these plates would have

60

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

to be immersed so as to obtain the true picture. But he, he alone, is able to read the plates, thanks to infinite mental efforts. He alone is able to extract from the negatives of essence a presentiment of its real picture. And from this presentiment speaks the negative of essence in all his poems.31 Ein Bild, zur Bezeichnung von Baudelaires Anschauung der Dinge. Vergleichen wir die Zeit einem Photographen—die irdische Zeit einem Photographen der das Wesen der Dinge aufnimmt. Aber nach der Beschaffenheit dieser irdischen Zeit und ihres Apparates bekommt er nur das Negativ des Wesens auf die Platte. Und niemand kann diese Platten lesen, niemand aus dem Negativ des Wesens, wie die Zeit es von den Dingen zeigt, das wahre Wesen, wie es ist, herauslesen. Und das Elixier der Entwicklung ist unbekannt. Da ist Baudelaire: auch er hat nicht das Lebenswasser, in dem diese Platten gebadet werden müssen, um das wahre Bild zu zeigen. Aber er, er allein, vermag mit unendlicher Anstrengung seines Geistes diese Platten zu lesen. Er allein vermag aus dem Negativ des Wesens eine Ahnung seines Bildes zu gewinnen. Und aus dieser Ahnung spricht das Negativ des Wesens in all seinen Dichtungen.32 Benjamin describes photography as a medium that can capture the essence of things, but only in the form of photographic negatives, which no one is able to read. Yet Benjamin sees Baudelaire as a privileged reader of such negatives. Although they cannot be read a priori, Baudelaire actually manages to read them; thanks to enormous mental efforts (and not to any developing elixir), he manages to “extract from the negatives of essence a presentiment of its real picture.” Using photography as a metaphor, Benjamin thus describes Baudelaire as a privileged reader of images. This passage is extraordinary not only as a prefiguration of Benjamin’s reading of Baudelaire, but also of Benjamin’s general views on history and truth. A basic tenet in Benjamin’s thought is that history is represented through images, but that these images cannot be seen or perceived immediately; they require a temporal distance before they become readable. Interestingly, this process—in which the truth of a historical moment is recorded, although not recognizable, is allowed to develop over time and then becomes accessible— is often laid out by Benjamin in terms of photography. With respect to Baudelaire, we should note that this is the first instance where Benjamin makes the connection between Baudelaire and photography, even if it is at a metaphorical level, and that this fragment preceded by ten years his comment on Baudelaire in “Little History of Photography” (1931). In this later essay Benjamin claims that Baudelaire failed to recognize the power of the photograph’s authenticity and in that manner suggests that he lacked the sensibility to understand photography properly. Thus, whereas the fragment suggests that Baudelaire had a photographic sensibility (metaphorically speaking), the essay suggests that he lacked this sensibility.

Photographs

61

The latter claim becomes more nuanced in “Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (1940), although Benjamin’s reading of Baudelaire in this essay is marked by the purpose of his article.33 Discussing the relationship between involuntary and voluntary memory, Benjamin claims that the camera extends the range of the mémoire volontaire and hence threatens the mémoire involontaire and the aura. Expounding on this issue, he asserts that the readiness of voluntary memory encouraged by the technology of reproduction “reduces the imagination’s scope for play [Spielraum].” In this context, Benjamin refers to Baudelaire’s Salon de 1859, asserting that Baudelaire saw something “profoundly unnerving and terrifying” in daguerreotypy and that he must have “sensed … the connections of which we have spoken.”34 Thus, whereas Benjamin in the 1931 essay claimed that Baudelaire was unable to appreciate photography properly, in the 1940 essay, he compliments him for sensing the dangers of photography. To understand Benjamin’s various approaches and judgments with respect to photography, it should be borne in mind that the photographic process consists of several phases; first, the camera fixates rays of light to film, thus producing photographic negatives, and second, these negatives are developed to make the images visible. When Benjamin in “Some Motifs in Baudelaire” associates voluntary memory with the camera, he is referring to the process of fixation, seeing the camera as an empirical instrument. When in the “Little History of Photography” he asserts that Baudelaire failed to understand the power of the authenticity of photography, he is also referring to the process of fixation, but this time acknowledging that the camera fixates not merely empirical truth, but also historical truth. In the early fragment on Baudelaire, Benjamin refers to both the process of fixation and to the process of development, and the very point of the fragment is to establish an analogy between time—or historical truth—and photography. In this manner, Benjamin attributes Baudelaire with a deep intuition regarding the historical truth—presented as a capacity to read negatives of history. This becomes more comprehensible once we recognize another astonishing feature of the 1921 fragment. The metaphor of photography seems to prefigure a literary device that, at a later point, Benjamin saw as crucial for Baudelaire’s poetry: allegory. Photography and allegory can be seen as parallel phenomena insofar as they are both forms of representation requiring a process of “development” before they can be properly understood. Both require inscription, that is, parergonal elements or forms of repetition that demonstrate the inability of the image to signify “by itself.” This similarity between photography and allegory is also noted by Samuel Weber (in a different context), who asserts that “in the same way that film and photography come to require captions, legends, and inscriptions, the fragmentation and dislocation of the phenomenal world in baroque allegory engenders a temporality of repetition characterized by a prevalence of inscription: legends become necessary to mark the way and to

62

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

bridge an image with its meaning.”35 This means that the question of how to read images could be presented either in terms of allegory or in terms of photography. The parallels between these structures—both with regard to time and to truth—are, indeed, striking, and it could even be suggested that Benjamin’s concept of allegory may be indebted to the technique of photography, or at least that Benjamin’s use of these two terms overlapped. We have seen that Benjamin describes Baudelaire’s genius as a talent for reading images, making use of photography as a metaphor. We have also seen that Baudelaire describes the activity of the poet-flâneur in terms that are reminiscent of photography: adopting the gaze of the camera, the poet-flâneur perceives the windows that appear after dark as a series of still photos. He knows exactly how to read, subtitle, and allegorize the “images” he produces in this manner; in fact, providing the images with captions seems to be a vital matter to him. Baudelaire and Benjamin thus appear to plead similar causes in similar terms. The issue for both of them is to battle the passive consumption of images encouraged by the culture industry. Baudelaire advocates an active use of the imagination in respect to images, and Benjamin highlights the importance of reading and interpreting images to reveal their secrets. Contrary to Benjamin, however, Baudelaire’s poet-flâneur in “Les Fenêtres” asserts that it does not matter whether the légende he makes up is true or not. Although we should keep in mind that Baudelaire is here rejecting empirical truth rather than moral, historical, and aesthetic truth, we may observe a paradox in this prose poem. This could appear to be the moment when the age of storytelling and the age of technological reproducibility (that is, the age of photography) converge.

Visual desire: Portrait photography and fetishism In Baudelaire’s prose poem “Mademoiselle Bistouri,” we find a more explicit comment on the technique of photography. Here, the situation from “Les Fenêtres” is reversed: The poet-flâneur is victim to a strange woman he meets on the street, and it is she who makes up his story. Just as in “Les Fenêtres,” the story is derived partly from her imagination, and what is interesting here is the way her imagination is nurtured by her collection of portrait photography. This prose poem could be read as a comment on a fetishistic imagination, stimulated by the expansion of a new and captivating medium: photography. The prose poem begins when the poetic subject on his stroll reaches the extremity of the suburb. He is under the street light—or in the spotlight— when Mademoiselle Bistouri approaches him, claiming that he is a doctor she has met previously. Even though he denies that he is a doctor and tells her that

Photographs

63

they have never met before, she insists, and lured by his passion for mysteries, he agrees to go home with her. Once there, he discovers that Mademoiselle Bistouri collects lithographs and photographs portraying doctors, some of them acquired from le quai Voltaire, the outdoor bookstalls along the Seine in Paris. We are thus introduced to the visual media of the period: She took out of a drawer a packet of papers, which consisted of nothing other than a collection of portraits of famous doctors of our day, lithographed by Maurin, and which you used to see on display for several years on the quai Voltaire. … And she spread out in the shape of a fan a mass of photographic images representing faces which were much younger.36 Et elle tira d’une armoire, une liasse de papiers, qui n’était autre chose que la collection des portraits des médecins illustres de ce temps, lithographiés par Maurin, qu’on a pu voir étalée pendant plusieurs années sur le quai Voltaire. … Et elle déploya en éventail une masse d’images photographiques, représentant des physionomies beaucoup plus jeunes.37 It is significant that the photographs in Mademoiselle Bistouri’s collection portray young doctors, or interns, whereas the lithographs portray older doctors of renown (presumably the generation of 1848; cf. the comment “That was at the time of the uprisings.” (“C’étais le temps des émeutes.”)). This dissimilarity accentuates the development in technology occurring during this period, when photography takes over the role of portrait painting and gives a new sense of verisimilitude to portraits. The central theme of the story is the way these images become the focus of a lonely woman’s sexual desires and fantasies: Mademoiselle Bistouri appears to be obsessed with doctors and their pictures. She collects them, entraps the doctors in photographs as well as in her fantasies, as she admits herself when she presents the photographs: “Now, here’s W, a famous English doctor; I caught him during his visit to Paris” (“Voici maintenant W, un fameux médecin anglais; je l’ai attrapé à son voyage à Paris”). The poetic subject, having been entangled into her web on the street, is obviously victim to the same alluring approach as were the other men. In keeping with this, Mademoiselle Bistouri asks him to bring his photograph on his next visit: “When we see each other again, you’ll give me your portrait, won’t you darling?” (“Quand nous nous reverrons, tu me donneras ton portrait, n’estce pas, chéri?”)

64

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

In a somewhat similar manner, Baudelaire appears to have collected the character of Mademoiselle Bistouri from the newspaper L’Epoque in which a certain “Mère Bistouri” appears in a “Chronique parisienne” from 1866.38 Taking material from the newspaper, rather than “directly” from his imagination, Baudelaire chooses a strategy that is not typical of the romantic poet. Similarly, in the prose poem, the poetic subject demonstrates his distance from romantic poetry. When he enters the shabby home of Mademoiselle Bistouri, he refuses to describe it and remarks that it has already been described in many old poems: “I’ll omit the description of the hovel; you can find it in several old and well-known French poets.” (“J’omets la description du tadis; on peut la trouver dans plusieurs vieux poètes français bien connus.”) Then, he reveals what has attracted his attention in the hovel: “Only, and this is a detail Régnier didn’t see, two or three portraits of famous doctors hung on the walls.” (“Seulement, detail non aperçu par Régnier, deux ou trois portraits de docteurs célèbres étaient suspendus aux murs.”) Instead of making a poetic tableau of the romantic sort, the poetic subject thus pays attention to a detail, and a detail that allegedly would have escaped the notice of the romantic poets (here represented by Régnier): a couple of portraits hanging on the wall. Here, the poetic subject chooses a strategy that is altogether modern: in disavowing a Romantic description and focusing on details, he in fact seems to have adopted the mode of photography. As for Mademoiselle Bistouri, a similar process appears to have taken place, but in her case, the adoption of a “photographic mode” is a kind of fetishism. Mademoiselle Bistouri is engaged in a strange enterprise involving doctors, their portraits, and her fantasies about them. Her attention, her gaze, has been captured by a collection of images, and her imagination seems obsessed with these images, to the point that she neglects reality. Treating these images as fetishes, she arranges her reality so that it fits with her fetishistic imagination. In keeping with this, her main occupation is “seeing doctors,” and she confesses that she likes doctors so much that she goes to see them even if she is not ill: “I love those gentlemen so much that even though I’m not sick, I sometimes pay them a call, just to see them.” (“J’aime tant ces messieurs, que, bien que je ne sois pas malade, je vais quelquefois les voir, rien que pour les voir.”) Apparently, “seeing doctors” corresponds to a visual desire, a kind of fetishism in which the procedure is entrapment, fixation, and collection. And the doctors she “sees” are denied any life outside her photos and her fantasies. For Mademoiselle Bistouri, “seeing doctors” also seems to imply some kind of prostitution, although she informs us that she does not always ask for money. Instead of money, she requires photos, and it may seem that photos here have replaced money as the currency. Thus, the business of “seeing doctors” seems to have replaced ordinary human relationships. In this manner, the prose poem testifies to the commodification of human relations in the modern era.

Photographs

65

Although the principle of prostitution underlies the entire text, Baudelaire gives it a twist. Usually, the prostitute is depicted as an object of desire, but here she is transformed into an active subject, exploiting men through a procedure of entrapment, collection, and fixation. Still, it is obvious that Mademoiselle Bistouri’s active role—her agency—is apparent. After all, she is incapable of transgressing the world of images, remaining, as it were, their prisoner. Her gaze seems to be fixated by photography, as if photography created a cut in reality and offered it to her fetishistic imagination. In this context, the name of “Mademoiselle Bistouri”—which translates as “Miss Scalpel”—merits comment. A bistouri is a knife used by surgeons; bistouriser means to make an incision, a cut, and in nineteenth-century vernacular, the word is associated with prostitution (“gibier à bistouri” means an unhealthy (infectious) prostitute (or originally, it means a game in respect to which precaution is necessary)). Thus, the name Mademoiselle Bistouri refers not only to her preference for doctors, but also to the nature of her sexual desires: her relationship to men, her penetrating gaze on their photographs, and her fetishistic imagination are here associated with the cutting and penetration of the surgeon. Curiously, the same association of visual technology and surgery appears in Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” although he is here talking about the film camera. In order to make the difference between the cinema and painting conceivable, Benjamin draws an analogy; he compares the technique of the cinema to the technique of the surgeon, and then the technique of painting to the method of the magician: The surgeon … diminishes the distance from the patient by penetrating the patient’s body … unlike the magician (traces of whom are still found in the medical practitioner), the surgeon abstains at the decisive moment from confronting his patient person to person; instead he penetrates the patient by operating.—Magician is to a surgeon as painter is to cinematographer.39 This analysis may serve to shed light on the nature of Mademoiselle Bistouri’s obsession. Her fixation is the fixation of the camera, cutting out details instead of confronting reality as a whole; drawing the object closer instead of maintaining ordinary human relations. In this perspective, the prose poem describes the advent of a new medium capable of fixating the imagination and of turning the image as such into a fetish. Furthermore, it describes how photography has become a currency of its own—an object of exchange and a collector’s item—transforming the relationship between human beings, bringing them closer, and keeping them more distant at the same time. Reading this prose poem, it becomes obvious that Baudelaire understood the dispositive of photography very well and recognized the way it could

66

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

paralyze the imagination of the beholder. For Baudelaire, photography does not merely reproduce reality identically; it performs a cut up of reality and presents the resulting images as objects for our fetishistic imagination. Indeed, “Mademoiselle Bistouri” reveals the violence of photography: its power to capture the gaze of the viewer, prey on his visual desire, and make him a prisoner of images.

Traffic in souls: Arresting/escaping identity The circulation of images is also a subject in “Le Joueur généreux” (“The Generous Gambler”), but this time, a more positive account of photography is given. The principle of reproduction, which pertains to photography, now becomes a means of subverting authenticity and identity, and reproduction is now associated with freedom. In this piece, photography is represented by a hugely popular nineteenth-century phenomenon: the carte-de-visite. Contrary to what one may believe, this phenomenon plays an important role in the history of photography, for we are not speaking about the traditional calling card, but instead about a new photographic format. The Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, under the entry for “Carte-de-visite,” provides us with the following information: The carte-de-visite was one of the most popular photographic formats of the nineteenth century. It consisted of small portrait photograph, around 9 cm by 6 cm, pasted onto a slightly larger piece of card. Cartes-devisites derived their name from the fact that their size gave them the appearance of a visiting card, a purpose for which it was rarely, if ever, used. The advent of the carte-de-visite in the late 1850s was keyed into photography becoming a public and a commercial media.40 The carte-de-visite was patented in 1854 by André Adolphe-Eugène Disderi, but it was not until a few years later that it became a success. According to the Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, “a rage for cards” caught on in France in 1858 and the carte-de-visite became “the latest social fashion.” The key to this success was Disderi’s technique, which allowed eight images to be exposed on one plate and thus reduced the cost considerably. In the carte-de-visite, photography had found a standardized format, a size and a weight that made it easy to circulate, and a price that made it accessible to almost anyone. With this format, photographs truly came into circulation. However, the visiting card was not the only photographic genre taking advantage of the possibility for multiplication. As Steffen Siegel has showed, common exercises in the early days of photography were the creation of photographic doubles and the multiplication of subjects.41 Particularly intriguing is the photographic display—a frame with several windows— which distributed a series of photographic portraits of the same person in

Photographs

67

a circle. Through this optical device, a person was “split” into a specter of personalities. Indeed, the technique of photography invites multiplication, and these possibilities were explored from early on. When Baudelaire wrote his Salon de 1859, it was in the heyday of the cartede-visite. Although his disdain for people’s narcissistic desire to contemplate their own image is directed at the daguerreotype, he might just as well have included this new and popular format. In fact, one of the photographs of Baudelaire taken by Nadar—from a sitting in 1862—was a carte-de-visite, so he was indeed familiar with the phenomenon.42 Furthermore, when he writes about a “carte de visite” in the prose poem “Le Joueur généreux,” published in 1864, it seems very likely that he is not referring to the traditional calling card, but to the latest fashion in photography. The prose poem is about a game with the devil in which the poetic subject plays and loses his soul. What is interesting is the way the soul is here related to questions of identity, representation, and reproduction—with an intriguing reference to the carte-de-visite. From early on, photography was seen as an objective means of representing identity, serving both the bourgeois desire for self-representation and governmental need for the identification of citizens. At the same time, however, photography was associated with supernatural powers; having one’s photograph taken was connected with the danger of losing one’s soul. Honoré de Balzac is famous for his belief that being photographed removed a part of his “essential substance,” and both Gérard de Nerval and Theophile Gautier held the same belief.43 Champfleury even wrote a story based on this esoteric idea, “The Legend of the Daguerrotypist” (1863). It depicts a photographic session in which the photographer repeatedly commands his client not to move, but has to begin the process over and over again to get it right. In the end, the daguerreotype manages to take a successful portrait, but at this stage, the poor man has disappeared altogether: “Fifty successive attempts had gradually annihilated the body of the model. There was nothing left of M. Balandard, except his voice.”44 The story illustrates the common belief that photographic images are produced at the expense of the model. Furthermore, from today’s perspective, photography also evokes the question of whether photographic images actually replace, to some degree, reality. How, then, are these views on photography—the magical power of capturing people’s souls, and the disciplinary power of capturing people’s identities—put into play by Baudelaire? As with many of Baudelaire’s other prose poems, “Le Joueur généreux” begins on the street; the poetic subject suddenly encounters the devil in the midst of a Parisian crowd. It is interesting to notice the close and in fact metonymic relationship between the crowd and the devil in the opening paragraph: “Yesterday, amidst the crowds on the boulevard, I felt myself brushed against by a mysterious Being.” (“Hier, à travers la foule du boulevard, je me sentis frôlé par un Être mystérieux.”)45 Significantly, the chain of events that will lead to a loss of identity begins with the luring dangers of the crowd. Reading further, we

68

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

learn that the poetic subject immediately recognizes the devil approaching him, and obeying him at the blink of his eye, the poetic subject follows the devil to his splendid subterranean residence, characterized by dazzling light and luxury. There, the poetic subject engages in a devilish game, presumably a card game, where the stake is nothing less than his soul. As we may expect, the devil wins the game and the poetic subject confesses that he has played and lost his soul. However, the poetic subject does not seem to mind the loss of his soul terribly and he claims that losing his soul amounts to the same as losing his visiting card on the street: “The soul is so impalpable, so often useless, and sometimes such a nuisance, that I felt no more emotion on losing it than if, on a stroll, I had mislaid my visiting card” (“L’âme est une chose si impalpable, si souvent inutile et quelquefois si gênante, que je n’éprouvai, quant à cette perte, qu’un peu moins d’emotion que si j’avais égaré, dans une promenade, ma carte de visite”). In this comment, we first notice that the soul is a dispensable object for the poetic subject; just like the halo in “Perte d’auréole,” he is happy to get rid of it (cf. Chapter 1). By comparing it to a visiting card, he aligns it with a fixed identity, and an identity that is extrinsic rather than intrinsic. In this manner, Baudelaire could be seen as emptying out the subject, depriving his protagonist both of his inner spirituality (a soul) and a (socially) fixed identity (a visiting card), and claiming that these two amount to the same (worthless) thing. Second, we should note that a strange tautology is in play here. The poetic subject, who on his stroll is lured by the devil into a game in which he loses his soul, claims that this amounts to the same as losing his visiting card on a stroll. It could indeed be claimed that he has lost his identity (or his soul) on a stroll, and that the encounter with the crowd was the first step toward this fortunate/unfortunate loss. Moreover, the French verb égarer means going astray rather than losing, which implies that the visiting card—or the soul— may not simply have been lost, but instead that it may have gone astray. Thus, losing one’s soul and going astray here seems to amount to the same thing. In this manner, a new sense of danger—or a new thrill—is associated with the art of taking a walk, and the experience of the crowd seems to be the very cause of this danger/thrill. Also in play here is the ambiguous logic of the visiting card; although the visiting card is, in theory, a device for arresting identity and, as it were, capturing the soul (or an identity) in an image, it paradoxically also embodies the capacity of the soul (or an identity) to visit, travel, and circulate, and thus to escape arrest. The very point of visiting cards is to produce a large number of copies and disperse them widely. However, with the spread of copies, the idea of an original is weakened, and in the prose poem, the original actually proves to be dispensable. Why bother with the mysteries of the soul, when your identity can easily be reproduced—and put into circulation—by means of visiting cards?

Photographs

69

In this context, we should note the appropriateness of referring to visiting cards in respect to a card game. What is implied is that, just like the playing card, visiting cards can be played with. Presumably, a game with visiting cards would be a game in which one plays with identities, where identities “go astray.” Juxtaposing these kinds of cards, Baudelaire thus makes the arbitrary relationship between the image and the referent clear: the visiting card refers no more to a soul than the king of spades refers to a throne. What Baudelaire describes in this prose poem is thus a mysterious “traffic in souls.”46 First, there is the devil trading in souls, second, there is the photographer trading in images, and third, there is the poetic subject taking leave of his soul, just as he would have taken leave of his visiting card, allowing it to travel, visit, and escape arrest. We may thus ask if the poetic subject is here playing a game of identities, whereas the old-fashioned devil is merely playing for a soul. It may indeed seem as if the poor devil is hopelessly committed to the original, whereas the poetic subject—having entered the era of technological reproducibility—has managed to escape his grasp.

Making images move As we have seen, Baudelaire warns against the power of photography; because of the way it reproduces reality identically, it risks paralyzing our associative abilities and arresting our identities. To counter this tendency and to escape “arrest,” Baudelaire advocates the circulation of identities and the active use of our imagination. This project can be seen as an endeavor to liberate images; what Baudelaire desires is to make images move. This attitude toward images may be illuminated by the work of Agamben, an astute reader of both Baudelaire and Benjamin. As we have already seen, Agamben is concerned with the temporality of images. In an essay on gestures and the cinema, he speaks against the reification of images, hailing the cinema because it allows images to escape arrest. His line of thought is centered around the idea of gestures; according to Agamben, gestures are arrested in images, but at the same time they refer beyond the image: Every image, in fact, is animated by an antinomic polarity: on the one hand, images are the reification and obliteration of a gesture (it is the imago as death mask or symbol); on the other hand, they preserve the dynamis intact (as in Muybridge’s snapshots or in any sports photograph). The former corresponds to the recollection seized by voluntary memory, while the latter corresponds to the image flashing in the epiphany of involuntary memory. And while the former lives in magical isolation, the latter always refers beyond itself to a whole of which it is a part.… And

70

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

that is so because a certain kind of litigatio, a paralyzing power whose spell we need to break, is continuously at work in every image; it is as if a silent vocation calling for the liberation of the image into gesture arouse from the entire history of art.47 Although Agamben’s main point is to illuminate the way gestures are liberated in the cinema, his reflections on the importance of freeing images from reification are also highly interesting for a discussion of photography. Especially the role he attributes to gestures reveals the double force of images: images arrest gestures, but the gesture of images is also the dynamic force of images, making them refer beyond themselves. These perspectives may serve to illuminate the prose poem “Les Fenêtres” and Baudelaire’s stance toward images generally. As we have seen, Baudelaire’s poet-flâneur adopts the gaze of the camera. Framing an illuminated window, he constructs a window-image and immobilizes the gestures of the woman he sees there. At the same time, he allows his imagination to “fill in the picture” that is produced in this manner, thus making the activity of the imagination and the act of providing images with captions analogue procedures. Further, he pays attention to light (illumination) and color when he considers various visual possibilities, and his preference is for illuminated images latent with life. In light of this, Baudelaire’s aesthetic preferences become clearer. It seems that Baudelaire develops a dialectics between stillness and movement in relation to images. On the one hand, he frames images and makes them stand out as still photographs; on the other hand, he prefers them to be vibrant with light and color and requires that they refer beyond themselves. Baudelaire thus endeavors to produce vibrant still images and to make them move. As I see it, it would be too simplistic to describe this merely as romantic aesthetics, as is often done, and to oppose it to the realism and stasis of photography. This dichotomy was already established in the ongoing quarrel between the realists and idealists, where the aesthetics of photography (or the daguérrotype) was associated with realism. However, with his modern motifs and his modern aesthetics, Baudelaire goes beyond this dichotomy and develops a sophisticated view on photography, recognizing its aesthetic possibilities and powers. His parenthetical remark in Salon de 1859, protesting the view of photography as simply an imitation of reality—“(they believe that, poor madmen!)”—testifies to his ability to see beyond the contemporary uses and ideas concerning photography. Indeed, his essays and poems reveal that he was familiar with the various idées reçues related to photography. Taking the complex media situation of the mid-nineteenth century into account and acknowledging Baudelaire’s concern with different ways of seeing, we may thus reconsider Baudelaire’s stance on photography. As we have seen, Baudelaire’s consideration of images in “Les Fenêtres,”

Photographs

71

“Mademoiselle Bistouri,” and “Le Joueur généreux,” appears to be influenced by photography in various ways, and the poet’s imagination seems to draw on the gaze of the camera. Baudelaire thus appears to recognize the camera’s ability to frame and freeze reality, its capacity for paralyzing our imaginative ability, and its capacity for “arresting” our identities. However, Baudelaire also knew how to counter these tendencies. Recognizing the image’s ability to refer beyond itself, he attempted to liberate them from reification. Preferring the copy to the original, he allowed images to circulate and escape arrest. Rather than bluntly opposing photography, Baudelaire played with the dispositive of photography and deprived it of its disciplinary power. In this manner, he created his own media aesthetics, demonstrating how perception changes in the age of photography and how different dispositives influence each other. Baudelaire thus demonstrated that it was possible to resist the violence of images and that one need not fall prey to the dominance of the new medium. This is how Baudelaire asserted himself as a poet in the age of technological reproducibility.

3 Precinematic devices

In the nineteenth century, a privileged metaphor for the description of urban life was the kaleidoscope; even today, the epithet kaleidoscopic appears to be indispensable whenever nineteenth-century Paris is on the agenda.1 What is often forgotten is that this metaphor only became available with the invention of the actual instrument at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and in this manner, the historicity of the metaphor is easily overlooked. The kaleidoscope was in fact but one among several optical instruments that were invented during the nineteenth century and used for groundbreaking experiments regarding vision. As these devices allowed human vision to be altered and the perception of the world to change, they soon came to serve as metaphors for different forms of perception, and eventually came to represent a specifically modern sensibility. Such metaphors are central in the writings of modernist icons such as Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, and Thomas Mann, but in spite of this, little attention has been paid to their origin stemming from nineteenth-century optics. In literary studies it often seems that these metaphors have been naturalized. In visual and cinema studies, by contrast, these optical instruments are seen as belonging to the precinematic age, and attention is drawn to the way nineteenth-century visual culture prefigures the age of cinema. The argument is that nineteenth-century experiments on vision had revealed that seeing was a phenomenon unfolding in time, being contingent upon the moving body. As a corollary, a new, visual sensibility developed, and nineteenth-century visual culture became “cinematic” before the fact. In the wake of Benjamin’s writings, this new visual sensibility is often associated with the figure of the flâneur, who comes to represent a new form of urban spectatorship—one that is mobile, idle, and accidental. What I will argue is that Baudelaire’s writings are characterized by a precinematic sensibility, one that requires both a literary and a visual approach. A careful reading of Baudelaire’s texts reveals that he was indeed sensitive to the new visual culture of his time and that his conception of modernist aesthetics was in many respects indebted to the possibilities

74

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

offered by the new visual field. In this regard, two aesthetic features are of particular interest: montage and movement.

Opening a new field of vision Today, the kaleidoscope is seen mostly as a toy for children, but generally, it could be considered a device for the contemplation of beautiful forms. The instrument was invented by David Brewster, a Scottish physicist living in London in 1815 and was patented by him in 1817. Brewster takes care to explain the meaning of the word kaleidoscope on the very first page of his book The Kaleidoscope—Its History, Theory, and Construction: “The name kaleidoscope, which I have given to a new Optical Instrument, for creating and exhibiting beautiful forms, is derived from the Greek words [kalos], beautiful; [eidos], a form; and [scopos], to see.” Thus kaleidoscope means “the beautiful form-seer.”2 From a technological point of view, Brewster’s kaleidoscope could be described as a tube containing loose pieces of colored glass and other tiny objects. These pieces are reflected by mirrors or glass lenses set at angles, and when viewed through the end of the tube, they create symmetrical patterns. Brewster underscored the number of variations that could be obtained by changing the parameters: the number of mirrors employed, the angle of the mirrors, the shape of the small objects, plus light, distance, and—of course—motion. The instrument was originally designed to study reflections of light and their impact on subjective vision, but it was discovered to have aesthetical value as well; turning the kaleidoscope, one can give rise to innumerable symmetrical patterns and beautiful forms. Recognizing this aesthetic value, Brewster claimed that the variation of colors in mathematical patterns would provide pleasure in much the same way as the variation of tones in music. Accordingly, the kaleidoscope could be aligned with the temporal arts—arts bounded by time—and described as music for the eye. The popularity of this device at the time of its introduction is difficult to conceive today. The kaleidoscope caused a sensation even before it was commonly sold in stores due to an early exhibition in London. In his book, Brewster gives an account of the instrument’s popularity and spread: The sensation excited by this premature exhibition of its effects is incapable of description, and can be conceived only by those who witnessed it. “It very quickly became popular,” says Dr. Roget, in his excellent article on the Kaleidoscope in the Encyclopœdia Britannica, “and the sensation it excited in London throughout all ranks of people was astonishing. It afforded delight to the poor as well as the rich; to the old as well as the young. Large cargoes of them were sent abroad, particularly to the East

Precinematic devices

75

FIGURE 3.1  Kaleidoscopic images by David Brewster and Charles Wheatstone.

Indies. They very soon became known throughout Europe, and have been met with by travelers even in the most obscure and retired villages in Switzerland.” According to the computation of those who were best able to form an opinion on the subject, no fewer than two hundred thousand instruments were sold in London and Paris during three months.3

76

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

Brewster’s account demonstrates the impact this instrument had, not only within scientific communities, but also within popular culture. However, the kaleidoscope was only one of many optical devices from this period that were originally invented for scientific purposes and that were transformed into toys for the masses. These optical devices—or optical toys—completely changed the way vision was understood. As Jonathan Crary has argued in Techniques of the Observer, vision in the first decades of the nineteenth century lost its status as a stable ground for seeing.4 It was no longer considered a neutral perception of reality, but instead was regarded as a subjective and mobile phenomenon, dependent on the body of the observer and his perspective and span of attention. Hence, the very object of study was subjective vision, with all its idiosyncrasies. Reflections of light, binocular vision, and peripheral vision were among the phenomena that were studied, but perhaps the most intriguing phenomenon was the effect of the afterimage—an “imprint” that persisted on the retina after the object that had been observed was removed. The discovery of this optical illusion—based on the “memory” of the eye—caused a revolution in the study of vision. First, the existence of the afterimage actually showed that vision was (partly) independent of an external object. Second, it showed that there was a delay in our visual perception—that seeing was a phenomenon unfolding in time. Third, it was assumed that the afterimage could fill in visual time gaps and hence that it allowed a series of images to be perceived as a continuous stream of images. Although the latter claim has been contested by modern researchers, these claims dominated discussions on vision throughout the nineteenth century. The effects of the afterimage were explored by means of a number of instruments.5 The most simple of these was the thaumatrope, invented by John Paris in 1825. This instrument could be described as a circular disk with an image on each side, for instance, a bird on the one side and a cage on the other. The disk had a string attached to its two opposite sides, which could be pulled to make the disk spin. The two images would then blur together and appear as a single, synthesized image. Consequently, the bird would appear to be in the cage, although this was merely an optical illusion. A more spectacular effect was achieved by means of the phenakistiscope, invented in 1830 by Joseph Plateau, which produced the illusion of moving images, that is, motion pictures—long before cinema. This instrument consisted of a handle with a circular disk attached to it. On the disk, a series of images were distributed in a circle, all representing the same figure in motion, but at different phases of its movement, for instance, a galloping horse or a man putting on and taking off his hat. When the disk was put in motion, the series of images would blur together. Yet, to complete the illusion, a framing device was necessary, so the design included a slot through which

Precinematic devices

77

the images should be seen, allowing only one image to appear at a time, as well as a mirror providing an indirect view of the moving images. When seen through the slot and in the mirror, the series of images on the disk appeared as a more or less seamless stream of motion pictures. This technique was improved throughout the course of the century, and with devices such as the zootrope and the praxiscope even more persuasive moving images or “motion pictures” were achieved. A different effect was achieved by means of the stereoscope, invented by Charles Wheatstone in 1838. The virtue of this instrument was that it created the illusion of depth; it made “flat” pictures appear three dimensional. This instrument resembled a pair of glasses, but it separated the perspectives of the eyes, making each eye see independently of one another. It was used to look at a pair of quasi-identical images (stereoscopic images), which were seen in this manner from two angles at the same time and thus appeared three dimensional. After photography was invented in 1839, the stereoscope was used to view photographic images and subsequently became a huge success. Between 1860 and 1920, the stereoscope was almost as ubiquitous in people’s homes as the television set is today.6 According to Jonathan Crary, the main achievement of these inventions was the discovery that vision could be altered. The human eye could no longer be trusted to provide an objective visual perspective, but was discovered to be vulnerable to manipulation and recoding. As a consequence, vision was turned into a “surface of inscription” upon which a number of effects could be produced. Adopting a Foucauldian perspective, Crary considers the optical instruments as “disciplinary techniques,” that is, “means of recoding the activity of the eye, to regiment it, to heighten its productivity and to

FIGURE 3.2  Joseph Plateau’s phenakistiscope.

78

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

FIGURE 3.3  David Brewster’s stereoscope and the optical principle of its operation.

Precinematic devices

79

prevent its distraction” and “techniques for imposing visual attentiveness, rationalizing sensation, and managing perception.”7 The same developments in the field of vision have been discussed by Mary Ann Doane in her book, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, with reference to Crary. Doane considers the studies of the afterimage as part of a central current in nineteenth-century science and philosophy: the obsession with time and its representability.8 Discussing various manifestations of this obsession (the technique of chronophotography being central), she claims that this period witnessed a new conception of time that culminated with the invention of cinema. According to Doane, the emergence of “cinematic time” thus predated cinema. Long before Crary and Doane, however, Benjamin took an interest in the precinematic era and the first experiments with “scientifically produced motion.” In a fragment in The Arcades Project (the section on photography), he accounts for various nineteenth-century visual technologies (in summary form)—from the thaumatrope and phenakistiscope to chronophotography and the cinema, referring to Roland Villier’s book, Le Cinéma et ses merveilles (1930).9 He also describes the effects of the afterimage (“the persistence of retinal impressions”) as “the basis of all cinema” and pays attention to the decomposition of movement. In the new edition of Benjamin’s writings on Baudelaire edited by Giorgio Agamben, this fragment is included in a large section entitled “De la Documentation à la construction” (From Documentation to Construction). It is followed by a fragment that refers to and quotes Baudelaire’s discussion of the phenakistiscope in an essay from 1853 (which will be discussed shortly).10 We may thus infer that Benjamin was familiar with precinematic technologies, that he had recognized Baudelaire’s interest in the phenakistiscope, and that he intended to connect—or at least juxtapose—these two fragments in his book on Baudelaire. It is certain that the nineteenth-century experiments with vision opened new possibilities within art, whose relative independence from reality was confirmed and whose object was, so to speak, put in motion.11 The question is how exactly this influence worked. This is, obviously, a question that cannot be answered definitively, but we may start by acknowledging the extent to which nineteenth-century visual culture was being transformed during this period. As we have seen, optical instruments soon became toys for the masses, and simple experiments with vision thus became relevant for everyone. Moving images and 3-D images caused fascination and astonishment everywhere they were seen, causing a widespread passion for optical illusions. And if the optical toys were mainly designed for private and individual use, they found their counterparts in a number of entertainment shows for the public; magic shows, illusionist shows, magic lantern shows, and phantasmagoria shows all traded in optical illusions. Within the domain of painting as well, the potential of optical illusions was explored; panoramas and dioramas were designed to create a feeling

80

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

of depth—a 3-D view that was only illusory.12 The panoramas often used artificial light to recreate the natural transformations of light during the day, making the panorama change from one minute to the next. Benjamin claimed that the panoramas announce “an upheaval in the relation of art to technology” and asserted that the panoramas, in their attempt to produce deceptively lifelike changes in nature, “prepare the way not only for photography, but for [silent] film and sound film.”13 The diorama, too, was considered in a precinematic perspective by Benjamin. He speculated on a possible acceleration of time in the dioramas, making “the transformations take place in fifteen or thirty minutes.” This would be “something like a sportive precursor of fast-motion cinematography,” he asserted.14 All these phenomena contributed to the shaping of a new visual culture in which the manipulation of the senses was paramount. However, little proof of this visual culture has been passed down to us today. Since optical illusions have no materiality—whether they appeared on stage or during play with optical toys—no “work” of lasting value issued from this major trend of nineteenth-century culture. It is certain, however, that the new technology offered new ways of seeing and in this manner opened a new field of vision. Many of the artists and writers who are today considered prominent representatives of modernism responded to this new visual field in their works. As Crary has demonstrated, the new visual possibilities were central for the work of Édouard Manet, Georges Seurat, and Paul Cézanne.15 My contention is that they were also crucial for Baudelaire. With his visual sensibility, his perceptiveness to all that was modern and his soft spot for popular culture, Baudelaire was well equipped to respond to the new field of vision. The importance of the new visual field for Baudelaire’s writings has been acknowledged by Françoise Meltzer, who discusses the stereoscope, double vision, and the effects of the afterimage in relation to Baudelaire.16 I pursue a slightly different line of inquiry. I discuss the aesthetics of optical toys, focusing on the phenakistiscope and the kaleidoscope and the effects of movement and montage.

Optical toys as initiation into art Baudelaire had firsthand experience with optical instruments. His presumed first experience with the phenakistiscope is described in a letter to his brother Alphonse written in 1833, when he was 12 years old. The instrument, invented three years earlier, had been offered to him by his father, and Baudelaire describes it as simply bizarre. Perhaps this characterization can be seen as foreshadowing his aesthetic preference pronounced in 1855: “beauty is always bizarre” (“le beau est toujours bizarre”).17 In the letter, written from Lyon, Baudelaire remarks that his brother must know the phenakistiscope, as Paris is full of them, but he still gives a thorough description of the way

Precinematic devices

81

it works and even encloses some drawings he has made to demonstrate its basic principles.18 Dad also has offered me a gift; he has given me a phenakistiscope. This word is just as bizarre as the invention. You must know what it is, you who are in Paris. For there are already lots of them there. Even if I think you know what it is, I will describe it to you, so that you cannot say: “What do I care about the phenakistiscope as long as I don’t know what it is!” It is a cardboard device with a little mirror, which is placed on a table between two candles. There is also a handle which is used to operate a round cardboard disc pierced with small holes all around it. Over it, one adds a second disc with drawings, in such a way that the drawings face the mirror. Then one turns it, and one watches the mirror through the small holes, where one sees really pretty drawings. Papa aussi m’a fait un cadeau: il m’a donné un phénakistiscope. Ce mot est aussi bizarre que l’invention. Tu dois savoir ce que c’est, toi qui es à Paris. Car il [y] en [a] déjà beacoup. Quoique je pense que tu saches ce que c’est, je t’en vais faire la description, pour que tu ne puisses pas dire: “Que m’importe le phénakistiscope, si je ne sais pas ce que c’est [!”] C’est un cartonnage dans lequel il y a une petite glace qu’on met sur une table entre deux bougies. On y trouve aussi un manche auquel on adapte un rond de carton percé tout autour de petits trous. Par-dessus on ajoute un autre carton dessiné, le dessin tourné vers la glace. Puis on fait tourner, et on regarde par les petits trous dans la glace où l’on voit de fort jolis dessins.19 Twenty years later, in the essay entitled “Morale du joujou” (“A Philosophy of Toys,” 1853), Baudelaire returns to the phenakistiscope. In this essay, he outlines not only a philosophy of toys, but also an aesthetics of toys, and in particular, an aesthetics of optical toys. His main concern is how toys generally act upon the child’s imagination, and stressing the importance of this early imaginative experience, he asserts that “the toy is the child’s earliest initiation to art” (“le joujou est la première initiation de l’enfant à l’art”).20 He describes how a toy offers itself to the imagination in an almost violent manner “with its lustrous neatness, its blinding flashes of colour, its violence in gesture and decision of contour” (“par la propreté lustrée, l’éclat aveuglant des couleurs, la violence dans le geste et la décision dans le galbe”).21 According to Baudelaire, toys represent the child’s ideas of beauty and it seems that their appeal comes from the way they forcefully and intensely affect the child’s imagination. From Baudelaire’s description, toys actually appear to beget their own lives due to the imaginary process they trigger in the child; the toys “come alive” in the child’s imagination. With a Freudian perspective, we could describe them as uncanny, just like the automatons and mechanical dolls that haunted romantic literature,

82

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

especially the work of E. T. A. Hoffmann. Arguably, a link can be drawn between Baudelaire’s interest in toys “coming alive” and his fascination with Hoffmann’s uncanny stories. The way toys “come alive” is made conceivable when Baudelaire discusses children playing and describes how they transform immobile objects and make them move. The children playing diligence transform a number of chairs into a vehicle that moves with great speed, and the child playing at war commands entire armies made of corks, pawns, and dominoes. Here, transformation and movement is of the essence; the child transforms everyday items into objects that move at his command. Baudelaire states clearly that he believes children dominate their toys but he also suggests that the contrary may be the case: toys may dominate children.22 Accordingly, the influence goes both ways, and the child may indeed find himself transformed by the process of playing with toys. Transformation and movement also appear to be the reason for Baudelaire’s interest in scientific toys, which he describes at length, paying close attention to the way they work and the effect they produce: There is one kind of toy which has tended to multiply for some time, and of which I have neither good nor bad to say. I refer to the scientific toy. The chief defect of these toys is that they are expensive. But they can continue to amuse for a long time and develop in the childish brain a taste for marvellous and unexpected effects. The Stereoscope, which gives a flat image in the round, is one of these. It first appeared several years ago. The Phenakistoscope, which is older, is less well known. Imagine some movement or other, for example a dancer’s or a juggler’s performance, divided up and decomposed into a certain number of movements; imagine that each of these movements—as many as twenty, if you wish— is represented by a complete figure of the juggler or dancer, and that these are all printed round the edge of a circular piece of cardboard. Fix this card, as well as a second circular piece cut at equal intervals with twenty little windows, to a pivot at the end of a handle which you hold as one holds a fire-screen in front of the fire. The twenty little figures, representing the decomposed movement of a single figure, are reflected in a mirror placed in front of you. Apply your eye at the level of the little windows and spin the cards rapidly. The speed of rotation transforms the twenty openings into a single circular opening through which you watch twenty dancing figures reflected in the glass—all exactly the same and executing the same movements with a fantastic precision. Each little figure has availed himself of the nineteen others.… The number of pictures that can thus be created is infinite.23 Il est une espèce de joujou qi tend à se multiplier depuis quelque temps, et dont je n’ai à dire ni bien ni mal. Je veux parler du joujou scientifique. Le principal défaut de ces joujoux est d’être chers. Mais ils peuvent amuser

Precinematic devices

83

longtemps, et développer dans le cerveau de l’enfant le goût des effets merveilleux et surprenants. Le stéréoscope, qui donne en ronde bosse une image plane, est de ce nombre. Il date maintenant de quelques années. Le phénakistiscope, plus ancien, est moins connu. Supposez un mouvement quelconque, par exemple un exercice de danseur ou de jongleur, divisé et décomposé en un certain nombre de mouvements; supposez que chacun de ces mouvements—au nombre de vingt, si vous voulez,—soit représenté par une figure entière du jongleur ou du danseur, et qu’ils soient tous dessinés autour d’un cercle de carton. Ajustez ce cercle, ainsi qu’un autre cercle troué, à distances égales, de vingt petites fenêtres, à un pivot au bout d’un manche que vous tenez comme on tient un écran devant le feu. Les vingt petites figures, représentant le mouvement décomposé d’une seule figure, se reflètent dans une glace située en face de vous. Appliquer votre œil à la hauteur des petites fenêtres, et faites tourner rapidement les cercles. La rapidité de la rotation transforme les vingt ouvertures en une seule circulaire, à travers laquelle vous voyez se réfléchir dans la glace vingt figures dansantes, exactement semblables et exécutant les mêmes mouvements avec une précision fantastique. Chaque petite figure a bénéficié des dixneuf autres.... Le nombre de tableaux qu’on peut créer aini est infinite.24 Here, both the stereoscope and the phenakistiscope are seen as scientific toys.25 Or, as their purpose, according to Baudelaire, is to develop the child’s taste for marvelous and surprising effects, we may call them perceptual toys. Both instruments change our perception; the stereoscope makes flat pictures three dimensional, whereas the phenakistiscope transforms a series of still images into a stream of moving images. Baudelaire explains thoroughly how the phenakistiscope is comprised of two phases: decomposition and recomposition. First, the movements of a figure (e.g. a dancer) are decomposed into a number of phases. Then, the circular disk with these figures is put in motion, allowing the figures to pass successively through the frame of a window, thus making the illusion of coherent movement. We should note that the principle that is at work in this decomposition/recomposition of images is, in fact, montage. The effect of the phenakistiscope is thus based on two central principles: montage and movement. When he describes the phenakistiscope, Baudelaire focuses on the effects of transformation and movement, just as he does when he describes other kinds of toys. As the images appear to move, they take on a life of their own, and the source of Baudelaire’s fascination is precisely this effect of movement creating the appearance of life—a marvelous and surprising effect. The same kind of effect is addressed toward the end of the essay, where Baudelaire discusses the child’s inclination to rip up his toy in the search for its soul, as it were. Baudelaire muses over this destructive behavior, which, in a sense, appears to be instigated by the toys themselves because of their uncanny lifelikeness. His claim is that this search for the toy’s soul is the child’s first metaphysical tendency. However, we may actually consider it both a

84

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

FIGURE 3.4  Phenakistiscope disks by Jean-Baptiste Madou.

metaphysical quest, i.e. a quest for a final cause, and a more mechanically oriented examination, i.e. a search for an efficient cause making the doll “come alive.” But in either case, the “cause” remains a mystery; it cannot be found, and yet the toy appears to be alive—a truly uncanny effect. A similar mystery is at play in the optical illusions created by the optical toys: 3-D effects and “motion pictures.” Here, too, an effect is produced that has no apparent cause. What characterizes these optical phenomena is that they have no materiality, but exist as mere effects—temporal images on the retina of the beholder. Although they appear “real,” these images do not refer (directly) to an external object and only exist as virtual images. This is obviously an aspect that appealed to Baudelaire, whose repugnance for the real is renowned. Having made these observations, we may discern two levels in Baudelaire’s argument concerning toys. Generally, toys can be seen as the child’s first initiation into the world of art, opening up the imaginative sphere and making the child appreciate how things “come to life” in his imagination.

Precinematic devices

85

However, the optical toys differ from ordinary toys; they create a space of “pure vision” where the beholder is allowed to produce the images. Neither devoted solely to reality nor to the imagination, these instruments open up a field where sensory perception can be explored and where reality can be transformed. In this sense, the optical toys serve as an initiation not only into art, but also into modernist aesthetics—understood as an aesthetics of movement, montage, and stunning effects. It should come as no surprise that similar optical effects would later be explored by the avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp, for whom the optical toys would serve as “transformative apparatuses” changing the way we perceive the world.26 Experimenting with stereoscopic effects and other optical illusions, Duchamp attempted to leave “retinal art” behind and create a totally new sensorium. In particular, he was concerned with the role of the viewer in the production of images. For Duchamp, images were not there to be perceived; they in fact took form through the process of seeing. Usually, this would require some effort of the beholder; he would need to change his angle of viewing, add more light, move in one direction or the other—in order to see. Duchamp’s dictum, “It is the viewer [regardeur] who makes the pictures [tableaux],” would probably have been applauded by Baudelaire, who insisted on the active role of the beholder. What separates Baudelaire and Duchamp, however, is that Duchamp’s work belonged to an avantgarde context and that Duchamp himself created objects through which optical phenomena could be explored.27 But what they have in common is their interest in visual abstraction and virtual effects. To Baudelaire, optical illusions represented a new aesthetic potential superseding reality. In particular, his interest in the diorama testifies to his appreciation of virtual images. In Salon de 1859,—where he denounces photography because it (allegedly) attempts to identically reproduce reality—Baudelaire expresses his preference for the illusions produced in the diorama. Criticizing the landscape painters of his generation for their great laziness of imagination, he proclaims: “I would rather return to the dioramas, whose brutal and enormous magic has the power to impose on me a useful illusion.… These things, because they are false, are infinitely closer to the truth” (“Je désire être ramené vers les dioramas dont la magie brutale et énorme sait m’imposer une utile illusion.… Ces choses, parce qu’elles sont fausses, sont infiniment plus près du vrai”).28 Baudelaire thus links his aesthetic preferences to questions concerning truth. As he sees it, truth does not belong to the realm of the natural or the real; it belongs to a superior sphere that can be reached through art and artfulness. And, according to Baudelaire, optical illusions can also open the view to a world beyond. Important in this context is the fact that optical toys depend on the active participation of the viewer; they invite play. These instruments integrate the body into the perceptive act, and they also bring a temporal dimension into

86

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

it. Thus, we are not dealing here with pure vision, but with embodied vision, correlating the visual experience with the bodily experience. As Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois have claimed with respect to Duchamp, this integration of the body and the visual experience does, in a sense, render the visual experience “impure.”29 Presumably, this is why these instruments are usually classified as toys and not as objects of art. Yet, what is important in this context is that the integration of the body actually empowers the viewer, allowing him to take charge and create his own experiences. This is also the reason for Mark B. N. Hansen’s interest in optical toys in New Philosophy for New Media, which deals with the digital media situation of the twentyfirst century. Attempting to correlate the aesthetics of the new, digital media with a theory of embodiment, he refers to nineteenth-century optical toys as early examples of an embodied media practice and hence establishes a relationship between the precinematic and the postcinematic era.30 These perspectives allow us to expand our understanding of these devises. Rather than seeing them merely as disciplinary techniques, we may see them as techniques of play and as embodied media practices. Rather than seeing them merely as instruments, we may see them as toys. As we will see in the following sections, the aesthetics of optical toys is operative at several levels of Baudelaire’s writings. When he describes the experience of the crowd and accounts for a specifically modern perception, he resorts to the aesthetics of optical toys. Likewise, when he pays tribute to Constantin Guys’s sketches, focusing on the particular vision required to capture movement, he is drawing on the aesthetics of optical toys. Finally, the kaleidoscopic vision is put to work in several passages of his writings, serving to transform the perception of reality. It could thus be suggested that Baudelaire’s aesthetics is deeply immersed in the new visual culture of the nineteenth century and that the aesthetics of optical toys for Baudelaire becomes a source of new visual possibilities.

The modern experience: Flickering life and movement When Baudelaire describes the modern experience in his essay on Constantin Guys, Le Peintre de la vie moderne, he focuses on a specific figure: “the man of the crowd.” Depicting this urban figure and his particular mode of perception, Baudelaire uses an interesting metaphor; he characterizes him as “a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness”: The observer is a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes.… Thus the lover of universal life moves into the crowd as though into an enormous reservoir of electricity. He, the lover of life, may also be

Precinematic devices

87

compared to a mirror as vast as this crowd; to a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness, which with every one of its movements presents a pattern of life, in all its multiplicity, and the flowing grace of all the elements that go to compose life. It is an ego athirst for the non-ego, and reflecting it at every moment in energies more vivid than life itself, always inconstant and fleeting.31 L’observateur est un prince qui jouit partout de son incognito.… Ainsi l’amoureux de la vie universelle entre dans la foule comme dans un immense réservoir d’électricité. On peut aussi le comparer, lui, à un miroir aussi immense que cette foule; à un kaléidoscope doué de conscience, qui, à chacun de ses mouvements, représente la vie multiple et la grâce mouvante de tous les éléments de la vie. C’est un moi insatiable du nonmoi, qui, à chaque instant, le rend et l’exprime en images plus vivantes que la vie elle-même, toujours instable et fugitive.32 Of course, this passage is well known, and Benjamin’s comment upon it in “Some Motifs in Baudelaire” has contributed to its prominence in Baudelaire studies. Benjamin’s concern is to describe a new mode of perception characterized by shock, which is instigated by the meeting with the crowd and the use of new technology (telephone, photography, and newspapers). His contention is that Baudelaire’s image of “a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness” serves to circumscribe this experience of shock: Baudelaire speaks of a man who plunges into the crowd as into a reservoir of electric energy. Circumscribing the experience of shock, he calls this man “a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness.” Whereas Poe’s passers-by cast glances in all directions, seemingly without cause, today’s pedestrians are obliged to look about them so that they can be aware of traffic signals. Thus, technology has subjected the human sensorium to a complex kind of training. There came a day when a new and urgent need for stimuli was met by film. In a film, perception conditioned by shock [chock-förmige Wahrnehmung] was established as a formal principle.33 In Benjamin’s account, the kaleidoscope represents something negative; the entire section in which this passage occurs describes an experience of shock that the subject cannot deal with and that instills him with fear. For Benjamin, there seems to be a close relationship between Baudelaire’s reference to electricity and his reference to the kaleidoscope; electricity causes electrical shocks, just like the kaleidoscope causes “perceptual shocks.” At the same time, however, Benjamin describes a brutal training process in which man learns to deal with the experience of shock, so to speak. The invention of film marks a threshold in this training process, because film actually establishes perception in the form of shock as a formal principle. For Benjamin, it appears to be the film era that allows

88

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

for a positive assessment of shock. Because film makes the experience of shock manageable, it reveals the radical potential of shock—the potential for social change. However, Benjamin’s narrative should perhaps be modified. Taking the precinematic era into account, it could be argued that the process of training started much earlier than Benjamin allows for in this essay and that nineteenth-century visual culture was familiar with “filmatic” (i.e. shock-like) experiences even before film existed. With this perspective, Baudelaire’s image of “a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness” needs not to be considered circumscribing the experience of shock in negative terms; it could be seen simply as the description of a new form of perception and a new way of experiencing space and time. Reading Baudelaire’s passage closely, we should observe that he actually compares the experience of the crowd—the modern experience par excellence—with the experience of looking through a kaleidoscope, and that the perceptual logic of the kaleidoscope is thus used to describe the new perceptive mode that is engendered by the crowd.34 It is essential that the crowd is described as “a reservoir of electrical energy” and hence as a storage of energy that the subject may connect to at will (and we should keep in mind that electricity was also a recent invention). Further, the crowd is described as a number of individuals, grouped closely together and perpetually moving, producing friction similar to the friction of electron particles. The mobility and liveliness of this perceptual sphere is described by numerous expressions within the passage: “with every one of its movements,” “life, in all its multiplicity,” “the flowing grace,” “the elements of life,” “more vivid than life itself,” “always inconstant and fleeting.” The issue here is thus how the movement of modern life is perceived or seen by the subject, and the kaleidoscope is used to conceptualize a visual mode of perception that is capable of processing movement. Baudelaire asserts that the man of the crowd—or the kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness—represents (représente) what he perceives, i.e. the movement of the crowd, and in this manner produces living pictures (images vivantes). This means that Baudelaire sees the man of the crowd as a living producer of images, producing images nonstop. For every movement he makes, for every step he takes, he translates his perceptions into images, just as if he were turning the kaleidoscope. However, he cannot preserve these images as they constantly have to give way to new images. The man of the crowd must deal with a successive stream of images, and a contemplative mode is thus precluded. In a strange way, these moving images—with their fleeting life and movement—bring to mind the flickering images of early cinema. In fact, one of the English translations of this essay reflects this, as Baudelaire’s “grâce mouvante” is translated as “flickering grace” (instead of “flowing grace”).35 What the cinema and the kaleidoscope have in common is that both are based on the principles of montage and of movement. As Benjamin,

Precinematic devices

89

Eisenstein, and others have demonstrated, montage is the essence of film, and it is a feature that distinguishes it from organic art. The kaleidoscopic image is also based on montage, but a peculiar kind of virtual montage. It is produced as multiple nonorganic units are reflected through mirrors, and as one turns the kaleidoscope, these images are perpetually unfolding and collapsing, unfolding and collapsing. Yet, this rhythm is quite different from the rhythm of narrative film, and the cinema and the kaleidoscope in some respects appear to work in opposite directions. Whereas narrative cinema synthesizes a series of images into a coherent stream of “motion pictures,” the kaleidoscope does not offer a steady flow of images and it disallows the creation of a coherent, mimetic universe. Instead, it produces abstract images that must perpetually be replaced by new, abstract images, and always at the viewer’s own pace. Yet, there are film traditions whose formal principles resemble those of the kaleidoscope: the cinema of attraction excelled in film tricks and effects, and the avant-garde film aspired to kaleidoscopic effects by means of advanced montage techniques. Comparing the formal principles of the kaleidoscope with those of film, we may thus see more clearly what characterizes the perceptive mode described by Baudelaire: montage and movement. This means that the mode of perception Baudelaire is describing—and which is deployed to process the movements of the crowd—is based on construction, not on some “true” and mimetic perception of reality, and that its phenomenology, to a large degree, resembles the phenomenology of film. How, then, is this perceived by the subject? When Baudelaire describes the perception of the man of the crowd, he stresses that the lack of visual coherency and stability appears to correspond to a loss of the “I” as the ground of vision. As he enters the crowd, his vision is both decomposed and put in motion, and in this manner, the “I” also appears to be put in motion. According to Baudelaire, the man of the crowd has an appetite for the “non-I,” that is, otherness, strangeness, or newness. Hunting for the “non-I,” he attempts to lose himself in the crowd, or more precisely, he attempts to lose himself in the new perceptual environments engendered by the crowd. In this manner, the distinctions between the “I” and the “non-I” start to blur. It would thus appear that the man of the crowd, to a large degree, evades consciousness and operates at a level where sensory perception is prioritized. If we are dealing with “a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness,” which is the term used by Baudelaire, it above all seems to be an aesthetic consciousness. What Baudelaire describes is thus an aesthetic consciousness at work. Interestingly, the association made between sensory perception and visual technology that we find in this passage can also be found in the essay “Morale du joujou.” There, optical toys were described in terms of their perceptual effects; here, the new kind of sensory perception is compared to the experience of seeing through a kaleidoscope. Furthermore, it should

90

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

be noted that in both cases, Baudelaire relates this process of perception to the child’s perception. In “Morale du joujou,” the perceptual process of the child was the main issue; the discussion concerned the child’s perception of toys in general, and the category “scientific toys” was described as a specific case. Here, the main issue is the man of the crowd’s perception, and the child’s perception is—a few paragraphs later—used in an analogy. How does this analogy between the man of the crowd’s perception and the child’s perception work? Above all, it seems to bring out the aesthetic character of this perceptual mode. Discussing the acute perceptivity of the man of the crowd, Baudelaire asserts that he resembles a child who sees everything as if for the first time. He stresses that the child’s perception differs from the adult’s, because for the child, sensibility has priority over reason: “In the one, reason has assumed an important role; in the other, sensibility occupies almost the whole being” (“Chez l’un, la raison a pris une place considerable; chez l’autre, la sensibilité occupe presque tout l’être”).36 Thus, when a child perceives forms and colors, the inspiration he receives from these impressions creates, in some way, congestion, since the surplus of sensory impressions cannot be organized by means of the analytic tools at the disposal of the adult: The child sees everything as a novelty; the child is always “drunk.” Nothing is more like what we call inspiration than the joy the child feels in drinking in shape and colour. I will venture to go even further and declare that inspiration has some connection with congestion, that every sublime thought is accompanied by a more or less vigorous nervous impulse that reverberates in the cerebral cortex.37 L’enfant voit tout en nouveauté; il est toujours ivre. Rien ne ressemble plus à ce qu’on appelle l’inspiration, que la joie avec laquelle l’enfant absorbe la forme et la couleur. J’oserai pousser plus loin; j’affirme que l’inspiration a quelque rapport avec la congestion, et que toute pensée sublime est accompagnée d’une secousse nerveuse, plus ou moins forte, qui retentit jusque dans le cervelet.38 The man of the crowd is thus described as a child who sees everything as if for the first time, and whose apparatus of perception is dominated by acute sensibility rather than analytical skills. This obviously causes a temporal challenge; he has to take in a series of new impressions, one after the other, without being able to deal with them analytically. Instead, he perceives them as merely a sensation overload—a kind of congestion, which Baudelaire relates to the category of the sublime. Here we are reminded of Immanuel Kant’s description of the mathematical sublime in Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), which also evokes an image of congestion. The mathematical sublime refers to the perception of something infinitely great, i.e. something beyond measure, which gives a giddy feeling of infinity. Kant asserts that when the imagination takes up a multiplicity of items

Precinematic devices

91

in a single intuition, both apprehension and comprehension is involved. Apprehension—the simple act of taking items into consciousness—can go on to infinity, but comprehension—the holding together of the apprehended images—becomes more and more difficult the further the apprehension advances, and eventually reaches its maximum. This is what causes the feeling of the sublime—the perception of something that exceeds the limits of the human imagination, and that instills the subject with respect.39 In the passage above, Baudelaire connects the sublime to inspiration and novelty and he describes it as a kind of congestion of shapes and colors, causing a nervous tremor and a feeling of intoxication in the child. The man of the crowd is subject to an intoxication of a similar kind, but in this case, Baudelaire describes how the overload of sensory impressions can be processed. To this purpose, he uses the kaleidoscope as a metaphor. Thus, in Baudelaire’s aesthetics, the kaleidoscope should be seen as an instrument capable of processing a huge amount of data, or sensory impressions, and of organizing these data not according to the traditional coordinates of space and time, but instead according to the new aesthetic principles emerging during this period: montage and movement. This means that Baudelaire makes use of the kaleidoscope to describe a new experience of space and time that is characteristic of modern life. The metaphor thus indicates that Baudelaire had come to terms with the new perceptual environments and testifies to his precinematic sensibility.

How to capture movement? Whereas the man of the crowd perceives the modern world instantly, as he connects to the crowd, the artist is confronted with the problem of representation: how can the multiple and perpetually changing perceptions of modern life be accounted for in art? Or put more generally: How can movement—or time as such—be represented? Will not any representation of movement imply a delay and an arrest that betray its object? Will it not always be too slow, doomed to a mode that is après coup? These are questions that occupy Baudelaire’s thought, and they are the very source of his interest in Guys’s sketches. Baudelaire believes that these sketches, published in various British newspapers, perfectly capture the speed and movement of modern life. In Le Peintre de la vie moderne, Baudelaire attempts to analyze Guys’s technique and come to terms with his way of capturing movement. Baudelaire begins his essay on Guys by paying homage to painters whose ambition is to depict the present, as opposed to classical and traditional motifs. It is in this context that he presents his well-known definition of art, which he claims must consist of both a temporary and an eternal element. One half must represent “the transient, the fleeting, the contingent” (“le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent”) and the other half must represent

92

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

“the eternal and the immovable” (“l’éternel et l’immuable”).40 Without the first element, which is specific to each age, art would be altogether sterile and abstract, and as Baudelaire sees it, it is this temporal element—art’s specifically modern feature—that is so well captured in Guys’s sketches. For Baudelaire, Guys’s manner of depicting crowds, carriages, and women—and the way they move—makes him the eminent painter of modern life. According to Baudelaire, the sketch is particularly well suited to capturing the speed of modern life because it must be carried out swiftly and therefore corresponds with the speed of its motif. He asserts that “there is in the trivial things of life, in the daily changing of external things, a speed of movement that imposes upon the artist an equal speed of execution” (“il y a dans la vie triviale, dans la métamorphose journalière des choses extérieures, un movement rapide qui commande à l’artiste une égale vélocité d’exécution”).41 And here, as always, Baudelaire was prophetic; toward the end of the century, the sketch becomes a fashionable genre precisely because of its ability to capture swift movement. Painters experiment with blurred contours and rapidly painted strokes, sacrificing the clarity of the object for the realism of its impression. In literature, as well, brief sketches become a fashionable genre; toward the end of the century a number of brief and sketch-like prose pieces were published, Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Croquis parisiens (“Parisian sketches,” 1880) being among the most noteworthy. Indeed, Baudelaire’s prose poems could also be seen as contributing to this trend. Yet, the sketch was not the only technique aiming to produce the effect of movement in this period; the sketch can be considered a part of a greater investigation of movement as a phenomenon, including aesthetic, philosophical, and scientific examinations. As we have already seen, studies of the afterimage in the first half of the century resulted in a number of technologies attempting to make images move. Here, the workings of the phenakistiscope are especially noteworthy; this instrument synthesized a succession of images and thus created the effect of movement—but without being able to represent movement permanently. However, in the second part of the century, more ambitious experiments were carried out, and the aim was not merely to produce movement, but to record it in a permanent way. Prior to the advent of cinema, the technique of chronophotography, literally meaning time-photography, was invented to study bodies in motion.42 With this technique, the successive positions of a moving body (people or animals) were registered at short intervals, making movements that were invisible to the naked eye visible. In this manner, chronophotography clearly demonstrated that the eye of the camera was superior to the naked eye. A pioneer in this field was the experimental photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who was commissioned to document—or refute—the contention that there was one instant when a cantering horse had all of its feet off the ground. Using a whole battery of cameras, Muybridge photographed the successive phases of the

Precinematic devices

93

horse in motion and proved the contention to be correct. The result was published in the magazine La Nature in 1878, under the title “Les allures du cheval representées par la photographie instantanée” (“The gait of horses represented by means of instant photography”). What were these representations of movement like? Muybridge’s technique is referred to as multiplate photography, meaning that the successive phases of movement are represented in separate frames. However, the physicist Etienne-Jules Marey was not satisfied with Muybridge’s results, as too much time was lost between each phase/frame. He thus experimented with singleplate chronophotography, which allowed several images—photographed at short intervals—to be represented within a single frame, either slightly overlapping or placed consecutively. In this manner, Marey’s technique succeeded in giving a detailed—although blurred—representation of the continuous movement. But, as Doane has pointed out, Marey was confronted with a dilemma: he had to choose between clear, in-focus representation of objects photographed at long intervals or blurred representations of objects photographed at short intervals.43 Marey thus learned that there was no perfect relation between time and its representation; it constantly had to be negotiated and adapted to various purposes. Further experiments in chronophotography paved the way for the advent of film. Muybridge devised an instrument to put his multiplate images in motion; in 1879, he created the zoepraxiscope, which allowed a sequence of photographs to spin around, creating the illusion of continuous movement. Marey improved the amount of blurriness in his technique by introducing chronophotographic film on paper in 1888 and celluloid roll film in 1889. With these improvements, significant steps were taken toward the invention of cinematography in 1895. In light of this, we may consider the phenakistiscope, chronophotography, and the sketch as all grappling with the same problem—the question of how to represent movement. As we have seen, Baudelaire was familiar with the phenakistiscope. Further, when he wrote about Guys’s sketches in 1863, the first experiments in chronophotography had recently taken place; although Muybridge’s and Marey’s more advanced work in the field date in the 1870s and 1880s, experiments with this technique began as early as 1860. Even if it is uncertain whether Baudelaire knew about these experiments, we may assert that he was not the only one pondering the question of how to represent movement during this period. If we consider the sketch in this larger perspective, Baudelaire’s comments on the art of sketching in Le Peintre de la vie moderne, published in 1863, become particularly interesting. Baudelaire attempts to describe Guys’s technique of capturing movement. One of his claims is that the speed of execution in the sketch requires a synthesizing vision. He stresses “the need to see things big, to look at them particularly from the point of view of their effect as a whole” (“[le] besoin de voir les choses grandement, de les

94 Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

FIGURE 3.5  “Galloping horse” by Eadweard Muybridge. Example of chronophotography (Photo © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Patrice Schmidt).

Precinematic devices

95

considérer surtout dans l’effet de leur ensemble”).44 Further, he asserts that it is necessary to avoid “a riot of details all of them demanding justice” (“une émeute des détails, qui tous demandent justice”), thereby refusing to make any concessions to realism.45 Baudelaire thus highlights speed, synthesis, and reproduction of an effect as the essential features of the sketch. Expounding on Guys’s technique, Baudelaire further contends that “all true draughtsmen draw from the image imprinted in their brain and not from nature” (“tous les bons et vrais dessinateurs dessinent d’après l’image écrite dans leur cerveau, et non d’après la nature”).46 In this manner, he explains how Guys solves the temporal challenge described above—the delay between a moving motif and its representation. Baudelaire claims that the artist simply dismisses reality once it has produced an image in his brain. His wording here should be carefully considered; he actually refers to an “image imprinted in their [the draughtsmen’s] brain.” Is he merely speaking about drawing from memory, or is he also alluding to the effects of the afterimage? Continuing this train of thought, Baudelaire claims: “This is the fear of not going fast enough, of letting the spectre escape before the synthesis has been extracted and taken possession of” (“C’est la peur de n’aller pas assez vite, de laisser échapper le fantôme avant que la synthèse n’en soit extraite et saisie”).47 The reference here to a “spectre” is peculiar; the afterimage can be described precisely as a specter, having no material reality and being perceivable only in a brief and passing moment. Baudelaire thus describes Guys’s technique in terms that are reminiscent of the optical phenomena being explored in this very period. For Baudelaire, the art of sketching is based on the short-lived memory of the eye and not on reality as such. The image printed on the brain of the beholder—merely a virtual image—is for him a better model than the real object because it is already a synthesis—an effect produced by the “real object.” The artist depends on this virtual image—this ghost image—to carry out his sketch. The representation of movement in the sketch thus seems to depend on the autonomy of vision, allowing for a synthesis of movement. Knowing Baudelaire’s aesthetic preferences, it should come as no surprise that he favors the virtual over the real and feels no grief in cutting loose the real world. Where this loss of “the real” is deplored by Marey, who attempted to come to terms with the delay in the vision process, it is actually embraced by Baudelaire. According to Baudelaire, Guys thus reproduces movement as synthesis and as effect. In his sketches, the successive phases of motion are condensed into a single picture, and Baudelaire describes how this synthesis produces the effect of explosive movement: “To sum it all up, our strange artist expresses both the gestures and attitudes, be they solemn or grotesque, of human beings and their luminous explosion in space” (“Pour tout dire en un mot, notre singulier artiste exprime à la fois le geste et l’attitude solennelle ou grotesque des êtres et leur explosion lumineuse dans l’espace”).48 It is noteworthy that Baudelaire not only describes Guys’s sketches as depicting an explosion of movement, i.e. depicting a sudden and violent movement,

96

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

but also describes this explosion in terms of light, using the expression “luminous explosions in space.” In this manner, he evokes photographic and chronophotographic representation of movement, where blurred rays of light illuminate the contours of the bodies in motion. Guys’s representation of movement, or rather Baudelaire’s description of Guys’s representation of movement, thus shares a central feature with the technological representation of movement; in both cases, movement is represented by the effects of light. A similar description may be found in the poem “A une passante” in Les Fleurs du mal, Baudelaire’s most renowned attempt to describe a fleeting moment in an urban environment. In the poem, the woman passing in the street is considered lost in the same moment as she becomes visible to the poetic subject. This flashing moment of appearance/disappearance is also described in terms of the effect of light: “One lightning flash … then night!” (“Un éclair … puis la nuit!”).49 Thus, in Baudelaire’s aesthetics, there seems to be a close connection between hasty movement and light. If the art of sketching was the art form best suited to capture dynamic movement in 1863, however, it was soon to be surpassed by the techniques of chronophotography and of cinematography. Both of these techniques decomposed the synthesis created in the sketch and produced a series of images, which could be put in motion. In this way, the visual arts entered into a new era; from this time on, the visual arts also belonged to the arts bound by time. Accordingly, Baudelaire’s musings on the art of sketching testifies to a century-long obsession with the question of how to capture movement. Marking a new phase in art history, he depicts the moment when the visual arts are about to imagine how to use movement and make images move. In many respects, Baudelaire’s aesthetics anticipates the aesthetics of the cinema, and it would not be entirely wrong to speak of Baudelaire as a cinéaste.

Kaleidoscopic vision If Baudelaire praises Guys’s sketches for their ability to capture the movement of modern life, he is also concerned with the ability of literature to capture the same phenomenon. Interestingly, he actually acknowledges the deficiency of literature with respect to the art of sketching. This happens as he comments on Guys’s sketches of carriages, admiring the way they convey dynamic movement: In whatever position it is drawn, at whatever speed it may be going, a carriage, like a vessel, derives, from the fact of motion, a mysterious and complex gracefulness which is very difficult to note down in shorthand. The pleasure that the artist’s eye gets from it comes apparently from the series of geometrical figures that the object, already so complex in itself, vessel or carriage, describes successively in space.50

Precinematic devices

97

Dans quelque attitude qu’elle soit jetée, avec quelque allure qu’elle soit lancée, une voiture, comme un vaisseau, emprunte au mouvement une grâce mystérieuse et complexe très difficile à sténographier. Le plaisir que l’œil de l’artiste en reçoit est tiré, ce semble, de la série de figures géométriques que cet objet, déjà si compliqué, navire ou carrosse, engendre successivement et rapidement dans l’espace.51 Baudelaire acknowledges the difficulty of capturing speed and movement in writing. Using the expression “to note down in shorthand [sténographier]” for writing, he brings attention to “speed-writing” as a phenomenon, but also to the deficits of speed-writing; because it is a coded language, it cannot convey the sense of speed. In this way, Baudelaire points to the inferiority of writing with respect to the art of sketching, and he acknowledges that he is stuck with the old—and slow—medium of writing. The same frustration with the medium of writing can be found in Baudelaire’s essay on laughter, where he attempts to describe the dynamic action and the violence of the pantomime: “Set down with the pen, the whole thing seems pale and chill. How could the pen rival pantomime?” (“Avec une plume tout cela est pâle et glacé. Comment la plume porrrait-elle rivaliser avec la pantomime?”).52 (This discontentment with the medium of writing will be further discussed in Chapter 4.) If we look at the motifs Baudelaire refers to in the quotation above, we observe that he displays a fascination for vehicles in motion, a fascination that he shares with the early cinema. As Stanley Cavell has pointed out in his book on cinema, the motifs Baudelaire describes in Le Peintre de la vie moderne (carriages, crowds, the man of the world) are “stores of cinematic obsession,” referring to the real world of the nineteenth century.53 In this sense, Baudelaire’s essay fits in with Cavell’s view of cinema as a projection of reality. Yet Baudelaire appears to be more concerned with the perception of the carriage than with its realism. In fact, his description of a carriage in motion may shed light on the question of how literature can capture movement. If we read carefully, we discover that Baudelaire actually describes the pleasure of watching a carriage in movement in terms of the kaleidoscope. He points out that the carriage affords pleasure to the artist’s eye and that this pleasure stems from the geometrical shapes it engenders, swiftly and successively. Baudelaire appears to have adopted the view offered by a kaleidoscope; this could indeed be described as kaleidoscopic vision. What makes this passage so interesting is the fact that it actually contradicts the previous sentence asserting the inferiority of writing with respect to movement; by means of kaleidoscopic vision, Baudelaire succeeds in conveying a sense of movement in writing. He thus puts literature in motion by adopting the perceptual logics of another medium: the kaleidoscope. In this manner, he demonstrates the principle of remediation.

98

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

FIGURE 3.6  “Coupé attelé d’un cheval allant vers la droite” by Constantin Guys. (Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre)/Michèle Bellot).

Baudelaire’s kaleidoscopic vision is at work in several places in his writing, conveying a sense of dynamic movement that pleases the eye. Interestingly, it is often associated with vehicles in motion, just as in the quotation above, where the carriage in motion is compared to a ship in motion. To Baudelaire, vehicles in motion represent a peculiar form of beauty; they appear as kaleidoscopic pleasures to the eye. For instance, in his diary, Fusées, Baudelaire describes the pleasure of watching ships in terms of the kaleidoscope: I believe that the infinite and mysterious charm which lies in the contemplation of a ship, especially of a ship in motion, depends firstly upon its order and symmetry—primal needs of the human spirit as great as those of intricacy and harmony—and, secondly, upon the successive multiplication and generation of all the curves and imaginary figures described in space by the real elements of the object.54 Je crois que le charme infini et mystérieux qui gît dans la contemplation d’un navire, et surtout d’un navire en mouvement, tient, dans ce premier cas, à la régularité et à la symétrie qui sont un des besoins primordiaux de l’esprit humain, au même degrée que la complication et l’harmonie,—et, dans le second cas, à la multiplication successive et à la génération de toutes les courbes et figures imaginaires opérées dans l’espace par les éléments réels de l’objet.55 Baudelaire calls attention to the visual spectacle offered by a ship in movement. First, he asserts that its symmetrical forms satisfy something similar to a basic

Precinematic devices

99

human need, and second, he observes that the ship’s movement produces a number of figures in the imagination of the beholder. Again, kaleidoscopic vision appears to be at work. The passage continues with a brief speculation on the poetic idea emerging from the ship’s movements; it evokes the idea of “an animal being possessed of a spirit” (“un animal plein de génie”). We observe the same fascination for life and movement without apparent cause as we did in “Morale du joujou.” This fascination is also present in another entry in Fusées, where Baudelaire describes the beauty of great ships bobbing in the water, pointing out that they appear to be idle and “out-ofwork” (“désœuvré”).56 He thus admires the dynamic movement that creates marvelous forms and patterns, yet appears to be idle and without cause. The most remarkable example of this “kaleidoscopic vision” is found in the prose poem “Le Port” (“The Port”) where the entire harbor is described in terms of the kaleidoscope. Reading this text, we should recall that in the nineteenth century, the harbor was a major junction where traffic and trade converged, and not always a place for quiet contemplation. Owing to this liveliness, the harbor was, in fact, a favorite motif of early cinema.57 It is also a motif that fascinates Baudelaire: A port is a charming sojourn for a soul weary of the struggles of life. The vastness of the sky, the mobile architecture of the clouds, the changing colours of the sea, the glittering of the lighthouses, are a wonderfully appropriate prism for amusing the eyes without ever tiring them. The slender shapes of the ships, with their complicated rigging, which follow the harmonious oscillations of the swell, serve to maintain in the mind the taste for rhythm and beauty. And, then, above all, there is a kind of mysterious and aristocratic pleasure for the man who is no longer curious or ambitious, which consists in contemplating, as he lies in the belvedere or leans in the mole, all the movements of those who set out and those who come back, those who still have the strength to want anything, the desire to travel or to grow rich.58 Un port est un séjour charmant pour une âme fatiguée des luttes de la vie. L’ampleur du ciel, l’architecture mobile des nuages, les colorations changeantes de la mer, le scintillement des phares, sont un prisme merveilleusement propre à amuser les yeux sans jamais les lasser. Les formes élancées des navires, au gréement compliqué, auxquels la houle imprime des oscillations harmonieuses, servent à entretenir dans l’âme le goût du rythme et de la beauté. Et puis, surtout, il y a une sorte de plaisir mystérieux et aristocratique pour celui qui n’a plus ni curiosité ni ambition, à contempler, couché dans le belvédère ou accoudé sur le môle, tous ces mouvements de ceux qui partent et de ceux qui reviennent, de ceux qui ont encore la force de vouloir, le désir de voyager ou de s’enrichir.59

100

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

The references to form (architecture), color, and movement, to blinking lights, and to the optics of the prism all seem to allude to the workings of the kaleidoscope. Moreover, this vision is said to “amuse the eyes” of the beholder, just as an optical toy might. Seen through the lenses of a kaleidoscope, the harbor no longer appears to be a place of trade and traffic; it is no longer considered for its purpose and its commercial value. Rather, it appears as a beautiful spectacle of movement and colors, which “amuses” the eye of the poet. Baudelaire underscores the aristocratic pleasure of being idle, of not being busy pursuing any project, but instead abandoning oneself to the beautiful spectacle of changing forms and colors—to the marvelous effects displayed for the eyes. We should note that the experience of beauty here unfolds in time, and that the depiction of the motif is allowed to develop and to move. It is thus by bringing his motif to life that Baudelaire reveals its beauty.

Virtual images: The visual attraction of modern life Having observed these instances of kaleidoscopic vision in Baudelaire’s writings, we should ask the following question: What exactly is implied by looking at modern life as if through a kaleidoscope? One could, of course, accuse Baudelaire of aestheticizing reality by means of the kaleidoscopic vision. This is an understanding that is easily backed by Baudelaire’s penchant for the wonders of the imagination and his many pleas for beauty in life and in art. It is also backed by the common view of Baudelaire as an impressionist. However, the kaleidoscopic vision, as conceived in his writing, could also be seen as a shift to the micro level of perception; a shift activated by the increased awareness of sensory perception in the second half of the nineteenth century, and, more specifically, by the new visual possibilities offered by the new visual culture. Indeed, it could be argued that when Baudelaire adopts the gaze of the kaleidoscope, he recognizes the potential of his own field of vision. As we have seen, the principles at work in kaleidoscopic vision are montage and movement. Kaleidoscopic vision decomposes “realist” motifs, breaks down that which is visible to the naked eye, depriving it of its usual form and significance. Accordingly, the vehicles in motion are considered not according to their function as vehicles, but according to the visual spectacle they offer to the eye. In this manner, kaleidoscopic vision destroys organic form, facilitating visual abstraction and montage instead. For Benjamin, this destruction of the organic is characteristic of Baudelaire’s poetry, and in a brief fragment in The Arcades Project, he connects this tendency to Baudelaire’s fascination with ships and “self-propelled” toys: “The passion for ships and for self-propelled toys is, with Baudelaire, perhaps only another expression of the discredit into which, in his view, the world of the organic has fallen.

Precinematic devices

101

A sadistic inspiration is palpable here.”60 Benjamin does not expound on this issue, nor does he refer to specific passages in Baudelaire’s writings. However, it seems clear that he situates Baudelaire’s fascination for these phenomena within a larger context, considering it a symptom of the decay of the organic world generally. Furthermore, his reference to Baudelaire’s “sadistic inspiration” should probably be seen as a reference to the violence that is involved in this process. With Benjamin, we may thus assert that kaleidoscopic vision refers to the decay of the organic in society and there is violence involved in the process of decomposition. Central here is the fact that Baudelaire saw the activity of the imagination as based on the principle of decomposition. In Salon de 1859, he expresses this quite clearly: “[The imagination] decomposes all creation, and, with the wealth of materials amassed and ordered according to rules whose origins can be found only in the deepest recesses of the soul, it creates a new world, it produces the sensation of something new.” (“[L’imagination] décompose toute la création, et, avec les matériaux amassés et disposés suivant des règles dont on ne peut trouver l’origine que dans le plus profond de l’âme, elle crée un monde nouveau, elle produit la sensation du neuf.”)61 Baudelaire highlights the creative potential of decomposition. The quotation reveals that for Baudelaire the new does not “grow out of” the old (organically); the new is based on a process in which the old is first torn to pieces and then rebuilt from the “raw materials” of the old. The workings of the kaleidoscope demonstrate this process superbly. The kaleidoscope, like the imagination, decomposes organic form, foregrounding instead abstract patterns, color, light, and movement. This means that Baudelaire, with his kaleidoscopic vision, shifts focus from lived experience to life at a micro level, from content to (micro) form. What further characterizes the kaleidoscope is that the new configuration is put in motion, making the geometrical forms move and change infinitely. The kaleidoscope does not synthesize movement, as the sketch, the phenakistiscope, and (narrative) film do, but rather, it brings attention to movement as a generative principle, capable of perpetually producing new forms—visual attractions for the eye. Thus, in kaleidoscopic vision, what occurs—“the event”—does not lend itself to hermeneutical interpretation, but rather invites a sensuous response. In addition to decomposition and montage, movement, disallowing the creation of a stable form, is thus central to the kaleidoscope. This is why kaleidoscopic vision so aptly represents modern life; making new images unfold at every turn, the kaleidoscope gives an inkling of the infinite repertoire of images latent in the modern world. In this manner, it also demonstrates a new experience of images; the images in question are not static or fixed images, but virtual images whose condition of existence is the temporal act of unfolding.62 This creates not merely a new experience of images, but a new spatial experience—space is here perceived as utterly dynamic.

102

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

Interestingly, this mode of perception appears to be akin to Henri Bergson’s concept of multiplicity, which has been central to modern film theory. This concept was coined to describe the experience of both heterogeneity and continuity (which are often conceived as opposites) at the same time. In particular, Deleuze’s reading of Bergson has emphasized the revolutionary potential of Bergson’s concept.63 Where Bergson applied the concept to describe a temporal experience (la durée), Deleuze applies it to a spatial experience in which space is perceived as dynamic. For Deleuze, the concept of multiplicity refers to a differential field upon which every genesis, every actualization, and every identity is preconditioned. Multiplicity thus refers to something virtual, as opposed to something actual (although for Deleuze, both the virtual and the actual are real). Deleuze considers this dynamic perception of space essential for the film experience. With hindsight, we may thus see Baudelaire’s kaleidoscopic vision as pointing to a new experience of urban space, which, in fact, foreshadows the experience of dynamic space in film. For Baudelaire the experience of the crowd appears to resemble the experience of multiplicity. Using the kaleidoscope to describe the experience of the crowd and using kaleidoscopic vision in his writings, he explores a new mode of perception that emerges in the urban culture of the midnineteenth century. As Baudelaire frequently resorts to imagery and perceptual logics from nineteenth-century visual technology to render the visual attraction of modern life, his precinematic sensibility is not merely operative at the level of motifs; it should also be seen as a poetic method in which he plays with the new visual dispositives. This means that Baudelaire was not merely subdued by the dispositives of modernity; he played with them and used them as ways of exploring the new perceptual field. For what changed in this period was not only “real life,” but also the ability to perceive and process, master and manipulate various visual impressions. Even before film, the new visual culture offered new ways of conceptualizing and organizing complex visual data, and in this manner expanding the visual horizon. First, experiments in optics had revealed that vision was not an objective, but instead a subjective phenomenon, and that vision could be manipulated and altered. Second, the popular entertainment culture of the nineteenth century (panoramas, dioramas, phantasmagoria shows and illusionist shows) trained the public in processing complex—and deceptive—visual phenomena. Third, the optical toys—which had spread to the masses—gave firsthand experience with visual manipulation, allowing the viewer to experience 3-D images and moving images. These instruments did not confine the viewer to a specific position; they invited him to take charge and create his own visual experience—they invited play. Thus, equipped with the aesthetics of optical toys, Baudelaire could explore and transform the world surrounding him. Equipped with what we may call a “kaleidoscopic vision,” he could put the modern city—with its visual potential—into play.

4 Corporeality

Although the gaze of the flâneur is usually seen as his main characteristic, another side of this figure deserves to be analyzed: his corporeality—the very premise of his mobile gaze. The body of the flâneur is a body in motion, experiencing the world through his senses, and never letting this experience come to a halt. It appears as if the destabilization of vision that occurred during the nineteenth century provoked an exploration of the other senses, allowing the body to come to its own.1 In this respect, the flâneur prefigures a new current in philosophy that appeared at the turn of the century: the recorporalization of the subject as discussed by Henri Bergson and developed further by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others. Thus, a study of optics in Baudelaire should also include a study of the flâneur’s corporeality and his way of being in the world. In many respects, the new appreciation of the body appears to be linked to the advent of the new media and a change in the perceptual apparatus of the subject. As Benjamin has argued, a change occurs in the perceptual apparatus at the verge of modernity, one that can be detected in the flâneur. As the experience of modern life, with its technology and crowds, shatters traditional forms of perception, a new form of perception comes to preside that is above all characterized by dispersion. Although this may be seen as a loss, it is also an opening for new possibilities, for the dispersed perception may be subject to construction and reconfiguration. In this manner, the body is invested with revolutionary potential. In this chapter, I examine the question of corporeality, dispersed perception, and the construction of the senses in relation to Baudelaire’s writings, drawing not merely on Benjamin’s writings on the flâneur, but also on his writings about film. In addition, I draw upon other media theories inspired by Benjamin’s work. Baudelaire explores the body of the flâneur in a number of his prose poems, as a center of perception and as an instrument of play, action, and violence. He delves into the bodily experience of intuition and he describes a radical will to intervene and act upon the world. This

104

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

active approach is contrasted with the mode of pure contemplation, which is usually seen as characterizing Romantic poetry. Still, the prose poems are not centered around a plot, but rather focus on an experiencing subject. To a large degree, the originality of his prose poems lies herein: Baudelaire invents a genre where experience is prior to plot and situates his protagonists in a modern and profane setting—the urban city. Embracing a more dispersed mode of behavior, he explores the possibilities that lie in various forms of commonality, that is, crowds, commonplaces, and mass communication.

The bodily apparatus: Perception and technology Baudelaire’s experience of the modern city could be described with one single word: dizziness. Considered as an aesthetic category, dizziness is first and foremost a distorted form of perception derived from a loss of coordinates; it stems from a radical “derangement of the senses” that generates a new perception of the world. The model Baudelaire uses to describe the feeling of dizziness is the violent and distorted world of the pantomime, which he discusses in his essay on laughter and the comic “De l’essence du rire” (“On the Essence of Laughter,” 1855–7). Here, Baudelaire outlines a veritable aesthetics of dizziness. For Baudelaire, laughter defines the situation of man after the fall and thus characterizes the modern world. Its most refined expression is what Baudelaire refers to as the absolute comic (“le comique absolu”), entailing a radical experience of dizziness. Where the significative comic (“le comique significatif”) merely imitates, le comique absolu, also called le grotesque, is characterized by the fact that it creates something new, and this is achieved through suddenness and violence.2 Whereas the significative comic stems from a feeling of superiority over other men (for instance, a man falling in the street), the absolute comic comes from a feeling of superiority with respect to nature. The absolute comic thus sets itself above nature, and the feeling of dizziness issues precisely from this violation of the norms of nature. According to Baudelaire, the highest form of the absolute comic is the art of pantomime, where everything is exaggerated and violent: “It seemed to me that the distinguishing mark of this type of the comic was violence.” (“Il m’a semblé que le signe distinctif de ce genre de comique était la violence.”)3 He asserts that the pantomime’s lack of restriction, consideration, and calculation makes it a pure and an innocent art; it is like an enchanted world where there are no ordinary laws and where common sense does not apply. In Baudelaire’s description, the “entry” to this enchanted world is guarded by a fairy, who, with a “mysterious gesture,” waves her magic wand and produces a feeling of dizziness:

Corporeality

105

Like a flash the giddy intoxication is upon us, it is in the air, we breathe it in; it fills our lungs and sends the blood coursing through the veins. What is this intoxication? It is the absolute comic; it has taken hold of them all; Leander, Pierrot, Cassandra gesticulate wildly, thereby showing clearly that they feel they are being thrust forcibly into a new life.4 Aussitôt le vertige est entré, le vertige circule dans l’air; on respire le vertige; c’est le vertige qui remplit les poumons et renouvelle le sang dans le ventricule. Qu’est-ce que ce vertige? C’est le comique absolu: il s’est emparé de chaque être. Léandre, Pierrot, Cassandre, font des gestes extraordinaires, qui démontrent clairement qu’ils se sentent introduits de force dans une existence nouvelle.5 In Baudelaire’s prose poems, a similar feeling of dizziness is produced, and in several cases, there are fairies involved. But most often, the sensory impressions of the modern city work the “magic”—a truly kaleidoscopic experience of changing forms and colors. As with the pantomime, the experience of the modern city entails a radical derangement of the senses and opens one up to “a new life.” What characterizes Baudelaire’s dizziness, whether it appears in the pantomime or in the modern city, is that it is virtually invisible; it is noticeable as an effect on our bodies and our perceptual apparatus, but it cannot be isolated and traced back to concrete phenomena outside of us. In the quotation above, we observe that Baudelaire describes the way dizziness fills the air: “it is in the air, we breathe it in, it fills our lungs.” When he describes the experience of urban life, similar phrasings occur. In Salon de 1846, he refers to all the marvels in Paris that we fail to see, because they surround us too closely: “Parisian life is rich in poetic and wonderful subjects. The marvelous envelops us and saturates us like the atmosphere; but we fail to see it.” (“La vie parisienne est féconde en sujets poétiques et merveilleux. Le merveilleux nous enveloppent et nous abreuve comme l’atmosphère, mais nous ne le voyons pas.”)6 The word “atmosphere”—which is actually very frequent in Baudelaire’s writing—is interesting here.7 The word is used to describe a feeling of bodily presence in a specific environment, emphasizing the perceptual or aesthetic effects of this environment, rather than its main attributes. Baudelaire describes the way the atmosphere imposes itself on our bodies and overwhelms us.8 In the passage concerning the pantomime, he describes the way this atmosphere is actually internalized; we breathe it and it fills our lungs, so that it constitutes our entire being.9 With such descriptions, Baudelaire reveals that he is aware of the ways in which our perception within the modern city is shaped, guided, and manipulated without our noticing: there is just something in the air, affecting us. And just as with pantomime, the dizziness of the modern city thus appears to be produced through magic.

106

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

This poetic description of dizziness obviously differs from Benjamin’s materialistic inquiry into the processes of perception. In his essay “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” Benjamin, in fact, accused Baudelaire of mystifying the causes of the processes he describes. Commenting on Baudelaire’s description of “magic cobblestones” that “rise up to form fortresses,” Benjamin asserts that “[t]hese stones, to be sure, are ‘magic’ because Baudelaire’s poem says nothing about the hands which set them in motion.”10 Thus, it seems that Benjamin is mainly interested in describing material causes and actual agencies, whereas Baudelaire is mainly interested in describing the effects. This “method” does not stem from negligence, but from an aesthetic choice; Baudelaire’s fascination for “effects without a cause” is also apparent here. By describing these effects, he in fact makes us see that which otherwise is invisible to us. However, Baudelaire does not completely hide away the causes of the new perceptual experiences. As we have seen, the new media technology—newspapers, photography, and optical devices—is present at several levels of Baudelaire’s writings, and Baudelaire was well aware of the way it affected our perception. Demonstrating that the new media technology could be played with, he in fact anticipated Benjamin’s views on the constructive potential of technology. For Benjamin, this constructive potential implied that technology could be used to train our perception, facilitate new forms of perception, and prepare social change. This would imply that the new forms of perception are integrated into our bodily apparatus. As R. L. Rutsky has claimed, taking his cue from Benjamin, “film becomes part of the bodily perceptual apparatus” early in the twentieth century, making perception “operate through montage.”11 A similar claim is made by Gernot Böhme, who in Invasive Technology argues that “technology has extended its reach to the human body,” and (with a reference to Foucault), he describes this invasive technification as a “dispositif.”12 Following such perspectives, we may thus consider the body not merely as a natural phenomenon, capable of “natural perception,” but as a “bodily apparatus” whose perception is influenced by—although not determined by—technology. A problem arises, however, for when technological features are integrated into our bodily apparatuses, it becomes difficult to discern their role. Baudelaire is, in fact, right on target: he reveals the way the dispositives shape and guide our perception without our noticing. What consequences does this new mode of perception have for the modern subject’s corporeal existence and behavior? According to Baudelaire, dizziness initiates truly radical behavior characterized by intuition, action, and violence. As Georges Bataille has argued, Baudelaire was inclined to excess and violence, opposing in this manner the utilitarian economics of bourgeois society. Whereas utilitarian economy favored deliberation and rationality, Baudelaire preferred the unpredictable and sudden leaps of action.13 Yet, this violent mode could also be seen as responding to the new

Corporeality

107

and dispersed kind of perception favoring action over contemplation. It seems as if the distorted form of perception triggered a desire to explore the new perceptual surroundings through various forms of action and violence. Baudelaire’s prose poems are of particular interest in this regard, because they stage a persistent conflict between contemplation and action. The contemplative mode, which has traditionally guaranteed the self-contained identity of the poet, is repeatedly interrupted by various forms of action— even violent fight scenes.

The impulsion to act The prose poem “Le Mauvais vitrier” provides an interesting reflection on the conflict between contemplation and action. Here, the poetic subject explores the impulse to commit sudden and violent acts, without any apparent motivation. Numerous critics have been intrigued by the capricious and unreasonable behavior of the poetic subject in this text: prompted by a sudden impulse, he attacks a glazier and chastises him for not selling colored window panes, and in his intoxication, he ends up smashing all the glazier’s goods. The incident may obviously be read as the poet’s protest against the prosaic tristesse of everyday life (represented by the transparent panes) and a plea for a more enchanted, Romantic world (represented by the colored panes). In this manner, the attack on a glazier offering transparent, colorless panes appears to be justified poetically. I would like to focus on a slightly different aspect and wind back to the beginning of the prose poem where the cause of this kind of action is discussed. In the first paragraph, the poetic subject indicates the subject of the prose poem: a mysterious impulse leading to irrational actions: “There exist certain individuals who are, by nature, given purely to contemplation and are utterly unsuited to action, and who, nevertheless, under a mysterious and unknown impulse, sometimes act with a speed which they themselves would have thought beyond them.” (“Il y a des natures contemplatives et tout à fait impropres à l’action, qui cependant, sous une impulsion mystérieuse et inconnue, agissent quelquefois avec une rapidité dont elles se seraient crues elles-mêmes incapables.”)14 What the prose poem explores is thus the conflict between contemplation and action and the strange impulse that sometimes makes even the most indolent person act. This impulse to act is further described as “an irresistible force” (“une force irresistible”), an “insane energy” (“une si folle énergie”), an “excess of courage” (“un courage de luxe”), and as “the kind of energy which springs from boredom” (“une espèce d’énergie qui jaillit de l’ennui”). It is thus seen as a vigorous force that arises from dissatisfaction and ennui and represents a surplus or an excess of energy, which is irrational. It is as if contemplation implies an accumulation of energy that is allowed no outlet, causing it to build up and

108

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

suddenly burst. This energy apparently lacks both a cause and a purpose, and we may therefore say that its main characteristic is indirection. The poetic subject attempts to account for this mysterious impulse by means of several examples. The first tells us about a person setting a forest on fire, the second is about a person who lights a cigarette close to a barrel of gunpowder, and the third reports how a person violently embraces a stranger. The fourth and most elaborate example is taken from the poetic subject’s own experience: the episode with the glazier. What is interesting is the way he describes the series of events leading up to the attack on the glazier: he wakes up, feeling “surly, sad, weary from doing nothing” (“maussade, triste, fatigué d’oisivité”) and opening the window, the first thing he spots is the glazier, whose dissonant outcry vibrates “through the heavy, dirty atmosphere of Paris.” On the one hand, Baudelaire thus appears to attribute the peculiar emotions causing the attack on the glazier to an interior emotional state that may possibly have been accumulated over time. On the other hand, he attributes his outburst to the sight and sound of the glazier outside his window and the atmosphere surrounding him, that is, the perceptual environment of the city. Yet, neither this example nor the others actually succeed in explaining the motivation for these sudden acts. The poetic subject reels off numerous motives for the actions; they are undertaken “to see, to know, to tempt fate, to force himself to show that he possesses energy, to ape the gambler, to discover the pleasures of anxiety, for no real cause, through a whim, through having nothing else to do.” (“pour voir, pour savoir, pour tenter la destinée, pour se contraindre lui-même à faire preuve d’énergie, pour faire le joueur, pour connâitre les plaisirs de l’anxiété, pour rien, par caprice, par désœuvrement.”) In this manner, the poetic subject works hard to find an explanation, but he finally admits that there is “no real cause,” and that the perpetrator himself presumably does not know why he has committed the act. Instead of a well-motivated cause, we are thus presented with a somewhat confused desire to explore the unknown, which lacks a rational cause or purpose. If these acts escape the laws of causality, this means that there was no moment in time prior to the incidents that indicated that they would take place. The acts described in this prose poem could be seen as defeats of the bourgeois rule, which subjects individuals to rational behavior, and more specifically, to the laws of causality and temporality. From this perspective, the impulsive act could be considered a leap out of time, and the instant thus represents “a window,” an escape from that which already exists toward something that is absolutely unpredictable. Such a leap would be facilitated by a dispersed mode of perception, allowing the subject to take advantage of the instant—cutting the instant loose, so to speak, from causal and temporal logics. The outbursts and the violent action in Baudelaire’s prose poem are thus not merely symptoms or expressions of discontentedness, but rather

Corporeality

109

attempts to grasp the instant, escape the rule of time, and create something entirely new. We should further note that the unexpected events in the prose poem are traced back to “a mysterious impulse” that serves as a substitute for a genuine cause. However, an impulse does not precede an act; it coincides with it, and it can therefore not be the cause of it. If the impulse is described as “mysterious,” it is because it (per se) lacks a causal explication; it is an effect without an identifiable cause, or what we could refer to as a pure effect. Accordingly, this impulse can be described as the force of the moment, or the vibration of the instant, luring the subject to take a leap out of time and do something that could not have been anticipated, predicted, or expected. Here, the instincts of the body—and not the powers of intellect— take charge, profiting from the moment to open up for a radically new existence.

Violence: Bodies in motion If “Le Mauvais vitrier” attempts to describe the very impulse to act, it also depicts the actual undertakings of the poetic subject: his capricious and violent behavior vis-à-vis the glazier. In a similar manner, other prose poems report on playful and passionate acts that are committed without any justifiable reason. Among these, two prose poems containing fight scenes are particularly interesting. Fighting demonstrates the body in action and foregrounds a corporeal approach to the world. What is fascinating is that this bodily engagement in Baudelaire’s writing takes on a comic quality: as soon as the subject’s composed demeanor is abandoned, comedy begins, with hilarious descriptions of bodies in disarray. It seems as if the only alternative to a contemplative, thoughtful subject is a comical one. Why, then, resort to fight scenes? An interesting feature is that both of the prose poems in which fight scenes occur ridicule the revolutionary ideals of 1848, with their echoes of the 1789 claims of liberty, equality, and fraternity. As is well known, Baudelaire had scorned these ideals after his reputed “disillusion” in the wake of 1848. He saw them as abstract ideals without foundation in reality and as bourgeois propaganda legitimizing the bourgeois rule. Instead of these abstract, universal, and essentially bourgeois ideals, Baudelaire promotes real action and corporeality—in an utterly comical form. Looking more closely at the fight scenes in question, we discover that they aim to destroy two bourgeois “states of mind”: first, the auratic experience of nature, and second, contemplative, “absorbed” reading. In “Le Gâteau” (“The Cake”), the fighting takes place outdoors, in the midst of beautiful scenery.15 The opening scene describes the feeling of being enveloped by natural beauty:

110

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

I was travelling. The countryside in which I found myself was of a grandeur and a nobility no one could resist. At that moment something of that grandeur and nobility doubtless passed into my soul. My thoughts fluttered about with a lightness like that of the atmosphere; vulgar passions, such as hatred and profane love, now seemed to me as far off as the clouds which filed past at the bottom of the abysses beneath my feet; my soul seemed as vast and as pure as the enveloping bowl of the heavens; memories of earthly things were weakened and diminished by the time they reached my heart, like the sound of the bells tied to imperceptible animals which were grazing far, far away, on the slope of another mountain. Je voyagais. Le paysage au milieu duquel j’étais placé était d’une grandeur et d’une noblesse irrésistibles. Il en passa sans doute en ce moment quelque chose dans mon âme. Mes pensées voltigeaient avec une légèreté égale à celle de l’atmosphère; les passions vulgaires, telles que la haine et l’amour profane, m’apparaissaient maintenant aussi éloignées que les nuées qui défilaient au fond des abîmes sous mes pieds; mon âme me semblait aussi vaste et aussi pure que la coupole du ciel dont j’étais enveloppé; les souvenirs des choses terrestres n’arrivait à mon cœur qu’affaibli et diminué, comme le son de la clochette des bestiaux imperceptibles qui passaient loin, bien loin, sur le versant d’une autre montagne. Interestingly, this idyllic scene recalls Benjamin’s description of the experience of the aura. He compares the experience of the aura of the work of art with an experience of nature, highlighting the strange relationship between distance and proximity: What is aura, actually? A strange web of space and time: the unique appearance of a distance, no matter how close it may be. While at rest on a summer’s noon, to trace a range of mountains on the horizon, or a branch that throws its shadow on the observer, until the moment or the hour becomes part of their appearance—this is what it means to breathe the aura of those mountains, that branch.16 As the quotation shows, Baudelaire’s scene could be described as auratic. The poetic subject describes himself as being situated “in the midst” of a beautiful landscape and as being “enveloped” by the bowl of heaven, while at the same time perceiving the clouds and the animals’ bells in the distance. We should also note that the opening line “I was travelling” may lead the reader to believe that he is about to read the story of a journey. However, it soon becomes apparent that it is an imagined journey—a spiritual rêverie carried out without any physical movement. Although the mundane world here seems very distant, it soon interferes, and significantly, it is the worldly

Corporeality

111

manifestation of hunger that generates the transition to a more physical world. At the moment when this world interferes, we also find a reference to a profane kind of travel that matches the opening line: tourism. The poetic subject’s packed lunch consists of a piece of bread and “a bottle of elixir that the pharmacists used to sell in those days to tourists” (“un flacon d’un certain elixir que les pharmaciens vendaient dans ce temps-là aux touristes”). Baudelaire thus highlights both the contrast and the similarity between spiritual rêverie and tourism: both involve an experience of nature and beauty, movement and displacement, but only the modern phenomenon of tourism has professionalized this experience by offering products that satisfy the bodily needs of the travelers. At this point, we may already suspect that the inner voyage is endangered. The action sets off as the poetic subject starts to eat. His piece of bread is soon spotted by a hungry, poor boy, who greedily scrutinizes it and whispers the word “gâteau”—cake. Here, of course, the religious connotations of bread and the class connotations of bread/cake join in. But as it turns out, the white bread—which is mistaken for cake—proves to be utterly inaccessible. As the poetic subject offers the boy the piece of bread, another boy shows up, trying to grab it. The result is a violent fight between the two boys, described in great detail, with phrases such as: “[H]e was bowled head over heels by another little savage.... Together they rolled on the ground.... The first, enraged, seized the second by the hair; the latter seized his ear between his teeth.” (“Il fut culbuté par un autre petit sauvage.... Ensemble ils roulèrent sur le sol.... Le premier, exaspéré, empoigna le second par les cheveux; celui-ci saisit l’oreille avec les dents.”) The fight is meticulously described; with emphasis on physical detail, dynamic movement, and blunt violence, it also has an undeniable strong sense of comedy. From where does this comedy come? Fighting implies a perturbation of postures and a deformation of bodies that is in itself comical, showing people from their least sophisticated angles. The comedy of these bodies in disarray is underlined by the fact that the boys—according to the poetic subject— are so similar that they could have been twins. Furthermore, the outcome of the fight is tragicomical: during the fight, the piece of bread is torn apart and “scattered into crumbs” (“éparpillé en miettes”) and neither of the combatants’ hunger is satisfied. Ironically, during this process of decomposition the piece of bread is described as “traveling” between the two boys: “The cake travelled from hand to hand and changed from pocket to pocket at every second; but alas! it also changed in size” (“Le gâteau voyageait de main en main et changeait de poche à chaque instant; mais, hélas! il changeait aussi de volume.”) Traveling is conveyed as a process of transfer that “eats up” its object, so to speak. This choice of words undeniably reflects back on the previous references to traveling; indeed, we may ask if this process of decomposition and transfer is also the principle of inner travels.

112

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

It is further noteworthy that the fight is viewed, from a distance, as it were, and that the poetic subject does not interfere. He observes what happens as a scene, and he refers to it as a “spectacle.” The prose poem ends as the poetic subject expresses his sadness over the ways of the world, well aware that he—with his inner journeys—belongs to the old world, whereas a new reality is manifesting itself right in front of him. It is a reality characterized not only by poverty, but also by new perceptual features: movement, fragmentation, corporeality, and violence. It is interesting to note that the poetic subject, interrupted from his contemplative mode, seems hardly able to describe the fight, as the following comment reveals: “Why describe a hideous struggle which in truth lasted longer than their childish strength seemed to promise?” (“À quoi bon décrire une lutte hideuse qui dura en vérité plus longtemps que leurs forces enfantines ne semblaient le promettre?”) Possibly, the poetic subject is referring not merely to the futility of the fight, but also to the futility of his own attempt to describe it in the medium to which he is accustomed: writing. It is as if writing here lags behind, not able to keep up with the successive movements of the fight. Bodies role around, a hand grasps a lock of hair, teeth bite an ear, and so the fighting goes on. But there is no climax and no winner; the movements do not compose a comprehensible line of action, but develop in the same rhythm as the decomposition of the piece of bread. When the poetic subject, having been interrupted in his rêveries, attempts to describe the violent action that takes place before him, he appears to be confronted with the shortcomings of his own medium. Faced with this massive “corporeality without purpose,” the poetic subject falls short, seeing the attempt to describe the event in writing as futile. Another violent fight scene can be found in “Assommons les pauvres!,” and here as well, Baudelaire dramatizes the conflict between contemplation and action.17 This time, however, the point of departure is not an auratic experience of being enveloped by nature, but a claustrophobic experience of reading, which takes place in an apartment. The first part of the prose poem describes the way the poetic subject is “confined” to his apartment, where, for two weeks, he has been reading the latest fashionable books (presumably revolutionary propaganda from 1848), without the least satisfaction. He finds himself in a state of mind bordering on “dizziness or stupidity” (“le vertige ou la stupidité”) and in this state of mind, he has a strange presentiment: It merely seemed to me that I could feel, locked in the depths of my intellect, an obscure seed of an idea which was superior to the entire dictionary of old-wives’ recipes I had just perused. But it was just the idea of an idea, something infinitely vague. Il m’avait semblé seulement que je sentais, confiné au fond de mon intellect, le germe obscur d’une idée supérieure à toutes les formules de bonne

Corporeality

113

femme dont j’avais récemment parcouru le dictionnaire. Mais ce n’était que l’idée d’une idée, quelque chose d’infiniment vague. The physical confinement is thus reproduced at the level of the mind, and this state of confinement seems to cloud and obscure his intellect: instead of thinking clearly, he detects an obscure germ—a mere presentiment of something important. His attempt at a contemplative mode is left behind when the poetic subject hits the street, and the action sets off when he encounters a beggar addressing him with his pleading look. Here, we may notice how the beggar’s effort to manipulate and move him with the eyes is ridiculed: “one of those unforgettable glances which could overturn thrones if mind could move matter, and if the eye of a hypnotist could ripen grapes” (“un de ces regards inoubliables qui culbuteraient les trônes, si l’esprit remuait la matière, et si l’œil d’un magnétiseur faisait mûrir les raisins”). With this phrase, Baudelaire makes it clear that neither the eye nor the mind touches its object, although we are frequently fooled to believe so. Referring to the quickly growing entertainment industry trading in visual manipulation of different sorts—magnétiseurs, illusionnistes, magiciens—he disavows both the eye and the mind as agents of change. By contrast, the prose poem advocates a doctrine of action. The content of this doctrine is manifested through an interior voice speaking to the poetic subject, taking on the personae of a “Demon of action” (“un Démon d’action”) and uttering the following words: “He alone is another man’s equal who can prove himself to be so, and he alone is worthy of freedom who is able to seize it.” (“Celui-là seul est l’égal d’un autre, qui le prouve, et celui-là seul est digne de la liberté, qui sait la conquérir.”) Immediately translating these words into action, the poetic subject attacks the beggar, and we are offered a meticulous description of the fight that follows: Instantly I leapt on my beggar. With a single punch I closed one of his eyes, which in a second swelled up like a tennis ball. I broke one of my nails in knocking out two of his teeth and, as I didn’t feel I was strong enough, being born delicate and having rarely practiced boxing, to beat up this old man quickly, I seized the collar of his coat in one hand and with the other grasped his throat, and began to pound his head vigorously against the wall.… Then, with a kick directed at his back, energetically enough to break his spine, I floored this enfeebled sexagenarian, and, seizing a large branch of a tree which was lying on the ground, I pounded him with the obstinate energy of cooks trying to soften a steak. Immédiatement, je sautai sur mon mendiant. D’un seul coup de poing, je lui bouchai un œil, qui devint, en une seconde, gros comme une balle. Je cassai un de mes ongles à lui briser les deux dents, et comme je ne me

114

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

sentais pas assez fort, étant né délicat et m’étant peu exercé à la boxe, pour assommer rapidement ce vieillard, je le saisis d’une main par le collet de son habit, de l’autre, je l’empoignai à la gorge, et je me mis à lui secouer vigoureusement, la tête contre un mur.… Ayant ensuite, par un coup de pied lancé dans le dos, assez énergique pour briser les omoplates, terrassé ce sexagénaire affaibli, je me saisis d’une grosse branche d’arbre qui traînait à terre, et je le battis avec l’énergie obstinée des cuisiniers qui veulent attendrir un beefteack. Note the exaggeration of the movements, the ridiculous positions, and the comic way in which a move immediately has physical consequences (the eye growing to the size of a ball). The movements take on a mechanical appearance: the fight is described in technical terms, without empathy for the persons involved; each movement is isolated and follows a simple cause-effect logic. Furthermore, there is a comic contrast between the poetic subject’s alleged delicate physique and the energy that he displays during the combat; it seems that he is charged with extra energy of some sort. The comparison between punching a body and tenderizing a steak could be seen as a climax; with this reference to the kitchen, the rhetoric of vulgar comedy is firmly established. Just as in “Le Gâteau,” we are presented with a chaotic and comical scene characterized by fragmentation, corporeality, and movement. We should notice, however, that the violence is here initiated by the poetic subject himself. Attacking the beggar, he offers his own take on the question of revolution: violence. How then should we understand these two fight scenes in Baudelaire’s prose poems? Obviously, the fighting comes to represent an alternative to the contemplative mode that at the outset characterizes the poetic subject’s way of life. Contemplation and abstraction are here substituted by violence and corporeality. But how is that alternative conceived? It seems as if Baudelaire’s inspiration for these fight scenes may have been the art of pantomime, which he described in his essay on the comic, praising its exaggeration and violence. Baudelaire thus appears to have transferred the world of the pantomime to a more realistic context: the urban city. In this manner, he demonstrates the new, radical, and dispersed behavior that is invited by modern life. From today’s perspective, however, their most striking feature is perhaps that these fight scenes resemble fight scenes from the comic silent movies: the urban setting, the exaggerated violence, the unusual attention to physical detail, the unreasonable reasons for the fights (a piece of bread and a beggar’s pleading look), the frail physiognomy of the protagonists (the fighting “twins”, the delicate “philosopher”), the reference to vulgar comedy (the steak analogy)—these fight scenes seem to incorporate all the features of comic fight scenes from silent movies. Of course, this association to the silent movies could be seen as “a long shot” as Baudelaire’s writing predates

Corporeality

115

cinema by several decades. Yet, it could be argued that in these prose poems, Baudelaire transfers the violence of pantomime to a more realistic context, while drawing on his “precinematic sensibility.” In this manner, he comes to prefigure the comic realism of silent movies. Just like crowds and moving vehicles, fighting is one of the emblematic motifs of early cinema. Fighting brings out the true potential of cinema—its capacity for conveying dynamic movement. By contrast, literature, in many respects, falls short when it comes to conveying movement and action. As we recall from Chapter 3, Baudelaire was concerned with writing’s inability to capture movement: because it is a coded language, writing could not convey the same sense of speed as Guys’s sketches. With respect to the motif of fighting, a comment from Baudelaire’s essay on the comic is illuminating as he returns to the difficult question of how literature can convey movement. Commenting on the violence and swift action performed in pantomime, Baudelaire acknowledges that writing can only give an inadequate replica of this dynamic action: “Set down with the pen, the whole thing seems pale and chill. How could the pen rival pantomime?” (“Avec une plume tout cela est pâle et glacé. Comment la plume pourrait-elle rivaliser avec la pantomime?”)18 It thus seems that the conflict between contemplation and action as described by Baudelaire parallels another problem: the conflict between the art of writing (a “slow” medium, coded language) and the art of pantomime (violence, action, movement), or, by extension, between writing and cinema. Where writing perfectly suits a contemplative, Romantic mode, slowly linking one thought to another and thereby producing meaning and coherency, it does not have the immediacy of pantomime and the cinema, which make these forms so well suited for conveying action and movement. Whereas cinema and pantomime allow for excessive energy without purpose or direction, writing as a medium appears to achieve this effect to a lesser degree. How, then, can fight scenes be described in writing? Drawing both on the art of pantomime and his precinematic sensibility, Baudelaire actually manages to put up a dynamic performance through the medium of writing. First, he transfers the exaggerated violence of pantomime to the urban city and thereby mixes artful comedy and hardcore realism. Second, he depicts the fight highlighting corporeality, fragmentation, and movement. This bizarre study of bodies in motion could be described as a precinematic technique based on the principles of decomposition and serialization. Just as with the phenakistiscope and chronophotography, where movement was first decomposed, then translated into a sequential logic, Baudelaire’s fight scenes decompose movement, using writing to meticulously describe the successive phases of the moving body. In writing, however, the decomposition has a comical effect; it delays the action and makes the reader forget the fuller picture, and it arrests the action in its successive phases, conveying

116

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

thereby a somewhat staccato picture of movement. We are thus presented with a fragmented description of exaggerated violence—featuring details of the body—in slow motion. By decomposing movement, by paying attention to physical details, and at the same time, exaggerating the action, Baudelaire succeeds in conveying liveliness and movement in a “slow” medium. In this manner, writing starts to resemble film even before the first film reel sees the light of day. Baudelaire’s fight scenes thus offer alternatives both to the contemplative mode of the poet and to the abstract revolutionary ideals: violent action and corporeality. Although these alternatives may not seem altogether serious, immersed as they are in comedy, the excessive violence succeeds in shaking up the entire field of Romantic and revolutionary rhetoric. Baudelaire provides us with intriguing descriptions of the new perceptual conditions of modern life, highlighting fragmentation, violence, corporeality, and dispersed perception.

Enjoying the crowd is an art A quite different experience of corporeality is described in the prose poem “Les Foules.”19 In this prose poem, the body truly comes into its own—as a sensuous organ in intimate contact with the urban surroundings: the crowd. The opening line describes the experience of the crowd as a bath and in this manner underlines the sensuous intimacy of the endeavor: “Not everyone has the gift of taking a plunge into the multitude: there is an art to enjoying the crowd.” (“Il n’est pas donné à chacun de prendre un bain de multitude: jouir de la foule est un art.”). It is significant that this ability to enjoy the crowd is described as the poet’s privilege accorded to him by a fairy in his childhood. It is described as an art, and its exclusiveness is emphasized several times. Yet, the experience of the crowd is not merely described as a corporeal experience; it is also an imaginative exercise. Here, the perception of the body is correlated with the imagination of the mind, both transcending the borders of the “I.” The poet plunging into the multitude is contrasted with “the selfish man, who is as tightly sealed as a strong box, and the lazy man, who is as selfcontained as a mollusk” (“l’egoïste, fermé comme un coffre, et le paresseux, interné comme un mollusque”). The egoist and the lazy man here seem to be images of the bourgeois who, in contrast to the poet, insists on holding on tightly to his identity and his property. The word “coffre” connotes both money/treasure and death/corpse, whereas “lazy” and “mollusc” refer to the bourgeois’ limp character. By contrast, the poet’s lifestyle implies a loss of identity and a state of “universal communion” (“universelle communion”) with others. In this state, multitude and solitude amount to the same thing: “Multitude and solitude: equal and interchangeable terms for the poet.”

Corporeality

117

(“Multitude, solitude: termes égaux et convertibles pour le poète actif et fécond.”) Furthermore, this mode of being is characterized by a radical openness; for the poet “everything is vacant” (“tout est vacant”) and his privilege is to enter, visit, espouse, and adopt as he is governed by “chance” (“circonstance”), “the unknown” (“l’inconnu”), and “the unforeseen” (“l’imprevu”). Baudelaire thus makes a clear distinction between two ways of living: whereas the bourgeois is governed by identity, property, and calculation, the poet is governed by multitude, interchangeability, and chance. A quick look at another prose poem may shed light on the poet’s sensuous approach to the world. In “Les Tentations” (“The Temptations”), the poetic subject dreams that Eros makes him an offer that implies a similar experience of multitude: If you wish, if you wish, I’ll make you lord of souls; and you’ll hold sway over living matter even more than the sculptor commands his clay; and you will know the endlessly renewed pleasure of leaving yourself to find oblivion in others and attracting other souls to yours, to the extent where they lose themselves in you.20 Si tu veux, si tu veux, je te ferai le seigneur des âmes, et tu seras le maître de la matière vivante, plus encore que le sculpteur peut l’être de l’argile; et tu connaîtras le plaisir, sans cesse renaissant, de sortir de toi-même pour t’oublier dans autrui, et d’attirer les autres âmes jusqu’à les confondre avec la tienne.21 Eros provides us with a striking image of life in its potential state: human beings are seen as clay in the hands of the sculptor, meaning that they are in the making, having not yet taken on their final form or an identity. Furthermore, the experience of losing oneself in the multitude is described as a pleasure, and as the offer is here made by Eros, the erotic aspect of this enterprise is highlighted. In “Les Foules,” too, the experience of the multitude is related to sexuality, but here sexuality is mixed up with cultic elements. It is described in religious terms (“this universal communion”), in cultic terms (“ineffable orgy” (“ineffable orgie”)), in sexual terms (“this holy prostitution” (“cette sainte prostitution”)), and in terms of the theater, or the Dionysian (“taste for disguise and masks” (“le goût du travestissement et du masque”)). These phenomena have in common a bodily and nonverbal community with others characterized by excess and desubjectivization. Another metaphor for this approach to the world is the voyage. The poetic subject contends that the art of enjoying the crowd presupposes “a hatred of home life and a passion for travel” (“la haine du domicile et la passion du voyage”) and he points out that the founders of colonies as well as missionaries presumably are familiar with such “mysterious intoxication”

118

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

(“mystérieuses ivresses”). With these lines, the poetic subject expresses a cosmopolitan attitude and a claim to world citizenship. As Baudelaire explains elsewhere, cosmopolitanism is a way of embracing strangeness, warding off the cultural shocks that such strangeness may cause at first.22 In this prose poem, however, traveling implies not only a transgression of national borders, but also a transgression of individual positions and identities. For the poetic subject, leaving one’s home and one’s country behind allows one to leave one’s identity behind—and to indulge in new experiences. Baudelaire thus describes the experience of living in the city as a mode of acute perception, an erotic enterprise where one intensely experiences the world through one’s senses. This “bath of the multitude” implies a contact with others that is so intimate that the distinction between the individuals starts to blur. In this manner, a space is opened up where identities are fluid and positions interchangeable. Baudelaire describes the feeling of existing in this “open” space where there are no fixed identities and where everything is still being shaped. Although it requires talent and energy to leave identities and rationality behind and abandon oneself to the crowd, Baudelaire promises that it is highly rewarding. In particular, this mode of being is well suited for the modern poet who is inclined to désœuvrement. The question that arises is whether such an existence is really possible, especially in an urban environment. Will not this attempt to live in “open space” without fixed boundaries be hindered by the fuzz of the city—with its crowds, shop windows, newspapers, photographs, advertisements, and posters—invading one’s consciousness? Here, Baudelaire demonstrates his profound comprehension of modern life. He observes that it is precisely the massive invasion of bodies, voices, and images—in constant flux—that allows one to lose oneself in a “bath of the multitude.” In this sense, “open” does not means “empty,” “natural,” or “without form.” It means that the multitude of forms that make up an urban environment lend themselves to free use, without any constraints, laws, or obligations. This is what opens up a world of possibilities to the subject. It is in this context that Baudelaire’s renowned claim that “enjoying the crowd is an art” becomes interesting. The reference to the art world suggests that enjoying the urban crowd is not a “natural” ability or disposition, but requires reconfiguration of the senses and adaptation to new forms of perception. And this call for a new “aesthetics of existence” is put forward at a moment in history when perception starts to become conditioned more and more by technology. A matter of concern in this context is whether such an exploration of perceptual and existential possibilities inevitably would take the form of mastery. As Heidegger warned, man’s relationship to nature in a world dominated by technology is characterized by calculation and instrumentality. For Heidegger, addressing the question of technology a decade after the Second World War, technology implies an understanding of nature as being

Corporeality

119

“on call” as a “standing-reserve” and hence an instrumental understanding of the world.23 To counter this rather pessimistic view, Benjamin’s dialectical view on technology is helpful. In a passage in One-Way Street, published in 1928, that is, a decade after the First World War, he refutes the common understanding of technology as man’s mastery over nature: “[T]echnology is the mastery of not nature but of the relation between nature and man.... In technology, a physis is being organized through which mankind’s contact with the cosmos takes a new and different form from that which it had in nations and families.”24 Benjamin thus focuses on the very relationship between man and nature and implies that this relation is not permanent and unchangeable; it may in fact be reorganized, reconstructed, take on a new form. Baudelaire explores this idea through the flâneur’s corporeality and his baths of multitude.

Multitude: Crowds, commonplaces, and mass communication Looking further into Baudelaire’s “bath of the multitude,” we may observe that it has a particular geography: the urban streets of Paris, conveying anonymity, brief encounters, and sudden glances. In the prose poems, expressions like “amidst the crowds of the boulevards” (“à travers la foule du boulevard”) and “as I was crossing the boulevard” (“comme je traversais le boulevard”) repeatedly situate the poetic subject in the turmoil of the city, and references to parks, fairs, newspapers, and theaters place him in the public domain. Thus, we are not merely talking about urban surroundings, but also about public space, a space that is free and open to anyone. Or, referring to public space’s counterpart in language, we could call it a common place. The next observation concerns language: we should note that entering into the urban sphere strongly affects one’s language. As we saw in “Perte d’auréole,” the poetic subject started to use commonplace language once he entered a brothel and blended in with ordinary people. To speak is basically to enter into a community, and in Baudelaire’s prose poems, this linguistic community consists of thoroughly worn phrases: a repertoire of commonplaces and revolutionary slogans, proliferating both in the newspapers and on the street. In contrast to the traditional Romantic poet, who distances himself from such linguistic practices and cultivates a purer, poetic vocabulary, Baudelaire plays with these phrases. His plunge into the multitude thus also implies a plunge into the language of commonplaces. In this manner, Baudelaire demonstrates a form of “communion” that differs from the republican “communion” that he had scorned. Having lost faith in the abstract ideals of liberté, égalité, and fraternité as the founding principles of the Republic, Baudelaire devotes himself to commonplace language.

120

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

A choice of such commonplace expressions—almost always marked as being commonplace expressions by italics or casual comments—reads as follows: … looking at it [the cat], as the saying goes, in the whites of its eyes … (“The Clock”) … I, of whom so much ill is spoken, am sometimes a good old devil, to use one of your everyday expressions. (“The Generous Gambler”) … and remembered a well-known expression: “The most terrible grief is that which is silent.” (“The Rope”)25 … le regardant [le chat], comme on dit, dans le blanc des yeux … (“L’Horloge”) … je suis quelquefois bon diable, pour me servir d’une de vos locutions vulgaires. (“Le Joueur généreux”) … et je me souvins de la sentence connue: “Les douleurs les plus terribles sont les douleurs muettes” (“La Corde”)26 The status of such commonplace expressions in Baudelaire’s writing is illuminated in a passage where he comments on the poet Champfleury: “[H]e neglected the commonplace, that meeting-place for the crowd, that forum for windy eloquence.” (“[I]l négligeait le lieu commun, le lieu de rencontre de la foule, le rendez-vous public de l’éloquence”)27 To Baudelaire, the commonplace thus represents the crowd, and as he notes in his diary: “nothing more beautiful than the commonplace” (“rien de plus beau que le lieu commun”).28 But not only does Baudelaire explore the commonplaces of “ordinary” language, he also plays with the commonplaces of the upper class. In many prose poems, he mimes polite language through a sort of mocking gallantry. In “L’Horloge,” for instance, the poetic subject addresses the reader in a scornfully polite tone: “Well, madam, isn’t that a truly meritorious madrigal, as emphatic as you yourself are?” (“N’est-ce pas, madame, que voice un madrigal vraiment méritoire, et aussi emphatique que vous-même?”).29 Baudelaire’s poetic subject thus abandons “authentic” language and immerses himself in a language of polite ready-mades. Furthermore, it should come as no surprise that Baudelaire plays with poetic clichés, especially from Romantic poetry. His way of recycling and reworking commonplace expressions has been pointed out by Jonathan Culler, who asserts that Baudelaire’s use of clichés should not merely be seen as an exercise in irony; it is much more complex. He questions the clichés and transforms them, and on many occasions, he also appears to

Corporeality

121

embrace them. Culler proposes that Baudelaire’s clichés be read as pastiches of Romantic poetry, and pastiches that are sympathetic rather than scornful (“pastiche d’adhésion” is the label he uses).30 Culler’s chief example is the opening of the well-known poem “Correspondances”: “Nature is a temple” (“La nature est un temple”). Culler reveals that when Baudelaire wrote this phrase, it was already thoroughly worn by Victor Hugo and Alphonse de Lamartine. And, in fact, the provenance goes all the way back to a biblical phrase that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was used by writers as diverse as Swedenborg, Darwin, and Wordsworth. Furthermore, as Culler points out, a problem arising here is that Baudelaire’s use of poetic clichés may be difficult to discern for a modern reader. However, if we consider the reception of Baudelaire’s work, we find that he was in fact accused of writing clichés by several early twentieth-century critics; around 1910, Paul Claudel claimed that Baudelaire’s style was “an extraordinary mixture of Racine’s style and the style of a journalist of his day.”31 Moreover, as Culler informs us, in 1924, Albert Thibaudet judged that “almost all the pieces of The Flowers of Evil swarm with platitudes and filler-words.”32 Baudelaire obviously had a soft spot for clichés and was happy to incorporate them into his writings. From the preceding, we may conclude that Baudelaire’s bath of multitude implies a plunge into the language of commonplaces and clichés, and that the experience of the common (the crowd, the urban environments) should be seen also as a linguistic phenomenon. In Baudelaire’s prose poems, we encounter an entire catalog of commonplace expressions: not only slogans, clichés, and everyday language, but also newspaper language, newspaper forms, and—not the least—well-known forms of poetry. For the poet, these commonplaces constitute an infinite repertoire subverting the contemplative, individual tendency of Romantic poetry. In this context, it is essential to observe that commonplaces and clichés proliferated the age of technological reproducibility, which allowed for the massive reproduction of stock phrases. In fact, the very word cliché was originally a French nineteenth-century term referring to the block of the printing press (in particular, the metal stereotype of a wood engraving used to print from), and by extension, it has also been used to describe the “negative” of photographs. Although Baudelaire used the expressions lieu commun and poncif rather than cliché, there is a close connection between the age of technological reproducibility and his interests in such phrases. Accordingly, the experience of the common encompasses not only public space (common space) and common forms of language (commonplaces), but also the media insofar as they are forms of communication—mass communication. We may thus extend the signification of Baudelaire’s experience of the multitude, connecting the experience of the crowd to the experience of mass media. The new importance of the masses in the age of technological reproducibility has been highlighted by Benjamin and explored further by

122

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

numerous critics inspired by him. According to Benjamin, the reception of the work of art in the age of technological ubiquity is no longer individual, but “mass-like” (massenweise), meaning that it does no longer “coalesce in an autonomous, individual consciousness,” but is instead displaced and dispersed and “unconsciously absorbed ‘through the collective’: that is, by the dispersed, ‘distracted masses.’”33 As Samuel Weber has observed, this means that images are “taken up” and “recorded” by the collective, and further that there is a similarity between this mode of perception and the way the apparatus (e.g. the film camera) “records” images.34 Yet, not only images, but also linguistic stock phrases, circulate in this fashion, that is, through dispersed perception. These reflections on the way images are “taken up” and “recorded” by the collective are illuminating with regard to Baudelaire’s descriptions of perceptual processes. Baudelaire’s dizzy protagonists—with their dispersed perception, their baths of multitude, and their commonplaces—seem to embody this experience, or more precisely, a mid-nineteenth-century version of this experience. Baudelaire subtly describes the ways in which the modern subject is invaded by mass-produced language and images, and he highlights how this massive invasion allows one to lose oneself in a “bath of multitude.”

5 Toys

Toys and play are subjects that have interested numerous philosophers, including Benjamin and Agamben. In a world dominated by reason and instrumentality, play demonstrates a different way of being in the world, and toys reveal a different way of relating to things. Yet, play is a mysterious activity; the status of the play world, as well as our own standing in it, is highly uncertain, for we do not know exactly where we are or who we are when we play. Are we on the inside or outside of ordinary reality? Are we playing or are we being played? Although different theories of play answer these questions differently, there seems to be agreement that play is a supreme mediator; it mediates between subject and object, between the “real” world and an imagined world, between rules and freedom. It can be argued that play is characterized by ontological ambivalence; it characterizes the experience of becoming and of entering into a relationship with something unknown. Baudelaire had a fascination for toys and play; he was especially interested in the way toys open up an imaginary world to children and the reciprocal relationship that is established between a child and a toy. He knew very well that toys invite play, stimulate imaginative activity, and incite worldmaking. Interesting in our context is the fact that the toys Baudelaire discusses— mechanical toys, scientific toys, and splendid toys—reflect the capitalist world in which he lived as well as the technological development of his day. Moreover, for Baudelaire, there seems to be a close connection between toys and symbolic objects such as commodities, fetishes, and art objects—objects that hold a particular status in nineteenth-century cultural history and that have been widely debated. Thus, Baudelaire’s writing on toys confirms Benjamin’s claim that toys are always steeped in cultural history. This interest in mechanical and optical toys in Baudelaire’s writings, as well as the cultural history they bear witness to, allows us to extend the discussion of nineteenth-century media to a discussion of toys and play. In many respects, toys can be seen as children’s media devices. Support for this

124

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

claim can be found in Kittler’s account of the media situation before 1900, when, he claims, the book was the only medium providing “serial storage of serial data”: “Aside from mechanical automatons and toys, there was nothing. The discourse network of 1800 functioned without phonographs, gramophones, or cinematographs.”1 This “next to nothing” is what will interest us in this chapter in which toys and automatons will be considered nineteenth-century media devices on a par with newspapers, photographs, and precinematic devices.

Interfaces: Toys, dispositives, and transitional objects The ontological ambivalence of play is well described in Donald Winnicott’s theory on play, Playing and Reality (1971).2 As a psychoanalyst and a pediatrician, he based his theory on infants’ play with “transitional objects,” such as dolls, teddy bears, and pieces of cloth. According to Winnicott, such objects are real and made up at the same time, and they serve as a bridge between the self and others, between the child’s imagination and the world outside of the child. This means that such objects belong neither to our internal world nor to the external world, but instead they open up a third arena, a potential world, as it were, between internal and external. It is in this room, Winnicott claims, that the child develops a sense of self in relation to the world and learns to be independent. This applies not to children: adults play in similar ways (with art, sports, and conversation) and in this manner continue to feel real, spontaneous, alive, and able to develop authentic selfhood. Although he may be accused of idealizing the activity of play, Winnicott’s theory on play things as “transitional objects” is intriguing, and it may be considered relevant in terms of theories of mediation. Agamben refers to Winnicott’s theory on transitional objects in his early book, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (1977), in which he reflects upon our relation to objects, inspired by Heidegger’s writings. According to Heidegger, a scientific and technological worldview defines our modern way of living, and our relationship to objects is therefore dominated by calculation and a desire to possess these objects.3 Countering this tendency, Agamben asserts the impossibility of possessing objects and explores joy, desire, phantasm, and fetishism as ways of entering into relation with “unreality” and with “the unappropriable as such.”4 In a series of suggestive essays, he explores our relationship to a number of objects that start to become significant in Baudelaire’s day: fetishes, commodities, and toys. It is in this context that he refers to the theory of transitional objects, contending that what Winnicott described in the language of psychoanalysis has always been known to children, fetishists, and poets. Winnicott is, however, merely

Toys

125

one of his references, and the title of the book section where these essays appear is revealing in this regard: “In the World of Odradek: The Work of Art Confronted with the Commodity.”5 Agamben thus sets out to explore the confrontation between art objects and commodities, drawing on Marx, Benjamin, Adorno, and Kafka.6 In Capital (1867), published in the year of Baudelaire’s death, Karl Marx discusses the rise of the commodity in the nineteenth century. According to Marx, the basic law of capitalism is that things lose their use-value and are considered instead for their exchange value. Consequently, in the capitalist era, things are assessed not according to their usefulness, but according to an abstract or imaginary value. Marx asserts that commodities are steeped in “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” and have a “mystical character.”7 Analyzing this phenomenon, Marx describes our relationship to commodities as a kind of fetishism and considers fetishism as the proper mode of capitalism. Yet, fetishism is an inscrutable phenomenon; religious fetishism, sexual fetishism, and commodity fetishism have in common that things are not valued for their use-value, but for an imaginary value.8 This means that the fetish shares many of its characteristics with art—and with toys. It is precisely this imaginary value that interests Agamben. He takes issue with the nostalgia for the usefulness of things that exists within the Marxist tradition, and, with reference to Benjamin, he asserts the necessity of freeing things from “the drudgery of being useful.”9 Fetishes, toys, and art are interesting in this regard because they all negate use-value, and in this manner they copy, as it were, the “logic” of the commodity: Fetishes transgress “the rule that assigns an appropriate use to each thing.” Toys are things that are simply exempt from such rules of use. The modern art object, as it is conceived by Baudelaire, negates use-value by turning itself into an “absolute commodity,” thereby turning the logic of the commodity against itself.10 This latter process is referred to by Agamben as the “transfiguration of the commodity” and corresponds to what Benjamin and Adorno considered the dialectical character of commodity fetishism; if it is pushed to its limit, commodity fetishism will redeem things from all forms of purposiveness and domination.11 As we may suspect, one of Agamben’s allies in his critique of usefulness is Baudelaire. Not only was Baudelaire a poet-dandy with fetish inclinations who proclaimed the absolute uselessness of art; he also had a soft spot for toys. Agamben refers (briefly) to Baudelaire’s essay on toys “Morale du joujou” as an early reflection on the “possible uses and abuses of toys.”12 Taking his cue from Baudelaire, Agamben suggests that the toy points to a more originary status of “the thing.” Drawing on Winnicott’s theory of “transitional objects” and Heidegger’s discussion of our relationship to things, he asserts: “Things are not outside of us, in measurable external space, like neutral objects (ob – jecta) of use and exchange; rather, they open to us

126

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

the original place solely from which the experience of measurable external space becomes possible.”13 Thus, we may infer that there is a lesson to be drawn from toys. Insofar as they are exempt from rules and instrumentality, toys reveal to us the originary status of things. They demonstrate that things should not be possessed and mastered, but rather be mediators opening the world to us. Particularly intriguing in this context is the following observation: there appears to be a close affinity between Agamben’s early discussion on the intermediary role of toys and his more recent discussion on the intermediary role of the dispositives.14 For Agamben, both toys and dispositives serve as intermediates in our experience of the world, but his discussions of these two phenomena have quite different contexts. Whereas his discussion of toys was grounded in philosophical, psychoanalytical, and aesthetic perspectives (Heidegger, Benjamin, Winnicott, Baudelaire), his discussion of the dispositives is more political (Foucault is his main reference, although Heidegger is also referred to). Furthermore, his discussion of toys in Stanzas is more optimistic (toys are seen as countering both the desire to possess objects and the logic of commodity), whereas his discussion of the dispositives is more pessimistic (the dispositives are seen as caught up in a capitalist logic). In both cases, however, the categories of play and of toys demonstrate a different way of relating to things, devices, or dispositives. For Agamben, play is thus a liberating activity, releasing us from dominating structures and mindsets and restoring us to a more profound experience of being in the world.

The toy fairy: A childhood memory What, then, does Baudelaire have to say about toys? His most elaborated views on the subject can be found in the essay Agamben refers to: “Morale du joujou,” printed in 1853 in Le Monde littéraire, which is a reflection on children’s playing habits. Baudelaire offers something like a taxonomy of toys, comprising “the scientific toy” (optical toys: stereoscopes and phenakistiscopes), “the poor child’s toy,” also called “the barbarical toy” and “the primitive toy” (simple, mechanical toys), and “the living toy” (a rat in a cage). What is intriguing is that he opens the essay by describing a childhood memory involving toys. This alleged self-biographical story may be considered a key to Baudelaire’s reflections on toys generally. It reveals that toys for Baudelaire are closely related to fetishes, commodities, and art objects. In the very first sentence of the essay, Baudelaire carries us back to his childhood, which he implies is immersed in obscurity: “Many years ago— how many? I have quite forgotten; all this goes back into the mists of earliest childhood—I was taken by my mother to visit a certain Madame Panckoucke” (“Il y a bien des années,—combien? je n’en sais rien; cela

Toys

127

remonte aux temps nébuleux de la première enfance,—je fus emmené par ma mère, en visite chez une dame Panckoucke”).15 However, when he recalls the appearance of the woman he would later remember as the “toy fairy,” the quality of his memory is very sharp: “I remember very clearly that this lady was clad in velvet and fur.” (“Je me rappelle très distinctement que cette dame était habillée de velours et de fourrure.”) This lady tells Charles that she wants to offer him a toy so that he will remember her. She takes his hand and leads him to a secluded room filled entirely with toys, which appears to young Charles as “an extraordinary and truly fairylike spectacle” (“un spectacle extraordinaire et vraiment féerique”). Mme Panckoucke asks him to pick a toy, adding that she keeps a depository of toys so she can offer them to young boys visiting her as souvenirs to remember her by. Full of desire, Charles throws himself over the most bizarre and expensive of the toys. As his mother will not allow him to keep it, however, he must compromise and pick something more modest, which he does not even bother to describe. Baudelaire’s childhood memory is intriguing for several reasons. First, Baudelaire’s description of the room full of toys as a spectacle féerique alludes to the visual spectacle of the féerie, which Baudelaire was familiar with. He thus situates toys in the domain of optical illusions and profane magic, that is, the same domain to which spectacles, arcades, and world exhibitions belonged. Second, we should note the peculiar relationship between the little boy Charles and Mme Panckoucke, the toy fairy, who appears to have a particular affection for little boys; she keeps a room full of toys and offers them to little boys so that they will remember her. And indeed Baudelaire remembers her! He points out twice that she was dressed in velvet and furs, materials that are often associated with fetishism. For Baudelaire, the toy fairy from his childhood was thus a woman dressed in velvet and furs, who separated him from his mother and introduced him to a magic room covered with toys. With the toy fairy, Baudelaire in fact introduces the topic of fetishism. In this light, the connection Baudelaire makes between this childhood episode and his adult life is noteworthy. He discloses that he would have liked to know the other boys who had received toys from Mme Panckoucke and seems to think that they all have something significant in common: It has often struck me that it would be amusing to know all the “nice little boys” who have now crossed a good part of life’s cruel desert and have for a long time been handling something other than toys, and yet whose carefree childhood once upon a time took away a souvenir from Mme Panckoucke’s treasury.16 Il m’a souvent pris la fantaisie de connaître tous les gentils petits garçons qui, ayant actuellement traversé une bonne partie de la cruelle vie, manient depuis longtemps autre chose que des joujoux, et dont l’insoucieuse enfance a puisé autrefois un souvenir dans le trésor de Mme Panckoucke.17

128

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

Baudelaire asserts that these boys as adults would “handle” (manient) other things than toys. What kind of things would that be? Could it be sexual fetishes? We should note that the verb manient is in French akin to both main (hand) and manie (obsession). Today, manier often has an abstract meaning, which is simply to “handle” or “take care of” something, but in the nineteenth century the signification was more directly related to the touch of the hand and to caresses (especially in relation to fabrics, such as velvet). Baudelaire’s use of the verb suggests that the boys who once had a manie for toys, and who share with him the memory of the woman dressed in velvet and furs, as adults may have transferred their manie to other objects— possibly sexual fetishes. Or, could they have transferred their manie to commodity fetishes? Baudelaire continues his reflections by disclosing that there is a close relationship between the childhood episode and his present fascination for toys in shop windows. He contends that he cannot stop to admire the toys in a window display without recalling the toy fairy: This episode is responsible for my never being able to stop in front of a toyshop and run my eyes over the inextricable muddle of the strange shapes and clashing colors of its contents without thinking of the velvetand-fur-clad lady who appeared to me as the Toy Fairy. Cette aventure est cause que je ne puis m’arrêter devant un magasin de jouets et promener mes yeux dans l’inextricable fouillis de leurs formes bizarres et de leurs couleurs disparates, sans penser à la dame habillée de velours et de fourrure, qui m’apparait comme la Fée du joujou. There is thus a similarity between the spectacle of toys from his childhood and the window display of toys. In both cases, the spectacle of toys—with their splendid shapes and colors—appeals to his imagination. Furthermore, Baudelaire highlights the aesthetic qualities of toys, asserting that a toy shop seems to be a sparkling miniature version of the bourgeois world: I have moreover retained a lasting affection and a reasoned admiration for that strange statuary art which, with its lustrous neatness, its blinding flashes of color, its violence in gesture and decision of contour, represents so well childhood’s ideas of beauty. There is an extraordinary gaiety in a great toyshop which makes it preferable to a fine bourgeois apartment. Is not the whole life to be found there in miniature—and far more highly coloured, sparkling and polished than real life? J’ai gardé d’ailleurs une affection durable et une admiration raisonnée pour cette statuaire singulière, qui, par la propreté lustrée, l’éclat aveuglant des coleurs, la violence dans le geste et la décision dans la galbe,

Toys

129

représente si bien les idées de l’enfance sur la beauté. Il y a dans un grand magasin de joujoux une gaieté extraordinaire qui le rend préférable à un bel appartement bourgeois. Toute la vie en miniature ne s’y trouve-t-elle pas, et beaucoup plus colorée, nettoyée et luisante que la vie réelle? Expressing his preference for the world of toys, Baudelaire foregrounds their aesthetic—or atmospheric—qualities; they have more color and are cleaner and shinier than real life. Yet, sexual fetishes and commodity fetishes are not the only options; the boys who once had a manie for toys may also have transferred this manie to art objects. For not only does Baudelaire contend that toys correspond to the child’s ideas of beauty; he also claims that toys are the child’s first initiation to art: “The toy is the child’s earliest initiation to art, or rather for him it is the first concrete example of art.” (“Le joujou est la première initiation de l’enfant à l’art, ou plutôt c’en est pour lui la première réalisation.”)18 In this manner, he connects the child’s fascination with toys with the development of an artistic sensibility, implying that as the child grows up, he may transfer his aesthetic preferences to art. The essay thus reveals that for Baudelaire, the world of toys is also the world of fetishes, commodities, and art. It seems that these objects attract us for similar reasons: their aesthetic, atmospheric, and phantasmagoric qualities. They appeal to the imagination, give access to an enchanted world, and they make the question of usefulness irrelevant. A question that arises is how these objects come alive in the imagination of the child or adult. In this respect, the logic of the sexual fetish is especially pertinent. The childhood episode Baudelaire recalls—a woman dressed in velvet and furs who separates him from his mother and leads him to an enchanted room—is described in a manner that causes the reader to suspect that it was in some sense a traumatic experience. Hence, Baudelaire’s relationship to toys, fetishes, and commodities as an adult, as they are described in the essay, may be understood in light of unconscious processes responding to such traumatic experiences. In his essay “Fetishism” (1927), Freud asserts that fetishism stems from a childhood experience: the discovery that the woman lacks a penis. This causes a fear of castration in the young boy and causes him to substitute the lacking penis with a specific object, which he invests with his desires. Freud suggests that the choice of velvet and furs is related to the child’s view of the woman’s genitals from underneath her skirts, allowing him to see her velvet underwear and her fur-like pubic hair. There is thus a metonymic relationship between the fetish and the “lack” it refers to. (Whether one agrees with Freud or not is of little significance; what matters is the cultural history of fetishism, which Baudelaire and Freud were both drawing upon.) In this light, it seems that Mme Panckoucke (a woman dressed in velvet and furs, who lures young boys into a secluded room) is not merely a toy

130

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

fairy; she is also a fetish queen. She appears to have inflicted a memory on these young boys, which would affect their relationship to objects as adults. Describing this very mechanism, Freud points out that the fetish is the preservation of a traumatic memory, or more precisely, it is the preservation of the last impression before a traumatic and uncanny experience. It seems rather that when the fetish is instituted [Bei der Einsetzung des Fetisch] some process occurs which reminds one of the stopping of memory in traumatic amnesia. As in this latter case, the subject’s interest comes to a halt halfway, as it were; it is as though the last impression before the uncanny and traumatic one is retained as a fetish.19 Thus, according to Freud, the fetish is installed—or comes to life—to ward off the memory of an uncanny and trauma-like experience. This means that the fetish is a substitute for something that is repressed. This perspective is illuminating with respect to Baudelaire’s predilection for fetishistic objects like toys and commodities, as well as his wish to be a dandy and his praise of women’s makeup. Baudelaire’s penchants were always for make-believe, makeup, and substitutes, and he acknowledged that not only art, but also toys, fetishes, and commodities open up an imaginary world.

How toys come alive The fetish shares with the toy the capacity to come to life, but the life of toys, in some respects, differs from the life of fetishes. As we have seen, the manner in which toys come to life in the imagination of the child is subject to Baudelaire’s great fascination, and in his toy essay, he depicts how children treat toys as if they were alive: “All children talk to their toys.” (“Tous les enfants parlent à leurs joujoux.”).20 His interest in toys appears to stem precisely from this dialectical relationship: I believe that generally children dominate their toys; in other words that their choice is determined by dispositions and desires, vague, if you wish, and by no means formulated, but very real. Nevertheless I would not assert that the contrary does not sometimes happen—I mean that toys do not sometimes dominate children, particularly in a case of literary or artistic predestination.21 Je crois que généralement les enfants agissent sur leurs joujoux, en d’autres termes, que leur choix est dirigé par des dispositions et des désirs, vagues, il est vrai, non pas formulés, mais très réels. Cependant je n’affirmerais pas que le contraire n’ait pas lieu, c’est-à-dire que les joujoux n’agissent pas sur l’enfant, surtout dans le cas de prédestination littéraire ou artistique.22

Toys

131

Baudelaire asserts that just as the child acts on the toy, the toy may act on the child, and a reciprocal relationship is thus created. Yet this latter line of influence—the influence of toys on children—seems even more vague and mysterious than the first. What kind of power do toys exercise with respect to children? What kind of agency can be attributed to toys? At the end of the essay, Baudelaire addresses this issue, or more specifically, he addresses the child’s search for the toy’s soul. Traditionally, the soul is seen as the vital principle; an inscrutable thing that gives life to all beings. (The French word âme derives from latin anima, meaning breath, and is akin to the English word animation; it is also the Latin translation of the Greek word for psyche, meaning life.) The child’s search for the soul of the toy may therefore be seen as a search for its vital—or animating—principle. Baudelaire reflects upon this inclination: The overriding desire of most children is to get at and see the soul of their toys, some at the end of a certain period of use, others straightaway. It is on the more or less swift invasion of this desire that depends the length of life of a toy. I do not find it in me to blame this infantile mania; it is a first metaphysical tendency. When this desire has implanted itself in the child’s cerebral marrow, it fills his fingers and nails with an extraordinary agility and strength. The child twists and turns his toy, scratches it, shakes it, bumps it against the walls, throws it on the ground. From time to time he makes it re-start its mechanical motions, sometimes in the opposite direction. Its marvelous life comes to a stop.23 La plupart des marmots veulent surtout voir l’âme, les uns au bout de quelque temps d’exercise, les autres tout de suite. C’est la plus ou moins rapide invasion de ce désir qui fait la plus ou moins grande longévité du joujou. Je ne me sens pas le courage de blâmer cette manie enfantine: c’est une première tendance métaphysique. Quand ce désir s’est fiché dans la moelle cérébrale de l’enfant, il remplit ses doigts et ses ongles d’une agilité et d’une force singulières. L’enfant tourne, retourne son joujou, il le gratte, il le secoue, le cogne contre les murs, le jette par terre. De temps en temps il lui fait recommencer ses mouvements mécaniques, quelquefois en sens inverse. La vie merveilleuse s’arrête.24 What motivates this search for the toy’s soul? Baudelaire describes it both as a metaphysical tendency—a quest for the transcendental principle—and as a manie—an obsession associated with hands and with touching. He describes meticulously how the manie fills the fingers and nails of the child as he searches for the soul of the toy. The paradox is that children passionately desire to touch the untouchable and see the invisible, i.e. the soul. The search for the toy’s soul is also discussed in an essay by Rainer Maria Rilke, entitled “Some Reflections on Dolls” (1914), which was most likely

132

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

inspired by Baudelaire’s toy essay. According to Rilke, it is the doll’s refusal to respond—its blank face and its constant silence—that forces the child to assert itself: With the doll we were forced to assert ourselves, for, had we surrendered ourselves to it, there would then have been no one there at all. It made no response whatever, so that we were put in the position of having to take over the part it should have played, of having to split our gradually enlarging personality into part and counterpart; in a sense, through it to keep the world, which was entering into us at all sides, at a distance.25 The doll thus refuses to return the child’s gaze, much like the people the flâneur runs into in the streets. It is as if the doll insists on keeping its secret, and Rilke asserts that this leaves the child with an unsatisfied desire. As the doll remains unresponsive, the child’s desire is directed toward the dollsoul, an “invisible something” that animates the doll and whose existence is highly uncertain: “[O]ne could never say exactly where you really were. Whether you were in oneself or in the sleepy creature over there, whom one constantly endowed with you.… But fundamentally, one were so busy keeping you alive that one had no time to determine what you were.”26 Rilke thus implies that a doll’s soul must be kept alive by the child; if the doll remains untouched for too long, the doll’s soul will be destroyed, and the doll will return to being an inanimate object. Both Baudelaire and Rilke thus have an understanding of the metaphysics of toys and assert that children perceive in them an animating principle: a soul. Yet, this soul is very much dependent upon the care and belief of the child; it is the child’s touch and imagination that keep it alive. This implies that the lives of toys must inevitably come to an end, and Rilke is concerned with the afterlife of dolls; what happens when no one plays with them anymore? Baudelaire’s interest lies elsewhere: he is concerned with the way children violently destroy their toys. For not only do children wish to touch the untouchable and see the invisible; in order to see what makes toys come alive, they destroy and put their toys to rest once and for all. The question of what animates the toy is especially interesting insofar as Baudelaire’s example is a mechanical toy—a toy that moves all by itself, as soon as the child pulls its mechanism. Baudelaire describes how the child starts the toys’ mechanical movements over and over again; he even reverses the toys’ movements. As everyone knows, this violent procedure may easily damage the mechanics of a toy, and as a result, the toy’s “marvelous life comes to a stop.” We may ask if mechanical toys are more susceptible to this destructive treatment than other toys. Is there something about the toys’ mechanical movements that provoke the child’s violent response? In this regard, we should keep in mind that the Romantic age was obsessed with dolls, marionettes, and automata, figures that featured in the writings of E.

Toys

133

T. A. Hoffmann and Heinrich von Kleist, among others, and that at a later date attracted the attention of Rilke and the surrealists. These “figures” were seen as combining the human and the mechanical, as well as the human and the supernatural, thus crossing boundaries that were perceived as natural. They provoked questions about the fate of man in the age of technology and whether inanimate objects could come to life. Accordingly, these figures were perceived as uncanny.27 In this light, the mechanical toys Baudelaire describes can be seen as simple automata or cheap, popular versions of the automata from Hoffmann’s stories. For Baudelaire, these are “the poor child’s toy,” and he gives several examples: the cardboard punchinello, actuated by a single thread; the blacksmiths hammering at their anvil; the horse and its rider in three pieces, four wooden pins for the leg, the horse’s tail forming a whistle, and sometimes the rider wearing a little feather in his cap, which is a great luxury.28 le polichinelle plat, mû par un seul fil; les forgerons qui battent l’enclume; le cheval et son cavalier en trois morceaux, quatre chevilles pour les jambes, la queue du cheval formant un sifflet et quelquefois le cavalier portant une petite plume, ce qui est un grand luxe.29 A description that is revealing in this regard can be found in the diary of one of the most renowned producers of automata in the nineteenth century, the illusionist Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin. Describing his first attempt in the art of making automata, Robert-Houdin compares his first results with a simple mechanical toy, and more precisely, a toy that is reminiscent of the mechanical blacksmiths Baudelaire refers to: Have you ever noticed a toy belonging to earliest youth, representing two blacksmiths at work on an anvil, which they are made to strike in turn by pulling two parallel rods? Well, those mechanical combinations, sold at one penny, I believe, are perfect marvels of art in comparison with my first essay in modelling.30 In fact, the same motif—two farriers beating an anvil—was used in one of Marey’s chronophotographic experiments, with stunning results. This seems to indicate that mechanical toys also played a part in the analysis of motion. Although the mechanical toys Baudelaire describes are of a simpler sort than Hoffmann’s and Robert-Houdin’s automata, and are based on a simpler technology than Marey’s photographs, they may cause the same kind of fascination and stupefaction in children. And certainly, they attracted Baudelaire’s interest—as cheap, mass-produced “automata” proliferating in the age of technological reproducibility.

134

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

In this context, it is interesting to observe that Benjamin recognized that animated dolls—in this case marionettes—belonged to the same mysterious sphere as did dioramas and panoramas: “The peep shows along with the dioramas, myrioramas, and panoramas, whose pictures were manufactured in Augsburg for the most part, lead the observer even more deeply into the mysteries of the world of play than do the marionettes.”31 Along with Simon During, we may describe these phenomena as instances of secular magic (as opposed to natural magic), that is, deceptive performances and objects, which emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and were used for entertainment purposes.32 Discussing the relationship between magic and religion, During stresses that secular magic corresponds to a secular worldview, but still excels great power in modern culture. Using the term “magic assemblage,” he describes the close relationship between various phenomena from popular culture, from magic lantern shows, ventriloquism, and early film to automata displays and optical toys. This secular magic was an important inspiration for Romantic literature.33 Baudelaire was also fascinated by secular magic. Yet, what intrigues him in the toy essay is not merely the child’s belief in the enchanting “life” of mechanical toys, but also the child’s inclination to destroy them. As he describes the child’s violent attack on these toys, he makes a comparison that is interesting in this regard. He compares the child’s effort with the effort of the people attacking and besieging le Palais des Tuileries, the home of the royal family: “The child, like the people besieging the Tuileries, makes a supreme effort; at last he opens it up, he is the stronger. But where is the soul?” (“L’enfant, comme le peuple qui assiège les Tuileries, fait un suprême effort; enfin il l’entrouvre, il est le plus fort. Mais où est l’âme?”)34 Just as the people succeeded in raiding les Tuileries through persistent attacks (in 1792, 1830, and 1848), the child succeeds in ripping the toy open. With this comparison, Baudelaire gives the attack on the toy a profane motivation; the child may be seen as demystifying the power of the toy, revealing that its power is merely a hollow fiction. Baudelaire thus describes toys as profoundly ambiguous objects; they are enchanting objects that open up an imaginative world and appear to come to life, yet they are profane objects that can be touched and destroyed. But whereas the people rejoiced in their victory at the Tuileries palace, the “victory” over the toy only causes sadness and melancholy in the child. Disappointed and disillusioned, they ask where the soul is. Children want to believe in the soul of toys, although we may suspect that their desire to see the soul is caused by a vague suspicion that no soul can be found. Indeed, the children destroying their toys may be seen as demonstrating the principle of deconstruction; they destroy and dismantle the fiction of power and are left with a dismantled object that does not work anymore. Having alluded to the uncanny world of E. T. A Hoffmann, Baudelaire finishes his toy essay with an allusion to Edgar Allen Poe’s mystery tales and

Toys

135

in this manner establishes a link between the child and the detective. What he refers to is the detective’s ability to solve the mysteries of modern life. He asks whether children who immediately destroy their toys are motivated by a superstitious fury against these tiny imitations of humanity, or whether they are subjecting their toys to a Freemason-like trial before admitting them into their lives. “Puzzling question!” he exclaims (in English), and thereby finishes the essay. As Poe’s readers will recall, the expression “puzzling question” appears in Poe’s epigraph to the short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), which asserts that such “puzzling questions” are “not beyond all conjecture.”35 Just as Poe’s detective was puzzled by the mysteries presented to him, but always managed to solve them, Baudelaire was puzzled by the mysterious spell of toys, but managed to see through it. For Baudelaire, as well as for Hoffmann and Poe, all that seemed to transgress the human was puzzling, yet—as they were fully aware—these puzzling mysteries belonged to the profane world. In the profane age of technological reproducibility, this double consciousness was essential for the poet.

The uncertain status of objects The second text in which Baudelaire addresses our relationship to things, toys, and commodities is the prose poem entitled “Le Joujou du pauvre,” published in La Presse in September 1862.36 This prose poem is in fact based on a few passages from the toy essay published in 1853. Baudelaire’s descriptions in the essay of the poor child’s toy (mechanical toys) and of the living toy (the rat in a cage) are here duplicated with only minor revisions. In the prose poem, however, these toys are not labeled as “the poor child’s toy” and “the living toy,” as they are in the essay. The only label is in the title “Le Joujou du pauvre,” whose reference is uncertain. What gives the prose poem its distinct character is the opening, which creates a new framework for the discussion of toys. “Le Joujou du pauvre” begins by proposing an idea for “an innocent form of entertainment” (“un divertissement innocent”) and in this manner takes the form of an urban play manual offering ideas for “things to do” or “games to play” in the modern city. The activity that is suggested to the reader is to bring along cheap toys on a stroll in the city and to offer them to poor children as gifts: When you go out in the morning with the firm intention of strolling along the highways, fill your pockets with little inventions costing a penny,— like the flat puppet worked by a single thread, or the farriers beating on an anvil, or the rider and his horse whose tail is a whistle—and in front of inns, or at the foot of trees, present them to the children you meet, children who are unknown to you and who are poor. You’ll see their eyes grow immeasurable wide.

136

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

Quand vous sortirez le matin avec l’intention décidée de flâner sur les grandes routes, remplissez vos poches de petites inventions à un sol,— telles que le polichinelle plat mû par un seul fil, les forgerons qui battent l’enclume, le cavalier et son cheval dont la queue est un sifflet,—et le long des cabarets, au pieds des arbres, faites-en homage aux enfants inconnus et pauvres que vous rencontrerez. Vous verrez leurs yeux s’aggrandir démesurément. The idea presented here conflates divertissement, flânerie, and performance, and the aim appears to be the observation of the children’s response to the offer: they will at first be greatly surprised and not believe their luck, before they suddenly take the toys and run away with them. This performative project clearly breaks with the distant attitude typical of the nineteenthcentury flâneur. We may assume that, just as in “La Fausse monnaie” (“The Counterfeit Coin”), the project is “to create an event.” In “La Fausse monnaie,” this was achieved by offering a counterfeit coin to a beggar; here, the project is to offer cheap toys to poor children. What motivates such undertakings? As Jacques Derrida has shown, “La Fausse monnaie” can be seen as a sophisticated demonstration of the ambiguity of giving: by giving, one sur-prises (literally “over-takes”) the recipient and in this manner obtains a hold (une prise) over him.37 Therefore, there is every reason to question the possibility of giving unselfishly. Further, it should be pointed out that the act of giving objects for free undermines the logic of the commodity: the exchange value. When the poetic subject in “Le Jojou du pauvre” suggests that people should give cheap toys to poor children for free, this could be seen as a commitment to expenditure—as a kind of entertainment.38 However, at stake in both “La Fausse monnaie” and “Le Jojou du pauvre” is not merely the ambiguous act of giving, but also the uncertain status of the gift, or, to put it more generally, the uncertain status of objects in the modern world. We should therefore note the peculiarity of the objects depicted by the poetic subject or of the “props” required for the street performance: “little inventions costing a penny,—like the flat puppet worked by a single thread, or the farriers beating on an anvil, or the rider and his horse whose tail is a whistle.” These objects are mechanical toys, that is, “smart” devices that can create movement or sound and in this manner appear to “come to life.” In the toy essay, Baudelaire assured the reader that these toys have the same imaginary value as more extravagant toys: “But do you think that these simple images create a lesser reality in the child’s mind than those New Year’s Day marvels …?” (“Croyez-vous que ces images simplent créent une moindre réalité dans l’esprit de l’enfant que ces merveilles du jour de l’an …?”)39 Yet, the status of these cheap, mass-produced toys is somewhat uncertain; they are at once toys, mechanical devices, and commodities. From this perspective, we may suspect that the children will not merely be surprised

Toys

137

by the unexpected offer, but also be unable to recognize the “true” nature of the gift. According to Baudelaire, the children first stare at the objects, then they touch them and run off with them like cats running off with a piece of food, or, we may add, like thieves. Thus, it seems that there is a conflict between sight and touch in the children’s response to the offer. First they react as if they were cut off from the toys by an invisible barrier—as if they were commodities on display in a shop window. Then they realize that no such barrier exists; they grab the toys and run off with them like animals. The performance incorporates both of the norm of “just looking,” which pertains to commodities on display, and of children’s desire to touch and caress toys. Still, the mechanical toys are not the only ambivalent objects described in the prose poem. In the second half of the prose poem, we are presented with a description of a “living toy.” It is described as a chose vue, and is revealed gradually, so that we slowly see the whole picture: a rich boy in a garden by a castle has thrown his splendid toy away in order to watch something in the street on the other side of the fence: a rat in a cage and its owner, a poor boy who teases the rat. The poetic subject comments on this scene in the following manner: “Now, this toy, which the little slattern was teasing, shaking, and waving about in a barred box, was a live rat! The parents, no doubt as a means of saving money, had found the toy in life itself.” (“Or, ce joujou, que le petit souillon agaçait, agitait et secouait dans une boîte grillée, c’était un rat vivant! Les parents, par économie sans doute, avaient tiré le joujou de la vie elle-même.”) With this particular toy, we are actually leaving the world of objects; this toy is taken from life itself. What kind of toy is the living toy? First of all, it contrasts with the rich child’s toy, which he has thrown away: “Beside him, lying on the grass, was a splendid toy, as fresh as its owner.” (“À côté de lui, gisait sur l’herbe un joujou splendide, aussi frais que son maître.”) This toy seems to illustrate Baudelaire’s observation that many toys are miniatures of bourgeois domestic life. Here, even the hierarchy of bourgeois life is reproduced; the child is depicted as the toy’s master. The scene also proves Benjamin’s point that toys should not merely be based on imitation because then they will be simply uninspiring. Accordingly, the splendid doll is thrown away, and as the verb “gisait” suggests, it lies lifeless on the lawn, as a corpse. The splendid toy is like a splendid corpse—lifeless, immobile, dead. By contrast, the rat is very much alive and subject to both children’s keen attention. This living toy is not put into motion by means of the imagination, nor is it put into motion mechanically. The rat moves all by itself; it is a selfoperating creature. However, its movements are here provoked by the boy and restricted by the cage, and therefore limited in scope. The poor child teases and tortures the rat, but interacts with it in a quite restricted manner. As for the rich child, he watches the rat avidly, “as a rare and unknown object” (“comme un objet rare et inconnu”). In this manner, he demonstrates

138

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

that living creatures are now included in the world of things and that they, too, are exposed to the desire for appropriation. More than anything, the rat in the cage is treated as pure possession. The prose poem can be seen as an illustration of the decline in play in the age of high capitalism. Poor children see toys merely as commodities and seem to be unable to play with them; rich children find their expensive toys uninspiring and throw them away. Some poor children even take their toys from life itself and treat them as possessions. The prose poem thus offers a reflection on the uncertain status of objects in the modern world, and the inability to enter into meaningful relationships with objects. Indeed, it may seem that the only person capable of playing in this prose poem is the poetic subject, and we may therefore inquire into what kind of activity he is engaging in. Although it is described as an “innocent form of entertainment,” it may also be considered an art project—a street performance in which he plays with the uncertain status of objects. He offers children toys that may serve as initiation into the world of art, while the children are unable to enjoy the gift. The seemingly altruistic enterprise clashes with the real world, where people treat objects as commodities. Is there a pedagogy involved here? We should recall that the poetic subject presents the whole project in a pedagogic manner, as an “idea” to try. Remembering the title of Baudelaire’s essay “Morale du joujou” as well as his view on toys as initiation into art, we may suspect that the poetic subject has taken on a pedagogic project, attempting to teach the reader how to play with objects.

Play and profanation Having examined Baudelaire’s writings on toys, we may make a few preliminary conclusions and connect the discussion of play and toys to the overall subjects of this book. The matter is, however, complex and many issues are intertwined here, so we should be careful not to oversimplify. How should we describe the relationship between nineteenth-century toys and nineteenth-century media? What is the fate of toys in the age of technology and the age of high capitalism? Certainly, Baudelaire’s essay on toys could be read simply as a tribute to the Romantic imagination, as has often been the case. He praises the imaginative abilities of the child and describes the way toys open up an imaginative world to the child. He also reflects on the various ways in which children play with toys, highlighting the reciprocal relationship between child and toy. In this respect, Baudelaire’s ideas on toys are largely compatible with Winnicott’s ideas about transitional objects, although Baudelaire is more interested in the imaginative world opened up by toys than he is in the child’s relationship to reality.

Toys

139

Unlike Winnicott, however, Baudelaire views toys in light of the material culture of his day. He situates his discussion of toys in nineteenth-century Paris; he discusses numerous toys stemming from this specific culture; and he addresses the similarities between toys, fetishes, and commodities. Further, he describes the decline in play in the modern world and the inability to enter into meaningful relationships with objects. Thus, what Baudelaire describes in a more or less tacit manner is the clash between the Romantic imagination and the age of the commodity. The Romantic imagination, through which the poet casts a spell on objects and makes them come alive (and we should keep in mind that anthropomorphization was the master trope of Romantic literature), clashes with the fetishist imagination. This clash was duly noted by Benjamin in his writings on Baudelaire’s poetry, and it is also essential in terms of his writings on toys. There is thus every reason to keep Benjamin’s historical-materialistic perspective in mind and to see Baudelaire’s writings on toys within a broader cultural context. In this respect, During’s concepts of secular magic and magic assemblage are useful because they allow us to consider various nineteenth-century toys within a broader context and connect them to the nineteenth-century media. Optical toys, mechanical toys, automatas, commodity fetishes, panoramas, dioramas, photographs, and newspapers were all enchanting phenomena having a powerful impact on nineteenth-century culture. We may thus extend the perspective and acknowledge that Baudelaire responds not merely to the rise of commodity fetishism, but also to a wide-ranging magic assemblage that has capitalism and technological development as its premise. This is where the concept of play becomes particularly interesting. In an essay entitled “In Praise of Profanation,” Agamben examines capitalism as a form of religion, asserting that religion captures things within a separated sphere and in this manner removes them from common use. Transferring this perspective to capitalism, he discusses the possibility of returning such things to common use through profanation. According to Agamben, play is an organ of profanation: “The passage from the sacred to the profane can, in fact, also come about by means of an entirely inappropriate use (or, rather, reuse) of the sacred: namely, play.”40 Yet, Agamben contends that capitalism today has made profanation a difficult enterprise because it has extended its reach to include all spheres of society and captured all the means of profanation—without remainder. In this situation, there is also a decline in play as an organ of profanation: Play as an organ of profanation is in decline everywhere. Modern man proves he no longer knows how to play precisely through the vertiginous proliferation of new and old games.… In this sense, televised game shows are part of a new liturgy.… To return play to its purely profane vocation is a political task.41

140

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

Agamben asserts that there are still “effective means of profanation,” but he maintains that profanation not simply means returning things to a “natural” state that existed before the separation. For Agamben profanation is a kind of deactivation, which emancipates a programmed behavior, preserving its structure, but not its function and meaning: The cat who plays with a ball of yarn as if it were a mouse—just as the child plays with ancient religious symbols or objects that once belonged to the economic sphere—knowingly uses the characteristic behaviors of predatory activity (or, in the case of the child, of the religious cult or the world of work) in vain. These behaviors are not effaced, but, thanks to the substitution of the yarn for the mouse (or the toy for the sacred object), deactivated and thus opened up to a new, possible use.42 The point here is that profanation opens up to a new use and that a new use only becomes possible through the deactivation of an old use. “For to profane means not simply to abolish and erase separations but to learn to put them to a new use, to play with them.” What, then, is this new use? It is a free use that is liberated from having a purpose or an end; “it has joyously forgotten its goal and can now show itself as such, as a means without an end.”43 In these reflections, Agamben clearly relates back to his essay on Baudelaire and the free use of toys. In both essays, he sees play as a liberating activity that may release us from disciplinary structures and mindsets and restore us to a more profound experience of being in the world. It is no wonder that both Benjamin and Agamben are keen readers of Baudelaire, for he appears to have understood these processes very well. As Marx’s contemporary, he observed the impact of capitalism on Parisian culture, he noticed a change in our relationship to things, and he was sensitive to the effects of secular magic. Yet, his attitude toward these phenomena was profoundly ambiguous; he fought against its most vulgar installments, but was enchanted by its imaginary potential. Baudelaire thus entertained a double consciousness with respect to the secular magic of capitalism; rather than simply denouncing it, he immersed himself in it and played with it, knowing that its spell could be broken. Especially interesting in this regard is Baudelaire’s fascination with mechanical toys. When he asserts that even simple toys may fascinate the child, he describes three mechanical toys in detail, and when he reflects upon the children’s habit of ripping up their toys in search of their soul, he uses a mechanical toy as his example. In this manner, he reveals that he was highly influenced by the popular culture in which he lived. Mechanical toys of various sorts proliferated the market in the industrial age; they were cheap, mass produced, and catered to the growing fascination with technology and animation. Whereas automatons were expensive and complex constructions, mechanical toys were simple devices whose construction could more easily

Toys

141

be understood. They were moderately enchanting devices whose spell could easily be broken. Insofar as their mechanism was not concealed, but rather quite visible, they could be viewed as producing honest illusions. Furthermore, these mechanical apparatuses were devised to be operated manually and thus required the interaction of the playing subject. Moreover, it is essential that Baudelaire not merely laments the decline in play in the modern world, but also offers counterstrategies: spell-breaking activities and playful practices. In his essay on toys, he describes the toy as an enchanting object, but he also describes how children destroy their toys, breaking the spell the toys have cast upon them. In his prose poem on toys, he describes the decline in play, but then promotes a different way of playing with objects. In many respects, he seems to adopt a pedagogic— or a mockpedagogic—perspective. Uncovering “la morale du joujou” and offering “ideas for innocent forms of entertainment,” he pretends to teach the reader how to play. Or put more generally, he pretends to teach the reader how to relate to objects. Knowing Baudelaire’s aesthetic preferences, we may assume that the aim is not to destroy the imaginative world opened up by the toy (or the object) altogether, but to deprive it of its petrifying powers and make it an “honest” rather than deceitful illusion. The endeavor is, in short, to profane the spell of toys. Baudelaire was well aware of the illusion imposed on us by toys and by dispositives. However, through various forms of play, he aimed to profane their spell and deprive them of their disciplinary power. Certainly, Baudelaire knew both how to play with the dispositives and how to smash them.

6 Media imagery and modernity

The mind is a camera obscura. Paris is like a kaleidoscope. Life is like a film. Through the course of history, the media have served as privileged models and metaphors for reflecting on our mental and perceptual processes—not only in art, but also in philosophy and science. What is the reason for this? It may be that media technology is well suited as imagery for complex processes involving change or transformation. Such imagery provides us with specific and concrete ways of thinking about processes that otherwise appear incomprehensible and abstract. In particular, visual media technology offers useful imagery for the conceptualization of our imaginative and cognitive processes. There is a long-standing tradition in Western philosophy for describing the understanding process as a process of seeing, and there seems to be a preference for optical metaphors in philosophy. Especially in the Enlightenment paradigm of thought, the notions of light, seeing, and knowledge have been associated with one another, and optical technologies such as glasses, mirrors, and the camera obscura demonstrate the prevalence of the optical model in Enlightenment philosophy.1 This particular body of metaphors conveyed the idea of seeing as a transparent process and was used to support the idea that human consciousness can gain access to the empirical world without mediation. Yet this started to change with the advent of Romanticism, when the imagination was seen as the supreme human faculty. In this period, the images of the lamp and of the lanterna magica prevailed, contributing to the idea of the imaginative processes as a projection of images and a conception of literature as a lanterna magica producing a visual world for the reader. When new optical devices were invented and spread during the nineteenth century, new ways of seeing were made possible, and hence new metaphors were made available for the description of the mental and perceptual processes. Thus, the technologies of the phantasmagoria, the kaleidoscope, photography—and eventually the cinema—not merely contributed to the development of a new visual culture, but also provided new models and

144

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

metaphors for describing the experience of modernity. These metaphors conveyed the idea of vision as a complex phenomenon that involved distortion and construction. Furthermore, they brought attention to the perceptual processes as they developed in time, taking into account the role of the body and the effects of motion. These metaphors thus challenged, on the one hand, the Enlightenment paradigm of transparency and, on the other hand, the Romanticist paradigm of illumination and served to conceptualize a new historical paradigm: modernity. What are the implications of envisioning the human processes by means of such imagery? A simplistic response would be that they contribute to a mechanical view of man, and that such metaphors stem from a tradition of mechanistic philosophers. However, both the use of metaphors and the question of the relationship between man and technology should be considered at a deeper level. As Friedrich Kittler has argued, “we knew nothing about our senses until media provided models and metaphors.”2 That which is most intimate to us—our senses and our imaginative and cognitive abilities—simply need to be considered at a distance in order to be recognized and reflected upon. I would like to suggest that, in order to recognize the technological imagery at work, it may be useful to consider such imagery as rhetorical tropes of a particular kind. Whereas the act of attributing human qualities to that which is inhuman is identified as anthropomorphism, the act of attributing technological qualities to that which is human (our imaginative and perceptual processes) may be identified as technomorphism. Interestingly, technomorphism proliferates the period of modernity/modernism, but has been considered more in moralist terms than in rhetorical terms. Attention has been directed to the reified notions of humanity such images supposedly convey rather than the complex workings of such images. Instead of this moralist approach, however, we may recognize technological and visual imagery as useful for the conceptualizing of our perceptual and imaginative processes. Furthermore, such imagery may stimulate reflection on the boundaries between man and technology. According to Kittler, the reason for the privileged role of media metaphors for the depiction of our perceptual processes is simply that the media are developed to override our senses. As we have seen with respect to Baudelaire, they serve as interfaces allowing us to expand our “natural” abilities and explore complex perceptual possibilities. The intricate relationship between our senses and technology is also what makes uncertain the boundaries of the human, and it often brings about an uneasiness with respect to technology. Numerous philosophers have addressed the question of the relationship between man and technology, either warning against technology as a dehumanization agent or acknowledging it as an essential part of man. Kittler contends that there are media because “man is an animal whose properties are not yet fixed,” and accordingly, our humanistic idea of “man” is a fabrication that we should dispose

Media imagery and modernity

145

of.3 Agamben, too, addresses the question of technology within a wider discussion concerning the relationship between man and animal. According to Agamben, our encounters with the dispositives constitute us as human beings: “Through these apparatuses, man attempts to nullify the animalistic behaviors that are now separated from him, and to enjoy the Open as such, to enjoy being insofar as it is being. At the root of each apparatus lies an all-too-human desire for happiness.”4 At stake in these discussions—which are indebted to Heidegger’s thought—is thus our conception of the human and the possibility of happiness. These perspectives are highly relevant for a discussion about the uses of media imagery to describe what is properly human. Although Kittler and Agamben have quite different takes on these issues, both see our encounters with media technology as crucial for our experiences as human beings. Embracing a posthuman future, Kittler fully accepts the decisive role of technology, asserting that “media determinate our situation.”5Agamben’s stance is more critical. Even if he recognizes that a desire for happiness is at the root of each “apparatus” or dispositive, he is concerned with the way capitalism today has captured the dispositives, and the way modern media such as cell phones and television have made man more unfree than ever.6 In this manner, he addresses questions and concerns that have always imbued discussions on technology and that regard man’s agency, power, and freedom with respect to technology. Such perspectives are certainly pertinent and cannot be easily set aside, especially in the twenty-first century, when the era of technological reproducibility has given way to the era of advanced digital media technology. Yet, it is important to remember that the course of media history is not a one-way street without possibilities or disruptive moments. In this regard, it is worth reconsidering nineteenth-century media culture and the possibilities for play that came with the first phase of modernity. As the analogue media were used manually and their processes and mechanisms were more or less transparent, they invited play. Furthermore, the illusions they produced gave rise to a double consciousness; it was possible to simultaneously believe and not believe in newspapers, photographs, and optical illusions. These possibilities for play and for a double consciousness are what gave rise to Baudelaire’s media aesthetics. The questions I want to address in this concluding chapter concern the relationship between nineteenth-century media and modernity, and more specifically the way nineteenth-century media have contributed to the conceptualization of some of modernist aesthetics’ basic notions, as well as some of the key concepts of theories of modernity. In the decades before and after 1900, basic ideas of time and space, imagination and memory, truth and deception were reconfigured by means of models and metaphors issuing from nineteenth-century media technology. In a first section, I sum up the role such imagery played in Baudelaire’s writings and outline the

146

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

main characteristics of Baudelaire’s media aesthetics. In a second section, I extend the perspective and discuss how nineteenth-century media technology later served as models and metaphors in some early theories of modernity: notably the tradition of critical thinkers represented by Marx, Freud, and Benjamin. As these are prominent thinkers whose writings have been thoroughly investigated and discussed, this is an issue that cannot be dealt with in depth here. My aim is merely to bring attention to the importance of media imagery in the tradition of modern critical thinkers and in this manner open up a wider perspective, without attempting to fully cover the issue. What is important in this respect is not merely to extend the investigation of the use of media imagery into the twentieth century, but to introduce a genealogical perspective and situate key concepts of modernist theories within a historical framework. This leads to a closing discussion concerning different attitudes toward images and the relationship between nineteenth-century media and modernity.

Baudelaire’s media aesthetics recapitulated A new chapter in the history of images began in the nineteenth century. Romantic art, which was devoted to the imagination and the production of “inner” images, was confronted with a new regime of images that were mechanically produced. The result of this confrontation can be seen in Baudelaire’s aesthetics, which could be conceived of, to a large degree, as a sophisticated media aesthetics. Furthermore, it can be detected in the gaze of the flâneur, which testifies to the interaction between the Romantic imagination and the imagination marked by nineteenth-century media technology, that is, a media-saturated imagination. Accordingly, Baudelaire’s media aesthetics bridges the gap between high culture and popular culture and can be seen as intermedial at its core; it integrates aspects from poetry and journalism, painting and photography, as well as a broad spectrum of popular arts and devices. Taking intermediality as its premise, Baudelaire’s aesthetics demonstrates how the different media respond to one another and how the conventions of one medium can be paraphrased in another medium. The following paragraphs may serve to recapitulate key issues of the previous chapters and to outline the main attributes of Baudelaire’s media aesthetics: Mediation. Baudelaire’s media aesthetics brings attention to the processes of mediation; it reveals that modern life must be mediated in order to be noticed and recognizes that both visibility and readability are produced. Where visibility is produced through framing and captioning (photographs), readability is produced through layout and genre labels (newspapers). These features, which are supposed to help the reader and viewer make sense of what he reads and sees, are mocked by Baudelaire, for whom the point is

Media imagery and modernity

147

not so much to make sense of modern life, but instead to experience it and be seduced by it. As we have seen, the reading of texts and the reading of images are constantly problematized in Baudelaire’s writings. In particular, he explores mediated vision and the “optical unconscious” of images. Yet for Baudelaire, the optical unconscous is not only about empirical truth revealed by the camera, but rather about poetic truth, and it thus blends with the workings of the imagination. Montage. A central feature of Baudelaire’s media aesthetics is montage. As Benjamin famously has shown, Baudelaire’s writing reconfigures time through the use of allegory, in this manner juxtaposing the old and the new in dense constellations. Further, his writing reconfigures space through decomposition of organic material and recomposition of the same material into something new. In this respect, he puts to use the key principle of the media of his day. The commercial newspaper appears as a montage of miscellany texts, juxtaposing pieces that bear no relation to one another, and the kaleidoscope serves as a model for the principle of decomposition/ recomposition. Both the newspaper and the kaleidoscope were everyday items that introduced and spread the principle of montage in nineteenthcentury culture. As we have seen, Baudelaire’s writing experiments with kaleidoscopic vision and explores the forms and functions of the newspapers. Movement. Baudelaire’s writing takes part in a century-long obsession with movement, and his passion for movement spans from Delacroix’s vibrant colors and Constantin Guys’s sketches to the dynamic violence of the pantomime. It is therefore not surprising that he was fascinated by the movement of precinematic devices and that his aesthetics generally is concerned with movement. How to capture movement, how to process movement, how to make images move, and how to depict movement through the medium of literature are among the questions Baudelaire grapples with. The workings of the kaleidoscope, the sketch, the synthesis of movement, the decomposition/recomposition of movement, movement effects, light effects, and the vibration of colors are techniques and tools that he explores in this regard. Baudelaire demonstrates a fascination for the flickering and movement of modern life, and his writing is full of cinematic motifs such as crowds, carriages, and comic fighting scenes. Both his motifs and his techniques testify to his precinematic sensibility. The bodily apparatus. Baudelaire’s media aesthetics is an aesthetics in the true sense of the word, meaning that it focuses on the senses and the perceptual processes of the body. The experience of modern life is described as a sensual experience, closely in tune with the city, which appears as a media-saturated environment. Baudelaire is concerned with the magical atmosphere of the city, which creates a feeling of dizziness (a loss of time and space coordinates), producing a completely new existence. The media are seen as invasive technologies that are partly integrated within

148

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

our perceptual apparatuses, as seen in his image “kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness.” In Baudelaire’s urban environments, images appear to be taken up and recoded collectively, in a distracted mode, rather than individually and contemplatively. Interfaces. Baudelaire’s media aesthetics highlights the importance of mediating objects serving as interfaces between man and the world, such as toys, fetishes, commodities, media devices, and art. It explores the way such objects appeal to the imagination of the beholder and the reciprocal relationship that is established thereby. Although Baudelaire recognized the dual status of commodities and media devices in the age of capitalism, he was able to see through their powerful illusions, and he preferred an honest illusion to a deceitful one. In his writing, Baudelaire played with the illusions of such objects, thus depriving them of their spellbinding power. Virtuality. An interesting feature of Baudelaire’s media aesthetics is that it explores the generative abilities of the imagination on the one hand and the visual potential of the modern city on the other. Baudelaire describes virtual images whose condition of existence is the temporal act of unfolding and refers to an infinite repertoire of images. In particular, he is interested in optical illusions that allow him to explore the potential of his own field of vision. Rejecting a “realist” perception of the world, Baudelaire explores the microlevel of perception and is fascinated by a perceptual system at the verge of congestion. Interestingly, there appears to be an affinity between this mode of perception and Bergson’s concept of multiplicity. Multiplication. Baudelaire’s writings demonstrate an awareness of the multiplication of clichés and images in the age of mechanical reproducibility and the corresponding possibility for multiplication of representations and identities. Baudelaire explores the loss of authenticity and the loss of “aura.” He describes what happens when the poet loses his distinguishing marks and becomes a commoner using commonplace language. In several manners, Baudelaire’s media aesthetics demonstrates that, with the age of mechanical reproducibility comes rich possibilities for play.

Media imagery in theories of modernity Baudelaire shared his interest in nineteenth-century culture with Marx, Freud, and Benjamin, but their views about it and their ways of dealing with it differ in many ways. Whereas Baudelaire developed a sophisticated media aesthetics, which bears witness to a new perceptual regime, Marx, Freud, and Benjamin used nineteenth-century media (notably the phantasmagoria, photography, the stereoscope, and the kaleidoscope) to conceptualize new ideas about the mental and perceptual processes, thus reconsidering the categories of time and space, imagination and memory, truth and deception.

Media imagery and modernity

149

Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) and Karl Marx (1818–83) were contemporaries. Both witnessed the transformation of nineteenth-century culture—the expansion of capitalist ideology and the growth of a new visual regime—and wrote extensively about the city of Paris as the center of these transformation. Both were idealists invigorated by the 1848 revolution and both were critical toward the bourgeoisie (the social class to which they both belonged). Yet, Baudelaire soon turned his back on politics, devoting himself instead to poetry and aesthetics, whereas Marx became a renowned political philosopher, relatively uninterested in aesthetics. Although their trajectories differ in many ways, Baudelaire and Marx had a common interest in the new course taken by nineteenth-century culture, and, not the least, in the illusions haunting the century. As for Baudelaire, he declared himself disillusioned by the outcome of the 1848 revolution, and retrospectively he asserted that 1848 was interesting primarily because everyone had been building “castles in the air.” Throughout his life he mocked political ideals as illusions and utopias, and he was scornful of how we tend to lean on illusions in everyday life. “Chacun sa chimère” (“To Each his Chimera”) is the title he gave to one of his prose poems.7 Another prose poem, “La Soupe et les nuages” (“The Soup and the Clouds”), depicts a dreamer envisioning the clouds as beautiful phantasmagorias.8 Presumably, this ability to see through illusions was the reason why he preferred honest rather than deceitful illusions in aesthetics. As for Marx, he attacked the capitalist ideology as an all-encompassing illusion obliterating our sense of the material world. Yet, it is interesting to note that his analysis of capitalist ideology makes use of an optical metaphor stemming from a media technology that became popular early in the nineteenth century. It was Marx who initiated the tradition of seeing capitalist culture as a phantasmagoria, a show pretending to present ghosts on stage. In the Marxist tradition, the concept of the phantasmagoria proved to be useful because it served to conceptualize the spell of capitalism and the false consciousness it gave rise to. Given the shared historical context of Baudelaire’s and Marx’s writings, it would be naïve to see the former as a poet embedded in sociopolitical processes and the latter as a theorist providing universal tools for analyzing these sociopolitical processes. As Margaret Cohen has argued, Marx’s writings are to a large extent embedded in the nineteenth century. Furthermore, she suggest that it was Benjamin’s ambition in “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” to demonstrate that Baudelaire and Marx were “implicated in the same Parisian rhetorical milieu” and that the “expressive character of the Parisian environments shapes Marx thought.”9 (As is well known, this ambition was not recognized by Adorno, who described the essay as “a wide-eyed presentation of mere facts.”)10 These perspectives may prompt us to look further into the uses of nineteenth-century media imagery in Marx, Freud, and Benjamin’s writings.

150

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

Marx: The phantasmagoria of commodities Marx’s use of optical metaphors has been the interest of numerous researchers, in particular, his use of the camera obscura to describe the way ideology creates an upside-down image of reality.11 Yet, his reference to the phantasmagoria in Capital (1867) has been neglected to a large degree, with a few remarkable exceptions.12 As described in the Introduction, the phantasmagoria was part of the nineteenth-century entertainment industry based on visual deception. It conjured supernatural phenomena on stage, and in this manner, caused thrills and fear among the spectators. This was achieved by means of a lanterna magica, which was put to a new use. Contrary to standard magic lantern projections, where the projector was placed among the spectators, the instrument was in the phantasmagoria hidden backstage or made invisible in the dark theater. In this manner, the projected image appeared to be “without cause” and rational explanation; it appeared supernatural. Further, the projector could be put on wheels and moved around; in this manner the projected image would also move, now diminishing and now growing larger, appearing to come closer or to withdraw. And as the projected images were “naturally” immaterial and transparent, they passed through solid objects without any difficulties. The spectators thus felt they had been introduced to the world of ghosts and were thus presented with a real dilemma; even if they, as enlightened citizens, did not believe in ghosts, they actually saw the ghosts with their own eyes, and they had other witnesses to assure them that this was no hallucination, that what they saw was, in a sense, “real.” Still, the show was not presented to the spectators as a supernatural event; it was presented as secular entertainment that produced stunning effects by artificial means. As Tom Gunning has stressed, the phantasmagoria was based on the double consciousness of the spectators, who both believed and refused to believe what they saw.13 This description reveals the basic principle of the phantasmagoria. The entire spectacle was based on the hidden apparatus causing the phantom image, that is, the concealment of the human agency. It was this particular feature that made the show a useful metaphor for Marx and his followers. This illusory and indeed deceptive phenomenon lacking a material basis perfectly embodied the principles of capitalism and the “mystical” value attributed to the commodity.14 Marx’s assertion was that the commodity gained its value from its exchange value, that is, its value in comparison to other objects, and not from its use-value. In this way, it was removed both from the human labor that produced it and from the human practice for which it was intended. In a central passage in Capital, Marx describes this mystical and metaphysical value—exchange value—as assuming a phantasmagoric form (“dies phantasmagorische Form”).15 He thus sees exchange value as an illusory,

Media imagery and modernity

151

Figure 6.1  The phantasmagoria of Etienne-Gaspard Robertson. Frontispiece in: Etienne-Gaspard Robertson, Mémoires récréatives, scientifiques et anecdotiques (Paris, 1831).

fictive, and deceitful value that conceals the means of production, i.e. the human agency. With Benjamin, we may also describe the commodity as having an allegorical form.16 We should keep in mind that the title of the third (and theoretical) section of Benjamin’s planned book on Baudelaire (which was never written) was “The Commodity as Poetic Object,” a title that clearly demonstrates Benjamin’s interest in the abstract and expressive qualities of the commodity.17 For our purposes, it is important that Marx in this light appears as a critical thinker who was sensitive to the expressive and indeed aesthetic aspects of nineteenth-century culture. Having pointed out the phantasmagoric nature of the exchange value in Capital, Marx continues his analysis by describing exchange value in religious terms. This time, he explains the need for an analogy that can convey a notion of something unreal: “In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must take flight into the misty realm of the religion. There, the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own.”18 The peculiar relationship human beings establish with commodities—or rather with their appearances—is described by Marx as “fetishism.” Thus, in Capital, phantasmagoric becomes an auxiliary term used to prepare the reader for the analogy with the religious world and the use of the term fetish. Yet, as Cohen shows through her discussion of Benjamin, Marx’s had already used phantasmagoric terms in the essay “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon” (1852) in order to describe the ideological constructions of the Second Republic. In Cohen’s words, he depicted “a haunted Parisian universe of spirits and ghosts.”19 This was what interested Benjamin when he juxtaposed Baudelaire’s and Marx’s writings on Paris in “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire.”

152

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

Still, the fetish becomes Marx’s preferred metaphor, instigating a wideranging cultural discourse on fetishism, whereas the term phantasmagoric, in spite of its central place and its obvious potential, is not to the same extent considered a key trope in his writings.20 If the notion of the phantasmagoric has become crucial in the critical tradition, it is first and foremost due to its later appearances in the theories of Benjamin and Adorno. However, it could be argued that the phantasmagoric is a more appropriate term than the fetish because it is a profane term and not a term associated with religion. It describes a phenomenon that is known to be artificially produced and whose spell may actually be broken.

Benjamin: Paris as a phantasmagoria Although Benjamin’s use of media metaphors and models is worthy of a separate study, the perspective here will be restricted to the question of the phantasmagoria, whereas the subsequent sections will consider the role of photography, the stereoscope, and the kaleidoscope in his writings. Benjamin’s use of the term phantasmagoria was, to a large degree, influenced by Marx, but he also took into account our collective and unconscious dreams about commodities, with inspiration from Freud. For Benjamin, the new Parisian culture—with its arcades, shop windows, and world exhibitions—was a phantasmagoria. Tracing Benjamin’s use of the term phantasmagoria in detail would be a catalog-like exercise, so instead I will focus merely on a few key passages in which the term appears. Generally, the term is most frequently used in his writing related to The Arcades Project, and notably in the two exposés for the project that Benjamin sent to the Frankfurt School: the early version “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century” (1935) and the revised version written in French, “Paris, Capitale du XIXème siècle” (1939). Benjamin envisioned The Arcades Project as an analysis of the changes in Parisian society in the nineteenth century, and it is interesting to observe that the term phantasmagoria is attributed an increasingly important role. What at first may seem as a merely convenient—but not strategic—metaphor, at a later stage emerges as a theoretical concept and a master trope. As Michael W. Jennings has observed, “the category of phantasmagoria largely replaces the commodity as a theoretical tool” around 1938 and becomes the central category of his theory of experience.21 Important in this context is the subtitle Benjamin used in an early conception of the work: “Paris Arcades: A Dialectical Féerie” (“Pariser Passagen: Eine Dialektische Feerie”).22 In English, the word “Feerie” has sometimes been translated as “fairyland” or “fairy scene,” but it actually refers to a visual spectacle (in Frech, féerie) about (allegorical) fairies, in which “magic” effects are created by means of a complex and expensive theatrical machinery. In this respect, the féerie

Media imagery and modernity

153

bears a resemblance to the phantasmagoria. Benjamin’s early subtitle thus bears witness to the importance of these visual phenomena in his thought. In the first exposé, Benjamin uses the term phantasmagoria a number of times. He speaks of “the phantasmagorias of the interior,” thus referring to the bourgeois apartments serving both as the private environments and as the subjective illusion of the bourgeoisie. Furthermore, it should come as no surprise that he describes the world exhibitions in phantasmagoric terms, contending that they “open a phantasmagoria which a person enters in order to be destracted.” Benjamin also relates the phantasmagoria to the environments of the flâneur, claiming that “[t]he crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria—now a landscape, now a room.” He further compares the phantasmagoria of the flâneur to the phantasmagoria of the gambler, claiming that the “phantasmagorias of space in which the flâneur devotes himself find a counterpart in the phantasmagorias of time to which the gambler is addicted.” A central passage prepares this temporal conception of the phantasmagoria. Referring to Baudelaire’s notion of “newness” and the notion of the “ever recurrence of the same” (which he takes from Blanqui), Benjamin speaks of “the phantasmagoria of cultural history in which the bourgeoisie enjoys its false consciousness to the full.” In the first exposé, he thus uses the term phantasmagoria to describe both the public and the private environments, and he conceives of a spatial as well as a temporal phantasmagoria.23 Responding to the exposé, Adorno acknowledged the pertinence of the term “phantasmagoria” (and commented on his own use of it in relation to Wagner), but asked for it to be further developed, asserting that “a great definition and theory of phantasmagoria” was required.24 It was presumably due to Adorno’s request that Benjamin developed this concept further in the revised version, “Paris, Capitale du XIXième siècle.” In this version, the main sections are framed by an introduction and a conclusion, and Benjamin makes the phantasmagoria a key concept already on the first page: Our investigation proposes to show how, as a consequence of this reifying representation of civilization, the new forms of behavior and the new economically and technologically based creations that we owe to the nineteenth century enter the universe of a phantasmagoria. These creations undergo this “illumination” not only in a theoretical manner, by an ideological transposition, but also in the immediacy of their perceptible presence. They are manifest as phantasmagorias.25 Benjamin thus describes nineteenth-century Parisian society at large as a phantasmagoria and refers to a transition through which Paris was transformed into this state. The expression he uses is enter the universe of a phantasmagoria. It is as if Paris at some point just stepped over the threshold and into a show—and remained there. Yet, the dichotomy here

154

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

is not between the interior and the exterior of the phantasmagoria, but rather before and after the phantasmagoria materialized. How and when did the phantamagoria materialize? Benjamin’s essay is committed to the description of the various spatial arrangements that had become the driving force of the phantasmagoria of the nineteenth century: the shopping arcades, the world exhibitions, the department stores, the bourgeois interiors, the renovated streets, even the crowds. Except for the arcades, these are all explicitly described in phantasmagoric terms, with only minor revisions with respect to the first exposé. All these phenomena could be seen as dispositives reconfiguring the urban space and creating a specific relationship between people and their environment. Importantly, Benjamin in the revised exposé emphasizes that a phantasmagoria is not a purely abstract and theoretical phenomenon, but something that imposes itself on the senses. The new arrangements he discusses are illuminated by “the immediacy of their perceptible presence.” The dispositives making up the “phantasmagoria” thus have a perceptual impact and change the very experience of the world. In the conclusion to the 1939 exposé, Benjamin elaborates on the notion of a temporal phantasmagoria, referring to the French revolutionary LouisAuguste Blanqui and his book Eternity Through the Stars (1872). Blanqui used the term phantasmagoria to create an image of the human condition under capitalist rule, asserting that under the logic of capitalism, humanity is condemned to the recurrence of the same. He depicts the society of his day as a hellish world in which man must repeat his actions over and over (and as Benjamin points out, he precedes Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence by ten years). Drawing on Blanqui’s analysis and rhetoric, Benjamin asserts that here we are dealing with “the phantasmagoria of history itself.”26 Thus, what was at first a spatial and sensual metaphor used to describe the experience of urban space under capitalism is here transformed to a temporal category. Capitalism appears as the cul-de-sac of history from which there is no way out. Interestingly, it seems that it is the association between the phantasmagoria and the world of the dead that allows the spatial structure of the phantasmagoria to turn into a temporal structure. As the phantasmagoria specialized in making ghosts appear on stage, it appeared to make temporal transitions possible. This alleged ability to awaken the dead thus becomes the figure of history itself; awakening the dead, i.e. repeating what has been, becomes the only temporal move. The dead are bound to perform again and again in a ghostly show of endless repetition. Yet, we saw that Benjamin conceived of a temporal phantasmagoria already in the first exposé: the gambler’s belief that the next game will differ from the last and that he is only one move away from changing the game to his favor. For Benjamin, the gambler’s compulsive behavior is mechanical behavior and embodies the way humans act under the influence of new technology (under the influence

Media imagery and modernity

155

of shock). By considering both gamblers and ghosts as taking part in spatial phantasmagoria, he thus reveals the way both are destined to a mechanical process of endless repetition. The very last part of the conclusion offers a different perspective on nineteenth-century culture. It reveals that Benjamin saw the phantasmagoria as proof of a social failure and a missed opportunity. His view was that the nineteenth century had failed to use the new technology in a beneficial manner: “The century was inable of responding to the new technological possibilities with a new social order.”27 The outcome was the phantasmagoria, that is, a use of technology that mainly serves capitalist and political interests. Yet, by pointing to this failure, Benjamin reminds us of the possibilities of technology, and he reminds us of the potentially disruptive moments of history. At this point, we should observe that, as a theoretical concept, the term phantasmagoria has several advantages. First, it is a profane term and refers to illusions that are known to be artificially produced. In this respect, it differs from Marx’s key notion of the fetish. This is a difference that is, unfortunately, overlooked in Rolf Tiedemann’s introduction to The Arcades Project, where he asserts that Benjamin’s concept of phantasmagoria appears to be the same as Marx’s concept of the fetishistic character of the commodity.28 For Marx, it is crucial that the fetish is a religious term because he sees the commodity as shrouded in a veil of mysticism that is religious in its nature. Phantasmagoria, by contrast, is a term belonging to the profane world; it is produced by means of technology and therefore has somewhat different connotations than the fetish. Indeed, we may suspect that the profane connotations of the word contributed to the role it plays in Benjamin’s writing. In this respect, it is crucial that the concept of phantasmagoria differs from the key concept of Benjamin’s earlier work on eighteenth-century Trauerspiel: allegory. As Cohen has proposed, phantasmagoria may be seen as the nineteenth-century counterpart to eighteenth-century allegory.29 Whereas allegory can be considered a theological term conveying the idea of redemption and is used to characterize the baroque universe, phantasmagoria is an essentially profane term and is used to characterize the capitalist world of the nineteenth century. As Cohen underscores, the phantasmagoria is a phenomenon that is artificially produced, bearing the traces of human agency, and in this manner differs from the conceptual universe of the allegory. In this regard, she points out, it also differs from the dream imagery Benjamin used in the first exposé, which was criticized by Adorno for psychological subjectivism.30 The revised version abandoned the dream imagery and instead made use of the term phantasmagoria. As phantasmagoria was produced by means of technology, the relationship between base and superstructure could be accounted for in a more appropriate manner. The real crux here, however, is the temporal structure of the phantasmagoria. Does Benjamin really see humanity as condemned to a

156

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

capitalist phantasmagoria from which there is no way out? Again, it is essential that Benjamin uses imagery that conveys the idea of an artificially produced illusion. Knowledge of the phantasmagoria as a technological phenomenon and experience of its effect on the senses may actually provide valuable insight into the mechanism of capitalism. Acknowledging this, several researchers have suggested that a positive understanding of the phantasmagoria can be found in Benjamin’s writing. Cohen’s work is important in this regard; she discusses the notion of a “critical phantasmagoria” as “heir to the profane illumination and the dialectical image that is a dream image” (although she also expresses hesitation as to the mystifying ends to which it may be put).31 Another important contribution is Michael W. Jenning’s concept of a “progressive phantasmagoria.” Jennings asserts that the phantasmagoria is progressive “not as analysis or revelation, but as a device that condenses and exacerbates central, if hidden, features of time as sameness and repetition.” Accordingly, it may prepare for a world “conscious of its own structures, mechanisms, and possibilities.”32 This train of thought is pursued by Gunning, who calls attention to the ambiguity of the original spectacle: as it openly presented its illusions as scientifically produced, it created a double consciousness and could be seen as encompassing its own critique. On this basis, Gunning suggests that phantasmagoria for Benjamin may have a similar signification—it both produces illusions and makes us aware that these illusions are scientifically produced. According to Gunning, this positive view of the phantasmagoria can be aligned with Benjamin’s positive estimation of the cinema and of the dream image.33 In this manner, the phantasmagoria can be considered in a dialectical perspective—as a dialectical féerie—an illusion that has incorporated a critical dimension and thus signifies autocritique and demystification, not merely illusion and sham. If the phantasmagoria at the outset depicts the ontology of capitalism, it also conveys the idea of an exit and a life after the show.

Freud: The psyche as a photographic apparatus Whereas the metaphor of the phantamagoria has been used to convey the idea of deception in theories of modernity, the metaphor of photography has been used to convey the idea of truth. As new ideas about the human psyche were taking shape at the turn of the century, the technology of photography proved to be a useful model for the description of the psychic processes. The workings of the imagination had already been explored extensively in Romantic art and fiction, and now it also became a matter of interest in psychology and medicine. The importance of dreams and the unconscious were being recognized—little by little—and there was an increasing interest in the marginal and distorted aspects of the psyche. The idea that the

Media imagery and modernity

157

psyche was layered began to gain currency, prompting new thoughts about categories such as dreams, illusions, and hallucinations. In this period of scientific and philosophical upheaval, the technology of photography offered useful images for a new conceptualization of the human psyche. The photographic apparatus capable of recording contingent images conveyed the idea of the storage of such images; the photographic negative conveyed the idea of a preliminary, not-yet-visible version of an image; the photographic development process conveyed the idea of a temporal process that was required before an image could be seen. These ideas and concepts were now transferred to a new context— our mental processes. In this manner, the technology of photography appears to have influenced the ways in which mental processes were understood. A prominent thinker for whom visual technology played a central role is Sigmund Freud. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud compared the psyche to a photographic apparatus and drew on the notion of such an apparatus to describe the inner processes. The thrust of his argument was that the dream was staged elsewhere than in waking life and conscious imaginative activity. Accordingly, Freud put forward the very idea of a “psychical locality,” which, he warned, was not to be understood in any anatomical sense, only as a psychological category. To account for this psychical locality, he resorted to an analogy with the telescope and the camera, suggesting that we should picture the instrument which carries out our mental functions as resembling a compound microscope or a photographic apparatus [einen photographischen Apparat], or something of the kind. On that basis, physical locality will correspond to a place inside the apparatus at which one of the preliminary stages of an image [eine der Vorstufen des Bildes] comes into being.34 Freud here pictures the psyche as the inside of an apparatus, and thus allows us to think of the psyche as an instrument designed for the purpose of recording, storing, and producing images. In particular, he is concerned with the preliminary stage of the image. The analogy conveys the idea of mental images having a preliminary stage “hidden” somewhere inside the apparatus. This shows that Freud envisions the psyche as layered, as consisting of several stages (conceived as localities) where “images” are more or less developed, more or less perceivable to our consciousness. Freud expands his analogy by viewing the various components of the psyche as separated systems within an apparatus. In this manner, he puts forward the idea that the apparatus has a direction; the psychic processes run from one end of the apparatus to another. According to Freud, perception

158

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

and memory must be attributed to two different systems. Where our perception furnishes consciousness with the sensory quality of impressions, our memories are in themselves unconscious and are thus stored somewhere other than in our consciousness. By means of the analogy between the psyche and a photographic apparatus, Freud thus succeeds in describing something that is excluded from consciousness, which is hidden away in a different system of the psychic apparatus, but which makes itself present in dreams and hallucinations. According to Freud, the impressions that scarcely ever become conscious to us are the ones that affect us the most.35 Consequently, Freud claims that, in addition to consciousness, we must acknowledge the existence of both a preconscious system and an unconscious system, which may gain access to consciousness in different ways. The unconscious is the starting point for dream-formation, which strives to gain admission to the consciousness. During wakefulness, this path is closed, but during sleep, censorship is weakened, and the absence of new perceptions facilitates admission to consciousness—in the form of dreams. Dreams are characterized as having a regressive character; the idea in the dream is transformed back into the visual image (the perceptual image) from which it once originated. (This is also why dreams so often become lost to us and why we fail to express them adequately.) Instead of manifesting themselves as thoughts, they manifest themselves as hallucinatory images; instead of manifesting themselves to consciousness, ordinarily the last of the systems in the apparatus, they manifest themselves to the perceptor end of the apparatus. In this manner, the dream gains access to consciousness in the sleeping state—and as images. This is where the psychoanalyst finds his material and his vocation. His job is to reconstruct and advance, foster and encourage the invisible images hidden in the psyche of the patient. This description also makes the value of photographic imagery obvious: Freud casts the psychoanalyst as a photographer in the dark room, working on the development and exposition of images, excavating them from the darkness of the patient’s psyche.36 It should be pointed out that Freud was well aware of the imperfections of the apparatus analogy, his lacking skills in questions of technology, and the boldness of his analysis generally. Having presented this analogy, he informs the reader that he sees “no necessity to apologize for the imperfections of this or of any similar imagery.” He continues, asserting that Analogies of this kind are only intended to assist us in our attempt to make the complications of mental functioning intelligible by dissecting the function and assigning its different constituents to different component parts of the apparatus. So far as I know, the experiment has not hitherto been made of using this method of dissection in order to investigate the way in which the mental instrument is put together, and I can see no harm

Media imagery and modernity

159

in it. We are justified, in my view, in giving free rein to our speculations so long as we retain the coolness of our judgement and do not mistake the scaffolding for the building. And since at our first approach to something unknown all that we need is the assistance of provisional ideas, I shall give preference in the first instance to hypotheses of the crudest and most concrete depiction.37 As we see, Freud was convinced of the usefulness of auxiliary ideas, and the photographic imagery thus appears to have contributed to his groundbreaking ideas about the psyche. After Freud, the unconscious has been seen as a storeroom of images that only become visible through a process of development.38

Benjamin: Time as a photographer Although Benjamin was deeply influenced by Freud’s ideas about the complex workings of our memory processes, he was not primarily concerned with the individual’s memory; collective or historical memory was his main concern. The question he asked was how we can possibly gain knowledge of the past that reaches beyond facts, or put differently, how we can know something about the way historical moments were experienced and lived. Inspired by Freud, Benjamin asserted that collective memory works much in the same manner as individual memory. Profound experiences are not accessible to consciousness as they happen, but are registered, stored, in the unconscious and only become accessible at a later point in history. Thus, time works in favor of historical truth and will eventually, under the right circumstances, give us some insight into the past. From this perspective, it is easy to see why the mediation process is of the essence in Benjamin’s thought. For Benjamin, memory (Gedächtnis) is not an instrument through which the past becomes accessible; it is rather the theater (Schauplatz) of the past, where images are perpetually reconfigured, knowing no final version. Thus, according to Benjamin, memory is “the medium of the lived” (“das Medium des Erlebten”), but it will never allow us to experience things the way they were experienced originally; it will always involve distortion. There is in fact a link between Benjamin’s conception of memory as a mediation process in this early phase of his work and his later reflections on new media technology in essays such as “Little History of Photography” and “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”39 Although memories are nonmaterial phenomena, Benjamin saw them as media through which images, thoughts, and experiences are made available to us. In the same manner, he considered language a medium and an instrument of reflection. In this sense, both memories and language

160

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

can be considered on par with media technology such as photography and film. This link between Benjamin’s concern with historical memory and his concern with new technology is especially intriguing because he resorts to photographic imagery to describe the workings of time, history, and memory.40 For Benjamin, photography conveys the idea of storage—the idea that contingent moments can be arrested and represented through images, and it conveys the idea of development—the idea that these images require a process of development before they become visible. As we saw in Chapter 2, Benjamin used photography as a metaphor to describe Baudelaire’s poetic method, comparing time to a photographer who captures the essence of things as negatives, and seeing Baudelaire as a gifted “reader,” having a great understanding of these images. The fragment on Baudelaire is not merely interesting with respect to Baudelaire, but is revelatory also with respect to Benjamin’s views on history and truth in general. A basic tenet in Benjamin’s thought is that history is represented through images, and that these images cannot be seen or perceived immediately; they require a temporal distance before they become readable. Benjamin often articulates this process in terms of photography. A passage from “On the Concept of History,” placed under the heading “The Dialectical Image,” makes this explicit: If one looks upon history as a text, then one can say of it what a recent author has said of literary texts—namely, that the past has left in them images comparable to those registered by a light-sensitive plate. “The future alone possesses developers strong enough to reveal the image in all its details. Many pages in Marivaux or Rousseau contain a mysterious meaning which the first readers of these texts could not fully have deciphered.....” The historical method is a philological method based on the book of life. “Read what was never written,” runs a line in Hofmannsthal. The reader one should think of here is the true historian.41 First, we may note that Benjamin here credits another writer (André Monglond, in a text published in 1930) for the photographic imagery, even if he had himself fleshed out the photographic metaphor with respect to Baudelaire several years before (1921 or 1922). Second, and more importantly, we observe that photography comes to represent a recorded image of history, whereas the development process represents the temporal distance required to see these images, and the skilled reader of images becomes the true historian. Benjamin thus describes the modus operandi of the dialectical image by means of photographic imagery. The same logic is operative in many of Benjamin’s passages and fragments, especially with respect to the process of development. For Benjamin, the process of development required in photography corresponds to the time it takes before images enter into legibility: “For the historical index of the images

Media imagery and modernity

161

not only says that they belong to a particular time; it says, above all, that they attain to legibility only at a particular time.”42 Just as he projects the understanding of history into the future, he projects the image into the future, endowing it with a second temporality. What Benjamin describes here is the messianic revelation of truth, and the temporality involved is quite complex. Time is conceived both as a distance (consecutive time) and as simultaneity. Before historical truth can be accessed, a temporal distance must be established, however, at the point when historical truth becomes accessible, a temporal synchronicity is established (dialectically). Temporal distance is thus a precondition for truth, but this very distance is itself abolished at the moment of truth. This is what Benjamin refers to as the “now” of recognizability.43 It is crucial to observe that Benjamin’s use of photographic imagery is not merely due to a convenient structural analogy, but that it also has political motivation. In his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” Benjamin describes the way this technology replaces cult value with exhibition value and hence contributes to the loss of aura in the work of art: “In photography, exhibition value begins to drive back cult value on all fronts.”44 Because it destroys the aura and because it is capable of registering chronological time, Benjamin recognizes a political dimension within photography. Accordingly, when he describes history in terms of photography, this is also a way of breaking history free from mythology, permitting him to emphasize profane, historical time. And just as technology destroys the aura of the original through the production of copies, the notion of history described in terms of photography destroys the notion of the unique and irretrievable moment by postponing the sense of history to the future. Neither the work of art nor the historical moment is thus allowed to coincide with themselves, but are instead involved in a process of mediation. Summing up, we may conclude that Freud and Benjamin not only allowed us to understand the psychocultural processes in new manners; they used metaphors from recent visual technology to make these processes conceivable. Freud described the way the psyche is layered and hides away images that can only be accessed after a process of development. Benjamin described the way time and experience are captured as negative images that can only be “read” after a process of development. In both cases, photographic structures and imagery serve to describe a complex mediation process.

Benjamin: The stereoscope and the dialectical image As a supplement to the discussion of photographic imagery, I would like to bring attention to a few key passages in Benjamin’s and Adorno’s writings,

162

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

which refer to the stereoscope. As described in Chapter 3, the stereoscope was an immensely popular device in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was based on the principle of binary vision, and the fact that each eye sees a slightly different image than the other. The two lenses of the stereoscope separated the perspectives of the eyes, and a pair of stereoscopic images—taken from slightly different angles—was placed in front of the lenses. When these two images were seen through the stereoscope, they converged, and an illusion of depth—a 3-D image—was created. This way of seeing attracted the interest of both Benjamin and Adorno. As we may suspect, the stereoscope provides rich imagery for reflecting on dialectical thinking and the access to historical truth. Interestingly, Benjamin pays attention to the stereoscope in an early fragment written in 1923, the same period as his fragment on Baudelaire and photography was written. In this fragment, Benjamin cites Rudolf Burchard’s words: “To educate the image-making medium within us, raising it to a stereoscopic and dimensional seeing into the depths of historical shadows.” The fragment is part of The Arcades Project, and it is placed in the section on the theory of knowledge and the theory of progress. Benjamin’s brief introduction to the quotation is “[p]edagogic side of this undertaking.”45 He thus appears to refer to his own ambitions for The Arcades Project, considering it as a stereoscopic and dimensional seeing into historical truths. It is interesting that Benjamin adopts the image of the stereoscope for a privileged way of seeing because it clearly relates to the notion of the dialectical image. A pair of stereoscopic images seen through the stereoscope is very well suited as a model for Benjamin’s concept of the dialectical image. Further evidence of Benjamin’s interest in this device is the fact that a section in One-Way Street (written in the period 1923–6, published in 1928) is entitled “Stereoscope.”46 It offers a series of detailed “pictures”—or dialectical images—from the city of Riga that in subtle ways testify to the terrors of czarism. Yet, Benjamin does not offer any explicit discussion on the stereoscopic way of seeing, and the metaphor only plays a minor role in his writings. Noteworthy in this regard is the fact that Adorno at a much later point suggested to Benjamin the usefulness of the stereoscope as a model for a theory of perspective. The renowned letter written on August 2, 1935, in which Adorno severely criticizes Benjamin’s first exposé of The Arcades Project for being “undialectical,” targeting especially Benjamin’s conception of the dialectical image as being “immanent” and hence undialectical, closes with the following suggestion: “An explicit theory of perspective would be indicated on p. 176: I believe there was something on that in the original draft. The stereoscope, which was invented between 1810 and 1820, is relevant here.”47 It is possible that Adorno here refers to Benjamin’s previous use of the stereoscope as a theoretical model in a draft that was never published. Yet, what is important in our context is the fact that Adorno here

Media imagery and modernity

163

appears to propose a remedy for Benjamin’s undialectical conception of the dialectical image: a theory of perspective that takes the stereoscope as its model. Thus, both Benjamin and Adorno appear to see the stereoscope as a useful model for a theory of vision in which vision operates dialectically and creates an in-depth view of history. Indeed, the use of double vision to produce depth is the virtue of the stereoscope. Although the history and theory of dialectical thinking certainly go beyond these few references to the stereoscope, the device provides a simple model for reflecting on the intricate relations between history and truth in critical theory. Furthermore, insofar as the stereoscope is a nineteenth-century invention, it is a well-suited model for Benjamin’s endeavor to gain profound insight into the truths of the century.

Benjamin: The kaleidoscope must be smashed If we compare the temporality of photography and the temporality of the phantasmagoria, it is obvious that they function according to different logics. Where the temporality of photography works in favor of truth, the temporality of the phantasmagoria implies eternal recurrence (of ghosts) and hence eternal deception. Photographic imagery conveys (messianic) ideas of revelation and awakening, whereas the temporal structure of the phantasmagoria appears to have no similar point of recognition. As we have seen, however, Benjamin developed the idea of a dialectical phantasmagoria—and a dialecal féerie—that works in favor of an awakening. Such an awakening would result not from the very temporal structure of the dispositive, but instead from a recognition of the dispositive at work. A similar logic can be seen in Benjamin’s use of kaleidoscopic imagery. The workings of the kaleidoscope are perhaps easier to comprehend than the workings of the phantasmagoria. Its basic principle is reflection; by means of mirrors and tiny objects the kaleidoscope produces complex abstract patterns that can be varied and multiplied endlessly. The appeal of the kaleidoscope as a metaphor is its capacity to produce an endless series of dazzling, virtual images. Furthermore, the kaleidoscope conveys the idea of the subjectivity of vision and the inability to gain access to an objective reality. As we may suspect, kaledoscopic imagery is often used in a positive sense in art and literature, whereas it is usually used in a negative sense in critical theory. In his book on visual technology, Crary has brought attention to Marx and Engels’s use of the metaphor of the kaleidoscope in The German Ideology.48 There, Marx and Engels attack the principle of self-reflection that characterizes the writings of Saint-Simon, a figure central to the tradition of German Idealism. Saint-Simon’s method of argument, whose essence is supposedly self-reflection, is here described as a “kaleidoscopic display”

164

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

which is “composed entirely of reflections of itself.” Marx and Engels are thus concerned with the effects of the kaleidoscope and use the metaphor to describe a false vision caught up in a play of repetition and sameness. Benjamin as well uses the kaleidoscope to convey an image of repetition and sameness, but he is concerned mainly with the mechanism of repetition and sameness in relation to time and history. The question Benjamin asks is how we may free our minds from viewing the course of history as an endless cycle of repetitions and the metaphor of the kaleidoscope is used to illustrate this cyclic mechanism. To understand this image, which is found in a fragment in “Central Park,” we must keep in mind that the temporal logic of the kaleidoscope is to perpetually dissolve its patterns of images in order to create new patterns of images: The course of history, seen in terms of the concept of catastrophe, can actually claim no more attention from thinkers than a child’s kaleidoscope, which with every turn of the hand dissolves the established order into a new array. There is profound truth in this image. The concepts of the ruling class have always been the mirrors that enabled an image of “order” to prevail.—The kaleidoscope must be smashed.49 The metaphor of the kaleidoscope serves two functions. First, it points to the logic at work in the conception of history as a cycle of catastrophes: repetition and sameness. Second, it draws attention to the dispositives used by the rulers when imposing their power. In this manner, Benjamin highlights the fact that this particular conception of history is an ideological representation of history, produced through the use of specific concepts and mindsets. Generalizing his argument, Benjamin claims that the concepts of the rulers have always been the mirrors through which the image of an order is established. Benjamin thus contends that the idea of history that is imposed upon us is, in reality, just as contingent as the images of the kaleidoscope. He claims that the dispositive is less powerful than we thought it was and that it must be smashed. What is interesting is that Benjamin focuses on the cause that produces the effect rather than the effect itself. In this respect, his use of the metaphor differs from Marx and Engels’s. In short, Marx and Engels use the metaphor to highlight an effect, whereas Benjamin uses it to highlight a cause; Marx and Engels describe a kaleidoscope that works, whereas Benjamin describes a kaleidoscope that can be smashed. Benjamin points to the fact that the instrument—as well as the concepts we use—are artificially produced and that they are, in fact, in our hands. Here, he is very much in line with Baudelaire, who not only knew how to play with the kaleidoscope, but most certainly also knew how to smash it. Accordingly, we may think of the kaleidoscope in a dialectical manner, just as with the phantasmagoria. This would imply that the kaleidoscope

Media imagery and modernity

165

is seen as an instrument that displays and reveals the logics at work under capitalism: the mechanism of sameness and repetition. In this manner, the kaleidoscope may potentially serve as a spell-breaking phenomenon.

Media aesthetics and modernity Today, we see an increasing interest in the concepts, metaphors, and mediators that we use—in the arts and in philosophy as well as in the sciences. The simple, cartesian dichotomy of the mind and the world no longer holds. As Bruno Latour has argued, interest has “shifted to the middle, to the humble instruments, tools, visualizing skills, writing practices, focusing techniques, and what has been called ‘re-representation.’”50 Important in this regard is the role of the dispositives configurating both our perception and our mindset. As we have seen, the dispositives serve as interfaces in everyday life, and they also provide models and metaphors for reflection upon the perceptual and mental processes. In a media-saturated world, the question is how should we deal with the dispositives and the imagery they generate. In this respect, Latour’s work is helpful; he describes three attitudes toward visualizing techniques (widely conceived as images). Iconology is a naïve belief in images—without reflecting upon their role. This position is quickly dismissed by Latour. Iconoclasm is a common reaction to iconology; it attacks the use of images and reveals their power. Latour argues against iconoclasm because it implies a belief that we can do without images and regain transparency. Instead, he advocates iconophilia, where attention is directed toward the movement of images: toward the ways they work and the ways in which they are transformed. This is indeed a very fruitful approach. Rather than doing away with images, we need to understand how they operate, for better and for worse. Investigating the period of modernity, we should ask ourselves what type of attitude toward images we find in the writings of Marx, Freud, and Benjamin. Obviously, it would be mistaken to describe these writers as iconological, for they all demonstrate a critical awareness of the role of images. It is probably more accurate to see these writers as iconoclastic, critical as they are to images imposing a false consciousness. This is the overall perspective in W. J. T. Mitchell’s illuminating essay “The Rhetoric of Iconoclasm: Marx, Ideology and Fetishism” in which he discusses the writings of both Marx and Benjamin.51 As Mitchell shows, however, the attitude of the iconoclast can be quite complex, especially when the perspective of the historical materialist is adopted and a dialectical mode of thinking is applied. In that case, it could be argued that the iconoclastic attitude overlaps to some degree with the iconophilic attitude. This is particularly true of Benjamin. Rather than wanting to do away with images,

166

Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics

Benjamin sees them as historical-philosophical resources and demonstrates a sophisticated approach to images. His concept of the “dialectical image” reveals the dual workings of images and highlights their illuminating power. Indeed, Benjamin was concerned with the dynamic movement of images. Yet, it is interesting to observe that Marx, Freud, and Benjamin’s thinking appear to be influenced by—and inspired by—nineteenth-century media technology. Clearly, media imagery was extremely useful for the conceptualization of their ideas regarding the perceptual and mental processes. Still, there is no way of knowing exactly how and to what degree the media dispositives influenced Marx, Freud, and Benjamin’s thoughts, and therefore the issue invites discussion and problematization. Did the media metaphors restrict or expand their patterns of thought? Were their ways of thinking fully developed before they consciously chose to use these analogies and metaphors, or did these analogies and metaphors contribute to conceptualization of their way of thinking? Of course, these questions cannot be answered definitively. Yet, it seems to me that the media imagery was indeed useful for these thinkers at the time, expanding their ways of thinking, and not restricting them to certain patterns of thought. It allowed them to conceptualize views on the perceptual and mental processes that went beyond the Enlightenment paradigm of thought and which today may be described as thoroughly modern. In this regard, Kittler’s approach is fruitful. Media metaphors and models are what allow us to reflect upon our perceptual processes and hence also to reconceptualize our ideas concerning these processes as the historical and material conditions change. It may thus be an inevitable fact that we are immersed in the period in which we live and left to the dispositives that are available. This would mean that the truths that we entertain are internal to the dispositives (images, signifying practices, patterns of thought) that produced them. Although the conceptual tools developed by Marx, Freud, and Benjamin today appear neutral and timeless, they are actually steeped in a temporal context. As we start tracing the genealogy of modernity, we should recognize the importance of media imagery and structures stemming from nineteenth-century media technology. What, then, was Baudelaire’s attitude to images? Certainly, his love of images is well known, and at times he seems close to the iconological position. Yet, Baudelaire had witnessed the era in which the Romantic imagination was confronted with mechanically produced images, and he was critical toward the production of sterile images and the vulgar preferences of the crowd. In that respect, his attitude is in line with critical theory and could be seen as iconoclastic. Still, as we have seen, he developed a dual attitude to images and a sophisticated media aesthetics. As he was concerned with the movements of images—creatively exploring their potential—it seems most accurate to describe his attitude as iconophilic.

Media imagery and modernity

167

This iconophilic attitude is at the core of Baudelaire’s media aesthetics. Baudelaire was fully aware that he lived in a media-saturated environment, and he recognized the way newspapers, photographs, and optical devices change our perception. His writing reflects and observes the other media, often paraphrasing the conventions of other media, such as the newspaper, photographs, the kaleidoscope, and the phenakistiscope. Having firsthand experience with the new media of his day, he was able to play with them and to use them productively in his writing. This is why Baudelaire should not be studied merely as a representant of “pure poetry,” but as a poet exploring all the arts and media of his day in his writing. For the same reason, it is important to historicize Baudelaire’s aesthetics and to recognize that his encounters with the new media were important for his conception of modernity. If Baudelaire descibed the man of the crowd as a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness, it was because the instrument allowed him to depict a new mode of seeing and perceiving. If he has been hailed as the very first modernist, it is because he explored the new media of his day and developed his very own media aesthetics.

NO T ES

Introduction 1 Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, trans. Howard Eiland et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 2 The sociopolitical processes in question have been analyzed and described in numerous books, including David Harvey, Paris: Capital of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2003) and Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso: 2010). 3 Significant contributions to the study of Paris as the cultural and literary capital of the nineteenth century are Karlheinz Stierle, La Capitale des signes: Paris et son discours (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme Paris, 2001) and Christopher Prendergast, Paris and the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996). 4 Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 5 Bernard Marchand, Paris, Histoire d’une ville: XIXe-XXe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 1993), 11–12. 6 Charles Baudelaire, Intimate Journals, trans. Ch. Isherwood (London: The Blackmore Press, 1930), 63; Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 679–80 (henceforth abbreviated OC 1). 7 Baudelaire, Intimate Journals, 63; Baudelaire, OC 1, 679. 8 Baudelaire, Intimate Journals, 78; Baudelaire OC 1, 692. 9 Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, trans. James McGowan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 175; Baudelaire, OC 1, 85. 10 Harvey, Paris. Capital of Modernity, 98. 11 Harvey, Paris. Capital of Modernity, 113. 12 Edgar Allan Poe, The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Edition, eds. Stuart Levine and Susan Levine (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 283–9; Baudelaire, OC 1, 291–2. 13 Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. and trans. K. Wolff (New York: The Free Press, 1964), 409–24. 14 Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life, 68. 15 Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life, 79; 210. 16 “In the flâneur, the joy of watching prevails over all. It can concentrate on observation; the result is the amateur detective. Or it can stagnate in the

170

7 1 18

19

20

21

22 23 4 2 25 26 27

28

NOTES

rubbernecker; then the flâneur has turned into a badaud.” Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life, 99. Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life, 191; 210. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 22. For further discussion of Benjamin’s concept of allegory and its relation to the commodity, see Michael W. Jennings, “On the Banks of a New Lethe: Commodification and Experience in Benjamin’s Baudelaire Book,” boundary 2 30, 2 (2003): 89–104; and Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 177–201. This issue will be further discussed in Chapter 6. The relevance of Benjamin’s sociohistorical analysis for the reading of Baudelaire’s poetry has been contested by several critics stressing the difference between Benjamin’s Marxist theories and Baudelaire’s poetic endeavors, see Antoine Compagnon, Baudelaire devant l’innombrable (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2003) and Per Buvik, “Paris – lieu poétique, lieu érotique. Quelques remarques à propos de Walter Benjamin et de Baudelaire,” Revue Romane 20, 2 (1985): 231–42. For further discussion of the flâneur, see: Susan Buck-Morss, “The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering,” New German Critique 39 (1986): 99–140; Tom Gunning, “The Exterior as Intérieur: Benjamin’s Optical Detective,” boundary 2 30, 1 (2003): 105–30; Gregory Shaya, “The Flâneur, the Badaud, and the Making of a Mass Public in France, circa 1860–1910,” The American Historical Review 109, 1 (2004): 41–77; and Martina Lauster, “Walter Benjamin’s Myth of the Flâneur,” Modern Language Review 102 (2007): 139–56. Keith Tester (ed.), The Flâneur (London: Routledge, 1994); Rosemary Lloyd (ed.), The Cambridge’s Companion to Baudelaire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 58. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 2008), 202; Baudelaire, OC 1, 585. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 529. Baudelaire. The Flowers of Evil, 114; Baudelaire, OC 1, 55; 931. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 1997). Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” in Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on the Media, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). Theodor W. Adorno, “Letters to Walter Benjamin,” in Aesthetics and Politics: The Key Texts of the Classic Debates within German Marxism (London: Verso, 1980), 123. For an account of the discussions between Benjamin and Adorno and further references, see Momme Brodersen, Walter Benjamin, Leben – Werk – Wirkung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005). For a

NOTES

29 30

31

32

33 34

35

36

171

discussion of the Bilder-Streit between Adorno and Benjamin, see Andrew Benjamin, Benjamin and Art (New York: Continuum, 2005), 50–9. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in The Writer of Modern Life, 191. Important contributions to the understanding of Benjamin’s views on media technology are Michael W. Jenning’s introduction to Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life, and Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin’s introductory texts in Benjamin, The Work of Art. Likewise, Detlev Schöttker’s postface “Benjamins Medienästhetik,” in Walter Benjamin: Medienästhetische Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002), 411–33, is illuminating. Michael W. Jennings accounts for the publication history of Benjamin’s writings on Baudelaire in Jennings, “On the Banks of a New Lethe,” published in 2003. Recently, however, a new edition of Benjamin’s writings on Baudelaire edited by Giorgio Agamben has been published in Italian and French. (An English translation is expected in 2016.) This edition is based on Benjamin’s original manuscripts, which Agamben discovered at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and it attempts to reconstruct the book Benjamin planned to write on Baudelaire. As Agamben’s edition consists of more than thousand pages and this book was almost finished at the time when it appeared in French, I have not been able to take it into account – except for two fragments in which Benjamin considers the phenakistiscope, which I comment on in Chapter 3. Certainly, Agamben’s edition will open up new perspectives for everyone who is interested in Benjamin and Baudelaire. See Walter Benjamin, Baudelaire, ed. Giorgio Agamben (Paris: La Fabrique, 2013). Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street, in Selected Writings, vol. 1, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 476. See Chapter 6 for further discussion of Benjamin’s interest in media technologies. See, for instance, Sara Danius, The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), which examines the novels of Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, and James Joyce in light of new media technology, and Mark Gobble, Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), which studies American modernist literature (poetry as well as novels) in light of new media technology. Meltzer argues that double vision is a master trope in Baudelaire’s writings, which “informs and underpins most of his [his] texts.” This implies that he “saw two times, or things, at once,” “puts together divergent, opposing notions,” and “records antithesis.” Meltzer investigates four aspects of Baudelaire’s double vision (examined in four poems by Baudelaire): beliefs, seeing, money, and time. In the chapter “Seeing,” she provides an insightful reading of the poem “A Une Passante” (“To a Woman Passing By”). Françoise Meltzer, Seeing Double: Baudelaire’s Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 1; 6. Andrea Goulet, Optics: The Science of the Eye and the Birth of Modern French Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

172

NOTES

37 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). 38 Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 39 Tom Gunning, “From the Kaleidoscope to the X-Ray: Urban Spectatorship, Poe, Benjamin, and Traffic in Souls (1913),” Wide Angle 19, 4 (1997): 25–61. 40 Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). 41 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 64. 42 Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). 43 Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), especially the chapter entitled “Machines.” 44 W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 95. 45 W. J. T. Mitchell, “There Are No Visual Media,” Journal of Visual Culture 4, 2 (2005): 261. 46 English translations of both Foucault and Agamben use the word apparatus for the French word dispositif and for the Italian word dispositivo. In my opinion, this is unfortunate because apparatus suggests something that is too concrete, like a mechanism or a machine. Although the French word dispositif and the Italian word dispositivo obviously have these denotations, they also have more abstract denotations, like arrangement, disposition, system, law, and decree. These significations are especially important in Agamben’s extended use of the concept, and they must be appreciated to understand how Agamben’s use is different from Foucault’s. To maintain this wide range of significations, I will generally use the original term dispositive, which today is more and more used in English in academic contexts relative to Foucault and Agamben. For a discussion of the English translation of this term, see Jean Bussolini, “What is a dispositive?” Foucault Studies 10 (2010): 85–107. Bussolini argues that “dispositive” is a better translation than “apparatus.” 47 Frank Kessler traces the history of the concept in a useful paper published on his website, Frank Kessler, “Notes on dispositive,” Hompage van Frank Kessler, Universiteit Utrecht (2007). http://www.hum.uu.nl/medewerkers/f.e.kessler/ Dispositif%20Notes11-2007.pdf. 48 Jean-Louis Baudry, “Effets idéologiques produits par l’apparail de base,” Cinéthique 7–8 (1970): 1–8 and “Le dispositif: approches métapsychologiques de l’impression de réalité,” Communications 23 (1975): 56–72. Both articles can be found in Jean-Louis Baudry, L’Effet cinéma (Paris: Editions Albatros, 1978). 49 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990). 50 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, trans. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 194.

NOTES

173

51 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 11. 52 Crary, Techniques of the Observer. 53 Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus?: And Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 14. 54 Agamben, What is an Apparatus?, 13. 55 Agamben, What is an Apparatus?, 17. 56 I would like to mention two articles that present somewhat similar conceptions of the term dispositive: Hugues Peeters and Philippe Charlier consider “le dispositif” as an “in between” that not only controls and restrains human perception and action, but also equally allows for participation and play. See Hugues Peeters and Philippe Charlier, “Contributions à une théorie du dispositive,” Hermès 25 (1999): 15–23. Further, Joachim Paech’s use of the term implies a more open and value-neutral perspective; generalizing the concept, he speaks of “dispositifs of perception.” See Joachim Paech, “Das Sehen von Filmen und filmisches Sehen,” in Sprung im Spiegel. Filmisches Wahrnehmen zwischen Fiktion und Wirklichkeit, ed. Christa Blümlinger (Wien: Sonderzahl, 1990), 33–50. Both these positions are referred to in Kessler, “Notes on dispositif.” 57 Agamben, What is an Apparatus?, 15. 58 Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (Zone Books, 2007), 76. 59 Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 2007), 79. 60 Benjamin, The Work of Art, 49. 61 Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Room-for-Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema,” October 109 (2004): 3–45. Hansen brings attention to Adorno’s resistance to Benjamin’s “aesthetics of play”; for Adorno, play was a degradation of art to a form of sport, complying with the culture industry. 62 Rosalind Krauss, “The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodern Repetition,” October 18 (1981): 64. 63 The duality between reality and illusion, as well as the ironic attitude issuing from a double consciousness, have been core issues in Baudelaire studies, see, for instance, Sonya Stephens, Baudelaire’s Prose Poems. The Practice and Politics of Irony (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 64 Rosemary Lloyd, “The Art of Transposition,” in Baudelaire’s World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 188–208. 65 Media aesthetics is an interdisciplinary field of study that is widely defined. Generally, it highlights the complex relations between the various media and emphasizes the dynamic notion of mediation rather than the static notion of medium. For an introduction to the study of media aesthetics, see Liv Hausken (ed.), Thinking Media Aesthetics: Media Studies, Film Studies and the Arts (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2013), especially W. J. T. Mitchell’s foreword, 15–27. For an introduction to the study of intermediality, see Joachim Paech and Jens Schröter (eds), Intermedialität Analog/Digital. Theorien – Methoden – Analysen (München: Fink, 2008).

174

NOTES

66 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).

Chapter 1 1 Richard Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse. The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 118. 2 Judith Lyon-Caen, “Lecteurs et lectures: les usages de la presse au XIXe siècle,” in La Civilisation du journal: Histoire culturelle et littéraire de la presse française au XIXe siècle, ed. Dominique Kalifa et al. (Paris: Nouveau Monde, 2011), 29. 3 Dominique Kalifa, Marie-Ève Thérenty and Alain Vaillant, “Le quotidien,” La Civilisation du journal, 278–9. 4 Claude Bellanger et al. (ed.), Histoire générale de la presse française. Vol. 2 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969), 114. 5 Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse, 132. 6 “Thus it is clear that the literary and artistic field is constituted as such in and by opposition to a ‘bourgeois’ world which had never before asserted so bluntly its values and its pretention to control the instruments of legitimation, both in the domain of art and in the domain of literature, and which, through the press and its hacks, now aims to impose a degraded and degrading definition of cultural production.” Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, 58. 7 George Sand and Gustave Flaubert, The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters, trans. A. G. L. McKenzie (Middlesex: The Echo Library, 2006), 164. 8 Translated and quoted in Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, 82. 9 Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, 114. 10 Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions, trans. Herbert J. Hunt (London: Penguin Books, 1971), 360. 11 Honoré de Balzac, Illusions perdues, Vol. 5 of Honoré de Balzac, La Comédie humaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 1319. 12 Charles Sainte-Beuve, “De la littérature industrielle,” La Revue des deux mondes 19 (1839): 682. My translation. 13 Benjamin also refers to the mixing of editorial material and material that is paid for, using la réclame as his main example. See Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life, 60. 14 Bourdieu comments on this in the following manner: “The ‘serious’ journals [journaux] themselves give space to the serials [au feuilleton], light boulevard chronicles [la chronique boulevardière] and jottings [fait divers] which dominate the two most celebrated creations of the period,—Le Figaro—whose founder, Henri de Villemessant, spreads the tidbits he manages to collect in the salons, cafés, and behind the scenes in the theatres, dividing them between the rubrics of ‘échos’, ‘chronicles’, ‘letters’—and Le Petit Journal, a deliberatively apolitical penny paper, which gives pride of place to more or less fictionalized stories of a sensational nature [qui consacre la suprématie du fait divers plus ou moins romancé].” Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, 53.

NOTES

175

5 Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life, 173–4. 1 16 Benjamin, One-Way Street, 444. Another text that reveals that Benjamin saw a liberating potential in the newspaper is Benjamin, “Newspapers,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2/2, eds. M. W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 741–2. 17 Marie-ÈveThérenty, La Littérature au quotidien: Poétiques journalistiques au XIXe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 2007), 18. Thérenty does not discuss the antagonism between literature and journalism, but focuses on the circulation between literature and newspaper genres. 18 Thérenty, La Littérature au quotidien, 122. 19 Benjamin describes how the literary scene moves from the journal to the newspaper: “For a century and a half, the literary life of the day had been centered around journals. Toward the end of the third decade of the century, this began to change. The feuilleton provided a market for belles-lettres in the daily newspaper.” See Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life, 59. 20 Lise Queffelec, Le Roman-feuilleton français au XIXe siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989), 11–12. 21 Thérenty, La Littérature au quotidien, 242. 22 Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life, 67–8. 23 Balzac, Illusions perdues, 61. 24 Boris Lyon-Caen, “Écrire pour diverter,” La Civilisation du journal, 797; Marie-Ève Thérenty, “Rubriques pour rire,” La Civilisation du journal, 1093. 25 Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse, 134. 26 Balzac, Illusions perdues, 437. 27 Bellanger, Histoire générale de la presse française, 86. 28 Thérenty, La Littérature au quotidien, 270. 29 Roland Barthes, “Structure of the fait-divers,” in Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 194. 30 For an overview of Baudelaire’s contributions to newspapers, see Alain Vaillant (ed.), Baudelaire journaliste: Articles et chroniques (Paris: Flammarion, 2011). 31 During the period 1857–66, Baudelaire’s prose poems appeared in various newspapers and journals, in series of two or more prose poems. Two of these sites of publication stand out as being two of the major newspapers in Paris in full-scale format, featuring advertisements and stock market prices: La Presse and Le Figaro. The editorial policy of Le Figaro is unequivocally described by Theodore Zeldin: “Villemessant, editor of the Figaro during the Second Empire, declared himself to be satisfied with an issue of his paper only when every single line in it had been paid for.” Théodore Zeldin, France 1848–1945, Vol. 2, 165.The editorial policy of La Presse has already been commented on. 32 The prose poems were published for the first time as a “work” in vol. 4 of Baudelaire’s Œuvres complètes, edited by Asselineau and Banville and published in 1869, two years after Baudelaire’s death. 33 Previous studies that have recognized the influence of the newspapers on Baudelaire’s prose poems include Graham M. Robb, “Les Origines journalistiques de la prose poétique de Baudelaire,” Les Lettres romanes 44, 1–2 (1990): 15–25; Jonathan Monroe, A Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem and the Politics of Genre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987); and

176

34

5 3 36 37 38 39

0 4 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

0 5 51 2 5 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

1 6 62

NOTES

Sonya Stephens, Baudelaire’s Prose Poems: The Practice and Politics of Irony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). The source of this saying by Paul Claudel has proved to be difficult to find, but it is quoted in Jacques Rivière, Études (Paris: Editions de la Nouvelle Revue Française, 1921), 15. Rivière refers to something Claudel used to say, not to a written text. Baudelaire, OC 1, 706. My translation. Baudelaire, OC 1, 654; 676; 694; 781–2. Baudelaire, Selected Writings, 394; Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 686 (henceforth abbreviated OC 2). Baudelaire, Correspondance Vol 1, ed. C. Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 58; Pichois and Ziegler, Charles Baudelaire, 103. Baudelaire, OC 2, 1324. As concerns this newspaper, Histoire générale de la presse française refers to its lack of morality and raises the question of whether it is the specific newspaper or the times more generally that are immoral. See Bellanger, Histoire générale de la presse française, 286. Baudelaire, OC 1, 631. My translation. Baudelaire, OC 1, 361; 1352. Baudelaire, OC 1, 1347. Baudelaire, Selected Writings, 106. Baudelaire, OC 2, 495. Baudelaire, Selected Writings, 107; Baudelaire, OC 2, 496. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” in The Short Fiction, 187. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Man of The Crowd,” in The Short Fiction, 285. Baudelaire, The Prose Poems, 30–1; Baudelaire, OC 1, 275–6. This was, however, not an unfamiliar situation for him. In 1851, he compares his indebtedness with Balzac’s, but regrets that he does not have as good working habits as him. See Baudelaire, Correspondance 1, 177. Pichois and Ziegler, Charles Baudelaire, 424. Baudelaire, Correspondance Vol 2, ed. C. Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 225. My translation. Pichois and Ziegler, Charles Baudelaire, 298. Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, 52. Pichois and Ziegler, Charles Baudelaire, 267. Baudelaire, OC 1, 694. Baudelaire, Correspondance 2, 255. Pichois and Ziegler, Charles Baudelaire, 443. Baudelaire, The Prose Poems, 30. Baudelaire, OC 2, 275. This is an aspect that has also been stressed by Jonathan Monroe in A Poverty of Objects. The Prose Poem and the Politics of Genre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 97. Baudelaire, OC 1, 365. In Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, edited by Pierre Larousse and published from 1865 and onward, the article on “serpent” comprises the following passage:

NOTES

177

Il ne nous reste que quelques mots à dire sur le fantastique serpent de mer dont il a été question à diverses reprises dans les journaux. Ce fut le Constitutionnel qui, le premier, annonça la découverte d’un serpent de mer, dont il donna la terrifiante description et qui n’avait jamais existé que dans l’imagination d’un de ses rédacteurs, désireux d’attirer l’attention publique sur ce journal par un fait divers étourdissant. Le serpent de mer du Constitutionnel, un des canards les plus célèbres que la presse ait mis en circulation, a reparu depuis lors, avec des légères variantes, dans les journaux, et quelques voyageurs ont contribué à faire croire à son existence. C’est ainsi que, vers 1821, le voyageur russe Krinkoff prétendit en avoir aperçu un en se rendant à l’île de Behring. Il distingua, dit-il, dans l’eau un serpent rouge d’une longueur démesurée, dont la tête ressemblait à celle d’un lion de mer; deux énormes yeux disproportionnés avec le reste du corps lui donnant un aspect effroyable. (Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, ed. Pierre Larousse. Vol. 14 (Paris: Administration de Grand dictionnaire universel, 1875), 607) In Trésor de la Langue Française. Dictionnaire de la Langue du XIXe et XXe Siècle, the phenomenon has two different names: “serpent marin” and “serpent de mer.” Both a literal and a figural definition is given to each: Serpent marin, serpent de mer. Monstre marin fabuleux. On se rappelle le bruit que fit en 1837 la découverte du grand serpent de mer vu par le navire le Havre à la hauteur des Açores. Tous les journaux s’en sont occupés; et, après s’en être montrée stupéfaite, la presse, faisant volte-face, a présenté ensuite le grand serpent marin comme un être imaginaire. (Collin 1863) Au fig. Serpent de mer. Thème rebattu et peu crédible ou information généralement peu fondée, souvent à caractère sensationnel, reprise par la presse durant les périodes creuses. (Trésor de la Langue Française. Dictionnaire de la Langue du XIXe et XXe Siècle (1790–1960), Vol. 14 (Paris: Gallimard 1992), 395) 63 It may be objected that Baudelaire refers to his work as a “serpent,” not a “serpent de mer,” but the definitions in both Larousse and Trésor indicate that “serpent” and “serpent de mer” are interchangeable terms. In Larousse, the term “serpent” is used independently and in italics (“un serpent rouge d’une longeur démesurée”), and in Trésor, the term “serpent” is attributed a certain independence by the use of two different epithets: “serpent de mer” and “serpent marin.” Interestingly, this signification of the word “serpent” is not mentioned at all in Emile Littré’s Dictionnaire de la Langue Française, probably due to its aim to be a dictionnaire littéraire, rather than a dictionnaire d’usage. 4 Here, Baudelaire may (again) have been inspired by Poe. In a note, Baudelaire 6 compared one of Poe’s stories to the canards of the newspapers, claiming that Poe’s stories were superior to theirs because of their verisimilitude. Further, Baudelaire comments enthusiastically on Poe’s canards, stressing how they are shaped to flatter modern man. See Baudelaire, OC 2, 293; 321. Hence, it is not unlikely that he was inspired to undertake a similar project. 65 Extensive discussions of the city’s readability are provided in Karlheinz Stierle, La Capitale des signes and Christopher Prendergast, Paris and the Nineteenth Century.

178

NOTES

66 By contrast, French studies on the prose poem have tended to relate Baudelaire’s prose poems to previous forms of poetic prose—from Fénelon’s Télémaque and Chateaubriand’s Atala to Alphonse Rabbe’s L’Album d’un pessimiste and Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la nuit. Some of the most important works in this tradition are Suzanne Bernard’s Le Poème en prose de Baudelaire jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: Nizet, 1978) and Nathalie Vincent-Munnia’s Les Premiers Poèmes en prose. Généalogie d’un genre dans la première moitié du dixneuvième siècle français (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1996). 67 In the prose poems, the influence from moralist genres works in various manners. We find explicit references to La Fontaine in “La Femme sauvage et la petite-maîtresse” (“The Wild Woman and the Little Sweetheart”), to La Bruyère and Pascal in “La Solitude” (“Solitude”), and to Vauvenargues in “Les Veuves” (“The Widows”). We also find an extensive use of allegorical figures, and titles such as “Le Fou et la Vénus” (“The Jester and the Goddess”) and “Le Chien et le flacon” (“The Dog and the Flask”) are modeled on the fable’s scheme of juxtaposing two incompatible principles. Maxims are also dispersed in the prose poems. 68 Baudelaire, Correspondance 2, 583. My translation. 69 Baudelaire, The Prose Poems, 37; Baudelaire, OC 1, 283. 70 Baudelaire, The Prose Poems, 73; Baudelaire, OC 1, 324. 71 Baudelaire, The Prose Poems, 52; Baudelaire, OC 1, 300. 72 Le fait divers has its spicy and scandalous aspect in common with many of the events reported in Petits Poèmes en prose. It is not for nothing that several prose poems were considered unsuited for printing. Because the prose poems “Portraits de maîtresses” (“Portraits of Mistresses”), “Mademoiselle Bistouri” (“Miss Scalpel”), and “Assommons les pauvres!” (“Let’s Beat up the Poor!”) referred to unspeakable subjects such as sexuality, prostitution, and violence, they were considered unpublishable by the Revue nationale. For the same reasons, “La Belle Dorothée” (“Beautiful Dorothea”) was printed in a censured version. “Portraits de maitresses” was eventually printed, after a delay of two years. See Charles Baudelaire, Poèmes en prose, ed. Robert Kopp (Paris: Corti, 1969), 281. 73 Baudelaire, The Prose Poems, 98. 74 Baudelaire, OC 1, 352. 75 Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life, 208. 76 Baudelaire, OC 1, 670; 662. My translation. 77 Baudelaire, OC 1, 684. My translation.

Chapter 2 1 2 3 4

Baudelaire, Intimate Journals, 90; Baudelaire, OC 1, 701. Baudelaire, Selected Writings, 295; Baudelaire, OC 2, 616. Baudelaire, Selected Writings, 54; Baudelaire OC 2, 422. Henri Bergson, too, considered color to be akin to movement; as he saw it, movement resides in quality rather than quantity and is thus akin to

NOTES

5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12

3 1 14 15

6 1 17 18 19 20 21 2 2 23

24

25 26

7 2 28

179

consciousness, see Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1988), Ch. 4. Charles Baudelaire, OC 2, 595. My translation. Baudelaire, OC 2, 455. Champfleury, Le Réalisme (Paris: Michel-Lévy Frères, 1857), 91–3. Baudelaire, Selected Writings, 295; Baudelaire OC 2, 617. Baudelaire, Selected Writings, 297; Baudelaire, OC 2, 618. Baudelaire, Selected Writings, 295; Baudelaire, OC 2, 617. Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) wrote about his carrier as a photographer in a book published in 1900, see Nadar, Quand j’étais photograph (Paris Editions d’aujourd’hui, 1979). He also published a biographical book on Baudelaire, Nadar, Charles Baudelaire intime: Documents, notes et anecdotes (Sens: Obsidiane, 1990). Charles Baudelaire, The Letters of Charles Baudelaire to His Mother 1833–1866, trans. Arthur Symons (New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1971), 276. Baudelaire, Correspondance 2, 554. Susan Blood, “The Sonnet as Snapshot: Seizing the Instant in Baudelaire’s ‘A une passante,’” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 36 (2008): 255–69. Jérôme Thélot, Les Inventions littéraires de la photographie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2003), Ch. 2; Dana MacFarlane, “‘Waiting Still’: Baudelaire and the Temporality of the Photographic Portrait,” History of Photography 36 (2012): 3–14. Benjamin, ”Little History of Photography,” in The Work of Art. Benjamin, ”Little History of Photography,” 294. Benjamin, ”Little History of Photography,” 295. Baudelaire, Selected Writings, 98; Baudelaire, OC 2, 487. English translation quoted from Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 322; Baudelaire, Correspondance I, 676. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Babara Habberjam (New York: Continuum, 2005), 13–19. Charles Baudelaire, The Prose Poems, 87; Baudelaire, OC 1, 339. The counter-example is the poem “Le Soleil” (“The Sun”), where the sun shines and the view to the windows is blocked by blinds. Baudelaire, OC 1, 83; Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, 169. Giorgio Agamben, “Judgment Day,” in Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 58–9. Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 24. In this regard, Baudelaire’s poem “Obsession” (“Obsession”) from Les Fleurs du mal makes an interesting comparison; the poet acknowledges that the dark forest he contemplates only serves as a canvas for his reveries. See Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, 151; Baudelaire, OC I, 75. Baudelaire, Selected Writings, 228; Baudelaire, OC 2, 560. Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 293–4.

180

NOTES

9 Rosalind E. Krauss, “Reinventing the Medium,” Critical Inquiry 25 (1999), 294. 2 30 Taking Kant’s notion of parergon as a point of departure, Jacques Derrida questions the boundaries of the work and the boundaries between inside and outside. Kant himself explains parergon as that which does not belong to the work proper, but which may still complement it, as a frame does, for instance. Continuing this train of thought, Derrida sees parergon as referring to a lack within the work itself, calling for support from the “outside.” This means that the work requires a complement in order to be perceived as consistent and full. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University Press of Chicago, 1987), 54; 59–60. 31 Walter Benjamin, “Baudelaire,” in The Writer of Modern Life, 27. 32 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 6, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt a. M: Suhrkamp, 1991), 133. 33 Susan Blood discusses the relation between “Little History of Photography” and “Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” focusing on Benjamin’s shift of emphasis with respect to Baudelaire and photography. The article offers an interesting discussion of Baudelaire’s and Benjamin’s respective views on photography, exploring to what degree their perspectives could be described as historicalmaterial or dialectical. Blood also comments on the early fragment written by Benjamin and his metaphorical use of photography, before she ends up siding with his allegorical reading of Baudelaire, seeing the allegorical mode as suspended between materiality and metaphor. The article reveals the complexity of both Baudelaire’s and Benjamin’s positions. See Susan Blood, “Baudelaire Against Photography: An Allegory of Old Age,” MLN 101 (1986, French Issue): 817–37. 34 Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life, 203; 202. 35 Samuel Weber, “Theater, Technics, and Writing,” 1-800 (Fall 1989): 18. Quoted in Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 19. Cadava reflects upon Benjamin’s notion of inscription, pointing out that Benjamin’s discusses the scriptural dimension of both allegory and photography. 36 Baudelaire, The Prose Poems, 99–100. 37 Baudelaire, OC 1, 354. 38 Baudelaire, OC 1, 1347. 39 Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 35. 40 John Hannavy (ed.), Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, Vol. 1 (London: Routledge 2008), 276. 41 See Steffen Siegel, “Der Multiplizierte Fotograf: Figuren den jüngeren Bildgeschische,” in Charles Nègre: Selbstporträt im Hexenspiegel, eds. Michael Hagner, Bernd Stiegler and Felix Thürlemann (Paderborn: Fink Verlag, 2014), 88–101. 42 Dana MacFarlane, “‘Waiting Still,’” 5. 43 Nadar, Quand j’étais photographe, 6. 44 Champfleury [Jules François Félix Fleury-Husson], “The Legend of the Daguerreotypist,” in Literature & Photography: Interactions 1840–1990, ed. Jane Rabb (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 14.

NOTES

181

5 Baudelaire, The Prose Poems, 74; Baudelaire, OC 1, 325. 4 46 Traffic in Souls is the title of a feature film from 1913, an urban thriller on women forced into prostitution. The film is discussed by Tom Gunning in an illuminating essay on urban spectatorship, where he claims that “the view of the city that emerges from this film brings us to the final aporia of the urban spectator, unable to trust or evaluate all she sees.” Although the term “traffic in souls” here has a more concrete signification (white slavery), the issues Gunning discusses are related to the issues discussed in this Chapter. See Tom Gunning, “From Kaleidoscope to the X-Ray: Urban Spectatorship, Poe, Benjamin, and Traffic in Souls (1913),” Wide Angle 19 (1997): 41. 47 Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gestures,” in Means without End, 55–6.

Chapter 3 1 An interesting example is Karlheinz Stierle’s excellent book, La Capitale des signes, where the word kaleidoscope is listed in the index with six occurrences. In each of them, the word is used strictly as a metaphor, and there is no reference to the instrument in the book. 2 David Brewster, The Kaleidoscope. Its History, Theory, and Construction (London: John Murray, 1858), 1. 3 Brewster, The Kaleidoscope, 7. 4 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 1992. 5 My description of these instruments is based on Crary’s Techniques of the Observer as well as other books on the precinema period, in particular Jean Vivié, Prélude au Cinéma: De la préhistorie à l’invention (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006) and Victor Pinel, Chronologie commentée de l’invention du cinéma, special issue of 1895 [without number] (Paris: Association française de recherche sur l’historie du cinéma, 1992). In addition, it is based on firsthand investigation of optical toys. 6 Barbara Maria Stafford and Frances Terpak, Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2001), 358. 7 Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 24. 8 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 20; 70; 82. 9 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 686. 10 Benjamin, Baudelaire, 511–3. 11 Crary acknowledges these possibilities in his last chapter, where he suggests that two paths opened up once vision became relocated in the subjectivity of the observer: One led to an affirmation of the autonomy of vision “in modernism and elsewhere” (the late work of the painter J. M. W Turner being his main example). The other led toward “the increasing standardization and regulation of the observer.” Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 150.

182

NOTES

12 See Bernard Comment, The Panorama (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), which offers a thorough presentation of the history and the techniques of the panorama as well as a discussion of the relation between the panorama and the diorama. 13 Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life, 33–4. 14 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 529. 15 Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perceptions. Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). 16 See Meltzer, Seeing Double, 75–137. 17 Baudelaire, OC 2, 578. My translation. 18 These drawings have proved to be difficult to find. To my knowledge, they are not reproduced in any books, and the originals are most likely in a private collection. Interestingly, Claude Pichois remarks that they are worthy of the interest of a psychoanalyst. See Baudelaire, Correspondance 1, 701. 19 Letter written on November 23, 1833, Charles Baudelaire, Correspondance 1, 22. My translation. 20 Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life (London: Phaidon Press, 1995), 200; Baudelaire OC 1, 583. 21 Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 199; Baudelaire OC 1, 582. 22 Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 202; Baudelaire OC 1, 585. 23 Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 202–3. 24 Baudelaire, OC 1, 585–6. 25 Baudelaire claims that such toys are expensive, but he must be referring mainly to the stereoscope, whose popular success came with the spread of photography in the second half of the century. Simple versions of the phenakistiscope, by contrast, must have been cheaper, as is also indicated in Baudelaire’s letter to his brother, where he states that Paris is full of such instruments. 26 See Jean-François Lyotard, Duchamp’s Transformers (San Francisco: The Lapice Press, 1990). 27 Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs are circular disks with circular patterns of various kinds. When the disks are made to spin, the spinning circles create the illusion of depth. In this manner, a 3-D effect is created. The Rotoreliefs are designed to fit on a record player and can be made to spin in the same way as records are made to spin. Duchamp did not consider these devices pieces of art, but rather as experiments into kinetics. Art historians, as well, tend not to see them as parts of Duchamp’s art production. 28 Translation quoted from Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 536; Baudelaire, OC 2, 668. 29 Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless. A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 135. 30 Mark B. N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 3; 37–8. 31 Baudelaire, Selected Writings, 400. 32 Baudelaire, OC 2, 692. 33 Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life, 191. 34 Jonathan Crary, too, quotes this passage, and he argues that the kaleidoscope provides more possibilities than the phenakistiscope (but he does not refer to

NOTES

5 3 36 37 38 39 0 4 41 42

3 4 44 45 46 47 48 49

0 5 51 52 53 4 5 55 56 57

8 5 59

183

Baudelaire’s writings on the phenakistiscope): “With all the luminous possibilities suggested by Baudelaire and later Proust, the kaleidoscope seems radically unlike the rigid and disciplinary structure of the phenakistiscope, with its sequential repetition of regulated representations. For Baudelaire the kaleidoscope coincided with modernity itself; to become ‘a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness’ was the goal of ‘the lover of universal life.’ In his text it figured as a machine for the disintegration of a unitary subjectivity and for the scattering of desire into new shifting and labile arrangements, by fragmenting any point of iconicity and disrupting stasis.” See Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 113. Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 10. Baudelaire, Selected Writings, 398; Baudelaire, OC 2, 690. Baudelaire, Selected Writings, 398. Baudelaire, OC 2, 690. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 135. Baudelaire, Selected Writings, 403; Baudelaire, OC 2, 695. Baudelaire, Selected Writings, 393–4; Baudelaire, OC 2, 686. For a history of chronophotography, see, for instance, Vivié, Prélude au cinema; for a brilliant discussion of chronophotography and time, see Doane, The Invention of Cinematic Time, 33–68. Doane, The Invention of Cinematic Time, 56. Baudelaire, Selected Writings, 406; Baudelaire, OC 2, 697. Baudelaire, Selected Writings, 407; Baudelaire, OC 2, 698. Baudelaire, Selected Writings, 407; Baudelaire, OC 2, 698. Baudelaire, Selected Writings, 408; Baudelaire, OC 2, 699. Baudelaire, Selected Writings, 409; Baudelaire, OC 2, 700. Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, 189; Baudelaire OC 1, 93. According to Benjamin, this sonnet reveals that the delight of the poet is “love—not at first sight, but at last sight.” It displays a temporal mode in which the eternal farewell coincides with the moment of enchantment. See Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life, 185. Baudelaire, Selected Writings, 434–5. Baudelaire, OC 2, 724. Baudelaire, Selected Writings, 157; Baudelaire, OC 2, 540. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 43. Charles Baudelaire, Intimate Journals, 48–9. Charles Baudelaire, OC 1, 663. Baudelaire, Intimate Journals, 36; Baudelaire, OC 1, 655. The photographer László Moholo-Nagy chose the harbor as the central motif of his first film, Impressionen vom alten Marseiller Hafen (Vieux Port) (1929). The film depicts a harbor that is busy with traffic and crowded with people, focusing particularly on the slow movements of a transporter bridge in steel, transporting people to the other side of the water. In this manner, it registers movement at several levels and at various speeds. Baudelaire, The Prose Poems, 91. Baudelaire, OC 1, 344–5.

184

NOTES

0 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 325. 6 61 Baudelaire, Selected Writings, 299; Baudelaire, OC 2, 621. The same passage is quoted in Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 290. 62 For a discussion of the concept of virtuality in relation to Romantic literature and popular entertainment shows, see Peter Otto, Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity, and the Emergence of Virtual Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Otto’s focus is British literature, including Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and William Wordsworth’s poetry. He refers briefly to Deleuze’s concept of virtuality. 63 Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1988).

Chapter 4 1 This is the perspective established by Martin Jay in Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), although his object is not vision as such, but discourses on vision. Jay sees an increased skepticism toward vision from the late eighteenth century onward and shows how this train of thought is accompanied by an increased acknowledgment of the body as an instrument of perception. 2 Baudelaire, Selected Writings, 152; Baudelaire OC 2, 535. 3 Baudelaire, Selected Writings, 155; Baudelaire OC 2, 538. 4 Baudelaire, Selected Writings, 157. 5 Baudelaire, OC 2, 540. 6 Baudelaire, Selected Writings, 107; Baudelaire, OC 2, 496. 7 Among other places, in “Le chambre double” (“The Double Bedroom”), “Le Gâteau” (“The Cake”), and “Le tir et le cimetière” (“The Firing Range and the Cemetery”). 8 Gernot Böhme explores the concept of “atmosphere” as the fundamental concept of a new aesthetics, which he (following Baumgarten) outlines as a general theory of perception. For Böhme, perception “is basically the manner in which one is bodily present for something or someone or one’s bodily state in an environment.” Böhme develops the concept of atmosphere in relation to Benjamin’s concept of aura (meaning breath), but whereas Benjamin explores the aura in the context of new technology, Böhme sticks to Benjamin’s initial focus on the “dimension of naturalness and corporeality in the experience of the aura.” Gernot Böhme, “Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics,” Thesis Eleven 36 (1993): 125; 117. In his later work, however, Böhme investigates the way technology has extended its reach to the human body. See Gernot Böhme, Invasive Technification: Critical Essays in the Philosophy of Technology, trans. Cameron Shingleton (London: Bloomsbury, 2012). 9 In this regard, it is interesting that the word atmosphere (gr. atmos, vapor  lat. sphaera, sphere) is akin to aura (air, breath), which in Benjamin’s work describes the mystical atmosphere enveloping the work of art, deriving

NOTES

0 1 11 2 1 13

4 1 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

4 2 25 26

185

from its unique existence and central place within a tradition. See Benjamin, The Work of Art. Whereas the aura characterizes the perception of a specific object, atmosphere characterizes the experience of being present in a specific environment. Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life, 50. R. L. Rutsky, “Walter Benjamin and the Dispersion of Cinema,” Symploke 15 (2007): 16. Böhmne, Invasive Technification,18. In his book on literature and evil, Georges Bataille discusses Baudelaire’s inclination toward excess and violence. Taking issue with Sartre, who considered Baudelaire’s life a failure insofar as he refused to take responsibility for himself and remained in the child’s rebellious position, Bataille sees this “failure” as the result of a quasi-deliberate choice: Rather than subordinating to the logics of bourgeois society, Baudelaire opts for the “impossible” position of the poet: “Baudelaire wanted the impossible until the end [jusqu’au bout].” As Bataille sees it, poetry is an impossible choice insofar as it can never substitute for life, but devotes itself to the “logic” of excess, celebrating the very moment of transgression as well as its impossible future. In this manner, poetry escapes the utilitarian economics of bourgeois society and abandons itself to a different “logic”: “it is a work of luxury, gratuitous and unpredictable.” Yet, liberty cannot be conquered by means of a deliberate choice, as this would imply submitting to utilitarian logic. Instead, Bataille contends, liberty must be conquered suddenly, by abrupt and unexpected leaps: “There is nothing surprising in liberty demanding a leap, a sudden and unforeseeable snatch, no longer accorded to those who decide in advance.” Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil, trans. Alastair Hamilton (London: M. Boyars, 1985), 48 ff. Baudelaire, The Prose Poems, 38; Baudelaire OC 1, 285. Baudelaire, The Prose Poems, 49–51; Baudelaire, OC 1, 297–9. Benjamin, The Work of Art, 285. Baudelaire, The Prose Poems, 103–5; Baudelaire, OC 1, 357–9. Baudelaire, Selected Writings, 157; Baudelaire, OC 2, 541. Baudelaire, The Prose Poems, 44–5; Baudelaire, OC 1, 291–2. Baudelaire, The Prose Poems, 59–60. Baudelaire, OC 1, 308. Baudelaire, Selected Writings, 116–7; Baudelaire, OC 2, 576–7. Heidegger’s pessimism is directed toward modern machine-powered technology. The philosopher attempts to conceive of a different concept of technology based on a more originary meaning of the word techne. According to Heidegger, modern machine-powered technology is a means to an end, whereas techne is a mode of revealing; it is about bringing forth rather than about manipulating and dominating. For Heidegger, techne belongs to the domain of poiesis. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1982). Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street, 487. Baudelaire, The Prose Poems, 51; 76; 79. Baudelaire, OC 1, 299; 327; 330.

186

7 2 28 29 30 31

32

33 34

NOTES

Baudelaire, Selected Writings, 247; Baudelaire, OC 2, 79. Baudelaire, Intimate Journals,101; Baudelaire, OC 1, 670. Baudelaire, The Prose Poems, 52; Baudelaire, OC 1,300. Jonathan Culler, “Poésie et cliché chez Baudelaire,” in Le Cliché, ed. Gilles Mathis (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 1998), 215. Paul Claudel: “C’est un extraordinaire mélange du style racinien et du style journalistique.” Quoted from J. Rivière, “Baudelaire,” Nouvelles Revue Française, 1910. My translation. “[P]resque toutes les pièces des Fleurs du Mal fourmillent de platitude et de chevilles.” Albert Thibaudet, Baudelaire, Intérieurs (Paris: Plon, 1924), 58. Quoted by Culler in “Poésie et cliché chez Baudelaire,” 206. My translation. I am borrowing Rutsky’s wording here; see Rutsky, “Walter Benjamin and the Dispersion of Cinema,”18. Samuel Weber, Mass Mediauras. Form, Technics, Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 89.

Chapter 5 1 Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, 116. 2 Donald W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (Adingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2005), 5; 7; 41; 51. 3 Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology. 4 Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas. Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L. Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xix. 5 “Odradek” is the name of a creature that appears in a brief prose piece by Kafka entitled “The Cares of a Family Man.” It is a hybrid and bizarre creature, whose body is made up of discarded utensils. Having crossed the boundaries between man and thing, Odradek is incapable of dying and will therefore outlive the man who takes care of him. 6 For a thorough discussion of Agamben’s sources of inspiration and philosophical project in this series of essays, see Miguel Vatter, “In Odradek’s World: Bare Life and Historical Materialism in Agamben and Benjamin,” Diacritics 38 (2008): 45–70. Vatter’s contention is that Agamben’s political thought—including his concept of profanation—is a continuation of Benjamin’s redemptive project and that Agamben reworks four central motifs in Marx’s historical materialism: the facticity of alienated existence, the fetishism of commodities, the profanity of bourgeois society, and the nihilism of revolution. Vatter argues that, in addition to Marx’s, Benjamin’s, and Heidegger’s perspectives, Adorno’s negative dialectics is important for Agamben’s project, especially Adorno’s discussion of the dialectics of the commodity, which refers to Odradek. 7 Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 163. 8 For a discussion of various significations and uses of fetishism in modern culture, see Fetishism as a Cultural Discourse, eds. Emily Apter and William Petz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).

NOTES

187

9 Commenting on the role of the collector, Benjamin asserts that the collector is concerned with “the transfiguration of things” and that he dreams his way into a better world in which “things are freed from the drudgery of being useful.” Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 9. 10 Agamben, Stanzas, 42; 56–7. 11 For a discussion of the positions of Agamben, Benjamin, and Adorno in this regard, see Vatter, “In the World of Odradek,” 50–6. 12 Agamben, Stanzas, 57. 13 Agamben, Stanzas, 59. 14 Agamben, “What is an Apparatus?” 15 Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 198; Baudelaire, OC 1, 581. 16 Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 199. 17 Baudelaire, OC 1, 582. 18 Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 200; Baudelaire, OC 1, 583. 19 Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, Vol. 21 (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1963), 155. 20 Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 199; Baudelaire, OC 1, 582. 21 Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 202. Note that the English translator has added the word “sometimes” and thereby weakened the claim. 22 Baudelaire, OC 1, 585. 23 Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 203–4. 24 Baudelaire, OC 1, 587. 25 Rainer Maria Rilke, “Some Reflections on Dolls,” in Selected Works, Vol. 1, trans. G. Craig Houston (London: Hogarth Press, 1954), 45. 26 Rilke, “Some Reflections on Dolls,” 48. 27 It was E. Jentsch who first used automatons as examples of the uncanny, seeing doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate, as a source of uncanny sensations. In his essay “The Uncanny” (1919), Freud takes issue with Jentsch. He argues that what is uncanny in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story “The Sandman” is not this doubt (for we soon learn that Olympia is an automaton, and the feeling of the uncanny persists), but rather the fear of losing one’s eyes instigated by the Sandman mythology, which Freud sees as a fear of castration. Although Freud argues that the source of the uncanny in Hoffmann’s story is not doubt whether the automaton is alive or not, he makes a general claim at the end of the essay which complicates his stance. He asserts that unclear boundaries between the imagination and reality often cause uncanny effects. Further, Freud’s conclusion acknowledges that the experience of something that appears to be supernatural may be the source of uncanny feelings. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1961), 217–56. 28 Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 201. 29 Baudelaire, OC 1, 584. 30 Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, Memoirs of Robert-Houdin, trans. Lascelles Wraxall, Vol. 1 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1859), 229. Robert-Houdin,

188

31

32 3 3 34 35

6 3 37 38 9 3 40 41 42 43

NOTES

the most famous illusionist in the nineteenth century, was also a producer of automata. He started his renowned Soirées fantastiques in Paris in 1844, a spectacle that included the presentation of automata. Baudelaire refers to Robert-Houdin once in his diaries—scornfully. See Baudelaire, OC 1, 654. Interestingly, Roubert-Houdin not only connects the world of illusionism and the world of automata; he also has a role in connecting the world of illusionism and the early cinema: In 1888, Roubert-Houdin sold his theater to the illusionist Georges Méliès, who would take the visual illusions to the cinema screen a decade later. Walter Benjamin, “Old Toys,” in Selected Writings, Vol. 2/1, eds. Michael W. Jennings Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 99–100. Simon During, Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). During, Modern Enchantments, 66. Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 204; Baudelaire, OC 1, 587. The expression “puzzling questions” is borrowed from Poe’s epigraph to the short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), which quotes Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial (1658): “What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, although puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture.” The epigraph testifies to the wordly nature of Poe’s mysteries; the ingenious detective can always disentangle them. Poe, The Short Fiction, 175. Baudelaire, The Prose Poems, 55–6; Baudelaire, OC 1, 304–5. Jacques Derrida, Given Time 1 Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). For a discussion of Baudelaire and expenditure, see Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil. Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 201; Baudelaire, OC 1, 584. Agamben, “In Praise of Profanation,” in Profanations, 75. Agamben, “In Praise of Profanation,” 76–7. Agamben, “In Praise of Profanation,” 85. Agamben, “In Praise of Profanation,” 86.

Chapter 6 1 Jacques Derrida has demonstrated the prevalence of such metaphors. Derrida asserts that the metaphor of darkness and light is the founding metaphor of Western philosophy as metaphysics, and that the history of philosophy in this respect is a “photology” (the part of physics that deals with light, i.e. optics). Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 27. As Martin Jay has showed, Derrida’s critical assessment of optical imagery is part of a larger tendency, an increased skepticism toward vision as a model for epistemological processes in

NOTES

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

0 1 11 12

3 1 14

15 16 17

189

twentieth-century French thought. See Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes. Further, Tom Gunning has pointed out the importance of imagery issuing from optical devices in the critical tradition. See Tom Gunning, “The Exterior as Intérieur,” 110. Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999, trans. Anthony Enns (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 34. Kittler, Optical Media, 36. Agamben, What is an apparatus?, 17. Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey WinthropYoung and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), xxxix. Agamben, “In Praise of Profanation,” 21. Baudelaire, OC 1, 282–3. My translation. Baudelaire, OC 1, 350; Baudelaire, The Prose Poems, 96. Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 219; 224. Adorno, “Letters to Walter Benjamin,” 129. See Sarah Kofman, Camera Obscura: Of Ideology, trans. Will Straw (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). My discussion of the phantasmagoria and the critical tradition is indebted to Margaret Cohen and Tom Gunning’s illuminating writings on this issue. See Cohen, Profane Illumination, 217–59; and Tom Gunning, “Illusions Past and Future: The Phantasmagoria and its Specters,” Media Art Histories Archive (2004), http://www.pl02.donau-uni.ac.at/jspui/handle/10002/296. It should be mentioned that according to Gunning, the negligence of Marx’s reference to the phantasmagoria may partly be due to an inaccurate translation in the English version: the word “phantasmagorische” is there translated as “fantastic.” Gunning, “Illusions Past and Future,” 6. In Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida describes the relation between phantasmagoria and the fetish in Marx’s theory. Although Derrida is not mainly interested in the phantasmagoria as a spectacle, he implicitly refers to it, and he pays great attention to its illusory character. For Derrida, the phantasmagoria is mere appearance, and due to the impact it has on people’s imagination and beliefs, it is also a ghost-like phenomenon. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the State of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 135; 198. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 165. Translation modified. For a discussion of the relation between the commodity and allegory in Benjamin’s writings, see Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 177–90. Cohen takes this one step further when she suggests (although with reservations) that Benjamin in “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” constructs “Marx as an allegorist on a par with Baudelaire.” In this manner, she opens up a highly interesting perspective for the discussion of the relationship between Baudelaire, Marx, and Benjamin. Cohen, Profane Illumination, 228.

190

8 1 19 20 21

2 2 23 24 25 26 27 28 9 2 30 31 32 33 34 5 3 36

7 3 38

39

40

NOTES

Marx, Capital, 165. Cohen, Profane Illumination, 245–6. See Apter and Pietz, Fetishism as Cultural Discourse. Michael Jennings, “On the Banks of a New Lethe,” 96. Jenning’s article offers a valuable discussion of the relation between Benjamin’s theory of perception and the commodity, emphasizing the importance of the category of the phantasmagoria in the late phase of Benjamin’s work. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ix. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 7; 9; 10; 11; 12. Adorno, “Letters to Walter Benjamin,” 116–7. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 14. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 25. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 26. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften 5, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 26. Cohen, Profane Illumination, 235. Cohen, Profane Illumination, 229–30. Cohen, Profane Illumination, 251; 259. Jennings, “On the Banks of a New Lethe,” 103–4. Gunning, “Illusions Past and Future,” 12. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 504. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 507. Closer to our time, in the post-1968 climate, Freud’s conceptualization of the psyche as an apparatus offered new possibilities to think about film. In the midst of a vogue in which one apprehended the ideological impact of the cinema “apparatus” and the hold it had on the spectator’s mind, the following train of thought was put forward: Cinema could be considered as the external version of the apparatus described by Freud, that is, the external version of the psyche. See Jay, Downcast Eyes, 472. See also Mary Ann Doane, “Remembering Women: Psychical and Historical Constructions in Film Theory,” in Psychoanalysis & Cinema, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (New York: Routledge, 1990), 46–63. Doane discusses Freud’s analogy in relation to apparatus theory, using a feminist perspective. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 504. Important in this context is the fact that Freud’s use of optical metaphors has been subject to a deconstructionist critique and considered part of Western ocularcentrism, i.e. the Western metaphysical tradition. See Jay, Downcast Eyes, 472 and Kofman, Camera Obscura, 21–8. See also Jacques Derrida, “Freud: The Scene of Writing,” in Writing and Difference, 246–91. Central to Derrida’s reading of Freud is the notion of the “trace.” See Detlev Schöttker, “Benjamins Medienästhetik,” 417–8. For Benjamin’s description of memory as a theater, see Benjamin, “Berlin Chronicle,” in Selected Writings 2/2, 611. As Mary Ann Doane has shown, time is also a silent premise in Freud’s theory of the human psyche, but he abstains from considering time explicitly,

NOTES

41

2 4 43 4 4 45 46 47 48 9 4 50

51

191

probably because he sees time as belonging to consciousness, whereas he sees the unconscious as “outside” of time. Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, 34 ff. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 405. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 462. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 463; Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 405. Benjamin, The Work of Art, 27. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 458. Benjamin, One-Way Street, 474. Adorno, “Letters to Walter Benjamin,” 120. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 114. The German Ideology was written in 1845/1846, but was not published until 1932. Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life, 137. Bruno Latour, “How to be Iconophilic in Art, Science, and Religion?,” in Picturing Science, Producing Art, eds. Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison (New York: Routledge, 1998), 422. W. J. T. Mitchell, “The Rhetoric of Iconoclasm,” in Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 160–208.

Bib lio g r a p hy

Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Continuum, 1997. —“Letters to Walter Benjamin,” In Aesthetics and Politics: The Key Texts of the Classic Debates within German Marxism. Edited by Ronald Taylor. London: Verso, 1980, 110–33. Agamben, Giorgio. Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience. Translated by Liz Heron. London: Verso, 2007. —Means without End: Notes on Politics. Translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. —Profanations. Translated by Jeff Fort. New York: Zone Books, 2007. —Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture. Translated by Ronald L. Martinez. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. —What is an Apparatus?: And Other Essays. Translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. Apter, Emily and William Petz (eds). Fetishism as a Cultural Discourse. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Balzac, Honoré de. Lost Illusions. Translated by Herbert J. Hunt. London: Penguin Books, 1971. —Illusions perdues. Vol. 5 of La Comédie humaine. Paris: Gallimard, 1977. Barthes, Roland. “Structure of the fait-divers.” In Critical Essays. Translated by Richard Howard. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1972, 185–95. Bataille, Georges. Literature and Evil. Translated by Alastair Hamilton. London: M. Boyars, 1985. Baudelaire, Charles. Correspondance. Edited by Claude Pichois. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1973. —The Flowers of Evil. Translated by James McGowan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. —Intimate Journals. Translated by Ch. Isherwood. London: The Blackamore Press, 1930. —The Letters of Charles Baudelaire to His Mother 1833–1866. Translated by Arthur Symons. New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1971. —Œuvres complètes. Edited by Claude Pichois. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1975–6. —The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Translated by Jonathan Mayne. London: Phaidon Press, 1995. —Petits Poèmes en Prose. Edited by Robert Kopp. Paris: Corti, 1969. —The Prose Poems and La Fanfarlo. Translated by Rosemary Lloyd. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. —Selected Writings on Art and Literature. Translated by P. E. Charvet. London: Penguin Books, 1972.

194

Bibliography

Baudry, Jean-Louis. “Le dispositif: approches métapsychologiques de l’impression de réalité.” Communications 23 (1975): 56–72. —L’Effet cinema. Paris: Editions Albatros, 1978. —“Effets idéologiques produits par l’apparail de base.” Cinéthique 7–8 (1970): 1–8. Bellanger, Claude, Jacques Godechot, Pierre Guiral, and Fernand Terrou. Histoire générale de la presse française. Vol. 2. Paris: Presses Universitaires Françaises, 1969. Benjamin, Andrew. Benjamin and Art. New York: Continuum, 2005. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. —Baudelaire. Edited by Giorgio Agamben, Barbara Chitussi, and Clemens-Carl Härle. Translated by Patrick Charbonneau. Paris: La Fabrique, 2013. —Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. 7 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974–89. —Medienästhetische Schriften. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002. —Selected Writings. Edited by. Michael W. Jennings. 4 Vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996–2003. —The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on the Media. Edited by Michael Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin. Translated by Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, and Others. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. —The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire. Translated by Howard Eiland, Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, and Harry Zohn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Translated by N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1988. Berman, Marshall. All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. London: Verso: 2010. Bernard, Suzanne. Le Poème en prose de Baudelaire jusqu’à nos jours. Paris: Nizet, 1978. Blood, Susan. “The Sonnet as Snapshot: Seizing the Instant in Baudelaire’s ‘A une passante’.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 36, 3–4 (2008): 255–69. Böhme, Gernot. “Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics.” Thesis Eleven 36 (1993): 113–26. —Invasive Technification: Critical Essays in the Philosophy of Technology. Translated by Cameron Shingleton. London: Bloomsbury, 2012. Bois, Yve-Alain and Rosalind E. Krauss. Formless. A User’s Guide. New York: Zone Books, 1997. Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Translated by Susan Emanuel. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. Brewster, David. The Kaleidoscope: Its History, Theory, and Construction. London: John Murray, 1858. Brodersen, Momme. Walter Benjamin: Leben – Werk – Wirkung. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005. Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.

Bibliography

195

—“The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering.” New German Critique 39 (1986): 99–140. Bussolini, Jean. “What is a dispositive?” Foucault Studies 10 (2010): 85–107. Buvik, Per. “Paris—lieu poétique, lieu érotique. Quelques remarques à propos de Walter Benjamin et de Baudelaire.” Revue Romane 20, 2 (1985): 231–42. Cadava, Eduardo. Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Translated by M. B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Cavell, Stanley. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. Champfleury [Jules François Félix Fleury-Husson]. “The Legend of the Daguerreotypist.” In Literature & Photography: Interactions 1840–1990. Edited by Jane Rabb. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995, 10–14. —Le Réalisme. Paris: Michel-Lévy Frères, 1857. Cohen, Margaret. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Comment, Bernard. The Panorama. London: Reaktion Books, 1999. Compagnon, Antoine. Baudelaire devant l’innombrable. Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2003. Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perceptions: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. —Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. Culler, Jonathan. “Poésie et cliché chez Baudelaire.” In Le Cliché. Edited by Gilles Mathis. Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 1998, 205–18. Danius, Sara. The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books, 1988. —Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Continuum, 2005. Derrida, Jacques. Given Time 1 Counterfeit Money. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. —Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the State of Mourning and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994. —The Truth in Painting. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: University Press of Chicago, 1987. —Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. —“Remembering Women: Psychical and Historical Constructions in Film Theory.” In Psychoanalysis & Cinema. Edited by E. Ann Kaplan. New York: Routledge, 1990, 46–63. During, Simon. Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.

196

Bibliography

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. —Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. Translated by Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon, 1980. —Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France. Translated by Graham Burchell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Freud, Sigmund. “Fetishism,” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Edited by James Strachey, Vol. 21. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1963, 147–57. —The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated by James Strachey. New York: Basic Books, 2010. —“The Uncanny.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Edited by James Strachey, Vol. 17. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1961, 217–56. Friedberg, Anne. Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Gobble, Mark. Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Goulet, Andrea. Optics: The Science of the Eye and the Birth of Modern French Fiction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle. Edited by Pierre Larousse. Vol. 14. Paris: Administration de Grand dictionnaire universel, 1875, s. v. “Serpent.” Gunning, Tom. “The Exterior as Intérieur: Benjamin’s Optical Detective.” boundary 2 30, 1 (2003): 105–30. —“From the Kaleidoscope to the X-Ray: Urban Spectatorship, Poe, Benjamin, and Traffic in Souls (1913).” Wide Angle 19, 4 (1997): 25–61. —“Illusions Past and Future: The Phantasmagoria and its Specters.” Media Art Histories Archive (2004). http://pl02.donau-uni.ac.at/jspui/handle/10002/296. Hannavy, John (ed.). Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography. London: Routledge, 2008. Hansen, Mark B. N. New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Hansen, Miriam Bratu. “Room-for-Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema.” October 109 (2004): 3–45. Harvey, David. Paris: Capital of Modernity. New York: Routledge, 2003. Hausken, Liv. Thinking Media Aesthetics: Media Studies, Film Studies and the Arts. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2013. Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Translated by William Lovitt. New York: Harper & Row, 1982. Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Jennings, Michael W. “On the Banks of a New Lethe: Commodification and Experience in Benjamin’s Baudelaire Book.” boundary 2 30, 1 (2003): 89–104. Kalifa, Dominique, Marie-Ève Thérenty and Alain Vaillant. “Le quotidien.” In La Civilisation du journal: Histoire culturelle et littéraire de la presse française au XIXe siècle. Edited by Dominique Kalifa, Philippe Régnier, Marie-Ève Thérenty and Alain Vaillant. Paris: Nouveau Monde, 2011, 269–94.

Bibliography

197

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Kessler, Frank. “Notes on dispositive.” Homepage van Frank Kessler, Universiteit Utrecht (2007). http://www.hum.uu.nl/medewerkers/f.e.kessler/Dispositif%20 Notes11-2007.pdf Kittler, Friedrich A. Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Translated by Michael Metteer. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990. —Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. —Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999. Translated by Anthony Enns. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010. Kofman, Sarah. Camera Obscura: Of Ideology. Translated by Will Straw. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. Krauss, Rosalind. “The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodern Repetition.” October 18 (1981): 47–66. —“Reinventing the Medium.” Critical Inquiry 25 (1999): 289–305. Latour, Bruno. ”How to be Iconophilic in Art, Science, and Religion?” In Picturing Science, Producing Art. Edited by Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison. New York: Routledge, 1998, 418–40. —Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Lauster, Martina. “Walter Benjamin’s Myth of the Flâneur.” Modern Language Review 102 (2007): 139–56. Lloyd, Rosemary. Baudelaire’s World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. —(ed.). The Cambridge’s Companion to Baudelaire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Lyon-Caen, Boris. “Écrire pour diverter.” In La Civilisation du journal : Histoire culturelle et littéraire de la presse française au XIXe siècle. Edited by Dominique Kalifa, Philippe Régnier, Marie-Ève Thérenty and Alain Vaillant. Paris: Nouveau Monde, 2011, 793–810. Lyon-Caen, Judith. “Lecteurs et lectures: les usages de la presse au XIXe siècle.” In La Civilisation du journal: Histoire culturelle et littéraire de la presse française au XIXe siècle. Edited by Dominique Kalifa, Philippe Régnier, Marie-Ève Thérenty and Alain Vaillant. Paris: Nouveau Monde, 2011, 23–60. Lyotard, Jean-François. Duchamp’s Transformers. San Francisco: The Lapice Press, 1990. MacFarlane, Dana. “‘Waiting Still:’ Baudelaire and the Temporality of the Photographic Portrait.” History of Photography 36 (2012): 3–14. Marchand, Bernard. Paris, Histoire d’une ville: XIXe-XXe siècle. Paris: Seuil, 1993. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin Books, 1990. Meltzer, Françoise. Seeing Double: Baudelaire’s Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. —“The Rhetoric of Iconoclasm.” In Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987, 160–208.

198

Bibliography

—“There Are No Visual Media.” Journal of Visual Culture 4, 2 (2005): 257–66. Monroe, Jonathan. A Poverty of Objects. The Prose Poem and the Politics of Genre. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987. Nadar [Gaspard-Félix Tournachon]. Charles Baudelaire intime: Documents, notes et anecdotes. Sens: Obsidiane, 1990. —Quand j’étais photograph. Paris: Editions d’aujourd’hui, 1979. Otto, Peter. Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity, and the Emergence of Virtual Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Paech, Joachim. “Das Sehen von Filmen und filmisches Sehen.” In Sprung im Spiegel. Filmisches Wahrnehmen zwischen Fiktion und Wirklichkeit. Edited by Christa Blümlinger. Wien: Sonderzahl, 1990, 33–50. Paech, Joachim and Jens Schröter (eds). Intermedialität analog/digital: Theorien— Methoden—Analysen. München: Fink, 2000. Peeters, Hugues and Philippe Charlier. “Contributions à une théorie du dispositive.” Hermès 25 (1999): 15–23. Pichois Claude and Jean Ziegler. Charles Baudelaire. Paris: Fayard, 1996. Pinel, Victor (ed.). “Chronologie commentée de l’invention du cinema.” Special issue, 1895 [without number]. Paris: Association française de recherche sur l’historie du cinéma, 1992. Poe, Edgar Allan. The Short Fiction of Edgar Allen Poe: An Annotated Edition. Edited by Stuart Levine and Susan Levine. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976. Prendergast, Christopher. Paris and the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. Queffelec, Lise. Le roman-feuilleton français au XIXe siècle. Paris: PUF, 1989. Rabb, Jane (ed.). Literature & Photography: Interactions 1840–1990. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995. Rilke, Rainer Maria. “Some Reflections on Dolls.” In Selected Works, vol. 1. Translated by G. Craig Houston. London: Hogarth Press, 1954, 43–50. Rivière, Jacques. Études. Paris: Editions de la Nouvelle Revue Française, 1921. Robb, Graham M. “Les Origines journalistiques de la prose poétique de Baudelaire.” Les Lettres romanes 44, 1–2 (1990): 15–25. Robert-Houdin, Jean-Eugène. Memoirs of Robert-Houdin. Translated by Lascelles Wraxall. Vol. 1. London: Chapman and Hall, 1859. Rutsky, R. L. “Walter Benjamin and the Dispersion of Cinema.” Symploke 15, 1–2 (2007): 8–23. Sainte-Beuve, Charles. “De la littérature industrielle.” La Revue des deux mondes 19 (1839): 675–91. Sand, George and Gustave Flaubert. The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters. Translated by A. G. L. McKenzie. Middlesex: The Echo Library, 2006. Schöttker, Detlev. “Benjamins Medienästhetik.” In Walter Benjamin: Medienästhetische Schriften. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002, 411–33. Shaya, Gregory. “The Flâneur, the Badaud, and the Making of a Mass Public in France, circa 1860-1910.” The American Historical Review 109, 1 (2004): 41–77. Siegel, Steffen. “Der multiplizierte Fotograf: Figuren den jüngeren Bildgeschische.” In Charles Nègre: Selbstporträt im Hexenspiegel. Edited by Michael Hagner, Bernd Stiegler, and Felix Thürlemann. Paderborn: Fink, 2014, 88–101.

Bibliography

199

Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” In The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Edited and translated by K. Wolff. New York: The Free Press, 1964, 409–42. Stafford, Barbara Maria and Frances Terpak. Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2001. Stephens, Sonya. Baudelaire’s Prose Poems: The Practice and Politics of Irony. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Stierle, Karlheinz. La Capitale des signes; Paris et son discours. Paris: Edition de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2001. Terdiman, Richard. Discourse/Counter-Discourse. The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Tester, Keith (ed.). The Flâneur. London: Routledge, 1994. Thélot, Jérôme. Les Inventions littéraires de la photographie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2003. Thérenty, Marie-Ève. La Littérature au quotidien: Poétiques journalistiques au XIXe siècle. Paris: Seuil, 2007. —“Rubriques pour rire.” In La Civilisation du journal: Histoire culturelle et littéraire de la presse française au XIXe siècle. Edited by Dominique Kalifa, Philippe Régnier, Marie-Ève Thérenty and Alain Vaillant. Paris: Nouveau Monde, 2011, 1087–95. Thibaudet, Albert. Baudelaire, Intérieurs. Paris: Plon, 1924. Trésor de la Langue Française. Dictionnaire de la Langue du XIXe et XXe Siècle (1790–1960). Edited by Paul Imbs and Bernard Quemada. Vol. 15. Paris: Gallimard, 1992, s. v. “Serpent.” Vaillant, Alain (ed.). Baudelaire journaliste: Articles et chroniques. Paris: Flammarion, 2011. Vatter, Miguel. “In Odradek’s World: Bare Life and Historical Materialism in Agamben and Benjamin.” Diacritics 38 (2008): 45–70. Vincent-Munnia, Nathalie. Les Premiers Poèmes en prose. Généalogie d’un genre dans la première moitié du dix-neuvième siècle français. Paris: Honoré Champion, 1996. Vivié, Jean. Prélude au Cinéma: De la préhistorie à l’invention. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006. Weber, Samuel. Mass Mediauras. Form, Technics, Media. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. —“Theater, Technics, and Writing.” 1-800 (Fall 1989): 15–19. Winnicott, Donald W. Playing and Reality. Adingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2005. Zeldin, Théodore. France 1848–1945, Vol. 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Index

3-D images  1, 8, 50, 84, 102, 162 Adorno, Theodor W.  10–11, 18n. 61, 125, 125n. 6, 149, 152–3, 155, 161–3 commodity  10, 125, 125n. 6 ideology criticism  10–11, 149 phantasmagoria  152–3, 155 play  18n. 61 stereoscope  161–3 afterimage  76, 79–80, 92, 95 Agamben, Giorgio apparatus, see dispositive commodity  124–5 dispositive  15n. 46, 16–17, 126, 145 gestures  57, 69–70 “In Praise of Profanation”  139–40 photography  57, 69–70 play  17–18, 139–40 profanation  17–18, 139–40 Stanzas  124–6 toys  124–6 “What is an Apparatus?”  15n. 46, 16 allegory  38–42, see also Benjamin, allegory anecdote  29–30, 38–41 animation  69, 131–4, 133n. 27, 140 anthropomorphism  144 apparatus  15, 15n. 46, 85, 122, 141, 145, 158n. 36, see also ­dispositive art objects  58, 123, 125–6, 129 atmosphere  32, 105, 105nn. 8, 9, 108, 110, 129, 147 authenticity  18, 45, 60–1, 66, 120, 148 automatons  81, 124, 132–4, 133nn. 27, 30, 139–40

Balzac, Honoré de  13, 25, 28–9, 67 Barthes, Roland  29–30 Bataille, Georges  106 Baudelaire, Charles “A Arsène Houssaye”  33–8 “Assommons les pauvres!”  40, 112–16 “A une passante”  12n. 35, 51, 96, 96n. 49 “Chacun sa chimère”  39, 149 “Correspondances”  121 “De l’essence du rire”  104–6 Fusées  98–9 “La Corde”  120 “La Fausse monnaie”  40, 136 “La Soupe et les nuages”  149 “Le Cygne”  4 “Le Gâteau”  109–12, 114 “Le Joueur généreux”  66–9, 71, 120 “Le Joujou du pauvre”  40, 135–8 “Le Mauvais vitrier”  40, 107–9 Le Peintre de la vie moderne  31, 86–97 “Le Port”  99 “Le Rêve d’un curieux”  51 Le Spleen de Paris, see Petits poèmes en prose “Les Bons chiens”  31 “Les Fenêtres”  54–9, 62, 70 Les Fleurs du mal  21, 34, 49, 59, 121 “Les Foules”  5, 116–18 “Les Tentations”  117 “L’Horloge”  40, 120 “L’Irréparable”  10 “Mademoiselle Bistouri”  31, 41n. 72, 62–6, 71

202

Index

Mon cœur mis à nu  3–4, 30, 48 “Morale du joujou”  81–4, 89–90, 99, 125–35, 138 “Perte d’auréole”  41–5, 68, 119 Petits poèmes en prose  7, 23 “Quelques caricatures français”  58 Salon de 1846  31–2, 48, 105 Salon de 1859  8, 48–50, 52–3, 56, 61, 67, 70, 85, 101 “Un plaisant”  40 Baudry, Jean-Louis  15 Benjamin, Walter allegory  5–6, 5n. 18, 42, 45, 61–2, 62n. 35, 147, 151, 151n. 16, 155 The Arcades Project  79, 100, 152, 155, 162 aura  5, 8, 11, 17, 61, 105nn. 8, 9, 109–10, 112, 148, 161 “Baudelaire”  59–61, 160 Baudelaire (edited by Agamben) 79 “Central Park”  164 “The Commodity as a Poetic Object”  151 dialectical image  156, 160–3 film  9, 65, 79, 103, 106, 121–2, 156 “Little History of Photography”  52–3, 58, 60–1, 159 newspapers  27 One-Way Street  12, 27, 119, 162 “On the Concept of History”  160 “Paris, Capitale du XIXème siècle”  152–5 “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire”  11, 106, 149, 151 “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century”  152 phantasmagoria  152–6 phenakistiscope  79 photography  52–3, 58–62, 159–63 play  17–18 shock  5, 10–11, 14, 53, 87–8, 155 “Some Motifs in Baudelaire”  11, 61, 87 “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological

Reproducibility”  5, 10, 17–18, 65, 159, 161 Bergson, Henri  54, 102–3, 148 Blanqui, Auguste  3, 153–4 body  73, 76, 85–6, 92, 103, 106, 109, 114–16, 144, 147, see also corporeality Böhme, Gernot  105n. 8, 106 Bourdieu, Pierre  7, 24, 26–7, 34 Brewster, David  74–6, 78 Cadava, Eduardo  62n. 35 camera obscura  143, 150 capitalism commodity  125–6, 138–40, 148, 150 ideology criticism  10–11, 14 media technology  17–19, 27, 39, 53, 123, 145, 148, 165 phantasmagoria  149–50, 154–6 rise of  3–4 caption  53, 55, 58–9, 61–2, 70, 146 Carjat, Etienne  8, 50 carte-de-visite, see under photography Champfleury [Jules François Félix Fleury-Husson] 49, 67, 120 chronophotography, see under photography clichés  42, 45, 120–1, 148, see also commonplace language Cohen, Margaret  149, 151, 155–6 comic  41, 104–5, 109, 111, 114–16, 147 commodities Benjamin  2, 5, 5n. 18, 12, 151–2, 155 capitalism  4, 10 fetishism  123–6, 125n. 6, 139, 148, 150–1, 155 toys  135–9, 148 commonplace language  42–4, 104, 119–22, 148, see also clichés contemplation  88, 98–9, 104, 107, 109, 112–16, 121, 148 corporeality  103, 106, 109, 112, 114–16, 119, see also body Crary, Jonathan  13, 16, 76–7, 79–80, 163

Index

crowd experience of  9, 42, 67–8, 102–4, 116–21, 153–4 man of the crowd  5, 32–3, 86–92, 167 as motif  92, 97, 115, 147 streets  4–5 vanity of  50, 166 Culler, Jonathan  120–1 Daguerre, Louis  8–9, 48 dandy  125, 130 Delacroix, Eugène  48–9, 147 Deleuze, Gilles  54, 102 Derrida, Jacques  58n. 30, 136 dioramas  9, 12, 79–80, 85, 102, 134, 139 dispersed perception  103–4, 107–8, 114, 116, 122 dispositive concept of  15–21, 15nn. 46, 47, 17n. 56, 106, 126, 145 media technology  59, 65, 71, 102, 106, 124, 126, 141, 145, 154, 163–6 Doane, Mary Ann  79, 93, 158n. 36, 160n. 40 dolls  81, 84, 124, 131–2, 134, 137 Duchamp, Marcel  85–6 During, Simon  134, 139 fait divers  7, 29–30, 33, 37, 39–41 false consciousness  10, 149, 153, 165 féerie  9–10, 127, 152, 156 fetishism  18, 21, 62, 64–6, 123–30, 130, 139, 148, 151–2, 155, 165 feuilleton  7, 24–5, 28–31, 37 film Benjamin  9–11, 14, 18, 27, 65, 80, 87–8, 103, 106, 122, 160 Deleuze  102 montage  11, 18, 26–7, 88–9 precinema  1, 9, 80, 88–9, 93, 101, 116, 134 flâneur Benjamin  3, 5–6, 5n. 16, 11, 28, 42, 73, 103, 153

203

corporeality  103, 119 figure of  1–7, 12, 32–3, 39, 136 gaze of  2, 5–6, 12–13, 20, 26, 55, 58–9, 62, 70, 132, 146 Flaubert, Gustave  7, 24–5, 34 Foucault, Michel  15–17, 15n. 46, 77, 106, 126 Frankfurt school  20, 152 Freud, Sigmund Benjamin  11, 152 fetishism  129–30 metaphors  21, 146, 148–9, 156–9, 158n. 36, 161, 165–6 uncanny  81, 133n. 27 Gazette des Tribunaux  31–2 gestures  16, 57–8, 69, 81, 95, 104 Girardin, Emile de  24, 30, 35 Gunning, Tom  13, 69n. 46, 150, 156 Guys, Constantin  9, 31, 86, 91–3, 95–6, 98, 115, 147 Hansen, Mark B. N.  86 Hansen, Miriam Bratu  18 Haussmann, Baron  4 Heidegger, Martin  16, 118, 119n. 23 Hoffmann, E. T. A.  82, 133–5 Houssaye, Arsène  34–7 Hugo, Victor  12, 121 Huysmans, Joris-Karl  92 iconoclasm  21, 165 imagination active  69, 99, 101, 116, 123 art  8, 47–50, 85, 100–1, 156 fetishism  64–6, 129, 139 Kant  90–1 media technology  50, 64–6, 71, 146–8, 166 reading of images  57–62, 70 toys  81, 84–5, 123–4, 128–34, 137–41, 148 interface  17, 19, 124, 144, 148, 165 intermediality  20, 146 Jennings, Michael W.  5n. 18, 11nn. 30, 31, 152, 156

204

Index

journalism  7, 23–32, 38–9, 121, 146 kaleidoscope  9, 21, 37, 73–6, 80, 86–91, 97–102 Kant, Immanuel  58n. 30, 90 Kittler, Friedrich A. 14–15, 124, 144–5, 166 Kleist, Heinrich von  133 Krauss, Rosalind  18, 58–9, 86 lanterna magica  9, 79, 134, 143, 150 La Presse  7, 24, 28–37, 135 Latour, Bruno  14–15, 165 Lloyd, Rosemary  6, 20 Mallarmé, Stéphane  26 Marey, Etienne-Jules  93, 95, 133 Marx, Karl  3, 10–11, 21, 125, 140, 146, 148–52, 155, 163–6 media aesthetics  1–3, 19–20, 71, 146, 148, 166–7 media metaphors  19, 21, 37–8, 59–62, 73, 86, 91, 143–67 Méliès, Georges  9 Meltzer, Françoise  12, 80 memory  61, 69, 76, 95, 126–30, 145, 148, 158–60 Mitchell, W. J. T.  14–15, 165 Moholy-Nagy, László  53 montage aesthetics  1, 7–8, 20, 26, 74, 85, 91, 100–1, 147 film  11, 18, 26–7, 88–9, 106 precinema  80, 83, 85, 88–9, 100–1 movement aesthetics  20, 49, 70, 74, 91, 100–1, 147, 165–6 perception of  86–101, 111 precinema  8, 76, 79, 80, 82–101, 132, 136 sketch  9, 31, 86, 91–6 writing  96–100, 111–16 multiplication  48, 66–7, 148, 163 multiplicity  102, 148 multitude  116–22 Muybridge, Eadweard  69, 92–4 Nadar, Félix  8, 50–2, 67

newspapers  1, 6–7, 23–45, 48, 64, 91, 119, 121, 146–7 Neyt, Charles  8, 50 optical illusions  79–80, 84–5, 127, 145, 148 optical unconscious  53, 55, 58, 147 painting  9, 14, 20, 31, 47–9, 53–4, 63, 65, 79, 146 panorama  9, 12, 28, 54, 79–80, 102, 134, 139 pantomime  20, 97, 104–5, 114–15, 147 phenakistiscope  7, 76–84, 83n. 25, 88n. 34, 92–3, 101, 115, 126, 167 photography carte-de-visite  66–7 chronophotography  79, 92–4, 96, 115, 133 portrait photography  47–71 technique of  1, 6–8, 18, 47–50 Plateau, Joseph  76–7 play aesthetics  2–3, 17–18, 102, 119–20 media technology  7, 17–20, 38–45, 47, 59, 61, 67–9, 71, 80, 85–6, 102, 106 profanation  17–18, 138–41 toys  82, 85–6, 102, 123–41 Poe, Edgar Allan  5, 32–3, 41, 54, 134–5 posters  38, 43–5, 118 precinema  1, 2, 8–9, 13, 20–1, 73–102, 115, 124, 147 profanation  17, 18, 138–41 realism  47–50, 57, 70, 92, 95, 97, 115 remediation  20, 97 Rilke, Rainer Maria  131–3 Robert-Houdin, Jean-Eugène  133 Rutsky, R. L.  106 Sainte-Beuve, Charles A.  25–6, 39 secular magic  134, 139–40 Simmel, Georg  5

Index

sketch  9, 25, 28, 31, 48, 86, 91–3, 95–7, 101, 115, 147 stereoscope  7, 12, 21, 50, 56, 77, 78, 80, 82–3, 85, 123, 148, 152, 161–3 technomorphism  144 thaumatrope  76, 79 toys children’s  40, 81, 84, 90, 123–41 mechanical  123, 126, 132–7, 139–40 optical  1, 8–9, 73–102, 123, 126, 134, 139 transitional objects  124–5, 138

205

uncanny  81–4, 130, 133, 133n. 27, 134 violence  66, 71, 81, 95, 97, 101, 103, 106–16, 132, 134, 147 virtual images  1, 7, 84–5, 89, 95, 100–2, 148, 163 Weber, Samuel  61, 122 Wheatstone, Charles  75, 77 windows  4, 33, 54–9, 62, 70, 107–8, 118, 128, 137, 152 Winnicott, Donald  124–6, 138–9 world exhibitions  127, 152–4