Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject 0816646708, 9780816646708

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Scenes of Projection

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ION

ES N E C S

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CT E J O PR

Reca s Enlig ting the hten men tS

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Jill H. Casid

University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis | London

Portions of chapter 2 were previously published as “His Master’s Obi: Machine Magic, Violence, and Transculturation,” in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (New York: Routledge, 2002), 533–­45. Copyright 2015 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401–­2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Casid, Jill H. Scenes of Projection : Recasting the Enlightenment Subject / Jill H. Casid. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8166-4669-2 (hc: alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8166-4670-8 (pb: alk. paper) 1. Visual sociology. 2. Image transmission. 3. Projection (Psychology). I. Title. HM500.C37 2014 302.23—dc23 2014001555 Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-­opportunity educator and employer. 20 19 18 17 16 15

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To the shadows of a few of the intimate ghosts who contour this book’s recasting of the scenes of projection: my mother, Susan Casid Miller; my grandmother, Bert Lev; and my great aunt, Elizabeth Sichel—­all of whom died over the course of this book’s composition. To my father, Gerald Casid, whose death might as well have been this morning in terms of the passionate attachments and hold of loss that shape how I understand the imperative call of doing history otherwise—­ whether personal or collective.

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Contents

Introduction  Shadows of Enlightenment  1 1  Paranoid Projection and the Phantom Subject of Reason  35 2  Empire through the Magic Lantern  89 3  Empire Bites Back  125 4  Along Enlightenment’s Cast Shadows  159 5  Following the Rainbow  195 Conclusion  Queer Projection: Theses on the “Future of an Illusion”  225 Acknowledgments 245 Notes 251 Index 307

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introduction

Shadows of Enlightenment

Foucault once said something quite beautiful about this. He said that historical research was like a shadow cast by the present onto the past. For Foucault, this shadow stretched back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For me, the shadow is longer. There is no great theoretical difference between my work and Foucault’s; it is merely a question of the length of the historical shadow. —­Giorgio Agamben, “Papst ist ein weltlicher Priester: Interview with Giorgio Agamben”

Space may be the projection of the extension of the psychical apparatus. No other derivation is probable. Instead of Kant’s a priori determinants of our psychical apparatus. Psyche is extended; knows nothing about it. —­Sigmund Freud, “Findings, Ideas, Problems”

Scene of Projection 1: The scene of projection is an apparatus of power that produces its subject. Let me open this book on the recasting of the subject in the shadows of enlightenment not by shedding light to banish the menace of what the subject will not admit but by setting the scene of projection with the device of a dream that might seem readily dismissed.1 The dream begins: “In one dream, which I had in October 1958. . . .”2 Recounted in Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), the biography of C. G. Jung published in English two years after the Swiss psychiatrist’s death, the dream is already articulated in the familiar but distancing “I” voice of 1

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2  Introduction

the past tense as a dream that is already over, one that has passed into history as a processed lesson.3 Set concretely in the colonial, Cold War past, October 1958 was the month of geopolitical and extraterrestrial flights in which French Guinea declared its independence as the Republic of Guinea (which marked the beginnings of the repressive regime of which the concrete and barbed wire of Camp Boiro may well be the lasting diagrammatic sign); Pan-­American World Airways began its transatlantic jetliner service between New York and Paris; and NASA, the newly constituted U.S. government agency of aeronautics and space administration, officially launched itself with the failed lunar mission of the Pioneer 1 space probe that never reached its destination. The dream may thus appear dated in every sense. And yet, the curiosity and telling absurdity of the dream are its uncanny substitutions. The opening line that sets the stage of the dream text continues: “. . . I caught sight from my house of two lens-­shaped metallically gleaming disks, which hurtled in a narrow arc over the house and down to the lake. They were two UFOs” (323). In place of the retreating flights of colonial powers, the traversals of transatlantic jetliners, and the lunar trajectories of unmanned space probes, the dream sets in motion two “UFOs,” the dubious figures and strange attractors that so readily concresce Cold War paranoia into immediately legible signs, the flying saucers of cultural mass hysteria so easily boomeranged back not as agents of alien contact but as the affective vectors of feverdreams of overactive fear.4 The subsequent identification of two more such “metallically gleaming disks” only intensifies the strangeness. Flying directly toward the dream’s narrator who views them from the enclosure of the domestic space of the house, the iconic signs of a dated and even nostalgic version of paranoia not only are lens-­shaped but, as they come closer, resolve into not identifiable flying machines but scientific instruments of projection from the hallowed seventeenth-­century beginnings of what has been retrospectively enshrined as the “Scientific Revolution”: the telescope and the magic lantern. Let me quote the dream-­text’s description in full: Then another body came flying directly toward me. It was a perfectly circular lens, like the objective of a telescope. At a distance of four or five hundred yards it stood still for a moment, and then flew off.

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Introduction  3

Immediately afterwards, another came speeding through the air: a lens with a metallic extension which led to a box—­a magic lantern. At a distance of sixty or seventy yards it stood still in the air, pointing straight at me. (323)

These devices for casting an image on a wall, screen, or other surface function as dense condensation points in Jung’s dream, concrescing the historical with the psychoanalytic, the analogical and metaphorical with the material, not as a departure from but focused on and through the features of the technical. So let’s get technical for a moment. The more familiar version of the telescope (the celebrated optical tube fitted with an eyepiece and an objective lens) points up at the stars and planetary bodies in the night sky. But the projecting version of the telescope was used from the seven­ teenth century onward—­most famously in the work of Galileo Galilei and Christoph Scheiner—­to capture sunspots and planetary transits across the sun as images cast onto a surface for observation.5 A complex philosophical instrument of seventeenth-­century optics in its own right, the magic lantern, like the projecting telescope, depends on a light source and lenses to cast an image.6 The basic elements of the magic lantern device consist of a metal or wooden body or box, an illuminant, an objective or condensing lens, and a focusing lens. In its simplest setup, the magic lantern produces a cast image by light sent from a light source (most often a lamp), gathered by a mirror or lens (the so-­called objective), and passed through glass slides painted or containing specimens for projection and inserted upside down into a tube. The resulting image is altered by an additional lens that magnifies, focuses, and “rights” the orientation of the projected image.7 These devices were further modified to introduce obvious mediations between the world outside the aperture and the beholding subject. With prisms, smoke, artificial light sources, live or preserved specimens on glass, painted images on transparencies, wooden sliders with multiple images or specimens that could be rotated or moved back and forth, these devices were also used to project images in such a way that they would seem to come to life, appear out of nowhere, or dissolve into one another. Such effects gave the illusion of bridging the gap between the here and the over there, the real and the imagined, the intangible and the material.

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4  Introduction

Both the projecting telescope and the magic lantern do not just take place in a darkened enclosure or room but adapt the optical principles demonstrated by the philosophical instrument known by the Latin name for the dark room: the camera obscura (Figure 1).8 An experimental device described as early as the eleventh century in the work on optics by Ibn al-­Haytham (Latinized as Alhazen), the camera obscura became one of the principal machines for the demonstration of how the eye was supposed to operate. A room or box with a small hole or aperture often fitted with a condensing lens, the camera obscura was also a simple projector, showing how light from outside the wall or room could be directed through a hole in the wall to cast an inverted image of the world outside on the opposite wall or screen. Besides the scene-­setting devices of enclosure and surrounding darkness to intensify the illumination, the central feature all projecting devices share is the use of an aperture to condense and redirect the light rays that cross from top to bottom and bottom to top to form an upside-­down image. Without an additional lens to “correct” the inversion, the projecting telescope, the magic lantern, and other projective devices that took advantage of the dark room demonstrate the laws of optics and the ostensible physiology of vision as machines of projective inversion. Taking advantage of this technically embedded metaphorics for top/bottom relations of power and agency by inversion to extract a lesson from his dream of flying instruments of projection, Jung narrates an abrupt and astonished transition from sleep and dreams to a waking dream-­state, half in and half out of the dream. It is at this threshold of dream/reality that Jung’s thoughts on the dream-­content “pass through his head” as if vectored from a place external to the dream-­state. The astonishing reversal of the direction of projection from outside in makes of the head a camera obscura into which is cast the inverted image of the relation of the subject (Jung himself) to its abjured object (the UFO whose reality is denied by the projection)—­but with a nonsymmetrical substitution. It is not the unidentified flying object that projects the particular subject, C. G. Jung, but the apparatus of the magic lantern: I awoke with a feeling of astonishment. Still half in the dream, the thought passed through my head: “We always think the UFOs are projections of ours. I am projected by the magic lantern as C. G. Jung. But who manipulates the apparatus?” (323)

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Figure 1. Camera obscura, in Athanasius Kircher, Ars magna lucis et umbrae

(Amsterdam, 1671), 709. Copyright Science Museum / Science and Society Picture Library.

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6  Introduction

The dream-­text abruptly shifts to the question of who manipulates the apparatus, and it is on this question of the shaping agency of technology that the substitution of magic lantern for UFO is telling and yet also unresolved. The ultimate lesson of the dream narration translates the reversal, making a machine metaphor out of the technical inversion that is the distinguishing feature of the magic lantern’s operation. The magic lantern’s projection of the analyst performs a demonstration of the reversed relation between the ego and the unconscious, the domain of “reality” and that of the “dream” in order to provide an instrument representation for the unconscious as a machine of production—­the “generator” of what Jung calls the “empirical personality”: The aim is to effect a reversal of the relationship between ego-­ consciousness and the unconscious, and to represent the unconscious as the generator of the empirical personality. This reversal suggests that in the opinion of the “other side,” our unconscious existence is the real one and our conscious world a kind of illusion, a dream which seems a reality as long as we are in it. (324)

This thought that comes as if from the “other side” of the subject but experienced in the dream as if traveling toward the subject from the outside (and set off in quotation marks in the dream-­text as if the meta­ reflection on the dream-­thoughts were articulated by someone else) is a way of thinking, a way of knowing, a way of asking questions that the instrumentation of the unconscious as a device of projection that produces the subject and the subject’s “reality” does not resolve. Asking “but who manipulates the apparatus?” raises the vexed issue of agency in the scene of projection that extends well beyond the particular scene of Jung’s dream-­text of flying projective telescopes and magic lanterns. The identified and known technologies of projection—­not just the projective telescope and the magic lantern but also the practice of psychoanalysis itself—­perform another labor in this scene of projection that produces the subject, attempting to cast out lingering anxiety and doubt about an agency over the subject that is not just psychical but also material (as figured in a potential alien encounter with what the subject will not own and what the dream-­text and its analysis seek to dispel). We might say that the shadow of the abjured and unidentified flying object lingers in this question of machine agency over not just the psyche but the vulnerable and susceptible material body of the analyst that is nowhere in this scene.

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Introduction  7

While the structure of negating substitution and turnabout in Jung’s dream-­text of the scene of projection deploys scientific instruments of projection to demonstrate the workings of the unconscious in the casting of the subject, the projection is also a contraption for producing a fantasy subject of discarnate reason who can master the unknown and fear-­inducing unidentified mobile object by its conversion into known and reassuringly recognizable instruments of projection. These instruments do not only demonstrate the laws of optics and the “correct” way to see, but also a way of knowing—­the psychoanalytic practice of projecting the projection—­that offers the dream of dispelling the shadow of vulnerability to the disorganizing somatic and affective responses that hollow out the defended fortress ego of rational, disincarnate vision and its fantasy of sovereign agency over the tremulous body and its enmeshed, interdependent precarity. Building on Giorgio Agamben’s reworking of Foucault’s historical genealogy of the dispositif of power in the formation of the subject as that “apparatus” “in which, and through which, one realizes a pure activity of governance devoid of any foundation in being” (in other words, “apparatuses must always imply a process of subjectivization, that is to say, they must produce their subject”), Scenes of Projection takes seriously the instrumentation of the unconscious in the psychoanalytic scene of projection as a device for the casting out but also the recasting of what the subject will not admit, a process that points at once to the history of the shaping of the fortress ego by paranoid projection and also offers a way of analytically approaching the difficult question of what other lateral agencies across the scene of projection might be afforded for other forms of being and becoming besides the subjection of the fortress ego and its abject objects.9 Scene of Projection 2: Instrument metaphors for the workings of the unconscious that make use of early modern philosophical instruments, the elaboration of the mechanism of projection in paranoia, melancholia, and psychic life more generally, and the deployment of projection to counter superstition all draw on the history of projective apparatus as devices of subjection but also provide a means of understanding and intervening in the ways in which techniques of paranoid projection produce the phantom subject of rational vision.

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8  Introduction

Scenes of Projection sets itself the task of telling the story of image projection as a tale of the exercise of what psychoanalysis theorized as the mechanism and practices for developing and maintaining the fantasy of the fortress ego. In contrast with Jung, Freud’s instrument metaphors for the unconscious were compounded out of an assemblage of devices of recording, projection, enlargement, and writing (the microscope, camera apparatus, camera obscura, photographic positive and negative processes, and the Wunderblock) that refuse to resolve into a simple iconic form or a single shape that might be mistaken for a particular applied machine, whether experimental or therapeutic. This highly theoretical elaboration of citations to actual machines in the concocting of assembled fantasy machines that do not serve direct functions may be understood in terms of the work done on Freud’s ambivalent distancing of his treatment practice (the “talking cure”) from those who used machine touch (including genital manipulation) and direct machine experimentation.10 In the published work, one may note the ambivalence, for example, in the relegation to a footnote in the 1919 edition of The Interpretation of Dreams of Freud’s reference to the experimental application of a new time-­based variant of the magic lantern known as the “tachistoscope” (literally “quick view”) used by his colleague Otto Pötzl. While distinguishing between “this new method of studying the formation of dreams experimentally and the earlier crude technique for introducing into the dream stimuli which interrupted the subject’s sleep,” Freud nonetheless insisted that the questions raised by Pötzl’s 1917 paper extended far beyond the scope of Freud’s own work on dreams.11 Despite such demurring, Freud’s elaboration of fantasy machine assemblages must also be seen in terms of his own training, life world, and collecting and viewing practices. Freud attended Jean-­Martin Charcot’s lectures on hysteria at the Salpêtrière where Charcot used the magic lantern for experiments in hypnosis (Figure 2),12 and he collected painted lantern slides that remain largely uncataloged in the collection of the Freud Museum but include sliders, for example, featuring views of the homosocial worlds of fraternizing sailors aboard ship (Figure 3). Contemporary artist Susan Hiller’s piece “Curiosities of Sigmund Freud” (2005) calls our attention to a set of eight glass magic lantern slides called “miniature curiosities for the microscope” that

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Figure 2. Jean-­Martin Charcot (1825–­1903), French neurologist and pathologist, demonstrating the production of hypnosis with light projected from a magic lantern. Picture drawn from life at the Salpêtrière Hospital, Paris. Engraving from La Nature (January 18, 1879): 104. Courtesy of fotoLibra.

Figure 3. Colored magic lantern slide, uncataloged, date unknown. Collection of the

Freud Museum, London. Courtesy of the Freud Museum, London.

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10  Introduction

Freud collected (now uncataloged at the Freud Museum). Hiller’s prints, made by magnifying projection of the microscopic black dots on the slides, take advantage of the concresced material metaphor for the unconscious in the technical exploitation of magnification to reveal an interlining in the visible, demonstrating the way in which tiny, opaque dots, when projected, resolve ambiguously into apparitions such as the illegible but queerly suggestive intimacies of the bodies just beginning to resolve into view in “Spirits Dark & Fair” (Figure 4). Freud wrote in his letters to his family about seeing popular magic lantern displays when he was in Italy and, as Siegfried Zielinski recounts in the chapter on Giambattista della Porta’s book of Natural Magic in his Deep Time of the Media (2006), was interested enough in the kinds of refracting and reflecting devices described in early modern experiments to have installed a special projecting mirror in his office at Berggasse 19 in Vienna that allowed him to see other parts of the residence such as the bedroom reflected in the glass.13 But the point of assembling these material traces of Freud’s immersion in the culture of projection is not to find a smoking gun or magic lantern aimed at his head. Rather, it is to emphasize the cultural and material embeddedness of Freud’s elaboration of instrument metaphors for the unconscious. To emphasize that the unconscious performed a complex array of functions (receiving, inventing, recombining, negating, inverting, converting the libidinal investment or charge, reversing affect, and casting out), Freud elaborated the “instrument of mental function” as a compound device or assemblage with multiple, interconnected systems.14 In The Interpretation of Dreams, he makes it clear that it may be pictured as a compound microscope or photographic apparatus, but these examples hardly exhaust the analogy for Freud, who notes that “we should picture the instrument which carries out our mental functions as resembling a compound microscope or a photographic apparatus, or something of the kind” (emphasis mine).15 In his 1912 “Note on the Unconscious in Psycho-­analysis,” Freud replaced the photographic apparatus with the chemistry of photography and spoke of the “negative process” and the “positive process” to explain the relation between conscious and unconscious activity, emphasizing that not all negative impressions may be admitted to the positive process and, thus, result in a developed picture.16 In “Resistance and Repression,” Lecture XIX

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Figure 4. Susan Hiller, “Spirits Dark & Fair,” from “The Curiosities of Sigmund

Freud” (2005). Nine Iris giclée prints on Japanese handmade paper, based on  eight uncataloged glass slides from the Freud Museum, London, and a letter written by Sigmund Freud. Each image 2911/16 inches / 45.5 x 75.4 cm on paper: 207/8 x 321/8 inches / 53 x 81.5 cm. Courtesy of Susan Hiller.

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12  Introduction

in his “General Theory of the Neuroses” (1916–­17), Freud displaced the chemical aspect of photography and the analogy to the negative/ positive process and returned us to the topography we might infer from the spatialized discussion of the “photographic apparatus” in The Interpretation of Dreams.17 Rather than a single freestanding camera obscura box or room corresponding to the mind and opening directly onto an external reality, in Freud’s work on the neuroses the unconscious is mapped onto a “large entrance hall” and consciousness onto an adjoining “drawing room”: Let us therefore compare the system of the unconscious to a large entrance hall, in which the mental impulses jostle one another like separate individuals. Adjoining this entrance hall is a second, narrower room—­a kind of drawing room—­in which consciousness, too, resides. But on the threshold between these two rooms a watchman performs his function: he examines the different mental impulses, acts as a censor, and will not admit them into the drawing room if they displease him.18

In what Sarah Kofman calls Freud’s camera obscura model of the subject, the observer is divided within himself and vitally limited in his sight.19 Though adjacent, these rooms in Freud’s model are divided by a threshold whose watchman decides which impulses personified as “separate individuals” may be admitted to the drawing room. The observer is not only multiplied but also split into individuals who may never pass into consciousness, a censoring watchman, and “consciousness as a spectator” who is, nonetheless, barred from seeing directly into the entranceway and those foreclosed versions of the self who dwell there. Freud qualifies this spatial version of the instrument, insisting that “I should like to assure you that these crude hypotheses of the two rooms, the watchman at the threshold between them and consciousness as a spectator at the end of the second room, must nevertheless be very far-­reaching approximations to the real fact.”20 And yet he remarks that “they are not to be despised,” an indication of the fecundity and utility of such instrument metaphors for Freud’s dynamic conception of the unconscious, cultural life, and its discontents.21 In addition to this adaptation of the instrument metaphors of the camera obscura and the microscope, Freud’s elaboration of projection

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Introduction  13

in “A Seventeenth-­Century Demonological Neurosis” (1923) as at once a symptom of modernity’s disavowals (the susceptibility to influence cast backward onto superstitious belief in demonological agency) and a technique of analysis attests not just to the residue of forsworn “primitive” pasts but also to the complex legacy of early modern experiment and enlightenment method in the so-­called Scientific Revolution. It is no accident that early modern optics and specifically technologies of projection played a crucial role in Freud’s development of key concepts and techniques of psychoanalysis. When Freud calls projection a “special psychical mechanism” in Totem and Taboo (1913), and in The Interpretation of Dreams famously asks us to picture the psyche—­the “scene of action of dreams,” the “instrument which carries out our mental function”—­as a device “resembling a compound microscope or a photographic apparatus,” this is not merely a mechanistic construction of the body that has early modern antecedents in the work of Descartes and others.22 It is a kind of argument by demonstration, that is, a demonstration lecture that crucially employs instruments to demonstrate the operation of workings of the unconscious and the mechanism of projection in the formation of the fortress ego and its potential undoing. Running throughout these efforts not merely to explain the workings of the psychical apparatus and demonstrate the existence of the unconscious is an analogy to ocular instruments whose medium is the image, whose presentation environment is the dark chamber, and whose function is to stand in for the subject (as an artifactual semblance of human processes) and yet also performatively affect the viewing subject. In this sense, Freud’s recourse to the analogy of optical instruments and technologies of projection is far from arbitrary. Such instrument metaphors allow readers to imagine analysis as a visual operation, an optical spectacle that does not so much represent but act upon the psyche. While drawing on the conventional sense of enlightenment and its operation of illuminating an occluded chamber, the projection of psychic material plays a central role in the elaboration of psycho­ analysis—­not just in the theory of projection but also as a guiding aim for psychoanalysis, that is, the effort not just to cast light on but to cast back into the psyche what was imagined to have been displaced outward.

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14  Introduction

Ultimately, it was Freud’s less discussed and, in many ways, more submerged investment in the religious and scientific beliefs and practices of seventeenth-­century Europe that was crucial to his formulation of the task of psychoanalysis and its recourse to fighting projection with a kind of spectacle of counterprojection. In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), Freud generalizes projection as a normative feature of everyday life: In point of fact I believe that a large part of the mythological view of the world, which extends a long way into the most modern religions, is nothing but psychology projected into the external world. The obscure recognition (the endopsychic perception, as it were) of psychological factors and relations in the unconscious mind is mirrored—­it is difficult to express it in other terms, and here the analogy with paranoia must come to our aid—­in the construction of a supernatural reality, which is destined to be changed back once more by science into the psychology of the unconscious.23

Freud further works out his theory of projection in “Psycho-­Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)” (1911), also known as the case of Schreber, and in Totem and Taboo, where Freud articulates the aim of psychoanalysis as a “translation back” or reversal of the mechanism of projection: “owing to the projection outwards of internal perceptions, primitive men arrived at a picture of the external world which we, with our intensified conscious perception, have now to translate back into psychology.”24 But how that transformation or translation back is to be effected is not specified, only that it depends on “intensified conscious perception.” While the use of the possessive “our” makes a claim on the possession of such enhanced faculties, we might also see here a reason for the recourse to the language of optical instruments often understood to precisely intensify perception through focus, magnification, and even alteration such as the change in direction signaled by the repetition of the word “back.” This double move of projecting the projection is, I will argue, not as simple as eliminating the projection, but is rather a way of sustaining an analytic reckoning with those abjected and opaque aspects of the subject and a way of doing history that refuses the triumphalist closure of periods either as a fossilized historical alterity or the homogeneous empty time of a continuous present.

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Introduction  15

Scene of Projection 3: The scene of projection is an apparatus of power and metaphor machine that produces its subject by devices of transport that carry the subject out of the tremulous, vulnerable, and material body to produce a fantasy of discarnate, rational vision impervious to transports in the other sense—­transports of affect, belief, sensory and cognitive delirium, passion, and somatic response. In their techniques of magnification and alteration and, most fundamentally, the movement implied in the transfer of light and image effects from machine to wall or screen, technologies of image projection—­even at their most basic—­function as devices of transport.25 In this translation from an over there to a “right” here of the image as it appears on wall or screen, technologies of projection traverse space but can also give the effect of moving across geography and time, making the geographically distant come apparitionally close, the dead or inanimate quicken to a semblance of vivifying life, and the ostensibly passed or surpassed (re)surface in a luminescent presence. But these transports that govern what appears and how do so by an effect of transporting not only off scene but into the dematerialized and even impossible. Much has been made of the ostensible occultation of the device itself— ­as if the workings of the apparatus are visible or invisible only on the basis of whether or not one can see the machine, its internal workings, and its labor of operation. Yet what I mean here is a rather different effect that is a function of the setup and the action of casting, whether or not the light source, lenses, outlines of the room or box, the world outside the room, and/or the slides can be seen. That is, what the scene of projection promises to pull off is a rather different trick of performative magic than hiding or revealing the levers or the man behind the curtain. Indeed, it is the evacuation of embodied vulnerability and of susceptible precariousness and interdependence in the place of that man and the position of the implied spectator that is the astonishing transport effect of the scene of projection in the production of the phantom subject of reason—­an effect that is precisely not represented in the image or on the screen. But if this delusion is accomplished, it is never a once and for all: hence the repetitive tactics for its production and, we might say, its mechanical reproduction through training in its exercise. I deploy the history of image projection and specifically its use in the early modern period as an experimental and pedagogical device for

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16  Introduction

training spectatorship to make the larger argument that technologies for casting an image are teaching tools that do not reform but pro­duce—­ even when not literally employed in a classroom. The scene of projection is a setup that rehearses a scene of education by practice in separating body from cast image and screen, but it is also one that, even as it endeavors to displace spectatorial vulnerability, does not foreclose the possibilities of transformative affect, hallucination, and transporting somatic and material effects. To make this argument for the production of the phantom subject of reason by disincarnating devices of transport, I take seriously and work through pedagogical scenes—­and seens—­both large and small, showing just how much might be produced from what might seem like the minor case, the close analysis, the mere example. And so, for example, one of the many engraved plates (Figure 5) diagramming the pedagogical demonstration experiments that comprise William Hooper’s Rational Recreations (1774), a four-­volume work designed for popular science education, is a plate meant to accompany Hooper’s instructions for how to use the magic lantern (represented as Fig. 5 in the plate) and its phantasmagoria machine variant (Fig. 4 in the plate) that projected its cast images on a screen of smoke. At the top of the plate, two illustrations of magic lantern sliders bear the painted representations of that literal and overdetermined machine of transport, the chronotope of the ship of imperial fantasy and naval empire, the cargo hold of the slave ship, and the very shaping of the Atlantic world.26 But the painted sliders are a crucial part of the magic lantern as metaphor machine and transport vehicle in a sense far beyond the iconic register of the charged and embattled boat of naval conquest, trade, and exploration and the “many-­headed hydra” of storms at sea, mutiny, and revolt.27 The sliders—­one showing open water, the other crowded with sailing vessels—­are painted in a rendition of the seas that, by gradations, shifts from the visual simulation of still waters to the dramatic movement of a “furious storm.” Hooper provides detailed instructions for how to paint such sliders convincingly and operate them to produce a threatening “tempest.” By superimposing the two sliders in the magic lantern, agitating both sliders up and down, and increasing the motion, one may orchestrate a perfect storm—­perfect in the sense of a carefully orchestrated storm of motion that transports the spectator from a state of calm, to violent agitation, and a reassuringly triumphant

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Introduction  17

Figure 5. Engraving by J. Lodge, “Magic Lantern,” Plate IV in William Hooper, Rational Recreations (London: L. Davis et al., 1774), 2:50. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Wisconsin–­Madison.

resolution. In instructing readers to move the sliders in both directions from calm to storm and then back again, Hooper also provides a ready-­ made fantasy tale of imperial naval triumph and a fantasy version of the movement of a flattened historical time that makes the storm the exception and the resolution literal in the sense of a return to the implied present state—­as if it were both beginning and inevitable end. As Hooper narrates, “As you draw the glasses slowly back, the tempest will seem to subside, the sky grow clear, and the ships glide gently o’er the waves.”28 Though Hooper’s text here devotes detailed attention to explaining how to create a tempest, we should note the equally careful specifications about how to control and even master the scene of

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18  Introduction

environmental chaos so vividly produced. Through one technology, the technics of image projection, Hooper conjures the spectacle of threat to another, the ship tossed on an angry sea. Agitating fears of technical failure that the technology of projection promises to allay by resolving the torrent back into calm, Hooper’s “mere example” does the not so small work of attempting to master and control the fears of technologies that are shown to have the power to generate the very threats they are supposed to diminish. But the real work of the transport of the scene of projection would seem to be nowhere in this scene, namely, the transportation of embodied spectators so vulnerable to its effects that they leave no trace—­as if the only somatic evidence of the shaping of the subject would be nausea and seasickness from the rocking undertow of such condensed and recycled imperial narratives. While this entire section of Hooper’s Rational Recreations is governed by the telling example of how to use the magic lantern to steer ships through a storm, Hooper concludes his instructions by citing his otherwise unremarked source for both text and image—­the French geographer and physician Edmé-­Gilles Guyot’s four-­volume Nouvelles recreations physiques et mathématiques (first edition, 1769–­70)—with a curious qualification: “The instance we here give (says M. Guyot) being intended merely as an example, and to shew that this machine is capable of producing much more remarkable effects than have been hitherto exhibited.”29 What does it mean to function “merely as an example”? If we stay with what is stated and directly figured in this example of how to use the magic lantern, we find an attempt to manage stormy waters along with real threats and attendant fears of death, of loss of material, animal, and human cargo and of the investments they represent through the orchestration of a spectacle in which nothing is lost and all resolves quickly into calm. And we may note as well that the mere example selected to demonstrate the capacity of the magic lantern is not only the lantern’s rivalrous simulation and management of nature’s powers expressed through the destructive force of a storm at sea, but also its mediation and absorption of the functions of the boat as a vehicle of experience and container of cargo that bridges the distance between here and there. But in calling this demonstration of the lantern’s capacity to rival actual devices of transport “merely” an example, Hooper’s text also conjures the prospect of the machine’s greater powers to produce “much more remarkable effects than have

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Introduction  19

been hitherto exhibited.” I shall argue that this disavowed and yet covertly appropriated magical efficacy to affect the spectator, to act on bodies and matter, is the main action of the scene of projection as an apparatus of power for the production of its subject—­the discarnate vision that imagines it can be neither seen nor affected and the body susceptible to transports that is carried off scene by this metaphor machine that activates the sense of metaphor as transportation.30 Scene of Projection 4: Technologies for casting an image and technologies of projection and introjection in the psychic mechanism of paranoia, the dynamics of melancholia, and the exercise of the “special agency” that takes the ego as an excoriated and disciplined object shape the fortress ego and produce the phantom subject of discarnate reason, transporting bodily vulnerability, superstition, and susceptibility by a casting displacement that fixes that subject’s antitypes, the “others” of empire at home and abroad. In understanding the scene of projection as an apparatus of power that produces its subject by devices of transport, Scenes of Projection rethinks accounts of modernization and the formation of the subject as a disembodied and self-­contained modern observer by attending to what the scene endeavors to fix in the shadows—­those ego-­and identity-­ threatening parts of the subject, those vulnerable aspects of embodiment, those disavowed dimensions of history, those susceptible interlinings of vision, those doubtful, deluded, unpredictable, or, more importantly, unknowable dimensions of cognition, those agency-­dispersing dependencies the subject will not own—­cast out onto those who become the “butt” of the shaping satire of inversion as the abject objects made to carry the burden of the vulnerable, uncontrollably embodied, perverse, impressionable, superstitious, and “primitive.”31 In developing this argument, Scenes of Projection is in direct conversation with the groundbreaking and widely influential account Techniques of the Observer (1990) in which art historian Jonathan Crary elaborates the new observer of a modernity located in nineteenth-­century Europe. This modern observer, repositioned outside the fixed relations of interior/exterior, is developed against and out of the rigid spatial structure of what he calls the “juridical model of the camera obscura” from which, he argues, there is a radical break in the nineteenth century.

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20  Introduction

Crary constructs the camera obscura as a dominant scopic regime of rational vision by displacing the possibilities of invention and fantasy inherent in the dark room onto the magic lantern. His chapter “The Camera Obscura and Its Subject” splits the camera obscura as model of rational vision from the magic lantern that becomes both the machine metaphor and the container for the camera obscura’s disruptive capacities. While seemingly acknowledging the possibility of haunting and even subversion, Crary’s project asserts a separate development for the magic lantern “alongside” as opposed to within that of the camera obscura. Thus, the magic lantern’s use of the dark room for the purposes of projection is reimagined as an invasion from without, the “appropriation” of the apparatus by what Crary characterizes as an alien belief system. I would suggest instead that this foundational chapter for Crary’s larger argument about emergent nineteenth-­century disciplinary techniques for regulating vision reinforces the very operations of projection that worked to produce an imperial subject of science and reason by displacing vulnerability to its illusions and effects onto figures of “otherness.”32 If the camera obscura can be construed as the model of a rational vision exercised by European metropolitan men of science, it is a model that depends crucially on a bifurcation between the camera obscura and the magic lantern and between the subjects of “accurate impressions” and impressionable subjects, one given widely disseminated, stereotyped form in eighteenth-­century picture prints that represented the magic lantern as the fantasy machine of desire, wonder, and transformation, displaying its powers at the hands of signifying monkeys for audiences of women and children in the metropolis. Consider, for instance, the satiric print “La Lanterne Magique” (Figure 6) by Jean Ouvrier (published in Paris in 1765 after the painting by J. E. Schenau), where the audience of the magic lantern show is portrayed as a family group of a mother and three children.33 Using the iconography of an eroticized bacchanal of devilish animal-­human hybrids, the print exploits the technical capacities of the lantern to create apparitions, alter what it shows, and affect its spectators. The large portable version of the lantern in the darkened foreground casts the projected image of the obverse of the four spectators. In the projected image, the two boys are transformed into magnified and monstrous versions of themselves. The little boy spectator who smilingly peeks at the image becomes a

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Figure 6. Jean Ouvrier, “La Lanterne Magique,” Paris, eighteenth century.

Engraving after painting by Johann Eleazar Schenau. Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum.

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22  Introduction

large and triumphant, bare-­chested animal-­human-­devil hybrid, while the boy spectator who raises his hands, as if in surprise or fear, is refigured as the visible animal feet of an implied devil-­satyr whose hands now pull the rope round the waist of the mother-­figure turned captive witch on a broomstick. Yet the projected image not only alters but also reveals occulted and disavowed possibilities of promiscuous disorder. The little girl spectator reappears stripped of dress and cap to expose large horns, voluptuous breasts, and the animal legs of the small but developed devil-­woman she may already be or might become. The projected image converts affect, changing a smile to a frown, an expression of surprise or fear to a gesture of horn-­blowing celebration, and a furtive grin into a tongue-­ protruding display of openly lascivious excitement. And it transposes the relationships of the family group in sexually suggestive, homoerotic, and incestuous ways, shifting the little girl turned devil-­ woman to a position astride the mother-­figure and placing the little boys turned men in postures of leading her from the front and pushing her from behind to a place offscreen and the performance of counternormative, taboo-­defying acts not directly figured but implied. At the same time, the directionality of the projection is crucial to the work the print performs. Its comic representation of the magic lantern show places the illuminated spectators—­the woman and three children—­so that they face into the projection source and the magic lantern image is cast onto (and, it is implied, into) their bodies, the little girl’s white apron turned screen a double for the white sheet of the makeshift draped screen behind her. The magical capacities of projective machinery to substantially alter the observer are cast out and onto those who are figured as the opposite of the man of reason. In placing these figures of the vulnerable spectator in the path of the projection, the print constructs the space of the viewer of the whole spectacle—­the viewing position that encompasses the device, its operator, the figures of the impressionable spectator, and projected image—­as the fantasy perspective of the subject of a disincarnated, dispassionate, and ostensibly upright and unalterable reason. It is the magic lantern projectionist depicted as monkey who takes the fall in French printmaker Jean-­Baptiste-­Antoine Guélard’s plate from his Singeries published in Paris in 1741–­42 (after designs by Christophe Huet) (Figure 7).34 The monkey projectionist proved to be convenient

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Introduction  23

Figure 7. Jean-­Baptiste-­Antoine Guélard, The Magic Lantern, engraving after

Christophe Huet, from Singeries, ou differentes actions de la vie humaine representées par des singes (Paris, 1741–­42). Courtesy of the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (1558-­750).

comedic shorthand, a device adapted by late eighteenth-­century French writer Jean-­Pierre Claris de Florian (1755–­94) for his collection of Fables first published in Paris in 1792. The tale “The Monkey who Shows the Magic Lantern” narrates the story of a simian who takes over as projectionist and puts on a great performance involving a full program of slides. However, the spectators see nothing but a blank screen because he has forgotten to light his lantern.35 The monkey projectionist remains in the dark when it comes to not just the fundamental law of the device’s operation but also the dominant trope of casting light as the machine metaphor for the exercise of enlightenment reason. As the fables of Florian went through hundreds of editions over the course of the nineteenth century and the tale became the further subject of popular prints such as the one reproduced in the March 1865 issue of the Magasin Pittoresque (Figure 8), the monkey projectionist became the symbol of the deceptively false understanding at the butt

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Figure 8. The Monkey Who Demonstrates the Magic Lantern. Drawn by

Foulquier after painting by Victor Bachereau. Wood engraving from Magasin Pittoresque 33 (March 1865): 81. Courtesy of the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (93.R.110).

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Introduction  25

of what became a commonplace French expression: “oublier d’éclairer sa lanterne” or “to forget to light his lantern,” signifying to overlook the essential point or fact necessary for comprehension.36 Through displacing projection onto such satirical figures as women and children spectators radically altered by exposure to the lantern’s effects and the monkey who can ape the motions of inserting slides but remains as blank as the screen when it comes to the mechanism of the box, the “performative magic” of the illusionistic and transformative capacities and vulnerabilities inherent in the dark room of the camera obscura were cast out onto the magic lantern and its failed operators, ostensibly transporting the vulnerability and tremulous embodiment of the phantom subject of reason safely off scene. Scene of Projection 5: As an apparatus that produces its subject, the scene of projection is neither a static diagram of power nor a fixed architecture, but rather a pedagogical setup that operates across a range of sites as an “influencing machine” of persistent training and repetitive exercise. Though the old creaking “next slide, please” carousel projectors have given way to digital versions of the apparatus, devices that cast an image onto a screen still occupy a central material place in the pedagogies of visual studies, art, and art history. But this is not a tidy history of the fate of the art historical slide lecture. With the incorporation into the classroom of digital projection and 3-­D virtual reality technologies placing the viewer inside a virtual spatialization of the object, the slide lecture may further enact the hallucinatory, immersive, and altering effects attributed to the “magic” in the magic lantern—­a characterization displaced onto the device that points indirectly back to the shaping role of the scene of projection as an apparatus for producing its subject.37 At this time, when digital media absorb the functions and techniques of the pedagogical slide show and image projection screens quite literally saturate our everyday, it is imperative that we think critically about the globe-­ spanning, time-­ traveling, and world-­ making effects of projective apparatus, not as the seemingly transparent instrument through which we turn objects into projected images for analysis, but rather as a setup that trains the spectator in acts of losing themselves to constitute themselves, that is, the fantasy enactment of disembodied

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26  Introduction

vision as an exercise of reason.38 In developing the argument that the scene of projection is a pedagogical apparatus that persists at this moment of the ubiquity of the screen across sites far in excess of the schoolroom, Scenes of Projection offers a history of the unthought pedagogical method of image projection that traces this technology—­which is far from transparent or neutral—­to its crucial scenes in and beyond the metropole, including ones of colonial violence and subjection in its many senses. In short, I take technologies of projection seriously as kinds of “influencing machines.” This is not mere light play on psychoanalyst Victor Tausk’s 1919 essay “On the Origin of the ‘Influencing Machine’ in Schizophrenia.”39 While scenes of pedagogical and academic projection practice may seem comfortably distant from the analytic situation of the paranoid or schizophrenic patient, Tausk’s description of the influ­encing machine, that “machine of mystical nature” with “marvelous powers” to act on the patient in unbidden and unwanted ways, bears important resemblances to the scene of image projection. Besides its ability to create sensations and uncontrolled physiological and motor responses, the influencing machine is both a projected image in its own right and a projector that makes the patient see pictures. Indeed, Tausk writes of this envisioned machine that affects the subjects in question from outside their bodies as a “magic lantern or cinematograph” (187). Tausk’s analysis works with a logic of division between rational and irrational, between normal viewer and paranoid or schizophrenic, and between the actual presence of a device of projection and its conjuration. But this logic itself depends on a founding conception of the magic lantern as a figure or, in Tausk’s words, “symbol” for being made to see images, for that is what the device is designed to do. In its own use of the terms of projecting light and images into a dark and enclosed space or room, Tausk’s complex and fascinating rhetoric parallels the scene of projection it sets. As the device that promises in its staging a means to “look inside” and “reveal” or project the projection, the magic lantern emerges as so densely imbricated with the production of rational vision that it seems, as Tausk puts it, “impenetrable”: It is not necessary to discuss the magic lantern which produces pictures or images, because its structure harmonizes perfectly with the function attributed to it, and because it does not reveal any error of

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Introduction  27

judgment beyond the fact of its nonexistence. This rational superstructure is absolutely impenetrable. We must, at the start, use structures less solidly built, the walls of which reveal gaps through which it is possible to look inside. (192)

Tausk’s study thus moves from the impenetrable magic lantern, the most common form of the influencing machine in the larger group of cases he theorizes, to closely examine the case of Miss Nataliya A. whose projected “influencing machine” instead takes human and specifically female form. Tausk uses the deviating and exceptional case of Miss Nataliya A. and her persecutory fantasy of the feminine fleshly influencing machine to make the general argument that influencing machines are themselves paranoid projections of the schizophrenic patients’ own bodies and specifically the estranged organs of their genitalia. As richly complex as the case of Miss Nataliya A. may be, what interests me here is precisely what Tausk casts out—­under the guise of impenetrability—­ in this scene of peering into the gynomorphic machine: the magic lantern and its “rational superstructure.” “Woman” is penetrable for Tausk; the magic lantern is not. While Tausk’s conclusion that the “influencing machine” is a projected disavowal of the schizophrenic patients’ genitals depends on finding a more obvious, fleshly, and feminine substitute for the lantern, the structure of his further development of the theory of paranoid projection nonetheless recapitulates the setup and mise-­en-­scène of the magic lantern projection in the darkened room. Tausk’s effort to analyze the particular dynamics of paranoid projection demonstrates the pedagogical exercise of constructing rational vision, including his own, through the devices of casting light and images of “otherness” (often feminine or feminized) into the dark room (and here, via the womb). To go into the lantern or rather its setup and mise-­en-­scène is to find the disavowed cast onto the overdetermined figures of “otherness,” but the abjected, disavowed, and intensified in such scenes is the substitute or lure for what is thereby cast off: the vulnerable bodily implication of the spectator observing the scene (in this case, Tausk) and the performative magic of the apparatus of the scene of projection in producing its subject not once and for all, but over and over in the training of the exercise of such fantasized exorcism in scene after scene.

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28  Introduction

Scene of Projection 6: While the scene of projection as an apparatus of power that produces its subject has a genealogy that crosses the history of psychoanalysis, the history of philosophical and scientific instruments at the heart of the so-­called Scientific Revolution, and the history of colonization, “history” is also in the scene of projection as shaping dynamic spatial, temporal, somatic, and affective relations that may be inverted, displaced, or denied but are no less powerfully formative, residual, or haunting for those negations. If the scene of projection is not to be a machine for the production of a flattened terrain for the fortress ego that seeks to remake the world in confirmation and consolidation of its disavowed vulnerability and susceptibility, the scene of projection is necessarily also a scene for doing history for a different future, an apparatus for producing an opening by the tracing of the belied connections in and across precisely those scenes of projection that might seem not only disparate but disavowed in relation to what would seem their geographic or temporal place—­that is, the anachronistic, the minor, the backward, the ostensibly surpassed, or the better left behind. Scenes of Projection thinks projection as an apparatus of power for the production of the subject in terms of a psychoanalytic understanding of history as a task of analysis and writing, one that understands history as at once the haunting trace of the disavowed in the scene of projection and a practice of recharging the contacts of forsworn connections and forsaken passionate attachments, including those between the scene of psychoanalysis and the scenes of projective devices in pedagogical demonstration lectures and scientific experiment. In History after Lacan, feminist philosopher Teresa Brennan demonstrates that Lacan develops a history of the citadel ego, what he calls the “ego’s era,” from the optics of the early modern period with its self-­referential knowledge, positivism, and empiricist objectification. Brennan elaborates Lacan’s hints at a tactics for circumventing the “mass psychosis” of the “ego’s era” as the labor of making connections that she demonstrates by forging relations across Lacan’s work, a labor that produces a rewriting of history that is even or especially at the “price of self-­image” or the loss of the fantasy or mass psychosis of sovereign control and the paranoid delusion that the subject can project what it refuses to admit—­ as Lacan puts it in “Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis,” the “especial delusion of the misanthropic ‘belle âme,’ throwing back onto

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Introduction  29

the world the disorder out of which it is composed.”40 To emphasize, the tactic around the fortifications of the citadel ego of the “ego’s era” that Brennan elaborates from Lacan’s reworking of paranoid projection as a larger process or machine for the production of the subject and the social is the activity of making connections as a rewriting of the subject’s history from which the subject has been severed. But this reattachment is not the same as a practice of historical contextualism; the missing pieces are not the snap-­fit of a puzzle in which the intact subject is fitted. Quite the contrary, it is the disavowed in the subject, the self’s own disorganization, volatility, and vulnerability cast out onto the world as alien and threatening, that makes of the subject a fictive consistency of self-­sufficient and sovereign will in mirror reflection of a self-­confirming reality context. In this insistence on close attention to the uncanny, volatile, and irresolvable at the level of the text or scene, Brennan’s propositions for history as the effect of this labor of rewriting in the practice of reforging and charging connections resonate with the prompts I also take from Michel de Certeau’s “What Freud Makes of History.” Through a reading of Freud’s analysis of a case of paranoid possession by persecutory visions in “A Seventeenth-­Century Demonological Neurosis,” de Certeau prompts a radical change in praxis for the encounter between psychoanalysis and history: that we can understand psychoanalysis as not a displacing projection of superstition but rather an unfinished process of enlightenment in acts of shedding light that inevitably produce shadows, not shadows to dispel but with which to think and dream in an inevitable going back over the eruptive and recursive return of the repressed within the scene of projection and analysis.41 Drawing on this taking of the scene of projection as a site for the writing of history, the movement within the chapters and the larger arc of this book perform a back to the future movement, shuttling between times and geographies as it thinks psychoanalytically about the complex, dialectical capacities of projection to produce the illusion of the impervious subject of rational vision, and about ways of thinking the abjured and the trace as shadow-­histories or archives within the scene of projection as apertures for an opening onto ways of becoming that are imminent in the scene. Let me turn here to sketch the contours of the argument Scenes of Projection makes about the apparatus of the scene of projection as

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30  Introduction

a complex and uneasy pedagogy in the formation and recasting of the subject. This reevaluation is carried across five chapters, each of which is dedicated to relating a particular modality of psychoanalytic projection and the complexly allied process of introjection (paranoid projection, morbid projection, introjection, the “shadow of the object” cast across the ego in melancholia, and imaginative projection) to specific devices and techniques of projection (the camera obscura, magic lantern, phantasmagoria machine, solar microscope, prism, ingesting auto­ mata, spirit possession, shadow-­casting, and prismatic projection) across scenes that traverse as they connect centers and ostensible margins, metropole and periphery. Chapter 1, “Paranoid Projection and the Phantom Subject of Reason,” is dedicated to developing the book’s core argument that early modern devices for casting an image—­the camera obscura, the magic lantern, and their variants—­constituted a way of knowing, a method with power-­producing effects, that I characterize as “paranoid projection.” The chapter does so via the double move of providing a media genealogy for Freud’s theory of projection and by analyzing such devices as uncertain and incomplete exercises in paranoid projection. It makes the bidirectional historical argument that the theory of paranoid projection was developed from early modern devices for casting an image that also engaged in the very dynamics described by the theoretical concept. The chapter opens with Freud’s writings on projection and introjection. Rather than just rehearse the arguments of the well-­known texts in which Freud casts out religion as a form of delusion (“Civilization and Its Discontents,” Totem and Taboo, and “The Future of an Illusion”), I focus on the case study of the painter Christoph Haitzmann published in 1923 as “A Seventeenth-­Century Demonological Neurosis,” setting it in important relation to Freud’s more familiar work on paranoid projection in the case of Schreber. I go on to analyze early modern texts on optics, mathematics, and physics from Johannes Kepler to Willem Jacob ’s Gravesande to argue that the production of the phantom subject of rational vision depended on the vigilant demonstration and subjective internalization of a paranoid version of projection. Chapter 2, “Empire through the Magic Lantern,” approaches the imbrication of psychoanalysis and colonialism in the scene of projection as a way of reopening the question of the seemingly impossible both/ and of psychoanalyzing colonialism while decolonizing psychoanalysis.

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Introduction  31

The chapter takes up the psychoanalytic concept of morbid projection to provide an account of the shaping of the fortress ego by its violent abjections. I argue that the psychoanalytic concept of projection takes us not only to an important problematization of the binaries of “self” and “other.” It also takes us to the very techniques, in a material sense, for their attempted production. Through its case studies the chapter elaborates the magic lantern as a ready-­made theoretical vehicle and satiric trope for demonstrating the extent to which an “Asia,” “Africa,” or “America” failed to function as a blank screen that stayed safely “over there” because of the ways the device was so fused and infused with what it mediated. In chapter 3, “Empire Bites Back,” I explore how introjection functions as a complex response to morbid projection. The chapter puts pressure on the uncanny similarity between melancholia and introjection in the violent way in which they shape the subject by an internalized exercise of a punishing agency. In its case studies, the chapter takes seriously the ways in which the docile subjection to colonial authority resembles the critical melancholia that would seem to be its antidote, an introjection that spectacularly refuses to let go of injury, shame, and the incalculable losses that cannot be mourned because they do not not even count as such.42 The chapter’s consideration of introjection functions as the fulcrum for the book’s general argument about the volatile instability in the scene of projection that spans the sites of metropolitan science (chapter 1) and those of colonial conflict (chapter 2). Introjection returns acutely the troubling turbulence in any effort to project the vulnerabilities of embodied witness taken in as the surveilling and punishing superego and cast out onto abject “others” whose violent retaliation the ego endeavors to defend against and dreads. Chapter 4, “Along Enlightenment’s Cast Shadows,” begins with melancholy and the shadow of the object that falls across the ego. I elaborate how technologies of light projection to create shadow pictures form a foundational and persistent part of the history of projection technologies as both colonial regulatory devices for the production of the disembodied subject of reason and as machines haunted by other ways of knowing and becoming. Taking seriously the shaping and transforming potentials of shadow projection, the chapter pursues the argument that bringing the early history of photography back into the

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32  Introduction

dark room of devices for drawing with shadow allows us to bring out photography’s relation not only to identitarian fixity but also to volatility, desire, and transformation. The chapter concludes by reconsidering the institution of the photographic archive and its regulatory effects on the body. Thinking through shadow projection enables us, the chapter maintains, to see the body in ways that revolatilize the hardened differences of race and sexuality as well as galvanize the transformative instability in the universal pretensions of enlightenment technologies: we all cast a black shadow. Chapter 5, “Following the Rainbow,” turns to and with the refracting multiple edges of the prism, that device that is at once a child’s toy and a scientific device that casts a rainbow of brilliant colors from a beam of white light. Activating the prism as method, the chapter opens an avenue of possibility within the scene of projection in the dark room. Taking up the prism as a device for an analytics of wonder, the chapter pursues the practice of a both/and beyond the current choices of optimism versus realpolitik or reparative versus paranoid reading, a methodology that I term “projective prismatics.” The chapter pursues the argument that this neglected device of projection offers another logic in which the affective transports of wonder and the kinds of transformative effects on matter associated with alchemy are not the opposite of the demonstration of principles but their very vehicle. As an exploration and demonstration of the prism as method, the chapter develops projective prismatics as a vital, queer exercise in projective speculation and its potential materialization. Scene of Projection 7: Produced by the scene of projection as an apparatus of power, the subject of projection is not an a priori, not a fixed ontological standpoint, not a predetermined body, not a preexisting community. This is the good news. Scenes of Projection is an experiment in analytical double vision that takes as its foci two seemingly disparate but mutually constitutive sets of technologies, the one aimed at constructing the subject of rational vision, the other at making visible the unconscious as an object of scientific knowledge and as a shaping instrument and machine of not just psychic but also material production. In bringing into alternative focus the history of projection devices and the history of psychoanalytical

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Introduction  33

projection, Scenes of Projection implicates both the bright white lines that mark off disciplinary territories and historiographical fiefdoms and the temporal arcs that would seem to spring up from an originary darkness toward a pellucid future horizon. While the official lesson of casting an image in the dark chamber is to distinguish between subject and object and the primary effect of the pedagogical exercise of its demonstrations the production of the subject of discarnate vision, the operations of the device also threaten, the palpable traces of their catalytic contact pointing to the volatility of the shaping powers of the apparatus. Taking seriously this performative magic demands the constitution of a new object and, thus, necessarily entails the assemblage of seemingly disparate machines, bodies, texts, and images that return the occulted, the subaltern, and the seemingly minor back into the hegemonic regime of vision from which they were thrown. But pushing projection as a method, rather than reining in its potential trajectories, also promises to open “rationality” not merely to its opposite (the despised and feared “irrational”) but also to other ways of knowing or subaltern and queer versions of reason and ways of becoming.43 That is, while I am committed to the practice of close reading and attention to the particularities of specific cases, such close analysis is dedicated to unfolding the implications and potentials implied at the level of the densities and complexities of particular cases that are not ever and only located in the “contexts” (geographic, historical, cultural) to which we so often consign them: history is also in the case as eruptive difference and denied connection. In addition to rethinking the location of the case, I also re-­ pose the question of the place of the subject by moving, it might seem, outside the perimeters of the scene, to ask: for whom is this occupation of the scene of projection set? While Scenes of Projection is addressed explicitly to those engaged with me in the tasks of visual studies and queer studies, its aims are not identity-­based or ego-­confirming but, rather, deeply committed to excavating the potentials for transformation and alteration in these technologies for casting an image and for reversing its direction in practices of introjection, a potentially unattractive and troubling prospect from a range of positions, including nonnormative ones. And, yet, here is both the bad news and the good. In shuttling back and forth to provide the tensions and bristles of the both/and I am developing—­that is, both particular and general, both pedagogical and punishing and providing some possibilities for hope

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34  Introduction

and transformation, both located in the folds, interlinings, and crossed shadows of past in present, present in past, and pointing toward an uncertain future—­Scenes of Projection opens the scene of projection by tracing disavowed connections between elements in and across scenes to recast the subject, ushering in the becomings and releasing the potentials of the why-­not, the not-­not here, and the not-­not yet.

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chapter one

Paranoid Projection and the Phantom Subject of Reason

“Was the magic lantern ever magical?”1 This is and is not a trick question. As a barbed trick, the question, whether answered in the negative or the affirmative, catches us in the tense terms of its mobilization of the “ever.” “Ever,” that is, “at any (other) time,” presupposes a present in which the “magic” of the philosophical instrument for the demonstration of and training in how vision is supposed to function has been dispelled along with the specter of the spectator’s troubling incarnation. As a “was it ever or was it at any time?” question, the magic of the magic lantern is transformed into an either/or task of historiography in which the labor of the historian would appear to be either to recover a lost alterity predicated on mobilizing a radical difference between present and past or to trace an “ever” as an “always” or an “it was ever thus” of continuity based on establishing a confirming ground of the exercise of critical reason that stretches from the beginnings of the scientific method into a present confirmed as its heir. This reduction of the practical reckoning with history to the either/ or of break/continuity in which magic is displaced is the trick of the question. The sleight of historicizing hand that would seem to put magic at the center—­either as that which was lost or that which was never really there—­dangerously black-­boxes the problematics of susceptibility in the scene of the formation of what I call the phantom subject of reason, the tremulous interlinings of the ostensibly discarnate and impervious subject that the scene of projection raises and attempts to cast out. Going into the black box of the dark room of the 35

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36  Paranoid Projection and the Phantom Subject

scene of projection is to refuse the either/or of this kind of historicism in order to explore how the magic in the lantern’s adjectival naming functions as a rhetorical condensation point for the potential return of the surpassed that is densely and implicatingly part of not just our past but also our present selves, our bodily vulnerability, lack of sovereign agency, and susceptibility to influence. Indeed, the scene of projection must also be understood as a staging of the unresolvable problematic of history’s directionalities and technology’s agency in the shaping of the subject—­at once a setup in which the light of the present seemingly illuminates the force of dark pasts dispelled along the way to a brightened future, as well as a crucial site or nodal point of an ongoing effort to manage anxieties about the very shaping sequence of relations between past, present, and future. The question of the magic of the magic lantern is thus not a trick but a burning problematic. To confront the magic lantern’s magic is to take seriously the shaping power of the scene of projection as a historical problematic of the unsettled and unsettling force of the ostensibly dead or superseded past in the nonunified, riven present. The past that is not surpassed in the scene of projection constellates around the problematic agency of machines set against the fantasy of the sovereign subject, articulated as another either/or: either the disenchantment and dehumanization wrought by a technological determinism and enthrallment to the machine, or a counteragency on the part of the beholder as a freed agent of poaching and translating acts of unruly, emancipated, and active spectatorship, a spectator no longer beholden to a cabal of experts, the binds of context, or the ruling rules of the spectacle.2 And even in the past-­tense casting of the question “was the magic lantern ever magical?” the “ever” hovers between an “always” of smooth time and an “at any time” of differentiated temporality, a temporal intensifier whose implied “in any way” pushes us to address the ways in which the interrelation of the when (if ever) and the how (if ever) is inextricable from questions of sensation and affect. In his reading of Freud’s 1923 case history “A Seventeenth-­Century Demonological Neurosis,” Michel de Certeau resists the gesture of “filing it in the drawers of current chronological categories.”3 De Certeau’s point in “What Freud Makes of History” is not that early modern demonic possessions are the prehistory of modern psychoanalysis nor that what makes this case history historical is that its material dates to

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a distant past. Rather, what makes this case history importantly historical is the act of analysis itself, the shedding of light or elucidation (Aufklärung) that releases the uncanniness of history as an effect of the relations between temporalities brought out through the complexity of the dynamics (temporal and spatial) between elements of the text. Rather than installing a law or rule or authoritarian precept that one is obliged to find in or behind the inherent strangeness of detail or particular case or, worse, reinstalling the law-­of-­the-­father through such an exercise—­ the links discovered through the analytic act of mapping relations must themselves be displaced or altered if they are to effect an opening or gesture toward a praxis that initiates rather than repeats history, an act for which there are no guarantees. To pose the burning question of the magic lantern’s magic, then, is to recast the experimental scene of projection and its demonstration exercises in the training of disincarnated vision as the complex site where the long history of psychoanalysis and the vexed genealogies of projection technologies for shaping the subject cross, only to unsettlingly encounter the psychoanalysis of history. This chapter risks the shuttle of psychoanalyzing history and historicizing psychoanalysis not to contain but to analytically open the scene of projection to unacknowledged relations between the psychoanalytic theorization of the formation of the fortress ego, and the mechanisms of paranoid projection and demonological possession, and their seeming opposite in the early modern use of technologies of projection to produce the phantom subject of reason as a discarnate spectator impervious to the agencies of shaping machines. By risking this double movement of tracing connections from the scene of projection in the psychoanalytic texts of paranoia to paranoid projection in the scene of early modern image-­casting experiments, I demonstrate the difficult and disavowed agency of machines or the “performative magic” of paranoid projection in the construction of the phantom subject of rational vision.4

Performative Magic and the Historical Mechanism of Paranoid Projection To reckon with the magic of the magic lantern is to risk taking on the historical problem raised by the scene of projection and open the question of what historian Eric Santner has theorized as “performative

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magic.” In My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity (1996), Santner approaches Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903) as the “nerve bible” of a gnawing political crisis of authority and investiture in turn-­of-­the-­century Germany that would become the rebarbative core of National Socialist ideology.5 Schreber’s memoir is crucially the textual site mined in 1911 by Freud in “Psycho-­Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)” as a means of “elucidating” paranoia as a “concrete representation and projection outwards” of denied libidinal cathexes that return as persecuting agencies, expounding the special agency of the “mechanism of paranoia” in the shaping alteration of the subject.6 In the case of Schreber, Freud parses the “mechanism of projection” as a compound process by which an internal perception is suppressed, distorted in form but also affective charge, and cast out only to return as if from the outside.7 In paranoia as a delusion of persecution, the disavowed “wishful phantasy” is negated. For Freud, the ambivalently charged primary example is the avowed love of a man by a man, a formulation in which the denied “I (a man) love him” becomes “I do not love him—­I hate him.” This disavowal is, in Freud’s terms, “transformed by projection” into a justification of the affective shift from love to hate. As Freud lays out this conversion by projection in “the mechanism of paranoia,” “he hates [persecutes] me, which will justify me in hating him.”8 The hinge that binds the seemingly exceptional case of the paranoid psychotic to a wider sociopolitical “investiture crisis” in fin-­de-­siècle Germany is what Santner formulates as “performative magic” or a felt disruption in the social process by which subjects assume the “social essence” assigned by names and titles.9 Revisiting the theoretical implications of Schreber’s case in On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life (2007), Santner poses “performative magic” as the experience of the psychotic’s difficulty in metabolizing the symbolic processes by which the subject is inducted by “acts of institution” into the normative, authorizing, subjectivizing space of investiture, that is, the privileged ritual acts of becoming invested in and by authority as, for example, in the case of Schreber, his nomination as “judge.” “Performative magic” oscillates, in Santner’s work, between a general characterization of the somatic and affective textures of the effects wrought through the agency of social machines in the formation of the subject and the telling account of an exceptional

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distorting delusion that makes the action of symbolic authority in the shaping of the subject palpable in ways that are precisely contingent and particular to Schreber and the moment of crisis in turn-­of-­the-­ century Germany. Though, as Santner rehearses, one must reckon with the temporal coincidence of Schreber’s breakdown and his nomination to the chair of the highest appellate court in Saxony, the relation between paranoid projection, performative magic, and the processes of subjectivization is, nonetheless, a historical problem not easily dispatched by such gestures of narrowed time-­place contextualization. In the crisis case of Schreber’s experience of what he called “soul murder” as a way of describing the sensation of a shattering of world order, performative magic represents, for Santner, an instance of the performative in extremis or, as he puts it, “a kind of radicalization and literalization of the concept of the performative as understood by speech-­act theory.”10 Santner goes on to describe how for Schreber speech came to be experienced as the performing of “a mechanical and nonsensical action directly on his nerves,” and the crisis of investiture, in turn, as a collapse of the symbolic dimension of speech acts into “actual manipulation or influence, some form of direct psychophysical inscription” (48). Yet Santner relegates the potential wider significance of the disavowed and ghostly influence to a footnote, citing the refused or impossible “experience of the because” in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations thus: “Let us call these ‘impossible’ experiences of a direct influence by norms the specters or spirits—­rather than the spirit—­of normativity” (49). Such ascriptions of active or shaping agency to the subject’s outside is the very mechanism of projection at work in the postponed investigative heart of Freud’s account of Schreber’s published memoir as a paradigmatic case history of paranoia. Having argued that “the most striking characteristic of symptom-­formation in paranoia is the process which deserves the name of projection,” Freud goes on to generalize projection as a larger cultural condition of referring the causes of sensations to the external world. Yet in shifting from the particular to the generalized case, from the mechanism of the pathological to the machine of normalization, Freud makes the gesture of casting projection itself out of his current discussion, asserting: “let us make up our minds to postpone the investigation of it (and with it that of the mechanism of paranoic symptom-­formation in general).”11 And toward the

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conclusion of his analysis of the “mechanism of paranoia,” Freud reiterates this curious deferral even more forcefully: “The thorough examination of the process of projection which we have postponed to another occasion will clear up our remaining doubts on the subject,” that is, on the contention that, in paranoid projection, “what was abolished internally returns from without.”12 Strikingly, the occasion for Freud’s forecasted resolution of all residual doubt never arrives. The structure of Freud’s case study on paranoia models an ambivalent exercise of projection that holds doubt in suspension and thus denies any triumphalist closure of the problematic of the performative magic of projection and its promise to cast out the “object” of fear or hate, including our own susceptibility as uncertain and oscillating objects and subjects. In “A Seventeenth-­Century Demonological Neurosis,” his case study of the seventeenth-­century German painter Christoph Haitzmann based on the Trophaeum Mariano-­Cellense, Freud most clearly articulates the task of psychoanalysis as something more than a reversal of direction from the external world inward and into the intimate recesses of the subject. The case turns on vision and specifically the troubling question of the agency or source of image production: Haitzmann or the devil. Haitzmann’s lack of artistic vision left him in a state of melancholy without the will to make pictures until, between 1677 and 1678, he had visions of another sort. These apparitions or manifestations of the devil in various shapes and guises led Haitzmann to produce the images that formed the basis for the five folio pages of the Trophaeum Mariano-­Cellense dedicated to hand-­colored copies of his paintings of the devil.13 Freud sets out to demonstrate that Haitzmann’s visions were generated not by the devil but by an externalizing projection of his own repressed and refused desire for his father. In his introduction to this case study, Freud pursues a parallel between psychoanalysis and demonological theory (or what he elsewhere calls “animism”) and articulates the goal of analysis as one of relocating the agency and source of visions from the external to the internal world: The demonological theory of those dark times has won in the end against all the somatic views of the period of “exact” science. The states of possession correspond to our neuroses, for the explanation of which we once more have recourse to psychical powers. In our

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eyes, the demons are bad and reprehensible wishes, derivatives of instinctual impulses that have been repudiated and repressed. We merely eliminate the projection of these mental entities into the external world, which the middle ages carried out; instead, we regard them as having arisen in the patient’s internal life, where they have their abode.14

But Freud’s use of the phrase “eliminate the projection” is a densely complex and importantly ambivalent one. We might read the analogies between the states of possession in the seventeenth century and “our neuroses” not just as a relocation of the site of phantasms (from outer to inner and from then to now) or the replacement of one set of phantasms with another (reprehensible wishes in the place of demons) but also as a casting out or reprojection of the projection that makes possible in turn the restoration of the inner “abode.” Yet we might also read the “instead” as a recasting of the suspect ease with which we might “merely eliminate the projection of these mental entities into the external world” by, for example, refusing “possession” in favor of “neurosis.” A mere projection of the projection potentially avoids confrontation with the problem of agency, not just in the scene of possession but also in the scene of analysis itself. Instead of just casting out, Freud’s analysis of Haitzmann as a case of seventeenth-­century demonological neurosis thus activates another sense of projection. Twice in the course of the study Freud analogizes the clarity of Haitzmann’s visions “brought to light” in this case history as “veins of pure metal” (73) and “pure metal material” (87). There is an important association here with alchemy and the use of the term “projection” to refer to the casting or projecting of a “philosophical powder,” “philosopher’s stone,” or “powder of projection” over a base metal in the pursuit of changing base metal or waste into gold or something of great value.15 To project the projections of the past not surpassed is importantly not to dispel but rather to recast the disavowed as mattering in and for our present. In the case of Haitzmann, by projecting the projection, psychoanalysis performs the problematics of contact with the disavowed alter, using the analogy of the alteration and mining of hard metals in alchemical projection to keep in play the sensation that the production of these visions matter, that they also act on bodies and matter. By reading Freud’s “Seventeenth-­Century Demonological Neurosis” against his case study of Schreber, I wish to make visible Freud’s

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theoretical excavation of the performative magic of projection as exercised in the seventeenth-­century pedagogical demonstration lecture designed to educate and ultimately produce the subject of reason. In Freud’s case studies of Schreber and Haitzmann, projection takes the form of a casting out of a desire that the subject cannot recognize and a foreclosed version of the self that the subject cannot become. Both cases turn on a repudiated desire to take a feminized receptive position in relation to a masculine figure of authority, a wish that Freud controversially calls repressed homosexuality and that we may understand instead, from the work of Guy Hocquenghem, as the mechanisms of “homophobia” and “heterosexism” that control and censure same-­sex desire and desires for gender transformation.16 The episodes of Schreber and Haitzmann may seem quite remote from the scene of the pedagogical demonstration lecture in the extremity of their subjects’ articulated torment. However, in attributing their visions of persecution (Schreber) and temptation (Haitzmann) to the external agencies of the “rays of God” (Schreber) and manifestations of the devil (Haitzmann), Freud’s case studies situate Schreber and Haitzmann in the same position occupied in early modern texts of the experimental scene of projection by the figures of impressionable spectators from whom the addressee of such texts, that is, the rational subject, is distinguished. Further, Freud emphasized that a key element in projection is a transformation of affect and we might also say tone. The framing voice of Freud’s case studies is carefully distinguished from the emotional extremity attributed to their subjects, and in this distancing and displacing technique of tone, we may find reverberative echoes of Freud’s reworking of the devices of the early modern pedagogical projection lecture in which passion and emotion are the attributes of the cast-­out image rather than characteristics owned by either the demonstration’s narrator or the implied textual addressee summoned as the discarnate phantom subject of reason outside of, impervious to, and yet fundamentally shaped by this scene of projection. In the psychoanalytic scene of paranoid projection, however, I emphasize the ambivalent strangeness of Freud’s rhetoric of deferral toward a clarity that never arrives and the complexity of the technique of “projecting the projection” as an urgent prolongation of the process of analysis and a check against the triumph of the fortress ego in this restaged confrontation with the performative magic of contact between the forces of normalization and the recurrent charge of the foresaken.

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Camera Daemonica: The Magic of the Dark Room In arguing that the magic lantern lost its magic over the course of the eighteenth century, historian Thomas Hankins reminds us nonetheless that the instruments of experimental science owe their origins to natural magic.17 William Eamon has likewise sought to rehabilitate natural magic by arguing for its vital importance as a source for empiricism and the experimental attitude.18 It would seem then that the magic lantern was never really magical at all or, rather, that the species of magic to which it belongs can be cleanly distinguished from necromancy, the orchestration of transient images or phantasms, or the imagination as a foundation. The restitution, for example, of the Magiae Naturalis (1558; second edition, 1589) by Giambattista della Porta (1535–­1615) as a pivotal text in the history of the development of experimental science rests in part on a rereading of della Porta’s own rhetorical distinction between illicit sorcery and the licit natural magic that his own book espouses in its titling: There are two sorts of Magick: the one is infamous, and unhappie, because it hath to do with foul spirits, and consists of Inchantments and wicked Curiosity; and this is called Sorcery; an art which all learned and good men detest; neither is it able to yeeld any truth of Reason or Nature, but stands meerly upon fancies and imaginations, such as vanish presently away and leave nothing behinde them. . . . The other Magick is natural; which all excellent wise men do admit and embrace, and worship with great applause; neither is there anything more highly esteemed, or better thought of, by men of learning.19

We might first remark the rhetorical way in which, as historian Stuart Clark argues in Thinking with Demons (1997), natural magic and demonic magic operate as epistemologically and ontologically equivalent contraries whose “juxtaposition illuminated each other.”20 We may further note the role played by qualifying adjectives and controlling adverbs that leave important room for the role of spirits not foul, curiosity not wicked, and fancy and imagination provided they are supplementary and not foundational. The rhetorical continuity between natural and demonic magic extends further, as natural magic is shown to be the sort of work embraced by “excellent wise men” (and not the agency of demons) only through juxtaposition. In the performative distinction della Porta draws between licit and illicit magic, in his conjuration and

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expurgation of potent rhetorical images (i.e., foul spirits, wicked curiosity, and an art that stands on fancies and imaginations as foundations), we find the disavowed magic in natural magic, that is, its dependence on the performative magic or agency of working with the spirits, curiosity, fancy, and imagination it projects and casts out to produce its natural truths. Such performative magic is also at work in della Porta’s presentation of projective instruments. In the greatly expanded 1589 edition of his Magiae Naturalis, della Porta included an account of the use of the camera obscura to present an orchestrated “spectacle” of images. In his foundational study of the origins of cinema, The Great Art of Light and Shadow (1994), media historian Laurent Mannoni distinguishes this experiment from the mainstream of the camera obscura’s development. Christening della Porta’s example a “catoptric camera obscura,” Mannoni interprets it as a diversion of the camera obscura from its “scientific vocation,” a departure from the “domain of science and astronomy,” and an entry into the field of “artifice, play-­acting, the marvelous, and illusion.”21 If we were to look for signs of della Porta’s conversion of the camera obscura into an optical theater with the aim of entertainment we might focus particularly on the description of projected images as “delusions,” their reiteration as the fulfillment of desire, and the framing of the experience as one that brings pleasure: How in a chamber you may see Hunting, Battles of Enemies, and other delusions. Now for a conclusion I will add that, then which nothing can be more pleasant for great men, and Scholars, and ingenious persons to behold; That in a dark Chamber by white sheets objected, one may see as clearly and perspicuously, as if they were before his eyes, Huntings, Banquets, Armies of Enemies, Plays, and all things else that one desireth. Let there be over against that Chamber, where you desire to represent these things, some spacious Plain, where the Sun can freely shine: Upon that you shall set Trees in Order, also Woods, Mountains, Rivers, and Animals, that are really so, or made by Art, of Wood, or some other matter. You must frame little children in them, as we use to bring them in when Comedies are Acted: and you must counterfeit Stags, Bores, Rhinocerets, Elephants, Lions, and what other creatures you please. (364)

We might further note the combination of projected images of actors and actual flora and fauna with “counterfeits” of both real and imagined

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objects made by art, as well as the effort to transform with movement and sound a scene of humans in a natural setting populated by animals into a hunting story, a depiction of adventure calculated to arouse fear. We may note, too, the emphasis on the camera obscura’s images as delusions that deceive the eye: Then by degrees they must appear, as coming out of their dens, upon the Plain: The Hunter he must come with his hunting Pole, Nets, Arrows, and other necessaries, that may represent hunting: Let there be Horns, Cornets, Trumpets sounded: those that are in the Chamber shall see Trees, Animals, Hunters Faces, and all the rest so plainly, that they cannot tell whether they be true or delusions: Swords drawn will glister in at the hole, that they will make people almost afraid. I have often shewed this kind of Spectacle to my friends, who much admired it, and took pleasure to see such a deceit; and I could hardly by natural reasons, and reasons from the Opticks remove them from their opinions, when I had discovered the secret. (364–­65)

The closing sentences of the paragraph and particularly the use of the word “secret” would seem to confirm an interpretation of della Porta’s experiment as a kind of theft of the camera obscura for the purposes of a natural magic construed as mystification. What is delightful about the camera obscura, della Porta seems to say, is that it deceives despite revelation: its spectacle and the sensations it arouses are not to be dispelled by reasons whether natural or drawn from optical science. But there is yet one more revelation to this optical experiment, one intended to show how vision truly works and to dispel any question of a countervailing theory: Hence it may appear to Philosophers, and those that study Opticks, how vision is made; and the question of intromission is taken away, that was antiently so discussed; nor can there be any better way to demonstrate both, than this. The Image is let in by the pupil, as by the hole of a window; and that part of the Sphere, that is set in the middle of the eye, stands instead of a Crystal Table. I know ingenious people will be much delighted in this. . . . You shall amend the distance by the magnitude of the Glass. You have sufficient. Others that undertook to teach this, have utter’d nothing but toyes, and I think none before knew it. (365)

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Della Porta’s optical experiment with the camera obscura as a projector of images deceives the eye in order to dispel or cast out what philosopher Teresa Brennan refers to as the “other side of sight” or the theory of extramission, the model of the eye that one finds in Galen, for example, when he speaks of an optical pneuma, “an all-­pervasive agent composed of a mixture of air and fire,” that “flows from the seat of consciousness, the hegemonikon” and from there through the eye and out toward the perceived object.22 But it also crucially works as a device that creates subjects of reason, the so-­called ingenious, first through images that play on desire and arouse fear even in “great men,” “Scholars,” and “ingenious persons,” and then the displacing projection of deception that reveals both how the camera obscura works and the theory on which it depends. This illuminated “secret” divides spectators into kinds, distinguishing between “Philosophers,” “those that study Opticks,” and those who cannot be moved from their preconceived opinions even after the final unveiling. Della Porta’s spectacular experiment demonstrates that the camera obscura at this crucial juncture at the end of the sixteenth century is already an educational device that depends on dialectical trafficking between the demonstration of scientific truth and the pedagogical utility of optical deception. Della Porta’s writings on optics influenced Johannes Kepler’s use of the camera obscura to develop his own conception of the eye as a receptor.23 After working as an assistant to Tycho Brahe in Prague, Kep­ ler (1571–­1630) published his important work on optics, the Astronomiae pars optica (1604), in which he describes a visit to a “theater of artifices” that historians of science Sven Dupré and Michael Korey identify as the Dresden Kunstkammer of Emperor Rudolph II of Prague.24 Kepler describes watching what he calls an “experimentum” that involved the projection of bright images seemingly adrift in midair within the otherwise “dark emptiness” of an enclosed chamber: An experimentum of which I saw at Dresden in the elector’s theater of artifices. . . . A disk thicker in the middle, or a crystalline lens, a foot in diameter, was standing at the entrance of a closed chamber against a little window, which was the only thing that was open, slanted a little to the right. Thus when the eyesight traveled through the dark emptiness, it also, fortuitously, hit upon the place of the image, nearer, in fact, than the lens. And so since the lens was weakly illuminated, it did not particularly attract the eyes . . . but the little

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window and the objects standing about it, which had the benefit of much light, lying hidden beyond the lens, set up a bright image of themselves in the air.25

While Kepler describes how his glance struck upon the bright cast image, he also carefully explains that he could see the dimly lit glass lens behind the image, as well as the actual objects “hidden beyond the lens” and the source of illumination. That is, the passage is at pains to demonstrate that Kepler sees the illusion but also sees through it. Kepler goes on to distinguish his viewing capacities trained by previous observation from that of “others,” writing: “what I, steeped in demonstrations, stated that I had seen, others denied. I therefore attribute it, not to the overseer’s intent, but to chance” (194). And he concludes by describing the experimentum in the language of games, stating that “the games can be made more elaborate” (194). Though Kepler acknowledges the use of the camera obscura for ludic play and more elaborate and complex displays than the one he describes, he also uses this description of the setup and the casting of this particular type of image to play an intellectual game in which he bests the “overseer” by attributing the agency behind the projection to “chance.” Playing the ludic game to demonstrate that he is not deluded, Kepler’s account of the camera obscura stresses his capacity to see what others cannot and to see past the floating image to the objects and the mechanism.26 While Kepler does not here explain what sorts of elaborate games or ludi with the camera obscura he imagines, other accounts describe the use of the camera obscura not to project images of mechanically altered nature but, with the aid of actors and masks, to cast images associated with luciferian agency. The discussion of the camera obscura in book one of the Opticorum libri sex (1613) by the Jesuit mathematician François de Aguilón (1567–­1617) is also narrated as an eyewitness account of the operation of a camera obscura show. While the account likewise performs a revelation of the mechanism, the description is explicitly framed as a denunciation. Aguilón’s account opens up the dark room, not only claiming to show how visions of devils are produced but also displacing susceptibility to such visions onto the figure of the vulnerable spectators he calls the “uneducated rabble”: In just this way certain charlatans tend to hoodwink the uneducated rabble; they pretend to know about black magic, while they are hardly

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aware of what that means. They boast that they conjure up phantoms of the devil from hell itself and show them to the onlookers. They lead the inquisitive and curious who want to know all about secret and obscure subjects into a dark chamber where there is no light, except a little which filters through a small pane of glass [lens]. . . . they say that the devil will soon come. In the meantime, an assistant puts on a devil mask to make him look like the pictures of devils one usually sees, with a hideous monstrous face and horns on the head. . . . Then the assistant struts up and down outside [the camera] . . . to the place where his colours and shape can be reflected through the glass pane into the chamber. . . . After that, one takes a large board of paper and stands it opposite the light-­rays which have been allowed to enter the chamber. On it can be seen the picture of the devil walking up and down; this they look at with trepidation. This is the reason why the poor and unexperienced are unaware that they see the charlatan’s shadow and squander their money unnecessarily.27

The narrator places himself as the master showman, above Lucifer and the charlatan operator, countering projection with projection and casting the shadow image of the devil back to its source: the body of the operator, the lens, and the light through the aperture. The text’s addressee—­the spectator of Aguilón’s performative demonstration—­is to be transformed into a knowing and clear-­sighted subject through subjection to a spectacle of exposure that reveals the negative vulnerable spectator, the “uneducated rabble” who regard the projected image with fear, and the double or shadow of the scientist, the would-­be devil or charlatan who alters himself. With the power of the image recast as the theatricalized demons of popular fairs and the vulnerable spectator reclassed as the “poor and unexperienced,” the negatively implied attributes of the text’s addressee, money and literacy, become his defense. By figuring the transformative capabilities of the machine to alter image and reality, create alternate realities, and affect the spectator, Aguilón’s presentation of the camera obscura seems to make light of the demonic and transformative capacities of the projected image in a dark room. Yet in decrying the way in which the spectacle of the dark room draws even the “inquisitive and curious”—­those who possess the desire to learn and to know—­the account also suggests that the power or magic of the image to affect the spectator despite their class, education, or (dis)belief may not be swept away by the trope of unmasking.28

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The pivotal seventeenth-­century text of entertaining and educational experiments, the Récréations mathématiques (1624) often attributed to the Jesuit Jean Leurechon (1591–­1670), popularized the camera obscura as a potential device of delightful instruction by providing careful instructions for how to control its illusion.29 Translated into English in 1633, the Mathematicall Recreations, Or a Collection of sundrie Problemes, extracted out of the Ancient and Moderne Philosophers, presents the camera obscura or “Chamber” as “one of the finest experiments in the Opticques.”30 In place of any denunciations, this description of the camera obscura carefully explains how to “right” the image, how to make the images look “more lively than their naturall [appearance],” and how to gain a “goodly representation of the Heavens” so that the cast image “may be more delightfull and pleasant to the beholders” (7, 6). Unlike Kepler’s and Aguilón’s accounts, the compendium offers the experiment as a tool for gaining proper perspective by specifying that it should take place in a chamber “which is toward the street, frequented with people, or which is against some faire flourishing object” (6). Though the best location is stipulated as a natural, real, and recognizable place populated by ideal versions of the observers, the resulting image is, nonetheless, analogized to a “beautifull paint” (7). While rehearsing the language of nature and accuracy essential to the truth claims of such optical technologies, the analogy of the camera obscura’s cast image to a painted one brings out the extent to which a philosopher’s aid that was meant to “explaine the organ of the sight” created the very vision it was supposed to illustrate (8). The description closes with the assertion that, “for philosophers, it is a fine secret to explain the organ of the sight, for the hollow of the eye is taken as the close Chamber, the balle of the Aple of the eye, for the hole of the Chamber, the Cristalline humor at the small of the Glasse and the bottom of the eye, for the wall or leafe of Paper” (8). Using the language of natural magic and books of secrets to term the camera obscura’s demonstration of the operations of the eye a “fine secret” for “Philosophers,” the description seems to dispel representations and effects not so “beautifull and goodly” (7). But in opening up the eye as a dark reception chamber of cast images, its careful instructions for how to use the camera obscura also make room for beholders who may be touched and altered by what they see. To hold such susceptibility at bay, the description of this fine experiment involves a list of conditionals necessary

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to obtain a “lively perspective” and “right” representation, including “how much the hole is lesser, the day cleare & the sun shining” as well as specifying certain lenses, an appropriately darkened room, the location of the chamber, and appropriate “natural” objects outside the room (7). While there are no devilish apparitions or charlatans and no spectatorial dupes in the camera obscura of the Mathematicall Recreations, the delight of the “beholders” also emerges as dependent on a narrowed aperture (i.e., “how much the hole is lesser”) and the uncontrollable vagaries of the weather (“the day cleare & the sun shining”) that may not be sufficient to foreclose the other secrets of the chamber and especially the transforming agency of its cast images in the scene of projection.

Affect and the Contrivance of the Camera Obscura While I began with the claim that paranoid projection functioned as a passionate practice that displaces affect, the term “delight” recurs in the seventeenth-­century descriptions of the camera obscura I have discussed thus far. Derived from the Latin delectare meaning “to allure and attract,” the English word “delite” changed its spelling in the sixteenth century to “delight,” creating a relation to light not in its Latin root. While these texts that set the scene of projection stress the careful and appropriate direction of light into the dark room, they also admit delight. To delight is, of course, to create affect and specifically affects of pleasure. To confront the careful admission of affects of delight into the closed chamber as a crucial part of the casting out of fear, trepidation, and horror, let me turn to magnification and the complex and charged relation of delight and delusion.31 The English physicist, instrument maker, and curator of experiments for the Royal Society of London, Robert Hooke (1635–­1703) may be best known for his work with the compound microscope in his lavishly illustrated Micrographia of 1665, a book that made his microscope observations vividly accessible (Figure 9).32 With the aid of optical instruments, the Micrographia promised a dominion over not only the magnified blind eye of a dissected flea but also what Hooke calls the “dangers in the process of humane Reason.”33 According to Hooke, optical instruments do not just provide an “inlargement of the dominion of the Senses”; they also aid in the development of an internal watchman who monitors the

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Figure 9. Robert Hooke’s compound microscope, ca. 1665. Plate I from Micrographia

(London: Printed by Jo. Martyn and Ja. Allestry, 1665). Courtesy of the Science Museum / Science and Society Picture Library.

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“failings” of the sense and looks out for the ways in which, as Hooke writes, “the forces of our own minds conspire to betray us.”34 Yet even as the preface to the Micrographia positions the optical instrument as an aid to managing the senses, their use in “Experimental Philosophy” is proposed “as a matter of high rapture and delight of the mind” and even “as a material and sensible Pleasure.”35 Delight and delusion feature explicitly in “The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World” that Margaret Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle, appended to her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666). A critical response to Hooke’s Micrographia, the satiric fable takes more general aim at the men of science she calls “Bear-­ men” and their optical instruments, asserting that they “take more delight in Artificial delusions, then in natural truths.”36 To undermine the claims for optical devices and point up the passionate investment in instruments, Cavendish conjoins those terms kept apart in descriptions of the camera obscura: delight and delusion. For the attractions of delight to be distinguished from the disordering deceptions of delusion, delight is juxtaposed against grand and altering passions and becomes, in their place, a small admission of affect. In descriptions of the camera obscura, delight functions, like the narrowed aperture and other technical controls, to limit affect and direct attraction onto the illumination, exposure, and revelation that is to dispel belief and disarm the effects of the image. In 1668, Hooke published an account in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions of a portable camera obscura of his own design in which he describes the demonstration of “a Contrivance to make the Picture of any thing appear on a Wall” as an “Optical Experiment” that “produces Effects” he terms “very delightful.” Hooke’s optical experiment for casting images in the dark room is to demonstrate the affecting powers of belief in the external agency of images. The text of Hooke’s introduction to the experiment is worth quoting in full: This Optical Experiment . . . produces Effects not onely very delightful, but to such as know not the contrivance, very wonderful; so that Spectators, not well versed in Opticks, that should see the various Apparitions and Disappearances, the Motions, Changes, and Actions, that may this way be represented, would readily believe them to be super-­natural and miraculous, and would as easily be affected with all those passions of Love, Fear, Reverence, Honour, and Astonishment,

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that are the natural consequences of such belief. And had the Heathen Priests of old been acquainted with it, their Oracles and Temples would have been much more famous for the Miracles of their Imaginary Deities. For by an Art as this, what could they not have represented in their Temples? Apparitions of Angels, or Devils, Inscriptions and Oracles on Walls; the Prospect of Countryes, Cities, Houses, Navies, Armies; the Actions and Motions of Men, Beasts, Birds, &c. the vanishing of them in a cloud, and their appearing no more after the cloud is vanisht: And indeed almost any thing, that may be seen, may by this contrivance be very vividly and distinctly represented, in such a manner, that, unless to very curious and sagacious persons, the means how such Apparitions are made, shall not be discoverable.37

This account represents the use of the camera obscura for showing images of actual objects both man-­made and natural, of pictures of things both real and imagined. There is no lantern. Rather, the objects and representations to be reflected, refracted, and projected are held up to a hole fitted with lenses. Hooke’s performance is also importantly a spatial instrument that involves not one room but two, a spatialization that prevents the spectators from seeing the source of the images directly. While the camera obscura in Hooke’s experiment projects illusions and casts images of actual objects in such a way that they deceive the spectator, Hooke’s account of the experiment is carefully framed, setting “curious and sagacious persons” against both “Spectators, not well versed in Opticks” and “Heathen Priests of old.” Using the language of performance for the rhetorical display of his experiment, Hooke’s description conjures “Apparitions” and figures of false belief but attempts to hinge their affecting power to the occultation of the means by which they are generated. His account deflects the power of the image by aligning its textual addressees with a desire to learn, acuity, and optical knowledge. By performing a revelation of the mechanism and exposing the objects, glasses, apparatus, and operators on the other side of the window or hole that, he explains, would otherwise remain invisible to the spectators, the power of the image is to be eclipsed for the reader: These Objects, Reflecting and Refracting Glasses, and the whole Apparatus; as also the Persons employ’d to order, change and make use of them, must be placed without the said high Window or Hole, so that they may not be perceived by the Spectators in the room; and the whole Operation will be easily perform’d.38

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Hooke’s optical experiment conjures affecting apparitions in order to cast out the belief that is supposedly their cause and the passions that are ostensibly their consequence. With the performative discovery of their mechanism, the subject learns to refuse to recognize his negative doubles: the vulnerable, feeling spectator who is moved and attracted even after or despite knowledge of the mechanism; the heathen priest of old figured as manipulator of images and conjuror of visions, the dark obverse of the scientist as operator of optical devices. By projecting the projection (that is, the attribution of agency to miracles and supernatural causes) in such a way that the spectator is immersed in the spectacle of passion-­inducing illusion and yet comes out at the other end of the experiment with a lesson in optics, Hooke’s pedagogical device is also a machine of transformation for the making of spectators “well versed in Opticks,” “curious and sagacious persons,” and subjects of rational vision. The dispassionate and rationalizing tone of Hooke’s presentation of his projective apparatus might be understood as a necessary part of the experiment’s labors of casting out what are presented as disordering passions of the mind: “Love, Fear, Reverence, Honour, and Astonishment.” But Hooke’s use of the power of the projective apparatus in the dark room does not entirely dispel these passions but rather endeavors to manage and redirect those passions from one source onto another: from belief in the apparitions of heathen priests to belief in and potentially a measure of love, fear, reverence, honour, and astonishment for the apparitions of the laws of optics as manifested by curious and sagacious men.39

Shame and the Labors of the Lantern Having elaborated how the camera obscura functioned as a domain of disavowed magic in the power of the image to act on and affect the spectator, I turn to the magic lantern. I will argue that the demonstration of image-­projecting apparatus in the dark room worked to effect not only an internalization of a lesson about optics but also a self-­ surveillance for and routing out of any signs of gullibility or belief in the illusion projected. The studies of H. Mark Gosser, Laurent Mannoni, W. A. Wagenaar, and S. I. Van Nooten work to show that, while the German-­born, Rome-­based scholar and prolific Jesuit author Athanasius Kircher (1601–­80) presented a number of impressive projection

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devices in his Ars magna lucis et umbrae (1646) and published his claim to have invented the first lantern for the projection of images painted on slides in the second edition of 1671, the “inventor” of the magic lantern was Christiaan Huygens (1629–­95). The Huygens correspondence and manuscript papers do show that this Dutch Calvinist scholar and instrument maker, who was familiar with the first edition of Kircher’s Ars magna, described and sketched out plans in 1659 for a working projection lantern to cast images from a painted slide.40 However, given the historical evidence, the most compelling assessment is that these European claims of possession be viewed with some suspicion. Given what I have elaborated thus far about the use of the camera obscura for the projection of images, it is hard to clearly distinguish that apparatus from the magic lantern. Furthermore, according to historian Joseph Needham’s history of Science and Civilisation in China (1962), knowledge of the basic principles of the camera obscura—­the observation of how an inverted image is created by the rays of light through a pinhole in a screen—­goes back at least to the fifth century BCE and the writings of the Chinese philosopher Mo Ti.41 In addition, the Islamic natural philosopher and mathematician Ibn al-­Haytham (Alhazen, ca. 965–­ca. 1040) made studied experiments on the casting of images with candles as a light source.42 Rather than one device with a clear beginning and one inventor, we might more persuasively argue that various technologies for casting images were repurposed in seventeenth-­century Europe. Viewed not as the first but rather as one influential experimenter in a long line, the complicated and ambivalent case of Huygens is particularly instructive. Huygens may be better known now as the mathematician and mechanist who perfected the pendulum clock and, with his brother, ground lenses and built telescopes for their own use; in 1656, Huygens found that the “handles” of Saturn were actually a ring circling the planet.43 The case of Huygens the Dutch Calvinist allows us to complicate Crary’s characterization of the magic lantern as an unimpor­ tant device with an entirely separate development associated with the thaumaturgy attributed to the Counter-­Reformation Roman Catholic church.44 However, the ambivalence with which the device is treated in the Huygens correspondence and manuscript materials also allows us to trace the use of the magic lantern as a device for the management of anxiety, shame, and fear. If we look at what we might call the official

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Huygens, we note that Huygens gave presentations of his telescopes to the Académie des sciences in Paris and the Royal Society of London and pursued royal patents for his clockwork devices, but not his lantern. We may note, too, that his 1678 treatise on the wave theory of light, Traité de la lumière (published in 1690), mentions cutting prisms and the difficulties of preparing proper lenses for telescopes but says nothing about his work with the lantern.45 Huygens’s letters reveal numerous but far from uncomplicated references to this “lantern.” Indeed, a letter from Huygens to his brother Lodewijk dated April 5, 1662, would seem to uphold the argument that the magic lantern occupied a minor and even discredited discursive and social position. As this letter is one of the few documents relating to Huygens’s involvement with the invention and diffusion of the projecting lantern and the one to which scholars turn to discern Huygens’s attitude toward this device, it is worth quoting in full: Here is another commission that my father gives me, to arrange for him a lantern with two or three diverse pictures [“peintures”] to be shown with it. I can make no reply except that I shall do what he wishes, and as quickly as is possible for me: but to you I confess that these commissions inconvenience me greatly, and that many others as well as my Father will ask me for similar things. You would not believe the difficulty with which I occupy myself with such bagatelles, which already seem quite old to me, and in addition I am ashamed that people will know that they came from me. People are obliging enough to make it appear that they admire them, but afterwards they mock them and not without reason. For the future, if there is no other way, I beg of you to divert similar chores away from me.46

The letter establishes Huygens as the maker of a lantern for projecting images and, at the same time, his effort to disassociate his name from the device. The letter calls the lantern with various pictures a “bagatelle,” a French noun derived either from the Parmesan bagata for a “little property” or the Latin word baca for berry, fruit, or pearl. In either case, as a term that is about property or, rather, the lack of large amounts of it, “bagatelle” also signifies anxiety about value. Huygens’s letter articulates concern that “such bagatelles” belie the investment of time and labor required for their production, a material deception that induces social deception in the devices’ spectators and recipients.

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In the likening of the magic lantern to a bagatelle, a thing of precarious value that represents the untrustworthiness of vision and its openness to deception, we can see the beginnings of that rhetorical trope associating such technologies of image projection and particularly the camera obscura with the distorting effects of ideology most famously employed by Karl Marx in The German Ideology (1845–­46): “If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-­process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-­process.”47 The analogy between the camera obscura device and human vision operates in The German Ideology to explain the way in which the “camera obscura of ideology” transforms material reality through a historical process of which it is a crucial part, making it impossible to simply lift a veil and see right side up. In her psychoanalytically informed study Camera Obscura: Of Ideology (1973) that examines the nineteenth-­century metaphoric uses of the technical apparatus of the camera obscura in the works of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, French philosopher Sarah Kofman concludes with René Descartes’s use of the camera obscura model in his fifth discourse on “Dioptrics” from the Discourse on Method (1637).48 Severing mind from body and image from object in a quest to maintain that the mind or soul (“l’ame”) can function independently from the senses, this passage demonstrates the independence it claims by a literal cut, a surgical extraction that holds up a dead man’s or ox’s eye as a trophy of ideal vision, a chamber at the back of which images appear not inverted but in “natural perspective”: Thus you can clearly see that in order to perceive, the mind need not contemplate any images resembling the things that it senses. But this makes it no less true that the objects we look at do imprint very perfect images on the back of our eyes. Some people have very ingeniously explained this already, by comparison with images that appear in a chamber, when having it completely closed except for a single hole, and having put in front of this hole a glass in the form of a lens, we stretch behind, at a specific distance, a white cloth on which the light that comes from objects outside forms these images. For they say that this chamber represents the eye; this hole, the pupil; this lens, the crystalline humour, or rather, all those parts of the eye which cause some refractions; and this cloth, the interior membrane, which is composed

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of the extremities of the optic nerve. But you will be even more certain of this if, taking the eye of a newly deceased man, or, for want of that, of an ox or some other large animal, you carefully cut through to the back three membranes that enclose it. . . . Then having covered it over with some white body . . . you will see there, not perhaps without admiration and pleasure, a picture which will represent in natural perspective all the objects which will be outside it.49

Descartes’s ox’s eye may be a camera obscura, but it is one in which the pictures of actual objects appear in “natural perspective” and one that is independent of both the mind that thinks and any individual body’s point of view. In Kofman’s account, the counterexample of Descartes becomes the camera obscura model of vision and operates equally trophy-­like to stand in for the early modern period from which the work is excised. Kofman uses Descartes’s ox’s eye to demonstrate that the camera obscura metaphor employed in the nineteenth century for the unconscious, ideology, and inversion is “not a necessary consequence of the model itself.”50 I would like to suggest, however, that we may see already in Descartes’s presentation of the severed eye as a camera obscura of truth rather than deception, inversion, or mystification a defensive strategy that uses the severed eyeball to ward off the specter of the mind’s reliance on imperfect organs.51 For if the mind may function perfectly well without the contemplation of images of the things it senses, then why should it be necessary to prove with certainty that images formed at the back of the eye are not inverted or otherwise distorted? And in Descartes’s discussion it is, moreover, the surgical removal of a single eye from the body, not the operation of the camera obscura apparatus, that provides the ultimate visual demonstration of the certainty and truth of vision transcending the corporal—­a shift that points in its wake to the insufficiency of the camera obscura apparatus as an ideal model of rational vision.52 It is not a long step from the disembodied eye of Descartes’s essay on dioptrics to Huygens, for we know that Descartes was in regular correspondence with Huygens’s father on optical matters and publication of the Discourse, and that Huygens’s own treatise on light was in direct dialogue with Descartes. Linking Descartes’s discussion of the camera obscura in his Discourse on Method to the case of Huygens and specifically Huygens’s letter in which he calls the lantern a “bagatelle” enables us to see that the optical devices of the early modern period

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based on the camera obscura room or box were both machines and metaphors, and that these machine metaphors were not inverted in the nineteenth century from truth to falsity (as in Marx’s characterization of ideology) but had long been linked with the attempted management of fear and distortion. In calling the lantern a bagatelle that makes light of the difficulties of its production, Huygens calls attention to the apparatus as itself a crafted object, made by the laboring body from which it is divorced in Descartes’s account of the camera obscura, but one whose value does not correspond to the investment of labor required for its facture. Huygens is reputed to have been a master at crafting lenses, but even with the assistance of Caspar Kalthof, the German artisan whom Huygens employed, the making of a lantern would have been a time-­intensive task, with each lens requiring over twenty hours of work.53 But calling the lantern a bagatelle in the context of a complaint about the commissions from his father, their potential multiplication, and his own inability to control them points to another aspect of the conditions under which Huygens labored and to the lantern as a device that does not easily solve the problem of the dependent body. From 1650 to 1666 Huygens lived at home supported by commissions and an allowance from his father, the wealthy high government official Constantijn Huygens. Calling the lantern a bagatelle in this letter returns the optical device not only back to the laboring body but to a situation of dependence in which the laboring scientist’s time is far from entirely his own and in which his reputation and viability are tied to his father’s favor and a network of commissions.54 But the characterization of the lantern as a bagatelle also takes a more emotional turn, one that returns the optical device to the feeling and desiring body. In the subsequent section of Huygens’s letter to his brother the lantern transforms from a bagatelle—­a joke without consequence or import—­into a potential object of justifiable ridicule and an agent of degradation capable of bringing shame upon its maker. This is rather grand stuff for a bagatelle understood as a mere toy. It suggests, instead, that the lantern is inseparable from the politics of patronage and position and the difficulties of stably distinguishing labors of merit and value from trifles or jokes. The Huygens correspondence indicates that Constantijn Huygens requested the lantern for a presentation at the court of Louis XIV. The French court was an important potential patron, and Christiaan did eventually secure a handsome royal

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pension as well as a position as a founding member of the Académie des sciences. In the ensuing letters between Christiaan and his brother, we may note that Christiaan stalled, saying, for example, in a letter of April 19, 1662, that it would not be appropriate for his father to “play with those marionettes at the Louvre.”55 The reference to the puppets further suggests anxieties about independence, agency, and manipulation as well as an effort to distance Huygens’s instruments from the machinery of musical theatre and the commedia dell’arte.56 How profoundly these anxieties run may be read across the subsequent letters in which Huygens even tries to enlist his brother to sabotage the operation of the lantern.57 In an artfully constructed letter of August 17, 1662, turning on the name for the device in question, Huygens uses the word “lanterner,” the French verb signifying “to keep someone waiting.” Lanterning, that is, keeping his colleagues waiting for the lantern he was making for his father, Huygens writes that “despite all his industry and science he has not reached the end or goal” and tells his brother finally, “I am close to making him [a] Telescope, microscope, and all that he would want, except for the Lantern, whose invention must be counted inter artes deperditas [among the lost or destroyed arts].”58 Such elaborate stratagems, strenuous disavowals, and a suggested interdiction belie the notion of the lantern as an insignificant object of no value or importance. Given that Huygens was dependent on his father for financial support until he left home for Paris in 1666 as one of the most highly pensioned members of the Académie des sciences, we may also read both the reference to playing with marionettes and the various efforts to exert control over the commission process as signs of the younger Huygens’s own anxieties about his status and position or, in his own words, what would be the final judgment or assessment of “all his industry and science.”59 What we can see in the case of Huygens is the use of the multivalent lantern as medium and metaphor for the difficulties inherent in the effort to secure power, authority, and independence. While Huygens senior never did present a projection device made by his son to the court of Louis XIV, the Huygens correspondence reveals that Huygens neither lost nor destroyed the science or art of the lantern. At the same time that Huygens was blocking his father’s presentation of the lantern at court, Huygens wrote to his brother that the lenses were already made and would soon be ready to put in a lantern requested

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by the duke and marshal of France Antoine de Gramont.60 Two years later in 1664 Huygens distributed one of the earliest written instructions and diagrams for the assembly of a projecting lantern for slides in a brief reply to Pierre Petit, the French royal engineer who had requested clarification on the construction and dimensions of Huygens’s lantern. In a previous letter to Huygens, Petit refers to Huygens’s lantern as “this lantern of fear,” a telling phrase in that it registers not merely the now taken-­for-­granted use of the device to project fearful images but that the device itself might both arouse fear and function as a site for acting out and working through deep-­seated and even unconscious anxieties.61 I would like to suggest that Huygens’s continued involvement with the lantern despite protestations to the contrary is not merely a back-­ and-­forth game but rather an important case that helps us to account for the significance of this optical device. Thinking of the lantern or, in Petit’s terms, the “lantern of fear” as a machine of paranoid projection may help us to explain its function. In the case of Huygens, we see the projective function extending to the apparatus itself, an optical device that manages and even expels, however temporarily, fears of dependence, shame, waste, and deception.62 The sense of this “bagatelle” as a device of paranoid projection emerges particularly if we look at the Huygens manuscript materials. From the 1650s until his death Huygens continued to work on what was to be his own treatise on refracted light, the Dioptrica.63 In notes probably dating from 1692 on “the order to be kept in our Dioptrics,” Huygens included the magic lantern (laterna magica) as a device useful for the scientific observation of sunspots and solar eclipses.64 An associated diagram (Figure 10) likely drawn in 1694 is labeled “Laterna magica.”65 Huygens is known particularly for another diagram dating from 1659 that features not the lantern but designs for what appears to be an early version of a moving slide (Figure 11). Labeled “For representations by means of convex lenses at the lamp,” the drawing is laid out in a sequence on the page, with the first two figures inside circles that suggest the outline of a round glass slide, and sketches of a skeleton shown in the process of moving its arm, removing its head, and finally balancing one skull in midair while placing another as its head.66 Separated by thirty-­five years, these images—­one a drawing for a lantern slide that seems never to have been made or published, the other a labeled diagram of the machine

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Figure 10. Christiaan Huygens, diagram of a magic lantern, ca. 1694. Left to right: concave mirror, lamp, glass lens, transparent plate, lens, wall. From Oeuvres complètes de Christiaan Huygens, 22 vols. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1888–­1950), 13:786. Courtesy of Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin–­Madison.

intended for eventual treatment in a treatise on optics—­appear, at first glance, to be divided by far more than time in representing the opposing uses and meanings of the lantern: the demonstration of imaginary figures for the purposes of spectacle and entertainment versus the scientific, knowledge-­making use of the device to view natural phenomena. But there is also an important continuity between these two images. On the diagram and in the notes Huygens made for his treatise in the 1690s, we cannot ignore the deliberate and repeated use of the term “laterna magica” rather than the unmodified noun “laterna,” a term that might have been employed to distance the lantern from natural magic and sorcery. The skeletons in the 1659 design for a slide may recall Huygens’s earlier fascination with Hans Holbein’s Dance of Death series and thus be a reference back to youth. However, their artful contrivance suggests more persuasively an ongoing preoccupation. In a letter to his brother Constantyn from August 14, 1646, Huygens recounts an activity that he calls his “greatest pastime”: drawing figures of skeletons large as life on the garden wall of the family estate. In the letter, Huygens boasts of his ability not so much to copy but rather to enlarge and almost vivify the skeletal figures comprising Holbein’s miniatures.67 If we take seriously the close attention to the work of Holbein that would have been required to so transform the figures in the Dance of Death series and compare the 1659 sketch of a moving skeleton in the process of removing its own head and finally presenting a skull to the observer to the plates comprising Holbein’s first publication of the series as a book, Simulachres et historiées faces de la mort

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Figure 11. Christiaan Huygens, sketch for a magic lantern slide, 1659. From

Oeuvres complètes de Christiaan Huygens, 22 vols. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1888–­1950), 22:197. Courtesy of Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin–­Madison.

(Lyons, 1538), we find further continuity between the sense and function of the lantern in 1659 and 1692–­94. The one plate (Figure 12) added to the 1538 version was an image of the astronomer or astrologer, the only image to figure a skeleton presenting a skull in its hand. In the Holbein print, the astrologer is beseeched to turn from the astrolabe above his head to “behold” instead the other “Sphere,” the skull, that the skeleton holds out before him.68 In Huygens’s sketch, gone is the moralizing text; gone is the figure whose attention is focused upward on his instrument for studying the sky; and gone is the astrolabe, that device for visually projecting the positions of heavenly bodies onto a sphere. The detail with which the sketch outlines its designs for the

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Figure 12. Hans Holbein, “The Astrologer,” from The Dance of Death: from the

original designs of Hans Holbein. Illustrated with thirty-­three plates, engraved by W. Hollar (London: Printed for J. Coxhead, Holywell-­Street, Strand, 1816). Courtesy of University of Wisconsin–­Madison Libraries.

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addition of movement to the static emblem of a skeleton (e.g., the dots representing the path to be traveled by the arm) gives us a sense of the illusion it might have effected, one in which the skeleton hails the viewer. By effecting the presentation of the skull to the viewer, Huygens’s design places the observer in the position of the astronomer/astrologer who is asked to turn away from the astrolabe’s illusory representations and directly confront the real in all its fatality. In Huygens’s reworking of Holbein, we see a further turn on the mise-­en-­abyme wit associated with Holbein’s play with optics.69 The final figure in the sketched sequence of 1659 no longer has the visibly articulated bones of a skeleton. It stands in a posture of nonchalant triumph with one hand to hip and the other, which once held a skull, now stretched out to the viewer open-­palmed. In making the spheric skull appear and disappear, the image within the image points back to the metamorphic, trick capacities of the laterna magica itself and its ability to shine light through round lenses and sliders to make translucent images materialize and vanish. We might see this revision of Holbein’s astronomer/astrologer as a means of retelling the moral. Calling the viewer’s attention away from the visual illusion of the moving skeleton and dis/appearing skull, and directing it instead to the means by which it is projected, the allegorical figure of death takes the place of the astrolabe in signifying mortal folly and deception (in its ambition to cheat death), and the projection instrument now occupies the position of truth revealed. Huygens’s 1659 sketch uses the device of the mise en abyme, the image that calls attention to its own conditions of being, to puncture illusion and, with it, the reality of death and loss. At the same time, it disavows the unconscious fears and anxieties that one might not be able to distinguish truth from phantoms or, to turn back to Holbein’s plate, that there might not be such a clear difference between the vision of an astrologer and an astronomer, a professional distinction of no little import to Huygens, the maker of astronomical devices and observer of Saturn’s ring. Connecting both Huygens’s 1659 sketch of a lantern slide and his 1694 diagram and related notes on the “laterna magica” is the “lantern of fear” as staging a visual confrontation with the perils of sight, from the fear-­inducing vision of unavoidable mortality to the painfully tangible danger of looking directly into the sun. The lantern serves to manage fear—­of death and loss, of weakness of human sight and judgment—­by

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presenting itself as a way of facing and passing through those fears. Its translucent cast images allow the viewer to look directly at a skeleton (the imagined agent of death) and at the sun (the imaged agent of injury and even blindness) and yet emerge unscathed. But, of course, the magic lantern arranges no actual encounter, only the illusion of direct contact through the sense of sight. While the magic lantern may be employed to denounce the entrapments of deceptive images and Lucifer’s light, to effect such a change in the spectator it must play a double game, making the still, the dead, the two-­dimensional come alive and take palpable affecting shape before the observer. We can see in Huygens’s conflicted use and disavowal of the device—­dismissed as a “bagatelle,” repositioned as a “laterna magica” useful for viewing sunspots, and wittily recast as the source of visual truth able to outsmart death—­an effort to produce a consolidated subject of rational vision through an ambivalent necromancy that employs illusion, traffics with phantoms of the dead, and raises fears of failure and loss, the vulnerability and even incapacity of the sense of sight as well as the faculty of judgment.

A Device of Dubious Distinction The first printed illustrations (Figures 13a and 13b) to portray the details of a magic lantern device—­the dark chamber that employs a slider with painted images, a tube fitted with lenses, and an oil lantern to supply the illumination—­appeared in the second edition of Athanasius Kircher’s Ars magna lucis et umbrae (1671).70 These images have generated a debate among contemporary scholars as to whether or not they represent technical mistakes because they defy expectations about how the magic lantern is assumed to work: the mirror is not lined up with the light source; the glass slider is placed in front of the lens tube rather than behind; the slider is not placed in the tube upside down. Historian W. A. Wagenaar imputes what he interprets as errors to Joannes Jansson van Waesberghe, the Dutch publisher of the 1671 edition, rather than to Kircher.71 Countering Wagenaar, historian of science Koen Vermeir interprets the arrangement as both a functioning variant of the magic lantern (a point-­light source projection) and an analogical demonstration of Neoplatonic metaphysics of light. Encouraging us to see the dark chamber as the shadow theater of Plato’s cave, Vermeir argues that Kircher preferred this setup for its metaphysical significance: “In the

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magic lantern, light (lux/God) is diffracted by the first clear and bright lens (angel), then again even more dispersed by a second but opaque lens (man), casting shadows possessing form and figure (knowledge/ world).”72 Given the artful construction of Kircher’s Ars magna lucis et umbrae or “Great Art of Light and Shadow,” it does seem unlikely that the diagrammatical position of the elements of the apparatus was a mistake. Furthermore, as professor of mathematics at the Jesuit college in Rome, constructor of machines, conductor of experiments (known as “experiences”), and prolific writer and compiler, Kircher ably and even flamboyantly orchestrated lectures for students and public visitors to his museum that employed a vast array of inventive and often witty devices and illusionistic effects to dispel superstition and teach the rules of nature.73 The 1678 catalog of the Museo Kircheriano illustrates the assemblage at the Collegio Romano of optical devices, Egyptian artifacts, musical instruments, and natural history specimens and reproduces Kircher’s diagram of the magic lantern (Figure 13a).74 This posthumously published account also notes that Kircher used the magic lantern to project pictures on the museum walls.75 Extrapolating from Kircher’s known use of the device to describe the site’s experiential environment, Ingrid Rowland asserts that “life at the Collegio Romano with Kircher in residence must have been downright phantasmagoric.”76 Such deployment of the magic lantern and other kinds of image-­ casting devices at the Collegio Romano and the relative importance given to the magic lantern in the illustration program of the 1671 Ars magna indicate the device’s significance for Kircher’s pedagogical practices. The search for a secret key with which to symbolically decipher Kircher’s magic lantern has great appeal and seems in keeping with Pierre Motte’s engraved frontispiece to the Ars magna with its representation of a complex topographical arrangement of four sources of knowledge (sacred authority, reason, knowledge of the sensible, and profane or worldly authority) and the personification of light and shadow in the classical deities of Apollo and Diana as the sun and the moon.77 However, as with Wagenaar, the solution Vermeir supplies also separates the instrument from the larger scenario of the printed plates. Although Vermeir’s proposed schema speaks of “casting shadows possessing form and figure” that ostensibly take the place of “knowledge/world,” there is no mention of the role of the large and carefully rendered sliders. Light projection only casts shadows; the painted plates, however, make it

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Figure 13a. Athanasius Kircher, Ars magna lucis et umbrae (Amsterdam, 1671), 768. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, Washington, D.C.

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Figure 13b. Athanasius Kircher, Ars magna lucis et umbrae (Amsterdam, 1671), 769.

Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, Washington, D.C.

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possible to cast detailed images as illuminated pictures against dark walls within shadowy rooms. Kircher’s illustrations depict two such plates, and the arrangements of the elements of the apparatus are not identical. In one (Figure 13a) the slider is exposed, and in the other (Figure 13b) the slider is concealed within the chamber that contains the light source and tube with the lenses. If, as Vermeir persuasively contends, the device is used to visualize the invisible, then how does the same symbolic mapping work for both when they do not illuminate the same images or reveal the elements of the apparatus in the same way? But it is also possible that the projected images, the cross-­section display format of the illustrations that allows the reader of Kircher’s Ars magna to see into the other room or box housing the apparatus, and the technical presentation of the apparatus have another relation. In his essay “Between the Demonic and the Miraculous: Athanasius Kircher and the Baroque Culture of Machines” (2001), historian Michael John Gorman argues that Kircher’s magical machines functioned like “inside jokes” in that spectators who could deduce natural causes rather than demonic forces animating the seemingly miraculous effects confirmed their membership in a social elite.78 Gorman focuses particularly on another set of projective apparatus, namely, various vomiting machines such as the “cancer vomitor” and the fountain in the shape of a head spewing water from its mouth illustrated in the Mechanica Hydraulico-­Pneumatica (1657) by Kircher’s disciple Gaspar Schott. Gorman relates such displays of unseemly behavior to the spectacle made of superstition, arguing ultimately that these machines were early modern European “civilizing machines” that divided spectators into a knowing, civilized elite with discerning eyes and superstitious, animal, and grotesque bodies.79 Kircher’s figures might be read to have functioned as planted jokes whose performative role was to distinguish the magic lantern’s spectators—­in relation to whom the chambers containing the lamps, lenses, tubes, and, in one case, even the slider would have been closed—­from the readers of Kircher’s text and viewers of its special diagrams for whom the chambers were opened.80 However, what is also particularly striking about Kircher’s illustrations of the magic lantern or “thaumaturgo,” as Kircher called it, are the particular images projected. And I would like to suggest that Kircher’s projective machines and the particular images they were depicted as casting had a disturbing aspect that neither analogical

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demonstration nor civilizing machines quite captures. One diagram (Figure 13a) shows a wall illuminated with the enlarged image of a man, with outstretched arms being consumed by flames and billowing smoke; the other (Figure 13b), a skeleton brandishing a scythe and an hourglass, the common iconography for the personification of death as the grim reaper. By projecting images of the manifest agent of death and a condemned heretic being burned at the stake or a damned soul consigned to a fiery hell, the device is presented as a means of enlarging and making appear vividly real external threats to the subject and its negative alter egos as heretic, sinner, or skeleton. For a Jesuit polymath with a profound and avowed interest in magic and hermeticism as well as for the Collegio’s students and visitors attempting to find their way among competing ideas, such images were not so easily displaced onto others or dispelled by a laugh.81 The specters such images conjured may have cut close to home. Galileo Galilei—­a scholar for whom faith and science were not opposed—­was found guilty of “vehement suspicion of heresy” (a technical term indicating a specific level of religious crime) by the Roman Inquisition just two years before Kircher was sent to Rome.82 Historian Ingrid Rowland suggests that Kircher’s mission in Rome was to navigate the troubled and dangerous intellectual climate of Rome in the wake of Galileo’s trial.83 Not so distant either were the examples of Giambattista della Porta who found his works banned by the Inquisition from 1594 to 1598 and philosopher Giordano Bruno who was declared a heretic and burned at the stake in 1600 by the Roman Inquisition—­most probably for his theology and interest in hermeticism rather than his Copernicanism.84 Kircher’s use of projective machinery to cast images of a man engulfed by fire and of death as the grim reaper may have functioned to manage fear by a certain dividing and distancing projection of what the viewer is encouraged to refuse to become or to recognize in himself. As historian of science Paula Findlen argues, the avowed purpose of many of Kircher’s spectacles may well have been an attempt to fool the ignorant and distinguish between classes of spectators.85 And yet these graven illustrations also haunt, leaving intact the possibility that revelation of the apparatus and even the laws governing the projection will not entirely evacuate the power or even a certain truth from such fear-­inducing images of the body’s mortal fate. The problem of belief and the spectator’s susceptibility to the image preoccupies the account of a magic lantern show written by

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seventeenth-­century French traveler and professor of medicine at Padua Charles Patin (1633–­93). Patin witnessed a magic lantern show in Nuremberg around 1670–­73 and recounted the experience in a letter to the duke of Brunswick in 1674.86 In this letter, Patin recalls the show orchestrated by a monk he calls “M. Grundler” who is most likely Johann Franz Gründel or Griendel, an optical instrument manufacturer who became one of the most celebrated seventeenth-­century projectionists.87 Patin refers to the magnifying, refracting, and reproductive capacities of these projective displays as “that fallicious Art that deceives our Sight, and which with the Rule and Compass disorders all our Senses” (233).88 What makes Patin’s account so interesting is not his denunciation of an intrinsically deceptive spectacle and the use of laws of optics and geometry to disorder the senses, but rather its carefully composed narration of spectator response. Patin opens with the use of the lantern to summon phantoms and ghosts from hell and make them appear and “roll about” in the darkened chamber along with birds as though charmed by Orpheus. He then alludes to unnamed “Persons of great courage” who reacted with fear to the display; his own dread, however, has to do with his response to the projectionist and the sort of powers (“profound Learning” or “magic”) he, as spectator, is provoked to attribute to the agency behind the illusions: I know divers Persons of great courage who have chang’d pale at the sight of these Sports and of these Magical Artifices. And with M. Grundler’s good leave, all the Esteem that I had of his profound Learning, was not able to free me from that Dread which seiz’d upon my Spirits on that occasion; insomuch that I was apt to believe that there never was in the World a greater magician than he. (234)

Besides the sense of being caught by his emotional reaction to the sight of these images and being led, captive with induced dread, to a belief that he casts as contrary to his better judgment or reason, Patin also speaks of being tempted by visions of Paradise, Hell, and wandering spirits and phantoms and, weakened in his resolve, ready to yield and give over part of himself to these visions: “[A]ltho’ I know myself to be endu’d with some measure of Resoluteness, yet at that time I wou’d willingly have given one half to save the other” (234–­35). We can see here already some distancing mechanisms such as the insertion of “at that time” to qualify the breach in his resoluteness as a momentary and

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passing state. But even more of a distancing mechanism is the satiric way in which Patin treats “M. Grundler.” The negative building up of the projectionist or “artist,” “magician,” and “Master of the most abstruse secrets in Opticks” operates as a device that, by impugning the agency behind the images, serves to extricate the spectator from their grip. We can see this satiric device at work particularly in the added layer of commentary that frames the account. The account in which Patin writes of himself that he is “apt to believe” (which is, of course, not quite believing) is itself framed by disbelief. “M. Grundler” is introduced as not an optical instrument maker but rather as “a Monk who (as he saies) had lately embrac’d the Reform’d Religion, according to the Doctrine of Luther” (233). The parenthetical insertion of “as he saies” insinuates doubt about the true nature of the monk’s conversion from Catholicism to Lutheranism. And Patin’s account goes further: But to justifie to me the change of his opinion it wou’d be requisite for him to have as much command over Men’s Reason, as he has over their Eyes, to which he represents whatever he thinks fit, and in any manner whatever at his pleasure; for he is absolutely Master of the most abstruse secrets in Opticks. (233)

While the monk’s show may have affected its witnesses, Patin uses displacing satire to show himself the master and possessor of a superior reason beyond the manipulation of his eyes. Patin concludes with the declaration, “let us put an end to these Visions and endeavor to divert Your Most Serene Highness with somewhat that is more solid” (236). The account works to reorchestrate the show and, in banishing the visions as lacking in solidity, endeavors to teach the addressee of the letter how to look, how to respond to illusion as a diversion without permanence or weight in the sense of lasting effects, how to see through the “most abstruse secrets in Opticks” to the monk behind the curtain. Patin’s account attempts to separate eye from mind, restricting the power of the image over the narrator-­observer to the vulnerabilities attributed to sight alone, not reason or judgment. The account further displaces the observer’s susceptibility to the protean image onto the unstable figure of the religious convert. Nonetheless, Patin’s account might be read as itself a kind of conversion narrative in which the narrator is constituted as one who can control rather than be controlled by visions only through immersion in its effects. While this paranoid projection

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endeavors to manage affect and the specter of false belief by displacement onto the spectator’s double, the convert or potential convert, and to separate power over the eye from “command over Men’s Reason,” the vivid residue of the images of Paradise and Hell, phantoms, and the birds charmed by Orpheus that may disorient the senses and instill dread lingers nonetheless to make the technology of projection more a device of dubious distinction than a confirmation of men’s reason.

Megalopsychia: Monster-­Making, Magnification, and the Ambitions of Mastery Seventeenth-­century technologies of image projection also had the capacity to create sensations of wonder and overwhelm through magnification. Like Kircher, Johann Christoph Sturm (1635–­1703) referred to the magic lantern as the “thaumaturgo” or wonder-­maker, marking the lantern’s potential to produce wondrous things and effects. But in presenting the device entitled “Of the Megalographical Magick Lanthorn, or Thaumaturgo,” Sturm also used the classical Latin term megalographia, meaning “to draw pictures on a large scale,” to stress the device’s powers of expansion. A professor of mathematics at the university in Altdorf, Sturm became known for his education through visual experiment with the publication of his Collegium Experimentale, sive Curiosum (1676–­85), a collection of pedagogical demonstrations that included one of the first printed illustrations of a slide designed for projection from a lantern (Figure 14).89 The round glass slide bears a round, even rotund, and open-­mouthed face crowned with a bounty of grapes and leaves, the traditional and readily recognizable iconography of the Roman god of wine Bacchus based on the Greek Dionysus. Sturm’s work proved popular, and his discussion of the “Megalographical Magick Lanthorn” and the image of the open-­mouthed Bacchus slide were reprised and adapted for his Mathesis Juvenilis (1699–­1701), a work dedicated to young students and translated for English readers in 1708–­9.90 That the image on the slide is not an arbitrary selection is borne out by the text of the Mathesis Juvenilis in which Sturm identifies the image as the “Face of Bacchus curiously painted and crown’d with Ivy, and his Mouth open about an inch wide, as though Laughing” (384). As the text makes reference to other pictures but these are not shown, the image functions as the operational diagram. But what work does such

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Figure 14. Johann Christoph Sturm, Collegium Experimentale, sive Curiosum (Nurem-

berg: Sumptibus Wolfgangi Mauritii Endteri, & Johannis Andreae Endteri Haeredum, 1676), 165. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, Washington, D.C.

an image from classical mythology do in an experiment on the laws of optics? Sturm introduces the section on “Opticks, Catoptricks, and Dioptricks” with the analogy of the eye to a portable camera obscura: [O]ur first and chiefest Care shall be . . . to demonstrate, by Reason and an Ocular Experiment, that the Eye is nothing but a little portable darkned Room. . . . we shall not only give a general, and as it were visible Reason of Seeing, but also, by Ocular Experiments, we shall clearly demonstrate how the Figure of Corporeal Substances . . . are perceived by the Sense of Seeing. (254)

The means of demonstration is the “Ocular Experiment” allied with “Reason.” Using demonstration by reason, the ocular experiment is to make manifestly visible the “Reason of Seeing.” How does the projection of an image of the open-­mouthed head of Bacchus work to achieve this aim? On the transformation of Bacchus in seventh-­century visual culture, art historian Malcolm Bull argues that the myth of Bacchus underwent a shift from the representation of Bacchus in the context of cult worship, orgiastic rites, frenzied and ferocious maenads who tore

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Orpheus to pieces, and the powerful bacchantes who took over the city of Thebes killing its king, Pentheus, to the figure of Bacchus himself whose demonic powers of destruction and creation are transmuted from signs of madness into those of drunkenness, laughter, and lust.91 However, as Bull suggests, the link between Bacchus and threats to bodily and civic order was not so much dissolved as transposed. Illustrated histories of the classical gods such as the influential Venetian humanist Natale Conti’s Mythologiae, sive explicationum fabularum (1581) interpreted classical myth, including the story of Bacchus, as a source of knowledge.92 The spread of Conti’s Mythologiae is traced in part by the numerous editions and translations over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including a new edition published in Hanover in 1669 and an influential French edition in 1629.93 In Conti, the cult of Bacchus and bacchanalian rites are criticized and geographically displaced to the “primitive” savagery imputed to the indigenous peoples of Brazil.94 However, in his 1609 De Sapientia Veterum (translated into English as The Wisdom of the Ancients in 1619), philosopher Francis Bacon (1561–­1626), who advocated classical learning as a source of important philosophical, scientific, and moral lessons, presented Bacchus as the figure for what Malcolm Bull terms an “overmastering desire”: “For it [passion, i.e., Bacchus] never rests satisfied with what it has, but goes on and on with infinite insatiable appetite panting after new triumphs.”95 Bull’s chapter on Bacchus closes with Bacon’s representation of Bacchus as an emblem of cupiditas or insatiable desire and interprets this desire as an eminently containable appetite for consumption. Whether controllable or not, Bacon’s use of Bacchus is most interesting for the way in which it attempts to teach control of the passions and mastery of desire through the exercise of reason as a lesson in viewing. Using the iconography of the bacchanial procession to negatively reorchestrate the triumph of Bacchus as an unseemly pageant of disorderly motion, Bacon resituates the scene in the eyes of the Bacchic figure who reflects back to the spectator the image of his own potential for reason overthrown by passion: [F]or as soon as Passion ceases to go on foot and comes to ride in its chariot, as in celebration of its victory and triumph over reason, then is it cruel, savage, and pitiless toward everything that stands in its way. Again, there is humour in making those ridiculous demons dance about the chariot; for every passion produces motions in the eyes, and indeed

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in the whole countenance and gesture, which are uncomely, unsettled, skipping, and deformed; insomuch that when a man under the influence of any passion, as anger, scorn, love, or the like seems most grand and imposing in his own eyes, to the lookers on he appears unseemly and ridiculous.96

Though Bacchus sees himself as “grand and imposing,” the “ridiculous demons” that unsettle his sight imply that Bacchus, and by extension “a man under the influence of any passion,” cannot see himself. Thus, the addressee of the text, as witness to the spectacle, is taught to see this aggrandizing desire—­in the form of an inflated Bacchus with demons dancing in eyes—­as deforming and worthy of ridicule. Sturm’s presentation of the Bacchus slide also teaches a lesson. The main function of the “Megalographical Magick Lanthorn” is to convert small, painted images on glass into megapictures, representations that appear much larger than they are. However, with making things appear greater comes the possibility of distortion. While “megalopsychia” was translated from the ancient Greek for “greatness of the soul” and used in the seventeenth century as a positive accolade in the sense of magnanimity, enlargement also had its dangers. Sturm manages the potentially distorting effects of magnification by emphasizing that, with the proper technical controls, the pictures can maintain “their right shape”: The ordinary Use of this Lanthorn is this; To make small Pictures appear very large against a white Wall or Cloth, and yet keeping their right shape, all their Colours and Lineaments being lively express’d; which may be done in a darken’d Room, but best in the Night; and is a Sight greatly to be admired, especially by those who never saw it before. (384)

The implication remains that just as the images might not maintain their “right shape” and magnification holds the potential for making things seem out of scale and overturning the principles of proportion, the drama of the megalopsychia might not be an enhancement of the soul but rather a substantial alteration of the incarnate spectator carried away by admiration. In this section of Sturm’s lesson on the laws of optics in a course of lectures dedicated to demonstrating the general application of mathematics, the observer is taught how to recognize the magnification and, thus, potentially right the proportion. Under the

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tutelage of this lecture with the megalographical lantern, the open mouth of Bacchus writ large becomes the index by which the spectator learns to read the image as a demonstration of the ratio of magnification: For (that the vast Augmentation of the Pictures may after a sort be estimated) we have, among others, the Face of Bacchus curiously painted and crown’d with Ivy, and his Mouth open about an inch wide, as though Laughing; which being received on the Wall, exceeds above five Spans. (384)

However, though this calculation is the stated purpose for the picture, the framing of the presentation also acknowledges that the degrees may only “after a sort be estimated.” Further, while the “vast Augmentation” of the image of the open-­mouthed face of Bacchus may appear a grand image of “Laughing” and “crown’d” triumph, there is still the residual possibility that this image represents an excessive enlargement and even disproportion that cannot be restored through estimation to appropriate scale. The lesson, however, also explicitly uses a moderate version of the device of the vulnerable spectator in the form of those spectators who “greatly” admire the sight of magnification because they “never saw it before” (384). In this reference to how the projection of a magnified image arouses great admiration from those seeing it for the first time, there is the implication that seeing the magnification in terms of potentially calculable enlargement is a way of seeing, one learned only over time and through repeat exposure to and confrontation with the projected image. The device thus effects another kind of projection, displacing susceptibility to the image onto first-­time spectators or novices. There is a further displacement in this scene of projection, an added pedagogical and performative dimension to the exercise of the megalopsychia of the demonstration of the “Megalographical Magick Lanthorn,” the promise of a certain kind of mastery over the distorting effects of its magnification that comes only with the illusion of confrontation with temptation and the seduction of the senses by passion. Sturm’s course of lectures offers the spectacle of the god of temptation and a means—­mathematics applied to optics—­through which the spectator learns to best the god of wine, the god of ingestion and intoxication, and master the distorting effects of the magnified projected image. This lesson in rational vision may also work to constitute the subject of reason in gendered terms. The rolls of flesh on the rotund face seem

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to offer visual proof of the indulgent use of the mouth for drink with which Bacchus is most famously associated. The camera obscura analogy of the eye to a chamber into which images are cast or, in Sturm’s terms “a darkened chamber,” makes the eye a penetrable organ, one that takes in external stimuli. However, the Bacchus slide directs further attention not onto the eyes but rather onto that open orifice of ingestion that makes the body obviously penetrable and permeable. Sturm’s lesson in how to estimate the image’s magnification displaces the eye as an organ of ingestion by focusing attention on the expanding open mouth in geometrical terms. The lesson offers a fantasy escape from becoming one of Bacchus’s female worshipers (bacchantes), and the seduction of sight. We might see the lesson of the megalographical magic lantern with its mathematical mastery over the image of the open mouth as a means of splitting an identificatory link between the spectator and the god of wine as image-­object. But the use of the slide of the face of Bacchus may also have functioned as a way of producing a masculinized subject of rational vision by the displacing projection of disordered sight and passion onto novices and the negative possibilities of self-­aggrandizement and expansive or even insatiable appetites onto the magnified face of Bacchus, offering the illusion of being able to look into the illuminated and enlarged image without taking it in. The professor of mathematics and member of the Paris Académies des sciences Jacques Ozanam directly confronted the monstrous capabilities of the magic lantern in his Récréations mathématiques et physiques (first published in 1694). Ozanam’s discussion of the “Magical Lantern” refers first to the lantern’s capacity for making “Monsters and fearful Apparitions” appear on the white wall of a dark room and finally to its ability to magnify a painted image into a “Gigantick monstrous Figure.”97 In contrast to Sturm, Ozanam’s experiment explicitly displaces these transformative and seductive effects onto susceptible subjects, referring to “the Ignorant” and the “fearful Ignorant People” who impute the agency of the lantern to “Magick.”98 Ultimately the demonstration of projection or casting out of the monstrous capacity lurking in the machinery only functions to the extent that it can be done through the figure of the monster, the image of fear and feared versions of the self—­ including the susceptibility of the subject to transformation—­all converted into the useful and pleasant appearance of the demonstration room so carefully and meticulously engineered and explained.

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The persistent role, into the early eighteenth century, of projected figures of monstrosity in the demonstration lecture with projective machinery is underscored by one of the oldest surviving magic lanterns to still retain the painted slider designed for it (Figure 15). The lantern dates from the 1720s and was probably built by instrument maker Jan van Musschenbroek.99 Both the lantern and the slider are illustrated in

Figure 15. Jan van Musschenbroek, projection lantern, ca. 1720. Courtesy of

Museum Boerhaave, Leiden.

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Willem Jacob ’s Gravesande’s Physices elementa mathematica, experimentis confirmata (1720–­21) to accompany his presentation of the improved magic lantern (Figure 16). In his capacity as physicist, expounder of Newtonian physics, and director of the Leiden physics theatre, ’s Gravesande commissioned such instruments for use in his demonstration lectures. The painted slider represents the head and shoulders of a hairy and horned devil in slightly different postures: it is one of the images of this grotesque visage that ’s Gravesande reproduces, enlarged to wall-­size, in the print diagramming the setup of a box lantern in a darkened room. Historians Hankins and Silverman argue that ’s Gravesande is the most important figure for the development of the demonstration lecture and the magic lantern’s role in it, setting the standard for both the style of the lecture and the structure of the lantern up to the phantasmagoria lantern of the 1820s. They also insist that the image on the slider (“a particularly horrible devil”) is irrelevant, for ’s Gravesande’s lectures were about the geometry of vision and the technical production of the light image rather than what was shown.100 The exhibition Light! (2000) prominently featured the actual magic lantern and the painted slider with the devil but, repeating the argument of Hankins and Silverman, dismissed the images of “monstrous figures” as strictly a means of assuring the public’s attention.101

Figure 16. Willem Jacob ’s Gravesande, Mathematical Elements of Natural

Philosophy, trans. J. T. Desaguliers, 2 vols. (London: Printed for J. Senex and W. Taylor, 1720–­21), vol. 2, pl. 14. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, Washington, D.C.

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The attention-­grabbing explanation rings rather hollow when one considers the conditions of commission, the way in which ’s Gravesande presents his lantern and its pictures as improvements over earlier designs, and the resonance between the monster depicted and the rhetoric employed in describing the principle of magnification by which the picture is not only cast but also enlarged on the white wall. In the section on the lantern and referring specifically to plate 14 on which the room setup and the image of the devil are depicted, ’s Gravesande’s text introduces the magic lantern in the following terms: There are several Machines made by the Combination of Mirrors and Lenses; which afford useful and pleasant Appearances; whose Explanation may be easily deduc’d from what has been said. Amongst many other I shall only chuse to explain one, in which Figures, that are painted upon small Pieces of Glass, are represented monstrously large upon a white Plane. This is a Phaenomenon wonderful enough to deserve a particular Explanation. The Instrument that performs this is call’d a Magic Lantern, which Optic Writers have not altogether pass’d by, but yet have not sufficiently explain’d.102

While ’s Gravesande’s text performs an exposure to show how the magnification works, the function of the lantern hinges on transferring the monstrosity of monsters or, in this case, the agent behind the making of monsters, the devil on the slider and thus the cast-­out image (who is here a sort of animal-­human hybrid), to the magnification of the figures described here as “monstrously large.”103 Controlling the monster and banishing the possibility of supernatural agency require showing an ability to master the machine. However, this section of ’s Gravesande’s pedagogical work on optics ends with discussion of the great labors involved in illuminating each part of the image equally, warning that unless the “stop or Aperture bb be just where the Rays intersect, it does a great deal of Mischief.”104 In the text’s subsequent pains to explain how to prevent distortion of the image there remains evident concern for the difficulties of banishing the possibility that the performative magic of the machine cannot be controlled, and that the monstrous effects of its images may not confirm the subject of reason but rather overpower the incarnate spectator despite the most meticulous and precise setup and operation of the projective apparatus in the darkened room.

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Paranoid Projection and the Making of the Rational Subject Early modern devices for casting an image in the dark room of the eye and mind were deployed in an ambivalent dynamic of desire and fear between men the goal of which was the production of the masculinized subject of rational vision. But the production of this subject depended on the vigilant demonstration and subjective internalization of a paranoid version of projection.105 The terms “paranoia” and “paranoid” derive from the ancient Greek word for “beside the mind” or “beyond the intellect.” In the eighteenth century, medical lexicons used the Latinate form “paranoia” to describe a range of disorders from false perception and defects of judgment to delirium and alienation of the mind.106 While paranoia has a long history of use in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for delusions in general, it has come to be linked with the work of Freud, who developed paranoia not merely as delusion (including delusions of persecution, delusional jealousy, and delusions of grandeur) but also as a defense against and aggressive projection of unwanted parts of the self, particularly religion as primitive belief and a form of delusion (in “Civilization and Its Discontents,” Totem and Taboo, and The Future of an Illusion) and, in Freud’s case of Schreber, transsexual and homosexual desires. In its post-­Freudian use, paranoia has come to be associated especially with excessive fear and delusions of persecution and, in the work of Paul Ricoeur, with Freud himself, who is read as the master of a “hermeneutics of suspicion.”107 Though Freud vigilantly attempted to anticipate and deflect the characterization of psychoanalysis as itself a paranoid practice in famously asserting that “the delusions of paranoiacs have an unpalatable external similarity and internal kinship to the systems of our philosophers,” he was less willing to let go of projection and precisely did not theorize projection as pathognomonic for paranoia.108 In the case of Schreber, Freud insists instead that projection is also a “normal proceeding.”109 However, in the case of Schreber, Freud also observed that what he described as paranoia and classified as a clinical psychosis corresponded with no deterioration of the intellect, suggesting—­despite the deflection—­that paranoia may also represent an epistemology. In the work of Jacques Lacan, the paranoid is also a figure of knowledge claims rather than belief, a subject who founds the claim to know on what Lacan calls the “Other of the Other,” a persecuting authority beyond the symbolic

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order that, in the end, is the paranoid subject himself returned to the subject in inverted form.110 For Lacan, paranoia is also a kind of episteme that sets itself against belief. In “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is about You” (1997), queer studies scholar Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick sets out to understand how paranoia moved from the position of prime subject of antihomophobic theory to installation as its privileged method. Drawing on Melanie Klein’s description of paranoia not as a diagnosed form of dementia but rather as a position, Sedgwick elaborates the “paranoid position” as a particular way of knowing.111 In Sedgwick’s outline of the paranoid position and its strategies, paranoid practice is a method with five main features. The paranoid method (1) anticipates criticism, (2) reflects or mimics its object, (3) represents, in psychologist Sylvan Tomkins’s terms, a “strong theory” of the affects (in its claim to an enlarged domain and concomitant tendency toward tautology), (4) disavows its affective motive and force, masquerading its effects as truth, and, finally, (5) places its faith in exposure. In demonstrating these limits of the paranoid position, Sedgwick makes the case for reparative reading as a vital method. At the risk of reinforcing paranoia or sounding paranoid, I have argued that understanding early modern devices for casting an image in terms of a paranoid version of projection allows us to see how they function as method, that is, as a particular way of knowing based on orchestrating relations between what may seem like competing tendencies (e.g., images of the supernatural or monstrous, appeals to objectivity, technical description, and emotionally freighted negative constructions of believing spectators). The paranoid projection operative in early modern experiments with optical devices for casting an image in the dark room may be outlined into four main features. First, while technologies of image projection function as a way of producing the object of study and sight and as a means of making its subject or spectator, the demonstration with technologies of projection is presented as merely a way of knowing the object of its demonstration (e.g., the image magnified on the wall, the operation of the apparatus, and the laws of optics). Second, the teaching of rational method with devices for casting an image is a knowledge-­and power-­producing practice of belief (in natural law, reason itself, and the figure of the scientist) that presents itself

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as a means of routing out false belief or belief figured as superstition. Third, the use of technologies of projection is a practice of transformation. The images cast by optical devices based on the camera obscura (moving skeletons, the devil, death with a scythe, Bacchus, and a body consumed by flame) and the means of casting those images (magnification, distortion, illusion, appearance, and disappearance) are neither irrelevant nor incidental but rather function to present the subject with what, in paranoid projection, is disavowed or repudiated. In some cases, what is rejected is represented by the image (the soul burning in hell, the head of the devil, the face of Bacchus). However, most often cast out in paranoid projection are the distorting or transforming effects of the device itself and vulnerability to the performative magic of its effects. The use of devices for casting an image is a practice for transforming subject and object that, in paranoid projection, disavows and displaces vulnerability to affect and change onto a range of subjects it places as “other” and alter. Lastly, paranoid projection is a passionate practice of managing fear, desire, and attachment that presents itself in the form of a spectacle for the expulsion of impassioned response and affectivity, that is, as the means of creating the distanced and dispassionate objectivity required for the constitution of the phantom subject of rational vision.

Paranoid Projection and the Volatility of “Becoming” in the Dark Room of the Social Taking the risk of the double move of historicizing psychoanalysis while psychoanalyzing history, this chapter has traced the volatility in confronting a relentless effort to manage through disavowal the performative magic or agency of machines across scenes of projection, from the analysis of the mechanism of paranoia in the work of Freud to the pedagogical exercise of experimental devices for casting an image in early modern demonstration lectures. Refusing the closed circuit of an intellectual history that transforms the genealogy of the machine metaphors of the camera obscura and the magic lantern into a taming story of one-­way influence that black-­boxes the problematic of the shadow of the present on the past and the past’s lingering penumbra in the folds of the present, this encounter is also to open the scene of projection, not as the dark room of the walled psyche but as the powerful and dangerous

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fantasy of the fortress ego in the dynamics of the social. But even as early modern devices for casting an image—­the camera obscura, the magic lantern, and their variants—­must be reckoned with as a technics of knowing, a method with power-­producing effects in the social that I characterize as “paranoid projection,” the act of analysis in the encounter between psychoanalysis and early modern science is also a means of demonstrating the use of the camera obscura and the magic lantern as more than a matter of machine metaphors for the workings of the unconscious, the shaping effects of norms, the interpellations of ideology, or the disincarnation of the spectator in the making of the phantom subject of reason. In their radical recasting of psychoanalysis as an art or practice for forms of life, ways of being and becoming beyond the defensive fortress ego and submission to the law-­of-­the-­father, Deleuze and Guattari push the machine metaphor of the unconscious across the picket fence of the normative bourgeous family home or prison-­house of Oedipalization, intensifying, multiplying, and proliferating the agency of machines in the performative magic of the scene of projection as a psychosocial, affective, and material factory of “desiring-­machines of production.” In the place of the fantasy of the disembodied subject, Deleuze and Guattari find not absence or lack, but the interruptions and flows of dis-­and reorganizing organ-­and energy-­machines of manifold, recombinant parts that produce not intangible but materializing effects. Revisiting Freud’s account of Schreber and his fantasies of transforming into a woman and of being penetrated by solar rays that excite “voluptuousness,”112 Deleuze and Guattari set the scene of paranoid projection in releasing motion: “Judge Schreber has sunbeams in his ass. A solar anus. And rest assured that it works: Judge Schreber feels something, produces something, and is capable of explaining the process theoretically. Something is produced: the effects of a machine, not mere metaphors.”113 But this recounting of the productivity of metaphors as machines that have the capacity to alter us in taking us from the familiar here to an estranging there (as in de Certeau’s reminder that metaphors are devices of transport) is not to reinforce the cutting opposition of a negating and controlling psychoanalysis and a productive schizoanalysis (as figured in the inert patient lying restrained on the analyst’s couch versus the “schizophrenic out for a walk”). It is rather to demonstrate that within the scene of projection “performative magic” is the sign for agencies, processes, and capacities in excess of what might

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seem the endless duel of the agonistic field of paranoid-­sadistic machines of restraining subjection, Oedipalization, and normalization versus the return of the repressed, the abjected, and the forsaken as the overdetermined and determining figures of the ass-­side of a sexed and gendered master/slave dialectic.114 The disavowed performative magic in the scene of projection across psychoanalysis and early modern experiment in the dark room of the social leads not just onto the felt force of interpellation by the machinery of social norms or the material effects of the phantom subject of a disembodied rational vision but also to the volatility of becomings beyond the fixing fixities of rear-­projected or back-­installed positions of the normative as the starting-­place standpoint for “becoming-­other.” But these becomings, as Deleuze and Guattari proclaim, emerge from an expanded historical and political field: “Oedipus opens to the four winds, to the four corners of the social field (not even 3 + 1, but 4 + n).”115 Such a turning of the productive agencies of mathematical formulas of scientific method against the fortress ego reminds us that the scene of projection across psychoanalysis and the enactment of scientific method opens onto not only the social in a strictly European or bounded metropolitan sense but also the contested terrain of the global in the wake of colonization. It is to this terrain that I now turn.

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chapter two

Empire through the Magic Lantern

Even as psychoanalysis developed its theories of projection and practices for casting out the demons of the psyche from the early modern demonstration lecture and its projective machinery for casting images in a darkened room, it also emerged in historical relation to European imperialism.1 In Imperial Leather feminist and postcolonial critic Anne McClintock uses the metaphor of the magic lantern to characterize the desiring dimensions of European imperialism in the early modern period, writing that, “long before the era of high Victorian imperialism, Africa and the Americas had become what can be called a porno-­ tropics for the European imagination—­a fantastic magic lantern of the mind onto which Europe projected its forbidden sexual desires and fears.”2 McClin­tock challenges us with a both/and proposition: the possibility of psychoanalyzing colonialism in tandem with a decolonization of psycho­analysis. From McClintock’s own use of Kristeva’s notion of abjection as “something rejected from which one does not part” to Homi Bhabha’s formulation in “Sly Civility” of the subject of colonial authority as never free of its “scapegoat fantasy” that makes “him” not the “master” of a fortified castle but a “frontier station of joint occupation,” versions of the psychoanalytic concept of projection have provided some of the main tools for postcolonial criticism.3 I would like to suggest further that the psychoanalytic concept of projection takes us not only to an important problematization of the binaries of “self” and “other” but, as I began to argue in chapter 1, to the very techniques, in a material sense, for their attempted production. In pursuing the machine 89

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metaphor for the crucial role of abjured fantasies about Africa and the Americas (and we might add Asia as well) in constituting the imperial subject, the quick, shorthand condensing utility of the magic lantern as illustrative vehicle transports us to the inextricability, in the history of colonialism, of the psychoanalytic concept of projection and machine technologies for casting an image. The magic lantern provides such a ready theoretical vehicle for demonstrating the extent to which an “Asia,” “Africa,” or “America” failed to function as a blank screen that stayed safely “over there” precisely because the material device was so fused and infused with what it mediated. The screen was also the wall of the darkened room for the production of the imperial subject of discarnate reason. As othered parts of the world were a necessary part of the machinery by which Europe endeavored to cast out the hated, desired, and feared matter of its own machine imago, this disavowed matter stuck not just to the apparatus for its projection but also to the far from blank or distanced “screen” in these scenes of projection. European technologies of projection mediated colonial contacts through what many popular scenes of magic lantern demonstrations declared to be the materialization of a “new world.”4 To produce effects of imperial power, I argue that the European metropoles depended in the age of European expansion on technologies not merely of recording but of projection.5 The passive capturing of a semblance of likeness was not sufficient. Rather, delineation gave way to conjuration in the effort to give externalized form to European claims to superiority and to make those manifestations of power act on matter and bodies. Such attempted actualizations of authority through technological displays served not only to impress subjects and shape bodies and matter but were also made out of bodily and simulated contact with the “others” of empire. The production of imperial power as an effect of a claim to higher reason and technological supremacy required a transfer of aura away from the novelties and marvels associated with “otherness” and into the machines by which they were ostensibly demystified. While the conjuring effects of magic lantern displays were to confirm the rational sight of its metropolitan, European spectators by the darkened, apparitional inverse of their rational vision, the magic lantern’s traffic in the exotic and the occult through its apparitional imaging tricks also threatened the viewing subject. Presenting its beholders with an altered version of their model of rational vision, spectacles with

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projective machinery opened up the dangerous prospect of “otherness” and difference within.6 The possibility of becoming “other” or of being affected by the imagined “other” threatened to reverse the hierarchy and directional influence between Europe’s technologies and “primitive” magic. In the 1778 metropolitan European engraving by Carl Guttenberg (Figure 17) with its caption The Tea-­Tax-­Tempest, or the Anglo-­ American Revolution printed in English, German, and French, Father Time projects an image of revolt as explosive combustion with a magic lantern balanced on a giant globe. Asia with her unlit lantern and Africa and Native America in the guise of female warriors reduced to figures of astonishment look on in surprise as, in the midst of darkness, light diffuses into chaotic conflagration reducing to ash the difference between the imagined light of reason and primal, “primitive” fire. The large round image and the fiery cauldron at its center visually rhyme with the round globe that supports the lantern, suggesting that the geopolitical

Figure 17. Carl Guttenberg, The Tea-­Tax-­Tempest, or the Anglo-­American Revolution,

1778. Etching and engraving. Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum.

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contest over empire, the revolution of the print’s title, may not merely turn the mapped relations of the world around but rather set them aflame. The use of projected phantasmagoria of destruction through the magic lantern endeavored to stabilize the geopolitical power relations between original and copy and center and periphery by ostensibly confirming the location of science and reason through the specter of its opposite in the form of its inverted double. The Reception of the Diplomatique & His Suite, at the Court of Pekin (1792) (Figure 18) by British satirist James Gillray develops an allied tactic for anchoring such relations by scripting a version of the Euro-­diffusionist account of the origin of optical technologies. Though the principles of the camera obscura were already known and recorded in China long before the eighteenth century, the print represents the magic lantern as a diplomatic gift from England to the Chinese emperor. Further, the miniature image of the emperor on the lantern slide casts China and the emperor’s

Figure 18. James Gillray, The Reception of the Diplomatique & His Suite, at the Court

of Pekin, 1792. Published by Hannah Humphrey. Hand-­colored etching. Courtesy of the Art Gallery of Ontario. Gift of the Trier-­Fodor Foundation, 1980.

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body as objects that can be mediated and even brought down to size by machines claimed as European. It may be just a joke that the hot air balloon pierced by the protruding corner of the pagoda is represented as a puncture right through the eye of the screaming face painted on the balloon’s surface, yet the impaled balloon’s round shape and pink and yellow colors resemble the spherical shape and clothing of the emperor seated below it. The subdued violence of these parodic efforts to dispel the menace that its projected shadows of “otherness” (gendered and racialized) might dangerously reshape the European subject points to the dependence and instability at the heart of European enlightenment’s idealized machine self-­image. Such satiric prints exploit the inherent capacities of such technologies of projection as the magic lantern to magnify and transport matter and, thus, represent the actual or potential disruption of the imperial order of things. Because of their challenge to the spatial relations of geopolitics, technologies of image projection were directly linked to map projection as critical devices in eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­ century satire that exploited the material fact of the inverted image in efforts to mediate and control the directionality of influence in colonial contacts. But the frontier station of the scene of image projection was also an outpost of latent violence. While the first part of this chapter explores the geopolitics of the scene of image projection and its techniques of imperial mapping, the second confronts the emergent violence of these satirical vehicles as exercises of morbid projection by turning to the use of the magic lantern, electroshock, and electrical display in the context of colonial efforts to manage revolt and eliminate and yet absorb the magic and powerful efficacy attributed to rebel bodies.

Turning the World Upside Down: Imperial Map Projection and Seeing Otherwise In 1987, high above Manhattan’s Times Square, Chilean-­born, New York–­based artist Alfredo Jaar projected what he called “A Logo for America.”7 On the digital display screen images of the nationally bounded map of the United States as “America” and the U.S. flag as the claimed “American flag” were each evacuated and barred by the superimposed statements “THIS IS NOT AMERICA” and “THIS IS

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NOT AMERICA’S FLAG.” In the dissolving wake of these negations appeared the word “AMERICA” with the landmasses of the Americas joined to form the “R” in the word as hemispheric view. The negation and addition strategies of Jaar’s logo question the logic and the “legality” of U.S. aggrandizement across the geopolitical and conceptual terrain of “America.” But the spinning landmasses eventually stabilize; in retaining the down-­under position of Latin America, Jaar’s logo still maintains the implicit prioritization of north over south. In contrast, with its transposing flip of the hemisphere, the “Turnabout Map of the Americas” (1982) attempts to dislodge the coordinates of dominance by putting Latin America on top.8 Over the last two decades numerous map publishers have produced global variations of this reversal in expected orientation. By literally turning over cartographic convention, such versions as the Upside Down World Map by Interarts visually challenge the vertical north–­south stacking of north over south and the naturalization of top-­over-­bottom and master-­over-­slave relations of power.9 Such plays with the cardinal rules of imperial map projection draw on and contest an older pedagogical tropics of the flipped map. The dissemination of visual representations of a world upside down coincided from the mid-­eighteenth century into the nineteenth century with the widening use in Europe of another technology of projection for spanning the earth: the magic lantern. A small illustrated collection of poems, Signor Topsy-­Turvy’s Wonderful Magic Lantern; or, the World turned upside down, aimed at the education of children and published in London in 1810, draws on what we might call the magic lantern’s “queer” capacities. Indeed, its authors, the sisters Ann Taylor (1782–­ 1866) and Jane Taylor (1783–­1824), call their collection “a queer book.”10 The potential transformations of perspective and hierarchy affected by the magic lantern screening represented in the frontispiece exploit the sense of queer as “estranging.” The book’s structure takes the form of a sequence of illustrated story poems each based on a form of reversal ostensibly corrected for instructive purposes in the concluding “morals.” The introductory poem provides the organizing conceit that the book itself is a topsy-­turvy magic lantern show and its poems the sliders, a frame tale that takes its readers back to an unspecified moment in the past when a “philosopher” devised “the first Magic Lantern” (5–­6). Turning the tale of invention for comic effect into a failure to contrive a means to project an upright image, the frontispiece (Figure 19)

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Figure 19. Frontispiece, [Ann Taylor and Jane Taylor], Signor Topsy-­Turvy’s Wonderful

Magic Lantern; or, the World turned upside down (London: Printed for Tabart & Co., 1810). Designed by Isaac Taylor Jr. (1787–­1865). Engraving attributed to Reverend Isaac Taylor Sr. (1730–­1807). Courtesy of Special Collections, University of California–­Los Angeles.

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and introductory poem cast the philosopher as the Italian Signor Topsy-­ Turvy who, faced with a defiant mechanism that projects “feet in the air,” makes this perplexing obstacle the basis for a new form of spectacle that sets its images’ and spectators’ “heads on the floor.” In the frontispiece, we see the “philosopher” conducting a magic lantern show lecture as a means of visual education for a group of eager young subjects. But the twist comes in the projection that Signor Topsy-­Turvy is as yet unable to right—­a presentation of the globe that sets the vision of the rational, European spectator on its head with the suspended figure of the European subject and a topsy-­turvy reordering of the imperial relation between Europe and Africa. Three types of projection technologies are condensed in this scene. The magic lantern device represents image projection or the capacity to cast a figure onto a wall. The upside-­ down globe depicts the potential overturning of the power and authority of the north-­over-­south conventions of imperial map-­projection. The overall technique of comic inversion, enabled by the known capacities of the magic lantern, may also be understood as a device of projection. Anxieties about the potential reversibility of the terms of imperial dominance are projected onto slider-­tales that play out feared scenes of transformation and, in some instances, violent reprisal. By the displacing projection from geopolitical sites of trauma to the realms of seeming fantasy, the comic treatment endeavors to alleviate anxiety by re-­presenting feared reversal at an ostensibly comfortable remove from any actuality. Published just a few years after Britain pulled out of the slave trade, the book was issued at the time of continued unrest among slaves in the British West Indies where plantations continued to rely on slave labor.11 It is not only the upside-­down globe of the book’s frontispiece that throws Europe under Africa. The slider-­ tale of “The Cook Cooked” spins a successful kitchen revolution among the “patriots” of the larder, including a turtle who condemns the corrupting desire for profit that traded in “callepash,” the West Indian word for turtle: “And e’en a turtle ’woke itself / To reprobate the cruel pelf, / In callepash that traded” (9–­10).12 And “The Ass Turned Miller” turns the mill wheel round so that a “poor slave” in the form of a female donkey wields a whip over the “lord of the mill” (25). Such references to Africa, the West Indies, slavery, the beasts of consumption and burden who steal the tools of colonial discipline, and particularly slave revolt might be understood as simple exercises in cycling projected

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revolution back to a colonial order of things in which, as “The Ass Turned Miller” concludes, “fetters” “may suit” those “people” who, “like this silly brute,” “attempt to rule over their betters” (28). But with its apparitional tricks the magic lantern also threatened to collapse the distance and the difference between top and bottom, master and slave, human and beast. To the extent that these magic lantern slider-­tales gave form to the altered perspective that the device held within it—­even just a reversal of orientation—­they held out the possibility of actualizing the imagined change in the structure and effects of power. Empire’s subjects might, as the frame tale’s prospect of revolt implies, refuse to watch a “righted” version of the projection and insist, instead, that “they would see upside down” (7). The projection of the imperial grid imposes a mesh of authority and yet opens the apertures through which unruly matter and the vulnerabilities of sight and possibilities of seeing otherwise intrude.

Upsetting the Imperial Order of Things: Magnification, Matter out of Place, and the Disembodied Eye of Rational Vision While the potential for inversion in imperial map-­projection and the fact that the magic lantern requires a second lens to “right” the image have been used to point up and exploit the inherent instability of the machinery of colonial dominance, the magnifying capacities of both the magic lantern and a related projection device, the solar microscope, have also provided the material for satire taking aim at the obvious excesses of colonial violence because of the ways in which these machines could present matter out of place and scale. Also known as the “camera obscura microscope,” the solar microscope was supposed to pre­ sent things as they are. In the late eighteenth century, instrument maker and Royal Society fellow Edward Nairne (1729–­1806) advertised that the solar microscope, which can cast an image from a specimen slide, “will equally serve for a Camera Obscura.”13 Nairne declares that, of all microscopes, the solar is the “most entertaining” because it can be viewed in company rather than by one eye alone looking through a lens down a tube. Though the solar microscope, therefore, could be used, like the magic lantern, to produce an image in a dark chamber for an assembled audience, it was the magic lantern that came to be associated not merely with diversion but also with the manipulation of the

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spectator. We might take, for example, the presentation of the solar microscope by Priscilla Wakefield (1750–­1832) in her instructional text Domestic Recreation; or Dialogues Illustrative of Natural and Scientific Subjects (1805). In this book of lessons aimed at a young adult audience, the demonstration lecture is cast as a dialogue between a mother, Mrs. Dimsdale, and her daughter, Emily. When she is told that her mother has prepared a microscope of a different construction that will show the images it displays “to a far greater size,” Emily retorts, “Mamma, you have a mind to impose upon us; it is a magic lanthorn you are going to show us.”14 Mother replies that she never deceives and proceeds to explain that the solar microscope works in much the same way as a magic lantern, but with a rhetorical effort at differentiation. Although both the magic lantern and the solar microscope could distort through out-­of-­scale magnification, here the magic lantern becomes the figure for “imposing” magnification. To produce an imposing effect is not merely to make a small thing grand; it is also a shift in scale that, rather than putting things in place, marks the transits and transpositions of matter not in place but out of place. Having introduced the possibility that magnification could be a vehicle of impostures that unduly impose, the dialogues cannot completely dispel the anxious sense that magnification itself, whether from painted sliders or “real” specimen plates, might be used not only to distort appearance and cognitive sense impression but also to cross and, indeed, violate the bounds between image-­object and spectator, trespassing the learned distance between self and other, here and there whether that there be the screen of the instructional wall or the geopolitical place of “otherness.” These capacities of the projective machinery of the magic lantern and solar microscope not to better represent the “real” but rather more powerfully affect or “impose” on subjects and world, to invert power relations, and to magnify and thus alter the priority and importance of bodies and matter were used by political satire to turn projection back on the colonial order of proclaimed “reason,” exposing its disavowed violent passions and savagery. The etching and aquatint Galante Show (Figure 20) by James Sayers (1748–­1823), dated “6 May 1788,” takes its satiric device and title from another common phrase for the itinerant projection spectacle.15 Pronounced with a long “e,” the phrase “Galante Show” (with the variations in spelling of “galanty” and “galantee”) may have been taken from the Italian plural form “galanti” for “gallant”

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or “chivalrous,” and was used in the sense of “dressed up,” “artificed,” and even “feigned,” from the eighteenth century onward, to refer to both displays of the magic lantern and spectacles of cast shadow projections.16 The title’s connotations work in direct contrast with the events the print mediates and the material its depicted projection show places on view. This particular “Galante Show” stages a spectacle of projection in order to take parodic aim at the impeachment trials of British governor of India Warren Hastings, the first instance in which the colonial machinery of dominance was placed in judgment in the London metropole for its abuses. The conduct of the British in India

Figure 20. James Sayers, Galante Show. Etching and aquatint. Published by Thomas

Cornell, May 6, 1788. Copyright National Portrait Gallery, London.

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was revealed to London spectators in graphic accounts of torture, rape, theft, and massacre that formed the disputed evidentiary substance of the speeches delivered by prosecutor Edmund Burke to a packed audience.17 In this etching and aquatint by James Sayers, Burke plays the role of a showman, manipulating sliders through a magic lantern to a small group of white-­wigged spectators with raised hands. The exposed part of the slider depicts an upright satiric image of a corpulent, cross-­ legged Orientialized figure. Meanwhile, the contents of the lantern’s slider are magnified at the top of the print as projected onto a stretched white sheet. Labeled with the identifying phrases “A Benares Flea,” “A Begum Wart,” “Begum’s Tears,” and “An Ouzle,” the odd objects loom in gigantesque proportions over the spectators. The flea bears the place-­ name “Benares” associated in the trial with of the Chait of Singh, the raja of Benares, whom Hastings was charged with extorting. The magnification and reclassification transform the raja of Benares into an elephantine flea. The Begums of Oudh whose fortune Hastings was accused of dispossessing are represented as four eyeballs and three mountains of Antiquity—­“Olympus,” “Pelion,” and “Ossa”—­piled one on top of the other like three mounds of dung. The word “ouzle” may refer to the name for the common blackbird that is here portrayed as a spouting, half-­submerged and darkened whale. But the phrase written over the heads of the spectators, “very like an ouzle,” and the name “Polonius” on the side of the print between the spectators and the large animal floating above may also refer the “ouzle” to Alexander Pope’s 1723 rereading of the line in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (act 3, scene 8): “Mee thinks it is like a Wezell.” As a weasel is not conceived as “black,” Pope emended Hamlet’s line as a reference to an ouzle or blackbird.18 For an audience familiar with Shakespeare, if not also with Pope, the print’s repetition of the word “ouzle” in relation to the name Polonius and the projected whale might well have emphasized the quality of “blackness.” In the context of the eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century Atlantic world and its slave trade, “blackbird” was also the term for a captive on a slave ship.19 In playing with black and blackening, the print may also be drawing on the capacities of the lantern to produce shadows and also alter the colors of what it projects. In taking advantage not merely of the capacities for magnification and the transposition of bodies, places, and names but also changes in light and shadow—­ the Manichean stuff of emerging racialization in terms of physiognomic

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outline and skin pigmentation—­the “Galante Show” plays on fears that machines of rational vision could not only substantially alter but also produce the very stuff of the “reality” it mediates. The images projected by lanterns such as the one represented in the print were often from pictures painted on glass. But these glass sliders, like those used with a solar microscope, were also designed to contain and project images of actual specimens for magnified display. Whether the sliders contained the thing itself or a painted replica, such shows not only traded in effects of the real but gave the illusion of making an image materialize into actual matter as well as expand to exceed even the human body in scale. Sayers’s 1788 print calls our attention to the presentation of the real and the interrelationship between the magic lantern and solar microscope with its scrawled phrase “finely magnified” that accentuates the function more obviously attributed to the microscope: fine magnification. But the elephantine “Benares Flea” also relates the magic lantern to the magnifying and transforming properties attributed to the solar microscope’s conversion of the tiny and seemingly insignificant and even the pest into the grand. The looming louse occupied the status of a common trope. The natural philosopher and Royal Society fellow Henry Baker (1698–­1774) wrote in The Microscope Made Easy (1742) of the solar microscope, “a Louse may be magnified to the length of five or six feet.”20 John Cuff (1708–­72), who made the solar microscope Baker discussed and illustrated, characterized the capacities of his magnifying instruments in the same terms.21 And, in his Micrographia Nova (1742), which included “An Account of Camera Obscura, and the Solar Microscope,” Benjamin Martin (d. 1782) warned of the distortions of such magnification: “a Microscope may as well magnify too much as too little; a Flea may be magnified to the Bulk of an Elephant, but to little or no purpose.”22 With its ele­ phantine “Benares Flea” that resembles a rat, Sayers’s satiric print brings out further the extent to which these techniques of magnification and mimetic display that would enable close investigation of the world also threatened order by presenting the imperial spectator with matter out of place—­India in the London metropolis, the coarse and the abject breaking the decorum of the “galante,” the disintegration of the body with eyeballs quite literally cried out of heads—­and potentially out of scale in terms of both size and priorities of value with the Olympian dung-­heap of a wart exceeding even the flea in size.

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But this comic inversion of the imperial order of things nonetheless raises the very menace it endeavors to dispel: that the projective requirements of rational vision are also its dissolution. The exclamation “poor Ladies they have cried their Eyes out” scrawled over the heads of the spectators mingles the reminders of torture with the language of sentiment to provide a narrative for the four eyeballs swimming in the pool of tears above. Darkened spectacles obscure the eye sockets of Burke the prosecutor, making him simultaneously the figure of blind justice gone awry and potentially without eyes at all, the showman who forces others to watch what he prophylactically protects himself against, and a kind of magic lantern himself with giant magnification lenses over his eyes that suggest both a distortion of vision and submersion into the machine. While the wigged spectators attribute the bodily remains of violence and sympathetic response to the “ladies”—­ both the Anglo-­British ladies of metropolitan sentimental fiction and Indian “Begums”—­in a defense of their own vulnerability to being touched by what they see, those organs of sight, nonetheless, stare back in uncanny resemblance to the dissected eye of Enlightenment science, the presentation piece that was to demonstrate the symmetry between the workings of human sight, the way images are cast on the wall of a darkened room, and the faculty of judgment. There is no distinction here between the disembodied eye of rational vision and the eye as vulnerable somatic object: in place of one cyclopean eye, four severed eyes stare back at the spectators of the “Galante Show,” floating in the ocean of tears or blood above their heads. We might read this device as a variant of the trope of the vulnerable spectator that casts the viewer’s susceptibility onto the wigged judges at Hastings’s trial. However, even in such satiric prints as the “Galante Show” that would uphold reason, the sympathy required to get hold of the object and to apprehend it with the senses threatens to dissolve the masculinized European imperial subject of defensive reason, the master of ceremonies as much as the spectators, in an engulfing sea of sympathetic tears not as emotional catharsis but rather as reflecting pool of decomposing absurdity. Cartoons such as this one expose as they endeavor to exorcise or project anxieties about the contradictions inherent in the effort to produce disembodied rational vision as the sign of imperial superiority—­ difference that was at once gendered and racialized.23

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“His Master’s Obi” The very projection required for rational self-­reflection also threatened to alter the imperial subject, a precarious doubleness of the colonial machinery of dominance I explore through a case in eighteenth-­century Jamaica that involved the imitative conversion of the magic of the colonial “other” in an effort to extinguish, with the display of the power of European machines of projection, the possibility of slave revolution: the so-­called Obeah Trials that took place in the wake of the slave insurrection of 1760 in the English colony of Jamaica.24 One of the most pervasive slave revolts, the so-­called Tacky Rebellion, took its name from a male slave Tacky who the slave rebels believed could reverse the direction of any bullets fired at his body. Put down only after a prolonged and fierce resistance, the Tacky Rebellion marked a significant turning point in British colonial attitudes toward the possibility of an organized overthrow of the plantation system or, in the words of plantation owner Edward Long (1734–­1813), “the entire extirpation of the white inhabitants.”25 The story of the revolt in Long’s History of Jamaica (1774) is preoccupied by the role of magic practice in bringing the slaves together in an organized effort. Discussing the leadership attributed by colonial authorities to a “famous obeiah man or priest,” a “Coromantin” taken from the Gold Coast of Africa, Long’s version of the uprising is compelled by the capacity of fetishes and oaths to bind atomized slaves into a conspiratorial unity around a belief in their invulnerability, a fascination that hinges on the volatile instability of conjuration between mirror of the idealized version of the colonial state as solemn founding oaths, its threatening double in the form of pacts to overthrow, and that which is ostensibly its alter in extremis as the raising of spirits or the calling up of para-­or supernatural powers.26 Scholarship on Afro-­Caribbean religions traces Obeah to the Ashanti-­Fanti communities of the Gold Coast region of Africa, present-­ day Ghana. The term written variously in English as Obeah, Obiah, Obia, and Obi is thought to represent a corruption of the Ashanti word obayifo for “witch” or “wizard.” In the contemporary West Indies, the names “obeah-­woman” and “obeah-­man” are used interchangeably with the titles healer, doctor, and folk doctor.27 While poisonous and healing compounds made out of animal and plant substances are central to the current practice of Obeah, these preparations attain their

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efficacy, the power to annihilate or revivify, through the intervention of “jumbies” or “duppies,” ghosts or spirits of the dead conjured or taken on in a kind of double incarnation by its practitioners. Like Vodou, Obeah is also understood as a system of belief in the transformative powers of matter and the dissoluble boundaries between living and dead. Recent studies of Obeah emphasize its syncretic character as the product of encounter between various African, indigenous, and European belief systems and practices in the colonial Caribbean.28 In the decades following the Tacky Rebellion, however, British accounts attempt to displace Obeah and its associated fetishes, secrecy, oaths, rituals under the veil of night, and resurrecting and killing potions out of the colonies and onto Africa by representing Obeah as fully constituted prior to its transplantation by African-­born slaves. In his account of the Maroons, first published in 1796, the planter Bryan Edwards (1743–­1800) writes of Obi among the escaped slaves who formed communities in the mountains of Jamaica as a practice originating in Africa: Concerning the Maroons, they are . . . attached to the gloomy superstitions of Africa (derived from their ancestors) with such enthusiastick zeal and reverential ardour, as I think can only be eradicated with their lives. The Gentoos of India are not, I conceive, more sincere in their faith, than the negroes of Guinea in believing the prevalence of Obi* [*A species of pretended magick], and the supernatural power of their Obeah men.29

Such descriptions associate Obi with a political threat to the colonial plantation system of Jamacia so intransigently rooted in bodies and place that it justifies the extermination of the Maroons. And yet the account attempts to dispel the magical power of that threat with a double displacement from the real. In this account, Obi is neither local nor magical for it is Obi that is the “pretended magick,” the imitation of magical practices. Edwards’s 1793 History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies reproduces an account of Obeah prefaced by an attribution that endows it with legal authority. The account, itself composed of other reports, was transmitted by “the Agent of Jamaica to the Lords of the Committee of Privy Council” and appended to their report on the slave trade. Edwards attributes it to Edward Long. Obi threatened to the extent that it simulated and rivaled the colonial machinery of dominance that set out to eradicate it. Note

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the competitive phrasing in the very passage that is supposed to establish the report’s authority on the basis of “testimony” from black slaves themselves: As far as we are able to decide from our own experience and information when we lived on the island, and from the current testimony of all the Negroes we have ever conversed with on the subject, the professors of Obi are, and always were, natives of Africa, and none other; and they have brought the science with them from thence to Jamaica, where it is so universally practised, that we believe there are few of the large estates possessing native Africans, which have not one or more of them.30

A year after the publication of his history, Edwards was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in London, the British academy of science.31 Edwards’s strategic evocation of the metropole’s scientific institutions in reproducing this naming of the practitioners of Obi “professors” and their practices a “science” labored to distinguish Obi professors as naive believers from metropolitan academicians and European science from that brought from Africa. Likewise, in the account about the outlawing of Obi Edwards reproduces, its practitioners are referred to by another “Jamaican gentleman” in the same terms: In the year 1760, the influence of the professors of the Obeah art was such, as to induce a great many of the Negro slaves in Jamaica to engage in the rebellion which happened in that year, and which gave rise to the law which was then made against the practice of Obi. (2:97)

Here the phrase “professors of the Obeah art” may have functioned as a technique of derisive comparison, portraying these slaves as no different than the theatrical performers, showmen, and popularizers of science parodied as sham authorities and traffickers in false belief, with “Obeah” operating as an adjective to mark the difference between art and its supposed simulation, “Obeah art.”32 The “professor” of Obeah science and Obeah art stood at the important intersection of art, science, and belief. The phrasing “professors of the Obeah art” thus stood at the important intersection of art, science, and belief, a figure whose presence attests to anxious competition, mimicry, and counterimitation. In 1760 a Koromantyn male slave was charged with rebellious conspiracy as an “Obeah-­man” and put to death. From that year until emancipation the practice of Obeah was considered equivalent to

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conspiracy to overthrow and hence a capital offense, a law invoked in colonial texts. The immediate context of the publication of Edwards’s history and his reprinting of accounts from thirty years previous (i.e., the 1791 slave revolt on Saint-­Domingue, the Haitian revolution, and war with France) made the possibility of a colony-­wide rebellion a tangible threat. However, colonial accounts also register concern that exacting the full punishment of the law could not accomplish the work of establishing the primacy and authority of European science and its professors, or even the more pragmatic goal of eliminating threat of rebellion. The colonial machinery of domination fails, in the words of Edwards’s History, to extract what it desires: But neither the terror of this law, the strict investigation which has ever since been made after the professors of Obi, nor the many examples of those who from time to time have been hanged or transported have hitherto produced the desired effect. (2:94)

In this admission that the prohibitive inscription into law of magic or counterscience as a threat to the state punishable by death failed to produce the desired effect, the demands of colonial terrorizing open onto a certain insatiability, a need for repetitive execution. The anxiety that Edwards’s History betrays in the admission that Obeah might “flourish under persecution,” that it might itself be an organized response, a counterart or counterscience to the necromancy of the colonial order and its brutality, reveals a need to exorcise that charge against the machinery of dominance with a demonstration on the black male rebel bodies of the Koromantyns, those slaves who the account claims refused to display “strong emotions of sympathetic terror” (2:94, 69). The section of Edwards’s History dedicated to Obeah culminates with an account of the Obeah Trials attributed to the eyewitness of a white Creole gentleman who sat in judgment on two of the trials. First the account gives a two-­line description of the execution of the Koromantyn slave accused of Obeah: [H]e bid defiance to the executioner, telling him, that “It was not in the power of the White people to kill him.” And the Negroes (spectators) were greatly perplexed when they saw him expire. (2:98)

In the effort to display the “power of the White people,” the mise-­en-­ scène of the execution of the apparatus of colonial authority depends

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on a curious parenthetical: “Negroes (spectators).” One might say that, if the execution of colonial law had any hope of impressing the slave population with its terror, then, of course, any assembly of black people on Jamaica would be the intended audience of such a spectacle. And the accounts reprinted by Edwards do attempt to position the black spectators as the objects of embodied sight on which the colonial machinery performed its pain-­exacting effects of terror. For example, this account of the Obeah Trials is prefaced by the image of “the stoutest among them [the black slaves] trembl[ing] at the very sight of the ragged bundle, the bottle or the eggshells” used to characterize the practice of Obi. However, it is the British metropolitan public whose eyes the report claims to have opened while it establishes its claim to authority on the basis of the eye witness of a white planter who is supposed to have “sat on these trials” (2:97). The trials aimed to produce the kind of disabling, physically impressing fear or awe that might promise to produce a distinction between European colonial power and slave submission as well as between a disembodied and unaffected eye of authority and an embodied gaze of “primitive” observance somatically vulnerable to the physically and psychically altering effects of terrorizing, power-­producing spectacle. But the perplexity of the spectators at the execution that was to rival the power-­produced effects of Obeah sounds more like intellectual doubt. The report on “Obeah Practice” attributed to an absentee planter claims to have discovered the source of the high mortality rate on his Jamaican plantations in the thatched hut of an old slave woman. The narrative dramatically exposes its interior walls and roof entirely covered by the suspended “implements of her trade, consisting of rags, feathers, bones of cats, and a thousand other articles” (2:96). The scene is mimicked in the description of the execution of one of the leaders of the 1760 slave revolt, an old Koromantyn male slave. The closest the colonial authorities manage to come to inducing a somatic response is the “general panic” by which those involved in the 1760 rebellion were supposedly struck at the sight of this scene of his body “hung up with all his feathers and trumperies about him” (2:94). However, this “general panic” was not sufficient. In order to extract from the bodies of the black spectators an admission that might produce confirmation of a difference between the rational sight of the unmoved observer and a “primitive” form of observance that leaves the spectator open to being

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altered, the trial account concludes with another show, a series of experiments with electrical machines and magic lanterns not on the body of the old slave woman but on the flesh of rebel black male Obeah practitioners. The account reads: Upon other Obeah-­men, who were apprehended at that time, various experiments were made with electrical machines and magic lanterns, but with very little effect, except on one, who after receiving some very severe shocks, acknowledged that “his master’s Obi exceeded his own.” (2:98)

As an illuminating projection in the dark, the shining of light through a glass slider in order to throw a bright, spectral image onto a sheet or wall, the magic lantern held out the promise of enacting a mechanical version of Enlightenment as a projective mechanism, the casting out of despised matter (superstition, falsity, etc.) that it theoretically not only displaced but deprived of its fiery charge. And it is this kind of strategy that is called for in the passage on Obeah in James Grainger’s long Georgic poem of the tropics, The Sugar-­Cane (1764), published a few years after the 1760 Obeah Trials: In magic spells, in Obia, all the sons Of sable Afric trust: Ye sacred Nine! (For ye each hidden preparation know) Transpierce the gloom which ignorance and fraud Have render’d awful; tell the laughing world Of what these wonder-­working charms are made.33

This demystifying technique—­demonstrating the horror and then attempting to exorcise the aroused fear by a displacement achieved through a final exposure of the supposedly fraudulent mechanism to the derisive and now disbelieving gaze of the audience—­is precisely what the French showman Étienne-­Gaspard Robert (stage name Robertson, who disavowed the title of “Necromancer”) claimed for the phantasmagoria show’s magic lantern projection of the spirits of the dead (Figure 21) in the context of the Parisian metropole of the 1790s.34 But the admission in the Edwards account that the “severe shocks” compelling the acknowledgment that “his master’s Obi exceeded his own” otherwise produces “very little effect” indicates that the “transpiercing” technics Grainger invoked required more in the magic lantern show of the Obeah

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Figure 21. Robertson’s Phantasmagoria in the Cour des Capucines in 1797, from

É[tienne]-­G[aspard] Robertson, Mémoires récréatifs, scientifiques et anecdotiques du physicien-­aéronaute E. G. Robertson, connu par ses expériences de fantasmagorie, 2 vols. (Paris: Librairie encyclopédique de Roret, 1840). Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Trials on the island of Jamaica than a Manichean casting of light into darkness. To dispel “the gloom which ignorance and fraud / Have render’d awful” and secure physical acknowledgment of its efficacy, the magic lantern show of the Obeah Trials included electrical machines so that the projection of light was accompanied by the body-­penetrating projection of electrical jolts, an all too palpable piercing of black bodies with the display of the colonial machinery of dominance as sensate effects of power. The Obeah Trials turn on the double sense in early modern usage of “trial” as both legal proceeding and experiment. The use of the word “experiments” for these performances in Edwards’s account underscores this double effort to represent the Obeah Trials in the terms of scientific method and the exacting of an “acknowledgment” of empirically gained knowledge of causes and effects. Though the rhetoric of Enlightenment science, like the projective machines themselves, may have endeavored to distinguish the exercise of art and science (the penetration of mysteries, the discovery of truths) from the

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exertion of brute force on matter, the colonial machinery of dominance extorted not an admission of difference in kind (colonial science versus black or “primitive” magic) but rather of degree: “his master’s Obi exceeded his own” (emphasis mine). We should not ignore the effort to use irony as another part of the projective machinery, one that attempts to turn the Obeah-­man, the arrested spectator of the magic lantern show, and the black observers for whom he sat in not only into the figure of vulnerable vision but into its comic dupe of faith as well. But the directionality of these projections was not so easily manipulated. The black slaves who, in these accounts, believed in an invulnerability to white terror produced by rubbing themselves with powder managed to resist giving over the effects that the colonial machinery desired; they did, thereby, generate an effect of invincibility. And while the colonial authorities orchestrated with their magical machine lanterns and electrical apparatus at once a violent form of “tactile knowing” and a projective fantasy of a disembodied and disinterested sight untouched by the very “experiments” they too watched, any belief in the capacity of these devices to alter one set of spectators and not another required no less a leap of faith or, indeed, a tremendous conversion. English-­born Ebenezer Kinnersley (1711–­78), who worked with Benjamin Franklin, was a popular lecturer known for the “elegant apparatus” he used to demonstrate experiments in electricity. Though it is not yet known whether he visited Jamaica, between 1749 and 1753 Kinnersley made a tour of the British colonies in the Americas that included a visit to Antigua, and in 1772–­73 he also traveled to Barbados to lecture.35 Historian Vincent Brown relates the account of the Obeah Trials to a 1753 electrical demonstration in St. John’s, Antigua.36 Advertised as “A Course of Experiments on the Newly-­Discovered Electrical Fire” and presented as “entertainment for the curious,” the account of the experiment also uses the device of the vulnerable black spectatorial body: A Flash of Lightning made to strike a small House, and dart towards a Lady sitting on a Chair, who will, notwithstanding, be preserved from being hurt; whilst the Image of a Negro standing by, and seeming to be further out of Danger, will be remarkably affected by it.37

The reference, however, to the “Image of a Negro” rather than to an actual spectator standing near the demonstration suggests that the show may also have involved the projection of shadows or images. Historian

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Douglas Hall’s In Miserable Slavery mentions that Jamaican plantation owner Thomas Thistlewood recounts in his diary that, on September 14, 1767, he showed his magic lantern to favored slaves.38 While we cannot know what images were actually projected in the magic lantern show of the Obeah Trials in 1760 nor precisely what combination of electrical devices and projective technology was employed, William Hooper’s compilation of experiments culled from previous collections on scientific demonstrations such as those by Abbé Nollet and published in London in 1774 under the title of Rational Recreations suggests one possibility: a course of experiments called “Recreations in the Dark Chamber.”39 In this sequence of displays performed in the camera obscura, the electric apparatus replaces the candle, lamp, and solar rays as a light source to produce “a great number of pleasing and surprising recreations in the dark.”40 But while recreations such as the “globular fires” may have been executed as “beautiful” spectacles, they also had potentially dangerous physical effects. Using a globe and a cushion made of rubber placed atop a table connected by a string to a wheel in another room, the aim of the globular fires was to produce the effect of circles of brilliant illumination or, in Hooper’s words, “torrents of flame.” The performance was also tactile. As Hooper writes, “If . . . a finger be brought within half an inch of the globe, it is sure to be struck very smartly; and there will often be a complete arch of fire from it to the rubber.”41 Such participatory experiments on bodies may have been a source of knowledge production and amusement in the metropole.42 And, starting in Germany, electroshock was introduced at this time as a medical treatment for paralytics.43 In the colonies, however, the use of such a combination of optical spectacle and forced infliction of electroshock operated not as recreation in the sense of amusement but as an attempted re-­creation of authority and agency effected through its transfer from Obeah magic to the machines themselves.

“Marvellous Authority”: Prestige, Torture, and Rebel Flesh I now turn to a much later case that occupies a telling place at the intersection of the history of optical technologies, electrical demonstrations, and colonization: the 1856 state-­sponsored mission to Algeria by French magician, prize-­winning automaton and electric clockmaker, inventor and researcher in optics and electricity Jean-­Eugène Robert-­Houdin

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(1805–­71). In the autobiographical sketch Fusées (Rockets, 1855–­62) Charles Baudelaire observed caustically that “It belongs to an incredulous society to send Robert-­Houdin to the Arabs to dissuade them from miracles.”44 “Incredulous” (“incrédule”) has a double valence here, signifying both the unbelief of a skeptical post-­Enlightenment society and disbelief that a colonial state would send a “mechanic” most famous for his magic tricks to represent imperial interests and put down colonial rebellion. To produce an effect of imperial power, French metropolitan technologies depended on an effort not merely to represent but to realize. Capturing a semblance of likeness was not sufficient. Rather, delineation gave way to conjuration in the effort to give form to the visible and the intangible, as in displays of magnetism and electricity; such manifestations were then made to act on matter and bodies to produce marvelous effects of power or what Robert-­Houdin’s 1859 memoir termed “puissance merveilleuse.”45 Such attempted actualizations of the “marvellous power and authority” of the French state and its machines were not only to impress bodies (somatically and psychically) but were made out of bodily and simulated “contact” with the imagined “others” of empire. To do the cultural work of producing both universalizing abstraction and particularizing sensuous aesthetic knowledge, the French machines of modernization depended not merely on global transfer but on a transculturating and hybridizing incorporation of the disavowed “primitive” magic displaced onto and appropriated from those who inhabited the coveted sites of France’s territorial ambitions. To consider this double process I focus on the case of Robert-­ Houdin’s state-­sponsored performances in colonial Algeria in 1856. In 1845, Robert-­Houdin started a small theatre in the Palais-­Royal where he began staging his “Soirées Fantastiques,” and in 1846 at the Théâtre Royal du Parc in Brussels he premiered his innovative contribution to the history of magic lantern shows, a dissolving-­view presentation with apparatus of his own design. The presentation utilized a revolving glass disc that was shaded in part and placed before the lens of one lantern. When slowly turned the projected shadow was used to gradually occlude or reveal the image projected from another lantern, allowing time as well for the image to be changed without abrupt transitions.46 The Théâtre de Robert-­Houdin in the Boulevard des Italiens was opened in 1852, and it was here that Georges Méliès debuted such films as The Hallucination of the Alchemist (1897) and The Magic

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Lantern (1903) that related the origins of cinema and its capacities for transformative effects to other senses of projection (early devices for casting an image and alchemical projection or transmutation) as well as such films as The Laughable Musulman (1897) and two films in 1897 on colonial revolt against the British in India, Combat in a Street in the Indies and Attack of an English Outpost, that also attest to the global imperial context of the origins of cinema.47 Both in their making and in their subjects, these films were related not only to Robert-­Houdin’s sleight-­of-­hand tricks and machine-­generated illusions but also to his application of these “prestiges” to the colonial ends of the French state in Algeria.48 Robert-­Houdin’s séances of “prestiges” that would work to dispel supposed superstition and yet transfer prestige, power, and authority back into those very devices were organized by the French government as a means to put down organized revolt led by the Marabouts in Kabylia, the last holdout against French conquest.49 The Marabouts were holy warriors who inspired acts of courage and devotion among the Arab population by their displays of rebel flesh that could defy the otherwise lethal penetration of the body by French technologies of combat.50 Robert-­Houdin’s part in the so-­called civilizing mission of French science in the service of empire and its role in the “Pacification of Algeria” was to “destroy their influence,” but not by holding up reason against false belief or “fanaticism” but by the demonstration of superior sorcery or, in the phrasing of Robert-­Houdin’s account: [One] hoped, with reason, to make the Arabs understand, with the aid of my séances, that the sleights of hand of their Marabouts are nothing more than child’s play and, what’s more, because of their naiveté, are incapable of representing the miracles of an envoy of a higher power; that which we also naturally lead them to see was that we are their superiors in all things and that, as for sorcerers, there are none like the French.51

It is this fantastic claim—­“that, as for sorcerers, there are none like the French”—­that I would like to take seriously in the sense of exploring its more than rhetorical import for how we understand the geopolitical history and psychogeography of the development of science and technology in relation to its abjured other side, that is, disavowed “primitive” magic and belief in the efficacy of word and gesture discounted

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as “child’s play” (502). With the 1995–­96 Musée d’Orsay exhibition Magie et Illusionnisme: Autour de Robert-­Houdin and the 1999 publication of Brian Moore’s historical romance novel The Magician’s Wife, Robert-­Houdin comes to us as the sleight-­of-­hand magician or sorcerer.52 Robert-­Houdin’s descendant André Keime Robert-­Houdin’s Robert-­Houdin: Le magicien de la science (1986) counters such portrayals by reproducing Robert-­Houdin’s publications on optics, optical instruments, and electricity in order to emphasize a career trajectory that may begin with magic but ends with scientific research. However, the book’s opening characterization of Robert-­Houdin’s prestidigitation and invention as inseparable is rather apt.53 The scientific sorcery Robert-­Houdin brought over to Algeria in 1856 represented both the supposed rationalization of magic (its basis in and revelations of natural law) and, at the same time, a reenchantment of science.54 The official request from the French state asking Robert-­Houdin to perform in Algeria was issued in the immediate wake of the public award of a medal of the first class to Robert-­Houdin for the presentation, at the 1855 Paris Exposition Universelle, of seven electrical devices of his own invention. This event marked the transformation of this impresario of magic into the prestidigitator-­scientist whose “mysterious machines,” according to newspaper reports, “fascinated both men of art and science” in the metropole itself (501). The plan to send Robert-­ Houdin to Algeria as the incarnating envoy of the “higher power” of French empire was initiated just after this figure previously known to the metropolitan public primarily as a magician had retired from the stage to pursue research and inventions in optics and electricity at Le Prieuré, his laboratory and theater of machines cum residence. On the grounds of the large park he built a small “Theater of Specters” for the staging of what he called “Prestiges Optiques.” Using a two-­level stage, a hidden projection lantern, and a large mirror, Robert-­Houdin’s demonstrations of the illusion-­producing capacity of optics performed for small groups of visitors would transform a nocturnal Ibis perched atop a falling rock into a statue of the Virgin Mary, then slowly vivify the statuette into the image of a young girl dressed in white whose crowning wreath of flowers would grow gradually into an enormous bouquet of flowers with the virginal rose supplanting her face.55 But when Robert-­Houdin was invited by Colonel de Neveu, chief of the political bureau in Algiers, to put on a display of a select program

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of such “prestiges,” a rather different transformation was required. In his memoirs, Robert-­Houdin writes, “I played the role of a French Marabout.”56 Playing this role did not depend on producing visual resemblance on his body by, for example, assuming local dress: Robert-­ Houdin wore the same tuxedoed evening dress in Algiers as he had in Paris. Instead, becoming Marabout, in this case, involved accenting visual signs of difference while appropriating the powers of the Mara­ bouts. One might take the retention of European evening dress as an effort to maintain an outward defensive sign of difference to ward off the dangers of transforming himself from French magician-­scientist to Marabout. In orchestrating the visual effects of the show, Robert-­Houdin selected subjects from the audience to take the place of the projected and transforming images he had used in other contexts. Rather than the body of the magician, it was the bodies of the Algerian audience members that were to be seen to change onstage from invulnerable male rebels who defied the authority of the French state into figures of submission, that is, subjects rendered “as weak as an infant,” “weaker than a woman,” and “a child of the desert” (514–­15). Robert-­Houdin performed two shows at the Théatre d’Alger in October 1856 before audiences of Arab chiefs and their entourages. Rather than the usual voluntary purchase of theater tickets, the audience had been assembled by military summons or the threat of force. Robert-­Houdin’s wildly popular and much reprinted memoirs, Confidences d’un prestidigitateur (1858)— published a year after the culmination of the campaign against the Marabout in Kabylia, the last part of Algeria to resist colonization—­ describes this audience as a salon of wax dummies unmoved by the opening spectacle of Robert-­Houdin’s dexterity (511).57 “It was not sufficient,” Robert-­Houdin admits, “to amuse my spectators, to achieve the goal of my mission it was necessary to surprise, impress, and likewise to terrify them by the appearance of a supernatural power” (513).58 If the colonial machinery had any hope of impressing the Arab population with a sense of the power of the French state, then terror-­producing effects were in order. The account attempts to position the Arab spectators as physical objects, “wax dummies” on which the colonial machinery could impress its effects of terror. But let us not forget the role of Robert-­Houdin as a spectator himself. The memoir claims its authority, its capacity to attest to the “proof of the marvellous authority” of French machines on the basis of the eyewitness testimony of

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Robert-­Houdin, the magician-­scientist turned Marabout. Furthermore, the wax-­works’ unresponsiveness remarked in the account hardly yields up the image of flesh trembling with fear and awe that might promise to produce a distinction between white French power and Arab submission. In order to extract from the bodies of the Arab spectators an admission that might produce confirmation of an imperial difference between an incredulous French state that rules by rational sight and the Marabouts as impressionable, superstitious, and false subjects who could be cowed and converted, the account speaks of a change of tactics. “I changed my line of attack,” writes Robert-­Houdin in the language of the military campaign (513).59 The common derivation of prestige in the sense of power and authority and prestidigitation in the sense of the practice of legerdemain tricks characterized by deceptive illusion was exploited by Robert-­Houdin in his stage persona, his performances, and his memoirs. However, tricks of prestidigitation that did not call for a representative subject from the audience were apparently insufficient to demonstrate or confer the necessary prestige. Generalized attempts at interpellation gave way to specific address and finally the direct application of the machines. The show culminated with a sequence of three staged demonstrations that Robert-­Houdin called not “prestiges” but rather, in a strategic use of the language of experimental science, “expériences.”60 Robert-­Houdin insisted that it was the Marabouts who performed tricks (“tours”), declaring that, “Compared to the simple tricks of their pretended sorcerers, my experiments [expériences] had to be for the Arabs real miracles” (511).61 Through the applied use of electricity on bodies and the language of experiment, Robert-­Houdin attempted to create difference and authority by claiming the “real.” Each experiment was executed on an Arab representative hailed from the audience. For the first an “Arab Hercules” was called up from the audience—­one who thought himself strong enough to submit to the proof of the superior power of French machine magic. Presenting his subject with a strong box, Robert-­Houdin declared that he would render him as weak as an infant and asked the man to lift the box, which he did with little effort. But on the second try, the man was pronounced weaker than a woman, and because of a magnet hidden beneath the stage, this “Arab Hercules” turned “infant of the desert” was unable, despite great effort, to budge the chest (513–­15).

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But this spectacle of the weakened Arab was yet not enough. On the last attempt, an electrical charge sent to the handle of the chest produced the spectacle of violent muscle contractions, flailing limbs, and finally the Arab brought to his knees in crushing pain: a once proudly defiant figure of muscular intactness reduced to bodily disorganizing and shame-­inducing involuntary reactions. To prolong this physical “commotion” or bodily chaos would have been “barbaric” Robert-­ Houdin’s memoir concludes (515). And one might read such a statement as triumphant. And yet after the flight of the Arab Hercules who, we are to imagine, hid his shame in the folds of his enveloping burnous, comes the interjection that one of the means employed by the Marabouts to “elevate themselves in the eyes of the Arabs” and to “establish their domination is to make them believe in their invulnerability” (515).62 The mimetic symmetry, in Robert-­Houdin’s account, of these hydraulics of reduction and elevation betrays a certain anxiety that the Marabouts’ miracles of rebel flesh might themselves be an organized response, a counterart or counterscience to the necromancy of the colonial order and its barbarism and brutality. It is not the insatiable desire for domination on the part of the French state that we are to remark. And yet the abrupt switch from a spectacle of French barbarism to the Marabouts’ supposed urge for domination reveals a need to cast out recognition that the charge of “primitive” cruelty and a certain insatiable desire is the very battery of the machinery of colonialism. If Robert-­Houdin’s performance was commanded by the state to discredit the Marabouts’ claims to be able to defuse pistol fire in a demonstration of their status as divine messengers, his technics were also to establish superiority through mimetic rivalry, a demonstrated capacity to top such feats on their own terms. Hence, the next experiment depended upon a reversal of positions in which Robert-­Houdin as the “French Marabout” makes himself the defiant target of a Marabout marksman whom he authorizes to act as surrogate French soldier (516–­ 18). Newton’s apple here becomes a talisman that Robert-­Houdin announces will make him invulnerable. Though the Marabout aims at Robert-­Houdin’s heart, the bullet lodges itself in the apple. Faced with his defeat, the Marabout supposedly keeps his head, happily surrendering his pistol in exchange for the apple. While the joke, we are to believe, was on the Marabout, the redirecting apple is supposed to have

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impressed the Arab onlookers, for whom the Marabout stood in, with surprise and fright. And yet, this exchange of positions between pistol and apple, an envoy of the French state and an envoy of the divine, flesh that defies mortality and agent of death was met by silence on the part of the audience, a silence in which settling the locations of naive belief and rational skepticism, indomitable will and impressionable flesh demanded yet another experiment. The memoir is rife with the need for physical evidence, an admission extracted from bodies that the French machinery of dominance could produce sensate effects of power. What these colonial technics required was also their very obstacle—­the magic rebel flesh of the Marabout. The final display involved a projection and mirror trick that made the body of a rebel Arab first evanesce and then reappear, but only at Robert-­Houdin’s summons. In the fight against French domination of Algeria, the Marabout’s body, his physical embodiment of impervious and defiant sight, was the basis of resistance. Neither the pistol nor some substitute talisman was the Marabout’s weapon; rather, it was his capacity to look down the barrel of a gun and yet not yield up the required signs of fearful submission. Hence, in this sequence of experiments the representative Marabout body was first visibly pierced, disorganized and reduced by French machine magic and the torture of electroshock, appropriated as a surrogate French soldier, and, finally, dematerialized altogether to return only as a docile shell. Widely publicized in the press in both the colony and the metropole as demonstrations of skill rather than sorcery, Robert-­Houdin’s spectacle of European technology was nonetheless deemed successful only to the extent that this magician-­scientist and envoy of the French state was able to play the role of the “French Marabout.” The publication of Robert-­Houdin’s memoir in 1858 was ostensibly merely to ratify Robert-­Houdin’s role in putting down the rebellion in Kabylia. But the memoir’s preoccupation with the labor of attempting to transfer the aura of rebel flesh back into European technologies under the guise of rational demystification suggests an admission of French vulnerability to the Marabout claim of invincibility, an effect Robert-­Houdin’s narrative of his “experiments” on Marabout flesh repeatedly displays. While General Devaux would later proclaim that “the two men who did the most for the pacification of Algeria are Jules Gérard, the famous killer of lions, and above all Robert-­Houdin,” it is only in retrospect that the conquest of Kabylia

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in 1857 signaled the culmination of that “pacification.”63 With its appended “Course of Miracles” purporting to explain the mechanism behind the miracle, Robert-­Houdin’s memoir ostensibly works only to “destroy the prestige” of the Marabout by the application of reasoned analysis (557–­71). But to the extent that Robert-­Houdin was compelled to self-­experiment and ultimately incarnate the defiance of bodily limitation on the part of Arab rebels or, in other words, become Marabout, in order to transfer auratic prestige back into French technologies and “scientific method,” the sacred distance between metropole and colony, science and magic, disembodied reason and frenzied flesh gives way. Converting Arab resistance into submission entailed a transforming mimicry of the very Marabout practices that the colonial state set out to extinguish. While the process of auratic transfer from Marabout practices to French machines was to publicly produce a tangible distinction between an eye of reason and its disavowed vulnerability projected out onto Arab spectators as the abjectly embodied sight of “primitive” worship, this transfer of technologies put the machine imago, the very ego-­propping defense of the imperial subject at risk. Hence, the “French Marabout” memoir was not enough; an explicit admission was necessary in the form of a reprinted “hommage offered to Robert-­Houdin by the chiefs of the Arab tribes at the end of his séances given in Algiers, the 28th and 29th of October 1856.” Twice this document refers to the “sciences merveilleuses” cultivated and demonstrated by the magician-­ scientist named here “le sid Robert-­Houdin” (522–­23). Robert-­Houdin’s efforts to produce the “marvellous authority” of the “sciences merveilleuses” by “playing the marabout” and becoming “le sid” in the French colonial theater of Algeria mark the extent to which colonial order required the imitation and appropriation of magical practices of life and death to power its machinery.

Morbid Projection and Transculturation The authorizing claims of metropolitan empirical science are inextricable from the dynamics of terrorizing magic in the colonies. Attention to the staged use of machines of projective illusion with machines for electroshock in the colonies demonstrates not the difference between rational witness and somatically vulnerable flesh and not, as it might seem, the magic lantern in extremis or the exceptionality of the ways

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in which projective machinery was put to use as a tactics for the production of imperial power. Rather, the dark chamber of the mise-­en-­scène for the production of the subject of rational vision already holds within it the potential for the kind of violence that makes the paranoid projection of the early modern demonstration extend to the violence of morbid projection at work in the cases I discuss in this chapter. In Mimesis and Alterity cultural anthropologist Michael Taussig radically reconceptualizes the history of modernity from a progressive narrative of European internal technological development to a colonial dialectic of sympathetic and terrorizing magic carried out as an imitative dance of so-­called Enlightenment and primitivism, science and occultism, between colonizing Europe and its projected others in the period after the seeming watershed inventions of photography and the phonograph. Taussig’s retheorization of mimesis challenges historians of culture to rethink vision as inseparable as much from touch and magic as from the colonial relations between Europe and its “others.” But the “tactile knowing” Taussig elaborates from the work of Walter Benjamin to find a way out of the deadly dynamics of colonial history formed an essential part of earlier colonial technics. Attention to the eighteenth-­and early nineteenth-­century cases analyzed here enables us to reconsider how the production of effects of knowledge and power through the contact of the machines of rational, disembodied vision and bodily flesh was central to the applied necromancy of empire. These cases allow us to historically and theoretically develop Taussig’s suggestion that we look again at Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s contention in “Elements of Anti-­Semitism: The Limits of Enlightenment” that the machinery of dominance depended on “the organized imitation of magic practices, the mimesis of mimesis.”64 The culminating chapter of The Dialectic of Enlightenment—­ Horkheimer and Adorno’s collaborative account of the destructiveness internal to Enlightenment and its technologies first published in 1947— ­“Elements of Anti-­Semitism” centers on the function of a particular reproducible stereotype, the Jew. The repetitious production and circulation of this figure depends, they argue, on the seeming conundrum: “They cannot stand the Jews, yet imitate them” (183). From the example of the sacrifice of those identified with the exercise of the very bloody magic and exterminating rites carried out upon them, Horkheimer and Adorno make the suggestive argument that imitation and hatred are

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indistinguishably implicated in the mass production of the subject of technologized modernity. To do so they take up the psychoanalytic theory that the bounded ego is constituted on the basis of morbid projection whereby aggressive and taboo wishes are displaced onto the outside world. In morbid projection the despised matter cast out onto external objects reflects back the subject’s own abjected material in the form of imagined threats that must be eliminated. This negative construction of the subject does not merely depend on the expulsion of the fears and antisocial and self-­annihilating wishes that threaten the self’s construction of stable borders, but on the mimicry of the very exterminating energy invested in those objects that are taken to phantasmatically mirror what the self must overcome but, nonetheless, envies. The move in “Elements of Anti-­Semitism” to generalize this individual psychic dynamic into a collective paranoia that binds society into an imagined community on the basis of a waking nightmare does not take us far from what we recognize from Freud’s essay on the uncanny and his Totem and Taboo. Understanding this management of energies as an externalized technological mechanism of killing projection introduces, however, an important twist. Let me emphasize what is buried here and yet I think merits reexamination. Note the language of technics: The purpose of the Fascist formula, the ritual discipline, the uniforms, and the whole apparatus, which is at first sight irrational, is to allow mimetic behavior. . . . This machinery needs the Jews. (185, emphasis mine)

The imitation of magic practices, the “mimesis of mimesis,” or what Taussig calls the means by which culture makes itself second nature, is formulated as not just any kind of management but the machinic organization of psychic projection. The dynamic of morbid projection or paranoia emerges here as a social machine in the technical sense and one developed in the historical formation of modernity. Horkheimer and Adorno’s account of social systems of dominance as paranoid structures may have taken its pertinence from one effort at human extermination. However, the reach of their formulation extends further both geographically and historically. They assert that “the established group always adopts a paranoiac attitude to others. The great empires and even organized humanity as such are not more advanced than headhunters in this respect” (197). The opposition of the fantasized

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figures of “organized humanity” and the “headhunter,” however reversed in valuation, problematically maintains the terms of colonial discourse itself. Yet I would like to argue that this analogy between the paranoid subject’s constitutive morbid attachment to the expelled object of its own disavowed fear and loathing and the self-­consumptive mirroring of “great empires” and “headhunters” is, nonetheless, telling. Reading such a rhetorical device against the grain invites reconsideration of the Fascist formula as a social machine that took its techniques from an earlier dark side of the Enlightenment or what we might call instead the colonial machinery of dominance. Horkheimer and Adorno’s essay confronts the contradiction inherent in the early modern development of the so-­called scientific method that “in a certain sense all perception is projection” (187). In early modern scientific method’s effort to at once distinguish subject and object and yet bridge the gulf between them, they suggest that control of automatized projection as a reflex reaction required further automatization and mechanical systemization. The technological modernity of the conversion of bodies and environment into knowledge, surplus wealth, and effects of power that in the early modern period produced the very dynamics of imitating and yet ejecting and destroying its own hated matter was generated—­we might argue further—­in the contacts between Europe and its colonies. But what kinds of machines for the control of this contradiction are inherent in rational judgment and scientific method? The essay’s own investment in rescuing a certain form of Enlightenment rationality is particularly striking in Horkheimer and Adorno’s fascination with the nose as an open orifice and the sense of smell as a penetration of the subject, which they contrast with sight.65 They defensively assert, “When we see we remain what we are, but when we smell we are overtaken by otherness” (184). And yet in the ensuing effort to disentangle what they call “false” or morbid projection from the projection required for the subject to get outside of itself to perform the very self-­reflection that is to distinguish rational judgment, the very ability to differentiate, sight or perception is the battleground and the saving sense. Self-­ reflection as the “life of reason” works as a conscious or controlled projection in which the subject gets outside of itself not in a union with the object but in the finding of a third position from which to reflect on or adjudicate a considered opposition between what is reflected in the eye as receptor (cast onto the retina) and the external object (188–­89).

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Here we have the structure of optical devices such as the magic lantern used to project an image onto a wall or screen so that the subject as spectator might physically occupy that position of self-­reflection between the imagined object and the perceptual image. The possibility that the Enlightenment eye might be touched or permeated, as much as the archaic nose, by the sensual intrusion of the imagined object or the objectified other and what they call its “dazzling power” haunts this triangular setup. Horkheimer and Adorno’s essay tries to distance this threat by calling it the “hallucination of immediacy” (194–­95). In other words, by insisting that sensual immediacy or fusion is a hallucination, they attempt to distance seeing from the possibility of being taken over. They do concede that paranoia or morbid projection may be the “dark side” of sight-­based rational cognition. Yet at the same time they attempt to rescue projection as rational self-­reflection from what they call morbid, paranoid, or false projection in order to align a salvaged form of rationality with their standpoint as critics, imagined as situated outside the dynamics they describe. The essay’s mimicry of the early modern strategy it describes gives us a sense of what is at stake. Through the staging of the visual hallucination of immediacy, the waking dream or nightmare confusion of inner and outer worlds, and self and other as generated in the organized imitation of magic practices, the technological mimesis of the apprehension of nature in scientific method’s projective device was supposed to dispel such illusions and demonstrate how sight secures the disembodied and yet masculinized European subject against an identified external object. Externalizing sight as a floating perceptual image functioned as a means of denying the bodily, its mortal and permeable substance, the abjected feminine and racialized “otherness” within. But the machinic organization of the projective mechanism also inevitably set in motion the risk of objectifying, mortifying conversion. The effort expended in Horkheimer and Adorno’s essay to distinguish the eye from a penetrable bodily orifice is useful in calling our attention to the very somatic dangers inherent in the disavowing ambitions of rational sight and its machinery. These cases of morbid projection discussed in this chapter—­the magic lantern combined with electroshock in the Obeah Trials that becomes “his master’s Obi” and the scientist-­magician who attempts to transform himself into “le sid Robert-­Houdin”—­close the distance and difference between metropole and colony and between machines for

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the production of empirical knowledge and technologies of thaumaturgy. The culminating obeisance to “his master’s Obi” and to “sciences merveilleuses” offered as clear evidence of the differences between “primitive” belief, magic, and rational science is rather testimony to the necromantic violence at work not just in the machinery of colonial dominance, but also in the techniques of metropolitan science and its efforts to produce, through the apparatus of image projection and its interpellating pedagogy, the fortified hallucination of the fantasized discarnate subject of rational vision.

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chapter three

Empire Bites Back

The disciplinary pedagogical premise for the demonstration of image-­ casting devices—­the camera obscura, the magic lantern, the solar microscope, and their variants—­was to show and thereby train the spectator, in an idealized, ostensibly objectivizing, and instrumentalized version of how the eye works and, by extension, how the observer or witness of the experiment is supposed to see. As instrument imago of the spectator as subject of rational vision, however, projective apparatus did not actually resemble the witnessing body of the subject of rational vision.1 This lack of corporeal resemblance is not incidental but rather the material form of a formal denial, a careful and complex management of the dangers and instability of the menace of mimesis inherent in objectifying and instrumentalizing vision, above all the potential dissolution of difference between subject and object (mapped onto oppositions between human and animal, masculine and feminine, heterosexual and homosexual, master and slave) and the slippery slide of agency and authority not (or not just) from the machine imago to the disembodied witness but especially onto the abject objects that the projective apparatus mediates and attempts to cast out.2 The process of projection is internally destabilized by its very dynamics: its casting out of the potential threat to the subject’s constitution imbues the abjected object with greater energetic charge and even agency over the subject. Further, the very management of the threats of mimesis by the denial of resemblance that the apparatus grants the idealized machine image by not reflecting the body of the fantasized subject of rational vision has the potential to be critically activated by its projected (gendered, sexed, racialized) “others” who, in terms of the colonial regime of difference as discernible 125

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on the visible surface body, are no more or less mirrored by its machine image than those who would claim its command as their own. The colonial effort to manage this menace of mimesis is at the heart of both the operation and the form of the apparatus of technologies of projection. In the late eighteenth century and especially the nineteenth century, portable magic lanterns were produced with surface figural decoration (cavorting devils) and in various animate (a seated, exotic parody of a “Chinaman”) and inanimate shapes (pagodas and mosques) that incorporated into the device allusions to the images of “otherness” it was used to project. But giving the lie to the polymorphous and even perverse pluriverse of the multiform lantern is a fundamental and longstanding figural elision of any formal resemblance to the body of the sci­entific witness or subject of rational vision.3 From the early seventeenth century, working projective models of the eye with a visual resemblance to the dissected eyeball were made for demonstration purposes.4 Many of these devices were constructed to demonstrate the camera obscura analogy such that, when held near a brightly illuminated object, the subject could see an image of the object inverted in the glass of lenses of the globe of the eye. However, names for such instruments—­ the “artificial eye,” for instance—­carefully distinguish the eyeball-­shaped device from the physical eye of the witness. In the essay on vision by British instrument maker George Adams (1750–­95), Adams stresses that it “is absolutely necessary, in considering this subject, to distinguish between the organ of perception, and the being that perceives,” a declaration that carefully separates the instrument or artificial eye from the eye that operates the device and also severs the eye or organ of perception from the mind of the viewing subject where “vision” is located.5 In providing a slippery iconic semblance of the human eye, the artificial eye and related projective devices may not only be classed with anatomical models in general but also, as mechanical devices simulating the operation of sight, with mimetic machines such as automata that purported not merely to show how animate bodies look and function but also to rival them in taking in and perhaps surpassing their capacities.6 Whereas the artificial eye, as the surrogate of the ostensibly rational viewer, takes the abstracted form of the eye extracted from its socket, without a face, and removed from the body, the scene of projection promises to carry away the disavowed body and its penetrable orifices which it features centrally but at a displacing remove as the grotesque,

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devilish, and monstrous bodies of the projected images and the negative double of the subject of rational vision, the disavowed vulnerable spectator of corporeal response. As devices of what I have been discussing as “paranoid projection” and “morbid projection,” technologies for casting an image functioned as knowledge-­and power-­producing ways of managing fear and yet creating effects of terror impressed on the antiwitness, the body of the vulnerable spectator. As technologies of the phantom subject of reason and machines for producing the illusion of sovereign authority and mastery, technologies of projection endeavored to disavow or cast out the subject of rational vision’s own penetrable body, its passions and its susceptibility, its precarious difference from its projected “others,” and its vulnerability to transformation. The trace of such efforts can be seen in the elisions and partitions of the device, whether in the satiric antiform of the devil-­embossed lantern or the idealized disembodiment of the severed eyeball of the artificial eye camera obscura. While in their colonial deployment, such technologies of projection were to produce a distinction between a disembodied and unaffected eye of authority and an embodied gaze of “primitive” observance somatically vulnerable to machine terrorizing, the directionality and effects of projection in managing the threats of mimesis were far from stable. The theory of the eye as a dark chamber into which images are cast holds within it a hole, the necessary aperture through which light and images are admitted. As a receptor and an already permeable organ, the eye was a potential gateway to the rest of the body, its bowels, its humors, and its fetishized organs of binary sex consignment and racialization. The reshaping of the permeable organ of the eye into a fortified and partitioned machine of sight severed from the tremulous body, reinforced by the constitutive lack of corporeal resemblance between the human body and devices for casting an image, served to disavow and cast out the incorporative side of vision that leads to substantial transformation. But this management of the threats of mimesis also trades in the magic of resemblance by demonstrating how light enters the eye, thus opening the scene of projection onto not only what it endeavors to eject but also the volatility of what it necessarily takes in. The scene of projection, that is, cannot so readily banish the shadows it produces with its light-­casting effects but is also vexed internally by what it does admit: the harsh excoriations of seeing as injection or what Freud developed as “introjection.”7

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While projection casts out, introjection throws or carries in. Although the development of the concept of introjection as the casting into or onto the ego is attributed to Freud’s close associate Sándor Ferenczi (1873–­1933), the process of introjection plays a pivotal role in Freud’s development of the divided subject, the ego that is not only riven by ambivalent and competing drives but also fundamentally shaped by the harsh and even punishing light of an internal disciplinary apparatus to which Freud gave the name of the superego.8 Although introjection as a taking in might seem to have a more obvious capacity to nourish, poison, and otherwise substantially alter the body of which it becomes a part, in “Civilization and Its Discontents” (1930), Freud makes of introjection not a device of altering incorporation but rather a machine of social and political discipline.9 Introjection here is the dynamic apparatus at the uneasy core of (un)civil society, the unrest in the heart of empire, a desire for aggression that is “introjected, internalized” in the form of a “conscience” that is “ready to put into action against the ego the same harsh aggressiveness that the ego would have liked to satisfy upon other, extraneous individuals.”10 Although for analysts such as Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok introjection is the name for the profound and necessary reckoning with loss as loss that threatens the ego even as it also promises to utterly transform the subject, introjection for Freud shapes the empire of the fortress ego in the vehement register of a violence on violence or aggression against aggression.11 While reversing the direction of projection by casting in or on rather than out, as the disciplining authority of an internalized aggression, introjection is not, for Freud, necessarily the opposite of paranoid or morbid projection in terms of the social and political work it does. The apparatus of colonial authority depends on an orchestrated instruction in and management of what is taken in and that which is cast out: a projection of disavowed somatic vulnerability, (false) belief, and the violence and desire for aggression, on the one hand, and an introjection of the idealized machine imago of policing authority carefully distinguished from magical thinking or belief in a demonic agency, on the other. In the instructional scene of the demonstration of early modern instruments of projection from which Freud drew, the use of the magic lantern to produce images of phantoms, devils, and monsters endeavored to dissociate, through a complex manipulation of techniques of

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mimicry, the demonstration of the way in which images are cast into the dark room of the eye and mind from the fear of introjection as demonic infection or false belief, for injection also carried the sense of actively introducing something into the mind, and this kind of insinuation was associated with demonic agency: “The devil may continue to disquiet and disturb the Peace and Tranquility of our Consciences, by his wicked injections, and putting into our Minds evil Thoughts.”12 While the early modern demonstration lecture gave the appearance of casting out demons and demonic agency, we might also understand the mise-­en-­scène of the projected image as a careful orchestration of projection and introjection in the training and production of the subject, introjecting the dark chamber of the eye in a manner attributed to Lucifer and employing a profane simulation or version of machine magic to dispel the specter of the vulnerable, impressionable body or what the machine imago of the fortress subject cannot and will not admit—­ the torch of the passionate attachment that cannot be lit and, thus, the loss that cannot be mourned because it is foreclosed and remains the secret or alien crypt or even tomb of the subject. This tinderbox of what the subject can neither have nor become threatens from within as that which might internally combust and utterly transform the subject: an incendiary and consuming violence cast onto the projected flamethrowers without. This tinderbox just waiting to combust takes the form, in Freud’s “Civilization and Its Discontents,” of a colonial outpost not at the margins but at the center of the “civilizing” process: “Civilization” or, we might say, empire “obtains mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.”13 This urban architectural metaphor for the divided and walled ego disciplined by an agency of oversight echoes that of the apparatus of subjectivization elaborated in Michel Foucault’s “panopticism.”14 But it is also the apparatus of the dark room or camera obscura enlarged to the domain of the political, an arena in which it is not merely oversight but rather the training of sight in the management of projection and what psychoanalysis has theorized as its allied countermovement or introjection—­a process of taking into the ego only what is desired and casting out what the subject refuses to own.15 But in the conquered city of empire, the desired and the refused do not map easily or readily onto

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what shores up or sustains the colonial subject. Introjection, as feminist and postcolonial engagements with psychoanalysis remind us, is not only the process by which the subject is subordinated to the Name-­ of-­the-­Father and the law but it is also, for the feminized, racialized, and sexual “other,” a violent alienation or dispossession.16 In “Mourning and Melancholia” Freud never actually uses the term “introjection” for the “drawing-­in” of a lost object that the subject refuses to lose and cannot mourn. Rather, “incorporation” and “regress” are the directional terms that set a scene in which the self-­reviling, self-­tormenting ego enacts its revenge on the object, carrying out the violent sufferance of a loss to the ego by taking the ego as an object of abuse, “debasing it, making it suffer and deriving sadistic satisfication from its suffering.”17 Nonetheless, in this terrible scene of an objectified and disciplined ego, there are important structuring similarities between the special agency of introjection recounted in “Civilization and Its Discontents” by which the desire for aggression is turned inward and onto the ego and the violent circuit by which the object-­cathexis is withdrawn into the subject such that the subject takes its own ego as the site (analogized as an “open wound”) of a revenge against the lost object described in “Mourning and Melancholia.” I stress this uncanny similarity between the theaters of violence in the dynamics of melancholia and introjec­ tion—­both of which shape the subject by an internalized exercise of a punishing agency—­to mark the extent to which the docile subjection to colonial authority resembles what might seem to be its antidote: a critical, disalienating, countercolonial or queer melancholia that makes a show of refusing to let go of injury, shame, or the losses that cannot be mourned because they cannot be counted as losses. The sense of introjection as the incorporation of not only what may be hated, feared, or ambivalently desired and loathed but also that which exceeds or violates the law or norm has been crucial for work in postcolonial, queer, and feminist revisions and uses of psychoanalysis concerned with stubborn attachments to the losses of history—­ not just the dead we carry with us but the expropriated and denied pasts, the stubborn remainders of the refused discharged as refuse, the waste or dead matter that nonetheless sticks and haunts: not just the aporias or holes but the unmournable losses, the never-­was and the as-­ yet that persist as the unassimilable.18 Building on this work of a politicized ethics of melancholy, I attend in this chapter to the unstable and

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hauntingly anachronistic performance of introjection in two temporally and geographically dispersed cases involving the violent taking in of the punishing colonial law as complex responses to morbid projection. This chapter’s consideration of introjection serves as the pivot point for a larger argument about the volatile instability inherent in the dynamic, disciplinary scene of projection that spans the sites of metropolitan science and those of colonial conflict, the profound difficulty, that is, of casting out the vulnerabilities of embodied witness as well as the threats to self at once introjected as the surveilling and punishing superego and cast out onto abjected “others” whose retaliation the ego dreads and defends against. For Frantz Fanon, in Black Skin, White Masks, the “mechanism of projection” does not and cannot be understood outside of the situation of colonization and must be reconceived as a violent apparatus of radical asymmetry.19 While the “white man,” in Fanon’s terms “projecting his desires onto the Negro,” “behaves ‘as if’ the Negro really had them,” the “Antillean” is riven, self-­alienated by a shattering introjection of enwhitened civilization’s brutal projection that, to emphasize the force and violence enacted of the “absurd drama others have staged round me” (197), is rearticulated as a “cultural imposition” (194) from without. Black Skin, White Masks concludes with a stirring final prayer: “O my body, make of me always a man who asks questions” (232). One of those resonant questions is implicit in the lines that precede this invocation from the place of not only the overdetermined, occupied, alienated, and abjected body but also the body that, from under the cultural imposition of phobic colonial projections and out of the imprisoning master/slave struggle for recognition, the text hails in another kind of recognition, that is, the open question of the how-­to of the wish articulated as “I want the world to recognize, with me, the open door to every consciousness” (232). In the search for the open door, I wonder about the possibilities not outside of the scene of projection but within the minor aperture of the instabilities and volatilities in its very dynamics. In this chapter, I consider the possibilities for agency in the volatility and violence of the scene of projection from the position of the dispossessed, that is, from the place of the abjected objects of a claimed rational, imperial vision. I am interested in the activation of the mimicry of docile introjection as a form of agency and even a kind of violent resistance. Turning the focus around, this chapter considers the

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possibility that introjection, even as it might appear to work as the docile reproduction of colonial authority by its internalization, might also challenge colonial terrorizing through the asserted dominance and disembodiment of the eye by catalyzing the performative menace of mimicry in acts that make an outward spectacle of taking on and in the apparatus of dominance. Reckoning with the complex directionality and violence of the dynamics of projection and introjection in the dark room of the fortress ego of the walled city of empire, I consider two complex cases that do not resolve easily into the extremities of submission or revolution, damage or repair, but point nonetheless toward the unfinished, incomplete possibilities through the small, minor aperture of what is transmitted in and out of the dark room.20 The first revolves around an eighteenth-­century hybrid automaton, the “Englishman-­eating tiger-­ organ” produced for Tipu Sultan in 1792 that threatened transformative conversion in connecting visual consumption to the penetrable organs of the ear and that organ of assimilation and ingestion, the mouth. In the second part of the chapter, I turn to the performance of scenes of Vodou possession by the lwa (a homophone for the French loi for “law”) as a perilous way of introjecting in order to decry and even alter the charge of the injury of the law.

Reason and Its Appetites Introjection and particularly its appetitive version might seem alien to scientific progress. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, first published in 1904–­5, Max Weber attempts to establish a subject position of authority as a “product” of a reified entity called “modern European civilization” and specifically the “Protestant” that is set in opposition to India, China, Babylonia, and Egypt by ascetic practices and the control of appetite.21 Naming the book and its supposedly detached perspective as a “product” calls our attention to its fabrication, the process of objectification involved in the fashioning of “scientific objectivity.” Both the product and object—­the book and critical detachment as a form of rational perspective—­are used as evidence of a “modern European civilization” characterized by claims to scientific rationalization, systematization, and ascetic control.22 However, as a product of what Weber calls a “victorious capitalism” in which “material goods

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have gained an increasing and finally inexorable power over the lives of men,” the book unwittingly also attests to animistic fetishism and insatiable desires, the animating spirit worship Weber’s account displaces onto colonial peripheries and that formed a central part of Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism as the “religion of sensuous desire.”23 As William Pietz has pointed out in his essay “Fetishism and Materialism: The Limits of Theory in Marx” (1993), eighteenth-­century European tactics for casting out its own fetishistic investments in the very casting power of objects play a central role in Marx’s theorization of commodity capitalism.24 The citation in Marx’s work that Pietz recounts quickly and in passing to make this general point comes from French magistrate and scholar Charles de Brosses’s 1760 Of the Cult of Fetish Gods, the book in which the term fetishism was coined.25 The particularities of the citation excerpted by Marx are worth attention: “The savages of Cuba regarded gold as a fetish of the Spaniards. They celebrated a feast in its honor, sang in a circle around it, and threw it into the sea.”26 While the scene revolves around gold extracted by Spanish conquest of the Americas, the targets of de Brosses’s eighteenth-­century colonial ethnography are double. The indigenous peoples of the Caribbean are used against France’s imperial economic rival Spain so that both appear like barbaric agents: one of cannibal waste and the other of precapitalist or “primitive” accumulation and appetite. But, read against the grain, de Brosses’s account points to the way in which the development of global capitalism is inextricable from colonization and appropriative traffic in object worship. In contrast to Weber’s equation of global capitalism with rational disenchantment, we might see the claimed rational perspective of Weber’s account of the “spirit of capitalism” in terms of the personified commodities as social actors Madame la Terre and Monsieur le Capital of Marx’s Capital and Señor Tobacco and Doña Azucar or sugar in Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz’s 1940 Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar.27 Cuban Counterpoint revises Weber, providing an alternative account of the development of modern capitalism that situates Cuba and the plantation colony not as an outpost or passive recipient of technology transfer but instead as a “geographic laboratory” for the making of the modern capitalist system out of the slave plantation. In a global flow recharacterized as a hurricane of white powder and spiraling

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smoke, Doña Azucar and Señor Tobacco are transformative agents that not only remake the “New World” but also storm back across the ocean to fundamentally alter in substance something called Europe.28 Animated and materialized in all its destructive force, the spirit of capi­ talism embodies a fetish practice of incarnating objects of insatiable appetite.29 These “products of the vegetable kingdom that are cultivated, processed, and sold for the delectation of the mouth that consumes them” question the sensory hierarchy and mapping of the body politic, insisting that the mind’s eye is connected to an assimilating orifice, the consuming mouth.30 Whipping between production and consumption, planting and the colonial sites of manufacture, the slave labors of supply and the bottomless wants of the pipes and cups of metropolitan and imperial demand, the wind-­up death dance of these commodity actors on the global stage of the colonial plantation machine profoundly questions the claimed scientific rationality and civilizing force of capitalism’s commercial traffic. Such transformative consumption is far more than a matter of raw materials (as in sugar and tobacco). In a tactical reading of various early modern European prints including the frontispiece to Richard Brathwaite’s The Smoaking Age (1617), Ortiz does not simply suggest that contact with the Americas altered the course of European development long before the twentieth century; rather, he argues that the very core of European difference and identity was constituted out of that contact: “One might say that reason, starved and benumbed by theology, to revive and free itself, needed the help of some harmless stimulant. . . . For this, to help sick reason, tobacco came from America.”31 Through its extended and carefully plotted sequence, Ortiz’s Cuban Counterpoint packs indigenous belief and ritual into the sheaves of tobacco sent across the Atlantic and into the pipes of English dandies and roaring men. Reading the twirling clouds of smoke as an imitation of “Cuban ebolition” or the Indian manner of smoking and the curls of Latin text as a sign of the curls of thought, Ortiz argues that such gestures of the imaginative thinker, performances of elegance and taste, and acts for claims to masculinity could not have been exercised without the transculturating influence of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and specifically the Taino and Ciboney of Cuba. The very technologies of global capitalism, we might infer, were equally bound to animistic worship and the manipulation of machine objects for transformative consumption.

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Countercolonial Ingestion To pursue the question of agency through introjection, I look closely at a technological device of countercolonial ingestion as an instance of the appropriation and mimicry of the tools of colonial capitalist consumption and terrorizing: the complex automaton known as Tippoo’s Tiger (Figure 22) made around 1793 for Tipu Sultan, the eighteenth-­century Muslim ruler of Mysore, a predominately Hindu region of southern India.32 In 1799, British colonial forces in South Asia defeated Tipu Sultan and annexed a large portion of his territory for the British East India Company’s commercial enterprises.33 The soldiers in the employ of the British proceeded to loot the fortress and palace of the capital city of Sri Rangapattana. The “prizes” sent in 1800 as totems of absorbed power by then Governor-­General Richard Wellesley to King George III and the directors of the British East India Company were totems of absorbed power, objects closely associated by the British with the body of the defeated ruler.34 Among these power-­producing fetish-­trophies currently in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum is an object recorded, upon receipt, in the daybook of the East India House, as “Tippoo’s Musical Tiger.”35 Now displayed along with other British colonial war booty and set in a glass display case in the Nehru Gallery of Indian Art lies this six-­foot object labeled, yet more reductively, Tippoo’s Tiger. A 1799 memorandum sent to the British East India Company describes the prize object. It identifies the figures as a “royal tyger” and a “prostrate European” but greatly emphasizes the mixed quality of the object and particularly its intermixture not just in sight but also in sound: This piece of mechanism represents a royal tyger in the act of devouring a prostrate European. There are some barrels in imitation of an organ, within the body of the tyger, and a row of keys of natural notes. The sounds produced by the organ are intended to resemble the cries of a person in distress intermixed with the roar of a tyger. The machinery is so contrived, that while the organ is playing, the hand of the European is often lifted up to express his helpless and deplorable condition. The whole of this design was executed by order of Tippoo Sultaun.36

Both the label’s title Tippoo’s Tiger and the glass case arrangement work to reduce and contain the threatening consumptive hybridity of this “piece of mechanism.” Enclosed in the vitrine the mechanical musical

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Figure 22. Tippoo’s Tiger, ca. 1793. Mechanical organ automaton. Painted wood,

178 x 71 x 61 cm. Copyright Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

dimension is not only muted but barely discernible. The object appears mainly in its visual aspect as a giant emblematic sculpture, a wooden double effigy representing a tiger crouched astride and with its jaws in the neck of a red-­coated, pale-­faced human figure generally taken as the facsimile of a European man and specifically of an English colonial soldier. The contraction of the label to “Tippoo’s Tiger” reduces a complex piece of mechanism and its exercise of the authority of “Tippoo Sultaun” to a surrogate tiger effigy for an Indian ruler deprived of title and life by British forces. With its modern diminutive connotations the “poo” in “Tippoo” insinuates a rhetorical note of contempt along with a sly reference to the other end of the alimentary tract. However, the title given at the end of the eighteenth century to the seized piece of mechanism should already tip us off to the need for the possessive and reductive formulation Tippoo’s Tiger, that is, the machine object’s troubling potentialities, its capacity to act not only as the Tiger’s Englishman but also as an oral eating and playing machine, the Englishman-­eating tiger-­organ. As the eighteenth-­century memorandum already intimates, this object or piece of mechanism remains compelling because of its hybridizing, altering assemblage. Within a three-­dimensionalized hunting or game piece enacting a scene of ingestion between totemic, effigial surrogates

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of colonial conflict—­animal and human, animate and inanimate, self and “other”—­there is also a player organ and moving mechanism. The tiger incorporates a visible hand-­cranked lever in its left shoulder that, when turned, raises the one moving part, the left forearm of the figure that goes up and down in an oscillating gesture of self-­defense and expiring submission. Lifting the tiger’s hide discloses a keyboard of eighteen buttons attached to musical pipes.37 In thematizing ingestion while projecting sound, the device links the aural penetration of the ear with oral incorporation through the mouth. Though displayed as an example of “Indian art” and discussed in, for example, religious studies scholar Richard Davis’s 1997 Lives of Indian Images as an “Indian image” with a resonant afterlife as postcolonial spectacle, this piece of mechanism exceeds the bounds of both the “image” and the classification “Indian.”38 Although commissioned by Tipu Sultan, the origin of the commission hardly settles the matter of its making. Davis cites the work of previous scholars who attribute the carving and painting to South Asian artists and the design and manufacture of the organ to French technicians: that is, Indian sculptural image on the outside and French or European machine on the inside. But such a division problematically maintains an imperial geographic distinction between “primitive” wooden effigy and modern mechanism; it also depends on minimizing and even ignoring the complicating sight of the crank lever protruding from the tiger’s hide. Focusing on the animal part of Tippoo’s Tiger, historian Kate Brittlebank’s 1997 study of Tipu Sultan’s use of symbols places the Englishman-­ eating tiger-­organ automaton in the context of a program of tiger-­like symbols orchestrated by Tipu Sultan, such as the inclusion of a tiger in the fashioning of his throne. Brittlebank places this piece of mechanism in the context of eighteenth-­century south India and the legitimating and power-­producing strategies of a Muslim ruler in a predominantly Hindu region.39 Strikingly, she characterizes this space-­time locale as another world, a precapitalist, nonmodern one in which “there is no separation between spirit and matter” or, as she articulates later, between “human subjects and material objects.”40 The function of the Englishman-­ eating tiger-­organ is here understood as a symbolic object, a totemic tiger effigy circulated as part of a practice of kingship and statecraft that is somehow premodern and distinctly South Asian in its attribution of animistic and animal force to material objects.

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But what if we shift our attention from the Englishman-­eating tiger-­ organ as a static symbol to what this devouring automaton does? Tipu Sultan’s techniques for the assertion of what Brittlebank discusses as “universal kingship” are menacingly incorporative in another sense. The Englishman-­eating tiger-­organ enacts a rival mimesis of the practices of global capitalism and specifically the so-­called European imperial technique of hybridization, a usurping technology of transplanting animals, humans, and machines from all over the world and intermixing them into new assemblages. Like the Mughals and Marathas more generally, Tipu Sultan gathered at his court rare plants imported from France; animals from Europe, other parts of Asia, and Africa (e.g., a lion, a rhinoceros, and several tigers); technological objects including spectacles, barometers, clocks, printing presses, mathematical instruments, telescopes, and optical glasses commissioned from French, British, and Dutch artisans and instrument makers; and even the artisans themselves.41 The court did not just function as another market for European luxury goods or locus of accumulative consumption of material objects as rarities from the West but also made itself a rival center of hybridizing, incorporating production, a manufacturing nexus for skilled technicians put to work in, for example, “the fabrication or imitation of the cloths of all countries.”42 This practice of mimetic rivalry extends not only to the Englishman-­ eating tiger-­organ but also to the commemorative golden medal that was presented in 1800 to Lord Cornwallis, the former governor-­general of India, and is now present in the Tippoo’s Tiger case at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Designed by Matthew Boulton, engraved by Conrad Heinrich Kuchler, and struck in gold at the Birmingham Mint in 1799, the medal is marked by a Union Jack flying over the field of battle in which the positions are inverted: Britain is no longer a human effigy but an alchemical digestive lion mounting the tiger that is supposed to represent at once Tipu Sultan and India.43 And yet the medal can make but an ambivalent appropriation of Tipu Sultan’s banner with its slogan “asad allah ul-­ghalib,” a phrase that, as Kate Brittlebank observes, may be translated as either “the victorious lion of God” or “the victorious tiger of God.”44 We may see in the seizure and presentation of the Englishman-­ eating tiger-­organ, its labeling Tippoo’s Tiger, and its recasting in the commemorative medal an effort to vanquish the countercolonial threat

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of reversibility and transformation activated by this rival ingesting machine, this material/sound hybrid that literally bites back in its reversible intertwining of the stereotypes of the waving hand of expiring effeminacy and the jaws of rabid masculinity. The tail of the tiger and the crank lever loom over the falling hand of the English colonial soldier. And yet the two figures remain linked mouth to neck in an embrace of masculinized animal and feminized English colonial soldier. In The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (1983), Ashis Nandy characterizes the psychological consequences of colonization in India in terms of a negative colonial projection that is incorporated into the subaltern “self.” In Nandy’s terms, British colonization imposed a general “cultural consensus” that equated political and socioeconomic dominance with aggressive masculinity against androgyny, homosexuality, and polymorphous sexuality understood as “primitive.”45 However, the queer hybrid embrace of Tippoo’s Tiger is not reducible to the introjection of aggressive masculinity and the projection of androgyny, homosexuality, and polymorphous sexuality. Part of the machine’s threat is its re-­presentation of militant colonial conflict as an entangled assemblage of eroticized consumption that hollows out British imperial property claims to disembodied rationality and martial masculinity: hence the elision of the prostrate Englishman from the display label, Tippoo’s Tiger. This piece of mechanism not only questions the restricted categories of visual art object, technological apparatus, and scientific/musical instrument; it turns inside out the boundaries of Indian and European, top and bottom, masculine and feminine. At once animal and human effigy and machine, an automaton set into predetermined motion and sound by the turn of crank lever and a musical instrument that may be played improvisationally, an object commissioned by a Muslim ruler of a Hindu region out of triangulated imperial conflict between the competing powers of Mysore, Britain, and France—­this transculturating object is what I will call a “heterogeneous machine.” Borrowing from Félix Guattari’s 1992 Chaosmosis: An Ethico-­Aesthetic Paradigm, his rethinking of machines and particularly their orality as world-­remaking devices, I turn critical emphasis from questions about the iconography, symbolic power, and artifactual status of Tippoo’s Tiger to what this object does and may yet do.46 In pursuing the agency of objects or unruly objects of sight, I would like to consider particularly how this machine

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object, in its double effigy casings and multiple mechanisms, catalyzes the potential for machinic heterogenesis or becoming-­other, that is, the potential for a differently mapped body of connections between the geopolitical orders of here and there, the British soldier and the totemic tiger by means of a machine of sight, sound, touch, and movement for generating altered hybrid subjectivities. In 1808 this heterogeneous machine was placed on display as part of the museum and library set up in the East India House in London where it became, according to historian Richard Altick, “one of the most famous individual exhibits in London show history.”47 The most often quoted contemporary response to the display, John Keats’s poem “The Cap and Bells, or, The Jealousies” (written after his visit to the East India House in 1819), diminishes the massive, nearly six-­ foot, object to a “play-­thing” and a “pretty toy” and displaces it to an India-­turned-­fairyland. And yet Keats also calls the device the “Man-­ Tiger-­Organ.” And the poem’s redisplay of the object is also situated, however ironically, in terms of a viewer response not of curiosity or wonder but of fear: “he feared less / A dose of senna-­tea or nightmare Gorgon / Than the Emperor when he play’d on his Man-­Tiger-­Organ.”48 Such stuff of satiric wit also contains a certain uncanny residue not completely dispelled by the device of miniaturization. Doses of senna-­tea, from the herb imported from India, were then taken as a laxative. By comparing the fear induced by the spectacle of watching and hearing the “Emperor” playing on the “Man-­Tiger-­Organ” to dread of a laxative, the poem connects hearing and sight to the bowels and the anus. The image of the “nightmare Gorgon” was deployed as a counterrevolutionary emblem for the radical rearrangement of the body politic in, for example, Edmund Burke’s 1791 Reflections on the Revolution in France, and such contemporary cartoons as Thomas Rowlandson’s The Contrast of 1792 portray Brittania in the guise of Athena and the rival French empire as Medusa.49 Though Medusa’s gaze turned men to stone, the “nightmare Gorgon” is linked in the poem instead to the drinking of a liquid that makes other bodily contents flow, a loss of control further haunted by the French Revolution’s enactment of beheading and, by extension, the loss of reason. The machine’s mechanism was often referred to as its internal organs (plural) or bowels, gesturing to an implicit threat of something more terrifying than being made to lose control of one’s bowels. Indeed, the spectacle as restaged by “The Cap

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and Bells” invests the object with an effective agency with consequences far worse than a dose of senna-­tea or the nightmarish sight of the Gorgon, for the “Man-­Tiger-­Organ,” particularly when played, transformed the act of looking into a multisensory risk to the spectator in connecting sight, sound, taste, and internal sensation, suggesting the radical convertibility of matter and posing an assimilation of sensory input that threatened the fundamental alteration of bodily substance.50 If, as I have argued, projection machines worked as technologies for managing colonial ingestion—­a kind of eating of the “other” as charged commodities of spices, sugar, coffee, and tea in metropolitan marketplaces that posed an ongoing threat of consumption from within by a racialized and gendered “otherness”—­the heterogeneous machine of the Englishman-­eating tiger-­organ gives us an instance in which technologies of colonial terror and their dynamics of ingestion and projection were appropriated to parodic purposes by the very subalterns whose primitive magic was supposed to have been conquered or contained. Such countermimicry or parody through a surrogate machine object exposes the already unstable difference between subject and object and between supposedly “disembodied” rational sight and sensation, by embodying sight itself as a sensory orifice, the eye a consuming hole like the mouth that renders the observer porous to physical alteration. While I have shuttled back and forth between the making of the Englishman-­eating tiger-­organ, the seizure of Mysore, and the transit of the Englishman-­eating tiger-­organ and its redisplay at the East India House in London, I began my analysis in the present with the object’s current display at the Victoria and Albert Museum because I wish to insist on the aftereffects of this object as a playable synthesizer that, in its consuming and converting assemblage, exceeds efforts to reduce its work to a static effigy of reified difference or a memorial to a now dead countercolonial moment, freezing a transformative revenge wish into one that will never be fulfilled. With its consuming hybridity, this object continues to play on the internal instability of machines of projection, activating the implicit terrorizing effect of projection in that alchemical sense of being subject to changes in substance. Unfixable and in flux between the contested colonial sites of south India, France, and England, this transculturating heterogeneous machine destabilizes the machinic production of disembodied rational vision, the perspective of objectivity

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and the story—­particularly Weber’s narrative—­of modernization and the growth of capitalism as a distinctly European formation involving the progressive ascendancy of technology and the assumed attendant rationalization and disenchantment of the world. This consuming object of machine agency exposes and activates the doubled and seemingly contradictory function of early modern technologies that were supposed to reveal the mechanism of their operation and thereby demystify and strip the aura away from marvels and that yet trafficked in the wonder and magic of objects to produce effects of power. The Englishman-­ eating tiger-­organ performs the work of a technology of enchantment that makes obvious the appetitive introjection inherent in the machines of global capitalism. If enchantment literally means a singing upon or against, this organ—­with its doubled bellows noises of simulated animal growls and human cries expanded and unlimitedly recomposed by the addition and accompaniment of the keyboard’s adjustments—­sings with its organs upon and with human and animal bodies and matter, both organic and machinic, echoing back to us, with its incorporations, the impossibility of sensory separation or rational vision as anything but a rationalizing disavowal of the bowels of global colonial capitalism, our own “savage” violence, animality, and vulnerable objecthood.

Passionate Introjection: Vodou Possession as Magic Technology First published in 1938—­two years before Ortiz’s Cuban Counterpoint— ­Harlem Renaissance anthropologist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston’s ethnography Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica can also be read as a critical recasting of such accounts of modernity and scientific progress as Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism that trades in a complex and ambivalent mimicry of the machinery of dominance in its taking in and mobilization of abjected objects that perform possession by the law and the gods in ways that call out the violence of empire and its norms and laws. The ongoing circulation of Hurston’s Tell My Horse with its ambivalent critical offering of spirit possession as a passionate practice of introjecting even what is feared, loathed, or cast off resonates with performances of possession from the turn of the twentieth century to the present that recast Vodou as an everyday technology of knowledge production and political negotiation with the potential to act on bodies and matter and thus insinuate

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itself in destabilizing the very structures of the production of effects of power by risking loss and even self-­annihilation. When reissued in 1990 Hurston’s work ushered in a decade’s fascination with New World syncretic religions—­Obeah, Pocomania, Santería, and especially Vodou—­ as “queer technologies.”51 Despite the border surveillance and immigration control of their adepts and practitioners, Afro-­Caribbean sacred objects and rituals are apt to appear in unexpected places, riding the tides of Euro-­American acquisition and the successive waves of diaspora.52 With the publication of, among other novels, Canadian writer William Gibson’s Count Zero (1986), Vodou became an idiom for the cyberpunk gnosis in the machine.53 In the introduction to the catalog for the major touring exhibition Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou (1995), Donald Cosentino conceives the ready incorporation of the detritus of global capitalism—­televisual images, Hollywood icons from Darth Vader to Rambo, and advertising packaging—­as Vodou’s capacity to transform the signs and the very tools of economic and cultural oppression into “new spiritual software.”54 He elaborates the techniques of Vodou as psychoanalytically overdetermined assemblages of the found and the made, polyvocal conjuring, and historically multilayered mélanges (from eighteenth-­century comic opera, freemasonry, memories of Africa, and the Baroque dramaturgy of Counter-­Reformation Catholicism to name a few) that together produce “working models of heaven.” Culminating with early commentator on camp Susan Sontag’s description of the “Happenings” of the 1960s Manhattan arts scene, the essay concludes with a view of the voguing balls of the 1980s as mirrors for Vodou seremoni (54). With its citing of an Oscar Wilde epigram to account for the appreciation of “gaudy” and “ecstatic” Counter-­Reformation art, and its finding of the grand mise-­en-­scène of Cecil B. DeMille in the extravagant bricolage of the ounfo or Vodou temple and superstar Madonna in the cross-­dressed “vamping” of the male servitors ridden by the goddess of love Ezili, this Vodou “heaven” begins to accrue a certain queer familiarity while, at the same time, the analogy reinfuses the bricolage of postmodern camp with a lost magical aura, the capacity of the fetish object to act on and transform a world of injury. While M. A. Greenstein’s essay “The Delirium of Faith” for World Art (1996) restates Cosentino’s caveat that Vodou is postmodern but that it has been since the seventeenth century, her essay formulates Vodou practices as at once a “creole of necessity” and a “high technology of

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the flesh and the spirit that solves both human and cosmic problems, and joins the postmodern cyberfest of open information systems.”55 As a “technology of cosmic intelligence,” Vodou is here disseminated as a strategic praxis or an “open” system that promises to reinfuse modernity with lost magic efficacy. Fascinating in their upsetting of easy distinctions between mind, flesh, material world, and spirit by their seeming defiance of the coordinates of time and space, these sacred practices promise the capacity not merely to mimic the real but to realize or conjure, as possible forms of being and doing, that which is disavowed in the symbolic realm of the law or the founding proscriptions of the social that form the subject and imagined community. But, at the same time, the prohibitive foreclosure of homosexuality also plays a central role in this reworking of Vodou as a queer technology with a lost auratic power to realize. Cosentino compares Vodou to the “houses” and voguing balls of transgender and transsexual blacks and Latinos made internationally famous in Jennie Livingston’s film Paris Is Burning (54). Trance possession in which initiates are ridden by the gods or lwas and performative impersonation or voguing are linked as means of bodily inhabiting or corporealizing those forms of being interdicted to those whom society positions as abject objects. Yet the comparison between drag and possession operates as a disappearing act. Cosentino’s analysis of voguing minimizes the elements of cross-­gender drag and limits the desire to be and become to categories of class and ethnicity. Whereas New York drag artists become figures of internalized racism and embody the limits of mimesis, Vodou seremoni is imbued with the power to entify. The claim is that “It [Vodou seremoni] does not simply recall; it creates anew” (55). But the photographs reproduced for the catalog cross what the analysis separates. “Love Ball II. Roseland, New York, 1980s” does not take on the representatives of white dominant privilege—­ the “college students, Wall street bankers, society snobs” or “butch cops” called out in the text and caption (54). In their place, the selected photograph represents the participants at the Love Ball arrayed in fabulous costumes of purple satin and metallic glitter that pull together elements of space age gear, Catholic liturgical vestments, the tortures of the Inquisition and colonial slavery, and the dazzle of the Las Vegas showgirl. The photograph bears visual evidence of the kinds of magical and religious bricolage attributed to Vodou combined with the queer

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transvestments that the analysis and captioning elides. Captioned “Transvestite initiates with oungan Silva Joseph in Bel-­Air, Port-­au-­ Prince, Haiti,” the companion photograph appears in the catalog with an analysis that makes no mention of what aspect of cultural practice “transvestite initiates” signifies (55). And yet the catalog’s readers may recall the citations of Oscar Wilde and Madonna that are preceded by the mention that the lwa mistress Ezili, associated with luxury, is the patron of masisi, translated as “gays” (35). Cosentino’s “Imagine Heaven” essay makes over Vodou by analogy to postmodern camp as queer but by performing a certain refusal to read signs of nonnormative erotic practices. This kind of casting out from the domain of analysis returns the interdicted queer as an auratic pastiche of an unspecified outlaw erotic and the supernatural—­the older signification of “queer”— ­but at the potential expense of the officiates whose work it takes up and yet disavows, those who identify as queers of color. Alternatively, however, we might take the juxtaposition of these photographs as the slide of similitude, not opposition; the performative practice of drag might be its own practice of possession, holding out the possibility of entifying not just transformed bodies but a hovering version of heaven in the altered social space between them. Critical practices of fashioning Afro-­Caribbean syncretic religions into a queer technology for cultural renewal may do little for those whom it would seem to hail into the very center. As Latin American critic Nelly Richard cautions in “Cultural Peripheries: Latin America and Postmodernist De-­centering” (1995), we would do well to suspect the invitation for heretofore marginalized subcultures to come out to the center’s banquet as “prominent parts of the new antiauthoritarian modulation of a postmodernity finally respectful of diversity.”56 Richard’s caution rests on a particular directionality, an invitation extended from center to margin that may seem to erode the very terms “center” and “margin” by its production and celebration of transnational cultures or transcultures (as in the arts of African Diaspora, the arts of pan-­Caribbean créolité, the new internationalism, etc.) and yet does so on the center’s terms. However, centers and peripheries are not so clear. The 1990 Red, Hot, and Blue album, one of the first major AIDS benefit music compilations (a remix and reperformance of Cole Porter songs by contemporary pop artists), rearticulated the connection between “queer” and Vodou. Replacing “white” with “hot,” the titling of this

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Cole Porter revival most obviously represents a reinsertion of the heat of desire back into the national red, white, and blue of the U.S. flag, the colors of the Union Jack, and the bleu, blanc, rouge of the flags of postrevolutionary France and Haiti that often seem to have no room for the queer and that which is marked as not “white.” Released in the United States amid violently inciting media representations of AIDS as a threat to the body politic often incarnated by vampiric representations of homosexuals and Haitian immigrants coming from a projected outside of the national community, the gesture of linguistic substitution returns the heat of shame onto a trio of colors that, since the eighteenth century, have claimed to signify liberty and the extension of rights. This turn deflects shame by fusing homosexual and Haitian in a hot embrace with the red, white, and blue, the bleu, blanc, rouge, and the red blood of AIDS as sign of something beyond death. “Red, hot, and blue” calls in the survival aesthetics of the Afro-­Caribbean syncretic religion Vodou: rituals of serving the spirits, the loa or lwa (pronounced the same way as the French word loi for “law”) that take the forms of the “red” Petwo, the “hot” Bizango with its phallic and funereal imagery, and the cool, “blue” Rada. The very prohibitions or law represented by the flag of a state or body politic that constitutes itself on the basis of a refused identification with the homosexual, the nonwhite or not quite white, and/or the person who is living with or has died from AIDS now becomes the site precisely for an eroticized repossession by the state’s abjected objects or “others.” Subjection to this law (the red, white, and blue or bleu, blanc, rouge) as possession by the Vodou lwas (the red, hot, and blue) enables the performance of loving as well as mourning the real or potential loss of what the state may proscribe. For the album, singer-­songwriter Sinéad O’Connor performed a rendition of Cole Porter’s 1929 song “You Do Something to Me” with the lamenting refrain: “Let me live ’neath your spell. You do that Voodoo that you do so well. For you do something to me that nobody else could do.” In this refrain, living and loving beneath the spell of the law is made possible by recourse to “voodoo.” Between its ungendered, nonsexualized, and ethnically and nationally unmarked pronouns, an unnamed “something” is done by the unspecified “you” to the equally unmarked “me.” And it is “voodoo” that signifies the unnamed, even the unnameable acts or currents of desire. The performative command

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“let me live ’neath your spell” also positions Vodou as another version of the law to which one is subject. But this version of the spell of the law promises to let the “me” live without having to lose the “you.” It is this understanding of Vodou as a tactic for the introjection of the law (both its promises and its prohibitions) by its most abjected objects (those whose loves and longings, whose very belongings to the imagined national community are prohibited or cast out) in rituals of possession by that law (in the form of Gods or lwas) that might promise the transformation of both the subjected subjects and the imagined community that I would like to consider. I am interested here in how Vodou possession may work as a volatile, critical practice of passionate introjection. In “Subjection, Resistance, Resignification: Between Freud and Foucault” (1997), Judith Butler suggests that passionate attachment to subjection (incorporating the law, the wounding command, as an object of ritualized seduction) also holds out the promise of unsettling the abasements of subjection and re-­forming both the subject and imagined community.57 One might thus ask, how is counternormative identity shaped by not just violent prohibition but an erotic attachment to the punishment of the law? And if such passionate attachments promise unsettlement, even reformation of a larger social order, what is the fate of the subaltern or queer subject in such transformations? Butler’s essay phrases the subject’s attachment to the law’s woundings as an occupation, a “being occupied by” that is the precondition for recasting this power that confers identity. Butler writes, “As a further paradox, then, only by occupying—­being occupied by—­that injurious term can I resist and oppose it, recasting the power that constitutes me as the power I oppose.”58 But does this “being occupied by” necessarily become a possible means of resistance particularly if attachment to injury is of passionate intensity? And how may one distinguish between resistance and injury? The extent to which this language of occupation echoes the terms used for possession suggests that performances of Vodou may test the possibilities and limits of passionate introjection: while holding out the prospect of forming new subjects out of the ecstatic embrace of possession and the libidinally charged resignification of the instruments of subjection (serving the lwas), introjection of the law through the performance of possession exposes as it exploits the menace of likeness, calling out the law’s punishments and its necropolitics by a public ritual intensification of its morbid effects.59

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One might assert that Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My Horse also brokers the margin (Haitian Vodou) to the center (the United States) and thus already makes the kind of move for modernism that Richard remarks with caution in reference to postmodern. But what modernism is at issue? Some ostensibly ethnically unmarked modernism as in “modernist literature” or “modernist anthropology,” an ethnically specified modernism as in “African-­American modernism” (i.e., the Harlem Renaissance), or some gender or sexually inflected modernism?60 One might place Hurston’s Tell My Horse within what Deborah Gordon’s “Politics of Ethnographic Authority” (1990) calls the “discursive space that made African-­American identity a problem” and thus see Tell My Horse as the making of an authorizing counterculture appropriable for U.S. African-­Americans. And yet Gordon argues that the style of Tell My Horse “did not readily fit into the literary genres available for producing African-­American intellectual life, art, or folklore.”61 By “style” Gordon refers to the mixed presentation of Vodou (and Pocomania in Jamaica) as, at some moments, “folklore” art objects set out for admiration as if in a museum case and, at other moments, interpreted in a more apparently “scholarly” fashion. But what troubles both modes of representation is the text’s insistence on calling attention to its own narration and to the problems of its address. The chapter “Women in the Caribbean” that links the opening section on Jamaica to the two sections on Haiti calls out to its reader as “Miss America” and famously points to the precarious (im)possibility of its own narration as that of the “woman of genius” or ass who speaks to “darkish men” who “pay you no mind”: But now Miss America, World’s champion woman, you take your promenading self down into the cobalt blue waters of the Caribbean and see what happens. You meet a lot of darkish men who make vociferous love to you, but otherwise pay you no mind. If you to try to talk sense, they look at you right pitifully as if to say, “What a pity! That mouth that was made to supply some man (and why not me) with kisses, is spoiling itself asking stupidities about banana production and wages!” . . . It is just considered down there that God made two kinds of donkeys, one kind that can talk. (57–­58)

The “Miss America[s]” whom it addresses are not directly contrasted to “darkish men,” that is, the text’s readers are cast as neither “darkish”

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nor “lightish.” As Barbara Johnson has discussed with reference to Hurston’s essays “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (1928) and “What White Publishers Won’t Print” (1950) and her collection of folklore Mules and Men (1935), the positionality within and of the text is that of a self-­ different “me,” and in its address to “heterogeneous implied readers,” the text sets in motion a dynamic of difference within communities of imagined sameness (in terms of national citizenship, race, gender, and/ or sexuality) that undercuts any attempts to fix “inside” and “outside.”62 Furthermore, this question of address is not just a matter of to what preexisting audience the text may be said to call out. It also calls community, a space of transnational belonging, into being. One might, therefore, argue that Tell My Horse translates Vodou practice, marked as Haitian rather than “American,” to forge a different space that connects the “Miss America[s]” it hails to “Women in the Caribbean.” And yet this community is here forged through a bemoaning that joins, the mourning of a missing term, the darkish men who would quite literally pay you mind (and give value to your text by “paying” attention). Hurston’s hybrid text of folktales, political commentary, how-­to instructions for remedies and spells, and photographs takes its readers (the ethnically unmarked “Miss America[s]” it addresses) to a Caribbean under the “shadow” of U.S. military occupation. Tell My Horse opens its chapter on “Zombies” with an imagined interrogation as if the text’s narrator were on the witness stand in a U.S. court: “What is the whole truth and nothing else but the truth about Zombies?” And the narrator answers the positivist effort to establish a final difference between truth and lies, life and death with a third option: Here in the shadow of the Empire State Building, death and the graveyard are final. It is such a positive end that we use it as a measure of nothingness and eternity. We have the quick and the dead. But in Haiti there is the quick, the dead, and then there are Zombies. (179)

Asked not to lie, the text’s narrator responds that she cannot supply the truth “whole” but that she can show the “broken remnant, relic, or refuse of Felicia Felix-­Mentor in a hospital yard” (179). As if in evidence, the text presents us with a remnant of a revenant, a photograph (Figure 23) of a woman who stares out blindly, her eyes obscured by a shadow, so that we come face to face with the Zombie named Felicia Felix-­Mentor.63

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Figure 23. Zora Neale Hurston, “Felicia Felix-­Mentor, the Zombie.” Photograph in

Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938; New York: Harper & Row, 1990), 180. Reprinted with permission of Victoria Sanders and Associates, LLC, and the Zora Neale Hurston Trust.

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To the extent that the woman Zombie here walks under the shadow of U.S. empire, the text also presents Vodou as a Haitian practice that has survived the U.S. military occupation of Haiti of the 1930s. Tell My Horse’s central bloodbath, the chapter “Rebirth of a Nation,” makes reference, in its title, to U.S. filmmaker D. W. Griffith’s infamous filmic narrative of the rise of the KKK. Birth of a Nation produced a myth of endangered white purity in the form of white womanhood by the making up of a blackface threat, the performance of the stereotype of the black male sexual predator. Hurston’s chapter titled “Rebirth of a Nation” tells, in the form of a Manichean parable, the story of the massacre of political prisoners in Haiti by the Haitian army under then president Guillaume Sam (bloody “revolution” and “war”) and the arrival of the U.S. marines (“peace”) as a fraught parable of the inextricability of black and white. The chapter culminates with a disturbing sign: a “black plume with a white hope” (72).64 What the text brings into the United States (Vodou) it takes from the location (Haiti) where we find the United States already outside its imagined borders. And while military occupation may represent a triumphalist “white hope” of imagined purity, a body politic that remains “pure” even as it becomes estranged by traversing its borders into a “black plume,” Tell My Horse brings the disavowed something beyond death into the nation-­ space of the United States by placing the woman Zombie, spirit-­possessed serviteurs, and dismembered corpses right under the shadow (however long) of the Empire State Building. What possible community does the injunction Tell My Horse forge under the shadow of U.S. transnational empire? The pivotal chapter “Parlay Cheval Ou (Tell My Horse)” that gives the book its title introduces the one Vodou god or lwa neither African nor European: Guedé. Hurston characterizes Guedé as a creation of the Americas, a phallic god of the dead, a New World cigar-­smoking cinder dandy of the cemetery in black top hat and overcoat who manifests himself by “mounting a subject as a rider mounts a horse” (220). All the Haitian lwas possess their serviteurs this way. What makes Guedé distinctive in Hurston’s text is the everyday use made of performing being ridden by Guedé. In Hurston’s interpretation of the use of possession by this god, the introjection of the outspoken and revelatory qualities attributed to Guedé, the phrase “parlay cheval ou” operates as a “blind for self-­expression”

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or a “cover” under which to say what one might otherwise lack the courage to articulate: One is forced to believe that some of the valuable commentators are “mounted” by the spirit and that others are feigning possession in order to express their resentment general and particular. That phrase “Parlay cheval ou” is in daily, hourly use in Haiti and no doubt it is used as a blind for self-­expression. (221)

Hurston’s text takes its enabling guise for its aesthetics of renewal or community forging by enacting just such critical performances of possession. Caribbean and African-­American literary studies scholar Kevin Meehan asserts in his essay “Decolonizing Ethnography” (2001) that this guise is one of “social protest” out of which Hurston builds a “dissenting form of transnational culture” on the basis of the experiences of Black Diaspora: In my view, this identification with the loa of social protest serves as the crux of Hurston’s larger text-­building strategy: “tell my horse” is a blind for Hurston’s own self-­expression, allowing her to criticize not only the U.S. presence, but also the locally compounded practices of race, class, caste, and gender oppressions that Caribbeans inflict on one another. . . . In addition, though, I think we should . . . see Hurston as working to produce a dissenting form of transnational culture grounded in African Diasporan manipulations of the public sphere.65

I would like to argue that Tell My Horse possesses and is possessed by the law in an effort to “rebirth a nation” in the form of a transnational community.66 Rather than a preexisting ground, however, this altered transnational public sphere, I would argue, is one that Tell My Horse endeavors to call in. But before we assume that this altered transnational public sphere extends membership to all those that the nation (as in the United States and Haiti) abjects, we need to take a closer look at who is mounted and to what ends. Those who do the calling, the officiates or serviteurs, are those the law dispossesses such as the “market women,” “the domestic servant,” the “lesbian” (219–­22).67 And though Guedé is said to belong to all the dispossessed as the “god of the poor,” Hurston’s text speaks through one particular “tragic case” of Guedé’s appearance as a “lesbian.” The passage merits consideration in full:

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A tragic case of a Guedé mount happened near Pont Beudet. A woman known to be a lesbian was “mounted” one afternoon. The spirit announced through her mouth, “Tell my horse I have told this woman repeatedly to stop making love to women. It is a vile thing and I object to it. Tell my horse that this woman promised me twice that she would never do such a thing again, but each time she has broken her word to me as soon as she could find a woman suitable for her purpose. But she has made love to women for the last time. She has lied to Guedé for the last time. Tell my horse to tell that woman I am going to kill her today. She will not lie again.” The woman pranced and galloped like a horse to a great mango tree, climbed it far up among the top limbs and dived off and broke her neck. (222)

Just as every revolution would seem, in Tell My Horse, to demand its ritual sacrifice, so, too, at the center of this text we have not merely beaten mules and talking horses, but also the vehicle of the possessed “lesbian” who performs a public revelation of her desires in the language of prohibition and punishment. Recall the injunction to tell “nothing else but the truth.” And, in response, the text issues its own command, “Tell my horse,” from the mouth of the horse who does the telling or, rather, the lying and making love to women until she as he or he as she ends up with a broken neck. This scene might be dismissed as merely an unremarkable instance of the sacrifice of the figure of the defiant “lesbian” who sleeps only with women to the cause of the nation’s renewal by the heterosexual reproduction of its people. However, this is a scene of complicated multiple incarnation in which there is an unsettled and unsettling circuit: the narrator speaks through the Haitian God of the Dead becoming “a woman known to be a lesbian” who speaks as a punishing lwa in a public revoicing or performative possession of the law. At once the morbid introjection of a punishing law and the performance of an introjection, a punishing possession by the lwa and law that calls out by making a spectacle of its violence, it is this scene of multiple incarnation and volatile introjection that stages the very possibility of the book, its potential to talk back to the imperial United States and to the occupied nation of Haiti in an effort to entify an altered and alternative transnational public sphere. What kind of talking back is this that gives passionate voice to the law’s very punishing injunction and culminates in its execution on the body of the “lesbian”? How we read the scene of the “Guedé mount”

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would seem to be conditioned by the either/or framing the text gives us. On one side of the slash is a case of “real” possession in which a woman, a “known lesbian,” is mounted by Guedé, is made to proclaim that “she has made love to women for the last time” and that “she will not lie again,” and is forced to dive off a mango tree to her death. And on the other is an equally fatal instance of “feigned” possession or what, for example, Kevin Meehan describes as possession by “the voice of strong social protest” that “permits one woman to cry out, before committing suicide, against the heterosexism that has censured her ‘lesbian’ identity.”68 However, nowhere else in Tell My Horse are we allowed the securing certainty of an either/or. I read this scene as a key condensation point of the complexities and contradictions of passionate introjection: the voicing of heteronormativity as law through the mixed enacting of its opposite. I began with the question of how the subject and alternative imagined community may be shaped not just by violent prohibition but by a performed passionate attachment to the law. Tell My Horse introjects the punishment of the law. Indeed, its most lethal instruments make the “lesbian” as an identity possible in the sense of publicly articulable. But the “lesbian” appears only at the moment of her death or sacrifice, that is, when she is prevented from performing “lesbian” (making love to women) any longer. Hurston’s Tell My Horse would thus seem to endeavor to “rebirth a nation” by it founding its claim to procreativity on the broken neck of the dead “lesbian” that it mounts. Tell My Horse calls this case “tragic,” and yet the question of what sort of alternative transitional public sphere under the shadow of U.S. empire it might effect pivots precariously on whether this performance of possession and introjection of the law opens a space in which to mourn the loss of the “lesbian” it calls into public articulation. Let me compare this scene of performing “lesbian” to that of becoming (heterosexual) woman in the narrative description of how a Jamaican bride is prepared to serve her “master.” Its long, rolling exposition of detail also performs its work on the reader: Now the subtleties begin. . . . She [the old woman] begins and massages the girl from head to foot with this fragrant unction [extract of khus khus root in oil]. The toes, the fingers, the thighs, and there is a special motional treatment for every part of the body. . . . She carries this

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same light-­fingered manipulation down the body and the girl swoons. She is revived by a mere sip of rum in which a single leaf of ganga has been steeped. . . . The girl revives and the massage continues. She swoons again and is revived. . . . She is in a twilight state of awareness, cushioned on a cloud of love thoughts. (19)

Both “possessions” (the one by Guedé, the other by “love thoughts” of her master) require physical relationships to other women that, it would seem, must be renounced. One form of possession ends in death and the other with new life. Readers are told that the bride is taught that “Love killed no one. . . . And thus here went no frightened, shaking figure under a veil. No nerve-­wracked female behaving as if she were facing her doom” (20). And yet, once stated, “doom” is not so readily dissipated. Though seemingly opposed scenes of possession—­one leading to a life of love and the other to its loss in death—­they also cross in what has produced this cushioning “cloud of love thoughts.” These losses, of the unnamed “lesbian” and the women with whom she made love, this “twilight” at the fingertips of an “old woman,” are placed in the realm of a death, a sphere of potentially extinguished revolt, but let us not forget that Hurston’s Tell My Horse insists on not just the quick and the dead but the Zombie, the haunting spectrality of the living dead. Further, in Haiti, History, and the Gods (1995), Joan Dayan discusses the gender politics of the permeability of life and death in Vodou: For those who live, the dead threaten to become objects of sorcery or catalysts of revenge. If not served, fed, or remembered, they can become evil and unpredictable. . . . Most of the spirits called “evil,” whether lougawou (vampires), djablès (she-­devils), or soucriant, sucette, or soucougnan (suckers), are women.69

Tell My Horse seems to cast out the old woman, the bride before her wedding, the Zombie Felicia Felix-­Mentor, and the “lesbian.” However, these figures are not dispelled but, rather, haunt the transnational public sphere that Tell My Horse works to conjure, reminding that passionate attachment to the law does kill some but potentially without finality and without annilihating the capacity that what is cast out of that public sphere may return as shadowed but also shadowing remainders and reminders, calling out for recognition of the loss of the capacity to love that refuses the refuse heap. In the book’s title chapter,

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“Parlay Cheval Ou (Tell My Horse),” Hurston describes Guedé in terms not only of speech but also of revelatory vision: “When a ‘mount’ of this spirit is making devastating revelations the common comment is ‘Guedé pas drah.’ (Guedé is not a sheet), that is, Guedé covers up nothing” (223). Confronting the text’s readers or witnesses with the question of how they will view and respond to the text’s own revelations of unsettling apparitions, the sheet of the page that becomes the site of projections not so easily dispelled, Tell My Horse restages the scene of the casting of images of affecting power, incomplete projections that return as unsettled introjections without an easy resolution. Further, rather than occulting the susceptibility of the body to the image performances of covering nothing, Tell My Horse vividly narrates the performance of the permeable body without devices of the negative spectator to take the affective burden off the addressees of the performance. The use of Vodou possession as a magic technology of knowing and uncovering in Tell My Horse carries the implication that the punishing law that would make “lesbian” equal death and death speak a final sentence may yet be possessed and transformed through the response of the text’s addressees. But this is an address that may never reach its destination, for this is an urgent call without any guarantee of return, for it calls on the profoundly troubling doubleness of introjection, our introjection that Athena Athanasiou rearticulates, in conversation with Judith Butler, as the volatilely charged process and condition of dispossession. In Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (2013), Athanasiou compels us to attend to both sides of dispossession as a term for the “fundamental dependency and relationality” that gives the lie to the fantasized “impermeable self-­sufficiency of the liberal subject” and, at the same time, for those “imposed injuries, painful interpellations, occlusions and foreclosures, modes of subjugation that call to be addressed and redressed.” Addressing both sides of this condition of dispossession without recourse to yet more proprietarian claims of possessive individualism, Athanasiou and Butler call for the practice of the “performative in the political” that avows the trace, the remnants and revenants of primary passions and losses and a becoming in relation and in common not by an imagined gesture of being able to throw off or out the introjected law but, rather, by “assuming and resignifying injurious interpellations and impossible passions.”70 But this public assumption or taking on and in of the ways in which one has been painfully and

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often violently hailed, the affective and sensory inhabitation of the space of impossible passions is hardly a feel-­good praxis, and resignification may endeavor to stall or delay the death sentence but is thereby also subject to its flow. In reckoning with these difficulties of the unsettled and unsettling resemblance between the docile subjection of the disciplined fortress ego that introjects authority in strict obeisance to the law by which the subject is both possessed and dispossessed and the performative mimicry of violent introjection as an exercise of resistant agency, this chapter has necessarily traveled far in search of a small aperture of eruptive possibility in the scene of projection, spanning the strange, recursive time-­space of the psychogeographies of empire. Moving from the eighteenth-­century contestation of British overseas empire in India and an Englishman-­ eating tiger-­organ automaton that persists in a museum case in London to the performance of Vodou spirit possession as a magic technology, from homoerotic masculinity in a battle between competing powers to the eroticized performance of Guedé by the “lesbian” in Hurston’s account of early twentieth-­century Haiti, the chapter charts the uneasy place or, rather, displacements of the possibilities and limits of intro­ jection—­the taking in of what is cast off, feared, or loathed—­under the long shadow of empire and its techniques of paranoid and morbid projection that construct a subject of reason by the disavowal of the vulnerable spectatorial body that may still not have a place in our present but haunts with a call for our recognition.

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chapter four

Along Enlightenment’s Cast Shadows

In the complex pedagogical scene of projection that endeavors to produce the subject as a disembodied witness who exercises rational vision, the action of shedding light to cast out or eliminate the shadows of superstition, false belief, the susceptibility of witness, and the spectator’s own bodily vulnerability is not only to illumine. Such shadow projecting is also to participate in a volatile but also potentially self-­perpetuating motion machine, for to shed light upon is also to cast the very shadows the scene is to eliminate. Indeed, the scene of projection necessarily depends precariously on the fungible dynamics of the umbral thresholds of inside and out, projection and introjection. Crucial to Freud’s theorization of the disciplined fortress ego across the essays published between 1923 and 1925—­“The Ego and the Id,” “Economic Problems of Masochism,” and “Negation”—­is the recasting of that “special agency” elaborated in “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) and taken up crucially again in “The Uncanny” (1919). From the essay on the uncanny through the essay on negation, Freud reformulated the exercise of this special agency that takes the ego as its stringent charge not as an exceptional and pathological condition but as a generalized model for the formation of the subject out of not just its excoriation (the denunciative flaying or casting off of the tremulous body the witness is not supposed to have) but also the haunting of its very core.1 Introduced in “Mourning and Melancholia” as the unconscious taking in of a lost object of charged attachment not as an avowed and grievable loss but as a withdrawal of cathexis that turns round against the ego 159

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to take the ego as a penal object, this special agency is analyzed by a gesture of comparative negation that endeavors to distinguish melancholia from what it is not (the “normal affect of mourning”). This practice of negation is the exercise of the psychoanalytic investment in enlightenment experiment with projection and especially that material and technical metaphor for the production of knowledge and subjectivity: the casting of light. “Dreams have served as the prototype in normal life for narcissistic mental disorders,” Freud begins “Mourning and Melancholia”; “we will now try to throw some light on the nature of melancholia by comparing it with the normal affect of mourning” (243). This shedding of light exposes the mechanism of this special agency by the shadow-­trace of the lost object that sets the scene for its harsh judgment or the critical activity of the ego as altered by this “identification,” introjection, or the casting inward of the lost object. The enlightenment material metaphorics of the opening lines of “Mourning and Melancholia” and its shedding of light help to make sense of the curiosity of the terms in which the action of this special agency is phrased: “Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, and the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency, as though it were an object, the forsaken object” (249). In this scene, we see not the lost object but the shadow that it has cast across the ego, a shadow that sets the ego in a relation of vexed semblance to the forsaken object. The shadow cast makes the ego not just objectificable, that is, into the semblance of an object, but one treated “as though it were” the forsaken object. In the 1919 essay on “The Uncanny” in which Freud famously articulates the “unhomely” or unheimlich as the shadow boomerang of the lost, disavowed, or forsaken object, the familiar that returns in the guise of the unfamiliar, this special agency has a crucial place.2 Building on Otto Rank’s 1914 work “Der Doppelgänger” on the double and its connections with the reflections in the mirror and the shadow that reduplicate the body, Freud doubles back to repeat the work on that special agency with a crucial difference. Arguing that Rank “also lets in a flood of light on the surprising evolution of the idea [of the double],” Freud goes on to set the mise-­en-­scène of the performance of this special agency in terms of a setup of distanced spectatorship: “A special agency is slowly formed there, which is able to stand over against the rest of the ego, which has the function of observing and criticizing the self and of exercising a censorship within the mind, and

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which we become aware of as our ‘conscience.’” It is not just that this special agency takes the ego as its object but as the object of observation at a contrastive distance against the ego. While Freud maintains that it is in the “pathological case of delusions of being watched” that this special agency becomes dissociated from the ego and “discernible to the physician’s eye,” the pathological case becomes generalized to the larger social field as a characterization of enlightenment modernity in which the shadow double takes the perceptible form of “visions of terror” that correspond to ostensibly surpassed aspects of the ego (such as love attachments and forms of desire considered “primitive”) projected outwards, including mental states or ways of thinking such as the belief in gods and spirits ostensibly banished by the force of enlightenment secularism.3 Read alongside the use of the persecutorial shadow double as the rear projection backward of what has supposedly “long since been left behind” and must (once again) be cast out by that special agency in “The Uncanny,” the past tense of the articulation of the material and technical metaphor of “thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego” (emphasis mine) in “Mourning and Melancholia” (249) emerges as not just crucial to the generalization of melancholy as a larger social process but a way of understanding history as a secreted, even fugitive shadow archive of the adumbral traces in the unconscious of the “history” of the subject’s object-­choices whether avowed and grievable or those that cannot be acknowledged or mourned and are cast out only to return as uncanny doubles. But, as Frantz Fanon reminds in Black Skin, White Masks, this shadow archive of what Jung called the “collective unconscious” is not just any historical shadow archive of the disavowed, cast off, or ostensibly surmounted: it is a colonial one that Fanon describes as a raking topographical scheme, a pitched battle of light and shadow: “In the remotest depth of the European unconscious an inordinately black hollow has been made in which the most immoral impulses, the most shameful desires lie dormant. And as every man climbs upward toward whiteness and light, the European has tried to repudiate this uncivilized self, which has attempted to defend itself.”4 This “mechanism of projection,” as I discussed in chapter 3, is rearticulated by Fanon as far from inevitable but rather a forcible and alienating “cultural imposition” that, in the hideously distorting smoke and mirrors of the colonial scene of projection, does not play with but places

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light and shadow as fixing impositions that convert the blackened subject into a “phobogenic object” of disavowed sexuality, desire, and animality on the side of that “darkness, shadow, shades, night, the labyrinths of the earth, abysmal depths” making black the vector of shame as in “blacken someone’s reputation.” The shadow of the object that fell upon the ego is the postcolonial condition as a scene of projection in which the cast of light is also an enwhitening in which light and white constellate around “the bright look of innocence, the white dove of peace, magical, heavenly light” and “a magnificent blond child” as figure of “hope.”5 This Manichean epidermal schema of light and shadow is also a relentlessly plotted colonization of time along an imperial timeline on which the black shadow is the past better left behind and the radiant blond child the hope of the future. Thus, for Fanon, freedom from the binds of this abjecting shadow cast across the ego means negating the one-­way directionality and determinations of history as a body, a blackened and abject body he will not own. Taking his body as its own foundation, Fanon declares: “The body of history does not determine a single one of my actions.”6 But, as work on queer temporality, backwardness, and shame has endeavored to teach us, we are not so readily extricated from the umbrage of the shadow archive of history.7 As I consider in this chapter, the cast shadow-­trace and the blush of shame also have their volatile potentials for creativity and even resistant, critical transformation within the very site of enlightenment projection and introjection and its projection technologies that not only endeavored to produce the subject of rational vision but also instrumentalized the cast shadow to produce the ostensible visible truths of fetishized, binary difference on the body, difference not just of race, gender, and sexuality but also of time with certain bodies marked as signs of the livable future and others consigned to the “primitive” and even dead past. The classificatory lines of the race, gender, and erotic assignment of bodies intersect in the shadows of the Enlightenment and specifically in the technology of shadow projection employed in the development of what Johann Caspar Lavater attempted to position as a new science.8 This pseudoscience of physiognomy produced the contours of the regime of normative and deviant bodies and its colonial archive, the branding effects of which we still feel.9 The light-­projecting lantern was also the base element of the related machine precursors of the

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camera and the slide projector: the camera obscura, the magic lantern, the solar microscope, and the physionotrace. The lantern of the physionotrace was used to cast light onto faces and bodies in order to trace their shadows on the wall and produce physiognomic silhouettes as ways of seeing and knowing the character of the body turned shadow-­object.10 The process of tracing shadows is represented and allegorized in such eighteenth-­century prints as The Origin of Painting; or Portraits à la mode (Figure 24) in which we see a man tracing the shadow profile of a seated woman, a display of shadow portraits, and underneath them shadow puppetry in action using hands to create the shadow picture of a rabbit. Of course, as the casting of light inevitably produces shadows, the history of the use of light sources to create images necessarily includes consideration of the shadow. Yet in using the device of a child who makes shadows with his hands, the print The Origin of Painting also represents the shadow as the figure for the animal, childish, less developed, or “primitive” beginnings of representation going back to Plato’s cave. The print’s lightly comic treatment of the shadow as a figure for “primitive” beginnings (the child, the animal, and even woman) that the subject of reason has ostensibly moved beyond or past connects the technics for making shadow images to the psychoanalytic formulation of the self’s own alterity projected outward as a tethered and persecutory double. The use of technologies of light projection to create shadow pictures forms both a foundational and persistent part of the history of the use of technologies of projection as both colonial regulatory devices for the production of the disembodied subject of reason and as machines haunted by other ways of knowing and becoming.11 This chapter begins with a reconsideration of the physiognomic silhouette that attends seriously to the wildly ambivalent potential of Lavater’s assertion that what he calls the “shade” may assist the promotion of human understanding and love. The chapter then turns to the beginnings of photography and William Henry Fox Talbot’s alternate naming: “skiagraphy” or shadow writing. The chapter develops the argument that setting the early history of photography in relation to other devices for drawing with shadow and the myths that locate the origins of representation in the shadow allows us to bring out photography’s relation not only to fixity but also to volatility, desire, and transformation.12 The final section of the chapter focuses on the work of contemporary artist Kara Walker and her use of the technology of shadow projection

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Figure 24. Jean Ouvrier, The Origin of Painting; or Portraits à la mode, 1767. Etching

and engraving after painting by J. E. Schenau. Courtesy of the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture, University of Exeter.

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to reconsider the institution of the colonial photographic archive and its regulatory effects on the body. In his Physiognomische Fragmente (1775–­78), translated into English by Thomas Holcroft as Essays on Physiognomy (1789), Lavater asserts the “undeniable” existence of what he calls “national physiognomy” on the basis of what has become an analytic commonplace and cornerstone of art-­historical method: visual comparison.13 Opening the section on national physiognomy that culminates with lengthy supporting quotations from Buffon, Kant, and proto–­art historian Johann Winkelmann, Lavater instructs his readers: Compare a Negro and an Englishman, a native of Lapland and an Italian, a Frenchman and an inhabitant of Terra del Fuego. Examine their forms, countenances, characters, and minds. Their difference will be easily seen, though it will, sometimes, be very difficult to describe scientifically. (3:85)

We might read this discussion of what may be easily seen and yet described with difficulty as a distinction between the visual and the discursive. Yet for Lavater there is a crucial intervening step between that which enables the goal of the scientific description of physical matter and that which is the body’s shadow impression. The technology of the cast shadow and its mechanical tracing is positioned by Lavater’s Physiognomische Fragmente as the device that will address this difficulty of describing scientifically. In the section on the silhouette or what Lavater termed the “shade,” Lavater asserts that “Physiognomy has no greater, more incontrovertible certainty of the truth of its object than that imparted by shade” (2:110). The shade here promises to bring the claimed science of physiognomy in incontrovertible contact with its object, the surface features of the body and the secrets of the nature or physis of physiognomy’s name. While formally only a line drawn round a negative space filled in with solid ink rather than physical detail, the shade is to supply a natural grounding for the pseudoscience of physiognomy as a form of representation produced literally from the shadow cast by the proper and accurate illumination of the body. Let me recount at some length how Lavater positions the shade: SHADES are the weakest, most vapid, but, at the same time, when the light is at a proper distance, and falls properly on the countenance to take the profile accurately, the truest representation that can be given

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of man. The weakest, for it is not positive, it is only something negative, only the boundary line of half the countenance. The truest, because it is the immediate expression of nature, such as not the ablest painter is capable of drawing, by hand, after nature. (2:108)

Lacking in spirit or animation, namely life, the shade is positioned, nonetheless, as closest to physiognomy’s physis because it partakes of the sense of presence or the illusion that there is a body before the page casting this shadow, that it is the body itself making the representation. Yet we may also note Lavater’s calculated efforts to fix the shadow and control the illusion of presence, insisting, in the section on “Shades,” that these shades are outlines and further that they call for specific kinds of response. Lavater asserts that “shades collect the distracted attention, confine it to an outline, and thus render the observation more simple, easy, and precise. The observation, consequently the comparison” (2:110). Rhetorically, it is the shade’s absence of an interior that displaces controlling pressure onto its perimeter, confining the viewer’s attention to the fetishistically overdetermined lines of the brow, nose, lips, and hairs as marks of difference in terms of race, sex, and class. Yet, we may note as well the pedagogical directive to move from observation of the shade’s outline to the comparative space between shades, that is, to produce the conclusions of “national character.” Extensively translated and widely influential, Lavater’s Physiognomische Fragmente set itself the task not merely of developing skill in reading and describing the body but of generating both the technological means for producing more eloquent visual delineation and for creating the archive of images required for the implied and explicit comparisons that would ascribe character. It is no accident that Lavater should quote the Enlightenment philosophers of aesthetic judgment, for Lavater’s project is not just about the projected characters of these bodies turned shadow-­objects but also about the formation of character through the exercise of sense-­based judgment.14 The pedagogical goal of not merely representing but producing new subjects from the archive of shades the book both assembles and makes possible is made evident in the culminating phrase of the volume’s title: “for the promotion of human understanding and human love.” Such affectual goals wither to the status of the comical under the evidentiary weight of the punitive colonial archive inaugurated by the very technologies Lavater

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promotes.15 Yet, as much as the history of the tethering of the shadow to the ideologies of the racial, sexual, and gender consignment of bodies may be at irredeemable odds with the reparative and even redemptive possibilities of a phrase such as “for the promotion of human understanding and human love,” I would like to explore ways of taking seriously the connection forged in the Enlightenment between the tracing of cast shadows and the call to love without the demand to resolve into the impossible of the redemptive by considering the volatile properties of the negative space at the heart of Lavater’s shades, a space perhaps not so easily confined by its outline.

Shadow Writing at the Beginnings of Photography A dark salt-­fixed contact print from March 1839 (Figure 25) bears the imprint of a botanical specimen known as the Erica mutabilis.16 This prize remnant of the beginnings of photography turned museum object may seem quite far from the raced, sexed, and erotically assigned bodies of the colonial archive. A heath plant indigenous to South Africa but transplanted to England, the Erica mutabilis, characterized by the Latin word “mutabilis” for changeable or fickle, was the evidence that photographic pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot made as a special presentation gift to his friend the astronomer, mathematician, and chemical experimenter John Herschel (1792–­1871).17 Herschel may be best known for his efforts to map the southern celestial hemisphere from a base at the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, but he was also the early experimenter who developed a chemical fixative for prints and established the use of the terms “positive” and “negative.”18 Passing between Talbot and Herschel, the shadowy monumentalized and yet delicate African transplant that signifies the protean in its very taxonomic naming links the beginnings of photography to the colonial traffic in plants and bodies, the energies invested in classifying and dividing, as well as passionate fascination with the volatile and the changing. Whereas Herschel coined the name “photography,” Talbot, while conducting his famous chemical experiments, wrote instead of the desire to find a means to “capture shadows.”19 It is precisely the desire to fix shadows, not write with light, that Talbot encodes into the first names proposed in notebook entries on his contact prints. Talbot called the work with light-­sensitive chemicals we now naturalize as “photography”

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Figure 25. William Henry Fox Talbot, Erica mutabilis, March 1839. Photogenic drawing, salt-­fixed. Courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

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shadow writing or, in his coinage, “the Sciagraphic process.”20 In the first account of his work with light-­sensitive chemicals on paper “Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing” (1839), Talbot spoke not of light-­writing but rather of a process that draws with shadow or, in another more amplified entry, of “the art of fixing a shadow.”21 Talbot goes on to articulate the process in terms of the natural magic long associated with the variants of the camera obscura: the magic lantern, the phantasmagoria machine, and the shadow projector or ombres chinoises. “The most transitory of things,” Talbot elaborates, “a shadow, the proverbial emblem of all that is fleeting and momentary, may be fettered by the spells of our ‘natural magic.’”22 Such work with the shadow outlines a particular queer genealogy for photography leading to another side of the Enlightenment besides Lavater’s regulatory work with projected shadows and silhouettes, that is, to chemists such as Isaac Newton (whom I discuss at length in chapter 5) who wrote of their experiments in terms of natural magic and alchemy, in the language of transformative conversions of bodies and matter into light and shadows, of the fleeting, ephemeral, and discounted into the substantial and more permanent and back again in a potentially never-­ending circuit.23 What happens to the way we see and tell the history of the colonial archive if we account for photography’s relation to Enlightenment technologies of shadow projection? What happens to our understanding of the instrumental, identitarian use of photography to race, sex, and erotically assign the body, to produce normative and deviant bodies, if we explore photography’s longer shadow history as a mutable medium of experimentation tied to the alchemical promises of transformation inherent in its early naming as a process for drawing with shadow rather than light?24 Since the publication of critical studies of the Enlightenment development and use of visual technologies for the production of knowledge, inspired by the work of Michel Foucault, the body exposed for the camera comes down to us as the objectified body of the surveilled subject.25 Yet, as Foucault himself explored, images for surveillance and regulation may incite the very desires and enable the imagining of the very forms of being they are used to proscribe.26 Further, as the long history of vibrant subcultures for which the use of such Enlightenment instruments as the camera have served as a vital means of self-­documentation, identification, and imaginative survival suggests, the exposed body may exceed the policing functions of the

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camera and the archive, pointing not only to alternative possibilities but also to the constituent and yet destabilizing role of what I dedicate this chapter to theorizing: the shadow archive.27 Allan Sekula’s influential essay “The Body and the Archive” (1986) uses the term “shadow archive” to outline the unseen contours of a meta-­archive overshadowing the physical, institutional walls of particular territorialized archives.28 This notion of the archive as a larger system creating the conditions of visual intelligibility is elaborated directly from Foucault’s understanding of the archive not as a repository of what has been said or seen and of the records or a catalog of people and events but rather as “the law of what can be said” and that “system of their enunciabilities.”29 Sekula extends this pervasive shadow archive of surveillance into the present as the background and substrate against which the totality of photo-­ based and digital images of the body are read and judged in terms of type.30 However, despite the desiring ambitions of total knowledge and control that may be said to drive archive fever, we should be careful not to disavow the shadow matter that lines the enlightenment’s pursuit of knowledge through representation and what it claimed were its rational tools: the projector and the camera. These instruments come down to us as tools promising a kind of objectivity, a disembodied vision severed from the tremblings of passionate desire, and the carnal embrace of subject, object, and image displaced as dangerously hallucinatory. The beginnings of photography also offer a counterhistory of representation with its origins in transitory shadows.31

Shadow Projections and Photography’s Queer Origins In the passage on photography’s multiple origins in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, Benjamin makes reference to an archival find, noting, “An English etching of 1775, a genre scene, shows an artist making a silhouette of her model by following the shadow which the latter casts on the wall. It is entitled The Origin of Painting” (Figure 26).32 Here, in this remnant, an eighteenth-­century print that claims to reproduce a lost, ancient scene of painting’s conception is the birth of photography as the death of painting but also photography as a desiring practice of the making of silhouettes from projected shadows. To begin in the shadows is a far from random or idiosyncratic move. Philosopher Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, in his “Essay on the Origin

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Figure 26. David Allan, The Origin of Painting (“The Maid of Corinth”), 1773.

Painting. Courtesy of the Scottish National Gallery.

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of Languages” (1781), writes of the shadow as a visual and material trace directly connected to the expression of embodied desire: It is said that love was the inventor of drawing. He might also unfortunately have invented speech; dissatisfied with it, love spurns it, for there are more active ways of expressing oneself. She who so lovingly traced the shadow of her Lover had such things to impart! What sounds did she use to achieve these movements with her stick?33

Notoriously distrustful of cultivated language, the essay positions desire as the first cause of an imagined pure language of sound and impassioned corporeal gesture. Jacques Derrida’s readings of Rousseau’s appeal to an outside of language in Of Grammatology and his speculations on Jean-­Baptiste Suvée’s eighteenth-­century painting Dibutade or the Origin of Drawing in the Louvre exhibition Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-­Portrait and Other Ruins (1990) have done much to demonstrate that culture, writing, and representation are always already there and that projections of immediate, pure, indexical signs such as the tracing of a lover’s body and the invention of shadow writing are laced with absence and an inability to see and hold an evanescent body.34 These retellings of one of the main foundation myths of mimesis are taken from Pliny’s Natural History and repeat the compelling idea that representation begins in shadows associated with a feminine agency and bodily desire.35 And yet, these versions of the origin story that begins in shadows have the effect of working backward to fix the very desirous shadow-­writing they invoke as the primal shaping force. They cast desire in a blinding mold: a scene of a woman in the embrace of her male lover, eyes averted toward the wall, tracing the outline of a profile with her extended hand. And, yet, these origin scenes also help us to open the beginnings of photography in useful ways by challenging the legibility of desire with their mutable and ultimately ephemeral projected shadows. Though the camera may have come to us tied to a history of the promises of a kind of objectivity, photography, as these shadow myths prompt us to recall, also has a special relation to processes of transformation. In “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (1971), Foucault revisits shadow beginnings, the shadow projection of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” a fable that histories of photography and of cinema often cite in attempting to found an originating basis.36 But Foucault’s returning gesture never goes into the cave. Instead, Foucault

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reads the radical questioning of origin stories across Nietzsche’s corpus from The Gay Science and On the Genealogy of Morals to The Wanderer and His Shadow to insist that desire, like knowledge, is not beyond history and that a genealogy of desire and of knowledge opposes itself, he writes, “to the search for ‘origins’” (140). Genealogy, he writes, “uses history” rather than the “sleights-­of-­hand” and the “rituals of black magic” associated with the back-­projection of miraculous origins (Wunderursprung) (141). Rather, history is employed precisely, argues Foucault, “to dispel such chimeras of the origin, somewhat in the manner of the pious philosopher who needs a doctor to exorcise the shadow of his soul” (144). But as the essay’s intense engagement with genealogies and becomings attests, the telling of origin stories does matter, quite literally, in that the projection of these origins that come before the body, before the subject, before sexuality attempt to turn legend into historical reality, to mold matter and bodies according to the forms of fable. Further, these origin stories of the beginnings of representation give us a powerful medium of queer volatility in their chimeras that defy binary consignment, the shadow matter beyond the criminalizing pieties of either/or. I would like to suggest that thinking with or from the place of the desiring shadow body helps us to see in the dark of these origin stories for the capacities and possibilities in the dark room and its projective machinery. But such a method requires a questioning of the closure of the camera and its separation and division from the body that desires to know.37 It also requires drawing on and working with photography’s other history as a practice of drawing on the shadow and its contact with the referent. In Camera Lucida (1980), Roland Barthes takes photography out of its enclosure in the camera obscura box and, with the titling of the extended essay, traces his version of the history of photography back to the drawing aid introduced by William Hyde Wollaston that William Henry Fox Talbot employed at the same time that he was experimenting with light-­sensitive chemicals: the camera lucida.38 Noted historian of photography and its prehistory Larry Schaaf speculates that, in naming his device, Wollaston may have been citing Robert Hooke’s 1668 invented variation on the camera obscura (discussed in chapter 1 of this book) that Hooke called “A Contrivance to make the Picture of any thing appear on a Wall, Cup-­board, or within a Picture-­frame, &c. in the midst of a Light room in the Day-­time.”39

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Like Hooke’s device, however, Wollaston’s camera lucida was not a room or box but rather a device that could be used in a light-­filled room. As a device surrounded by light with an exposed prismatic lens, the camera lucida not only places the subject or body who employs it on view but may, therefore, lead us to the question of perspective or point of view. Indeed, asking what is photography, Barthes begins with the rhetorical question, “Why mightn’t there be a new science for each object? A mathesis singularis (and no longer universalis)? . . . So I make myself the measure of photographic knowledge. What does my body know of photography?”40 What Barthes produces is knowledge from the side of the viewer, and he writes specifically that he is too impatient for the other side, too impatient even for his negative example, the instant Polaroid, that “magic camera” introduced by Edwin Land to replace the need for the darkroom.41 “Fun,” Barthes demures, “but disappointing except when a great photographer is involved.”42 And, yet, it is a color Polaroid of a room enveloped in blue shadows by the late French photographer Daniel Boudinet that opens Camera Lucida and ushers the reader/viewer into the camera obscura recast as the intimate stage setup of a bedroom.43 In place of any bodies we discern the mere suggestion of a draped window, a bed, and a pillow enveloped by the illusion of the three-­dimensional presence of deep blue shadows that function as a bare minimum field for projection into the suggested recesses of fantasies of acts unseen and into which we are invited to search for the desire that would set such a photographic act in motion.44 Why attempt to capture on film this room at this moment when it is engulfed in shadows? And, further, why begin a counterhistory of photography based on the personalizing, intimate method of carnal vision, a practice that illuminates and exposes the desiring subject predicated on an opening up of the chamber to light, with an instant Polaroid that shows us not a figure of embodied vision but its setting, a shadowy bedroom? Barthes’s coy gesture of illuminating the dark room and restoring photography to its other history is not really a move to what is associated with light (i.e., the camera lucida or light room) but rather to shadow, the shadow of the desiring body with all its resistance to clarity and fixity. In a response to technologically determined origin stories, historian of photography Geoffrey Batchen’s rewriting of the conception of photography gives us not an original, first object or event but rather a burning desire for photography and the birth of the photograph,

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articulated by Louis Daguerre in an 1828 letter to his partner Nicéphore Niépce in which Daguerre writes, “I am burning with desire to see your experiments from nature.”45 Batchen’s history, with its multiple and fractured origins, spends a great deal of time on a painted version of The Corinthian Maid (1783–­84) by English painter Joseph Wright of Derby of the scene imagined in the reproductive print The Origin of Painting that Benjamin notes in passing in his short history of photography. The print, based on a painting (also known as The Maid of Corinth) by Scottish artist David Allan (1744–­96) from 1775, and Derby’s The Corinthian Maid retell the mythic scenario from Pliny’s Natural History.46 However, for Pliny the Elder, the origins of painting are as “uncertain” as those of the inception of the photograph in the histories and countergenealogies of the beginnings of photography. To quote the initial reference in Pliny: The question as to the origin of the art of painting is uncertain and it does not belong to the plan of this work. The Egyptians declare that it was invented among themselves six thousand years ago before it passed over into Greece—­which is clearly an idle assertion. As to the Greeks, some of them say it was discovered at Sicyon, other in Corinth.47

Despite these disputes over a place or culture of origin between Egypt and Greece (debates of real interest to the extent that they demonstrate anxiety that Egypt, not Greece, might be the wellspring for what has been subsequently claimed as the Western tradition of representation), Pliny goes on to maintain that all agree in the medium and act of inception, that is, with an origin in the obscurity of the cast shadow-­image and its attempted capture in clay. To the man’s shadow are added the character of a woman in love with uneasy substitute for a desired object. To quote, “All agree that it began with tracing an outline round a man’s shadow and consequently that all pictures were originally done in this way” (271). Pliny fleshes out this cryptic origin story of the birth of painting as the beginning of plastic arts as a woman modeling a man about to depart, a father (the potter Butades) who makes relief impressions of the shadow outline she traces, and a hardened likeness of the man’s face preserved in a shrine until the destruction of the city of Corinth. Let me quote in full:

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Enough and more than enough has now been said about painting. It may be suitable to append to these remarks something about the plastic art. It was through the service of that same earth that modeling portraits from clay was first invented by Butades, a potter of Sicyon, at Corinth. He did this owing to his daughter, who was in love with a young man; and she, when he was going abroad, drew in outline on the wall the shadow of his face thrown by a lamp. Her father pressed clay on this and made a relief, which he hardened by exposure to fire with the rest of his pottery; and it is said that this likeness was preserved in the Shrine of the Nymphs until the destruction of Corinth by Mummius. (371–­73)

It is only Butades the potter who is given a name and the episode is framed in terms of the plastic arts, and yet, in Wright of Derby’s version, like the others we have seen, the focus is narrowed to the act of tracing a shadow given form as an intimate near embrace between the cast shadow and a woman who kneels toward or sits in the lap of a seated man and reaches toward his face with her hands that pointedly hold a stylus or drawing implement. As Batchen recounts, Wright of Derby’s painting was commissioned by the pottery industrialist Josiah Wedgewood whose son Thomas Wedgewood experimented with protophotographic contact prints that proved so susceptible to light that they quickly burned from view. Derby’s painting has been discussed by Batchen as well as by art historian Ann Bermingham in its specific connections to the Wedgewood family and their interest in the possible or actual manufacture of reproductions either in clay or on paper.48 And yet, art historian Robert Rosenblum, as Batchen notes, places Wright of Derby’s version of the myth in the context as well of a wider obsession with this scene of origins in Europe between the 1770s and the 1820s, that is, in the years in which the development of photography was pursued alongside work with devices for the tracing of shadows such as the silhouette machine and the physionotrace as well as the machines Batchen does not include in his account—­the magic lantern and the shadow projector also known as the ombres chinoises or “Chinese shadows.”49 Setting the painting in relation to Pliny’s text, the circumstances of its commission, and the technologies of reproduction with which it shares a historical moment, one might argue that the obvious excisions in Wright of Derby’s Corinthian Maid—­Butades the potter and the cast impression of the lover’s face signified only by the

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suggestion of a fiery kiln in the shadowy recesses opposite the sleeping beloved—­represent, in their absence, the painting’s most important features. This technique of selective lighting and attendant obscurity invites us to reexamine Pliny’s sequence. Let us notice that, though we are to believe that painting’s origins remain obscure, we are, nonetheless, supposed to accept that they alight, without doubt, on the tracing of a shadow. This is the one element sustained in the subsequent origin story for sculpture that features the tracer as a woman.50 In a line drawn subsequently in a patriarchal genealogy from the father, she is later known merely as Dibutades or “from Butades.” Where is the tracer in this first scene? Why, we might ask, given the eighteenth-­century readings of this scene and its titling as The Origin of Painting, does the daughter appear only once the invention in question is not hers but is, rather, attributed to her father the potter and once her desire is figured not as desire for skiagraphy or shadow writing (the name given to photography) but only as desire for a departing male lover?51 There is a submerged logic to this selective highlighting, an effort to harden and stabilize the queer flow of desire through the metamorphic shadow. If the scene of origin, as it comes down to us, highlights the father and shadows the daughter, highlights his sculptural casting and obscures her tracing, highlights and directs the gaze and the desire of the woman tracer onto a male body and profile and obscures the less legible desires as written in shadow, then, by this logic, it is into what Pliny refers to as the uncertain remainder, into the shadows, that we should look for the most important and most anxiety-­provoking elements. What we may begin to see in the metamorphic shadow is not exactly the same old story. Batchen concludes his reading of Wright of Derby’s Corinthian Maid via Derrida with the confident assertion that “Any origin is always already marked by a play of sexual and other differences.”52 But such an assertion works to place the concept of “sexual difference” as some kind of unquestionable before, to blind us to the extent that, in the origin story of representation, sexual difference comes with a delay, that is, in the effort to make “photography” or “shadow writing” into hardened stone. Let’s look again at Pliny. In the first reference to shadow origins, there is no sexual difference; there is only a shadow profile. From here Giorgio Vasari, in telling a version of the origin of painting in Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550), gives the

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male profile in Pliny’s initial version of the myth a tracing hand and gives us the beginnings of painting as a version of the queer story of Narcissus: But according to what Pliny writes, this [art of painting] came to Egypt from Gyges the Lydian, who, being by the fire and gazing at his own shadow, suddenly, with some charcoal in his hand, drew his own outline on the wall.53

Looking back at these origin stories through, for example, the photo-­ tableau self-­portrait by London-­based photographer Karen Knorr entitled Butades’ Daughter (from the 1994–­95 series on academies of art and shot at the Royal Academy in Stockholm, Sweden) in which Knorr inserts herself kneeling in the place of the woman tracer, one might emphasize the agency and highlighted presence or, in the case of Pliny’s initial account of the origin of painting and Vasari’s elaboration of it, the profoundly shadowed obscurity of the woman tracer—­to the point of a pointed elision.54 One might attempt to argue, with French psycho­analyst and feminist theorist Luce Irigaray’s reading of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” (Book VII of the Republic) in Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), that written across these scenes of origin is not sexual difference but indifference and a hysterical disavowal of the womb and the mother’s body as birthplace.55 Linking these scenes of origin with French painter Gustave Courbet’s Origin of the World (1866)—­a painting produced in the midst of “daguerrotypomania,” disputes over the hierarchy of arts, and questions of the relation of representation to the “real” and the unseen, and that was later owned by psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan—­one might argue that the beginnings of photography and the camera with its mirrors for refracting light go back to the speculum as both mirror and dilator and the body claimed as “feminine” as the denied and yet primal site of its exercise.56 Yet to reduce what is obscured by these origin stories to the focal constriction of the “beaver shot” is to repeat precisely what is both highlighted and legible.57 Looking again at Knorr’s Butades’ Daughter, I am struck by the effort to use the story to turn sexual difference into immutable stone and the camera into a casting instrument. Knorr writes, “The shadow that I draw represents the negative that will be able to yield a sculpture of Dibutades, as in the legend.”58 The substitution visible in the photograph yields a shadow profile of a model in a dress carefully placed in opposition to and as morphologically different from the standing classical white marble male nude. What is obscured in

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this version of the origin of representation in shadow writing is not just what the speculum promises to open to view, the inside of the body, the interior of the womb, but rather also, and perhaps most disturbingly, the productive instability of the projected shadow, the technologies of skiagraphy or writing with shadow, and the play of “other differences” in the protean and the plural they set in motion. As Pliny’s shadow myth may also prompt us to recall, the Enlightenment technologies of the camera and the projector reach back to the palpable illusion of a confirming residue of contact with the image’s referent, the material body that casts a shadow. And yet, at the same time, the shadow is a fleeting medium that haunts these attempts at adhesive fixity with their insufficiency. While the scientific instruments of the projector and the camera promised to capture bodies and reproduce the subject of racial and sexual difference as a hardened visual object for investigative study and criminal evidence, these technologies are founded on and hold within them the medium of the shadow that was associated in Greek myth with the feminine, the wet, and the mutable. Let me turn here to Talbot’s initial naming of photography as skiagraphy, his relation of his early experiments with a positive-­negative process to natural magic, and the historical coincidence of these experiments with shadow-­projection technologies such as the magic lantern and the ombres chinoises or Chinese shadows. In his survey A Short History of the Shadow (1997), art historian Victor Stoichita˘ reviews the origin stories from Plato and Pliny and then turns to a plate, The Shadow Dance from Samuel van Hoogstraten’s 1675 treatise on painting, in which we see the use of a low projecting light source to alter the size and character of the bodies onto which the light is cast such that they appear bearded, horned, and tailed like demons as well as an illustration diagramming a “Parastatic Machine” from Athanasius Kircher’s Ars magna lucis et umbrae in which a lantern inside an Egyptian obelisk is deployed to associate Egypt with the creation and manipulation of demonic silhouettes like the blackened, horned devil image cast seemingly by the obelisk itself.59 From a glance at these techniques for casting shadows that alter the shapes of human bodies into duplicitous or diabolical forms Stoichita˘ turns to ask, “since the myth of origin harks back to a shadow that is in no way demonic . . . how can we explain the negativity with which the shadow is so often invested in Western painting?”60 Stoichita˘ begins with an abbreviated answer that

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the shadow comes to be associated with “otherness” and, thus, is relegated to a tool as opposed to the end or goal of representation. As art historians George Bauer, Michael Baxandall, and Thomas Da Costa Kaufmann and cognitive scientist Roberto Casati have discussed, since the Italian Renaissance, the depiction of cast shadows in drawing and painting has functioned as the basic tool of rendering illusions of depth and three-­dimensional modeling.61 However, the use of the shadow for the conjuration of the body is not so easily disassociated from the claimed rational use of shadow-­ casting because of their link to that lurking quality of the shadow that runs from Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” through the scenes of origin I have reviewed, the changeling shadow as a transformative medium operating between and beyond states we imagine as wholly distinct and separate: negative and positive, still and moving, present and absent, two-­dimensional and three-­dimensional, living and dead, male and female, human and animal, black and white, and heterosexual and homosexual. A poster from the collection of the French cinematheque for an 1803 London stage performance of the Skiagraphema (literally “Shadowwriting” or “Shadowletter” from the Greek “graphema” for a piece of writing) or Phantasmagoria machine variant of the magic lantern by a showman Mr. Gyngell advertises a didactic exercise that will enchant the eye and yet appeal to the disciplining mind: Ghosts or apparitions will be introduced in a manner peculiar to this extraordinary exhibition, by optical illusions. They will appear to originate in the air—­many indistinct appearances enveloped in clouds and mists, will serve to expose the baneful practice of artful Imposters and pretended Exorcists, who by means of such confused Shadows, have worked on weak and disordered imaginations till their beholders have been fully persuaded they have beheld the dead and absent.62

To confuse is to fuse with or to demonstrate a zone of hybridity between what are to be taken as necessary opposites. What the poster denounces and yet trades in is the shadow as shape and state-­shifting agent of substantial change that, rather than expose the purity of origins by the specter of their subsequent alteration, makes visible the mutating realm of their interconnection. The queerness of the shadow, its metamorphic instability and undecidability, may be seen in a less often discussed version of the origin

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myth of representation, Anne-­Louis Girodet-­Trioson’s Origin of Drawing published in the 1829 printing of his Posthumous Works.63 The interplay between the shadow cast on the wall, the shadowed parts of bodies, and the highlighted regions of the scene work as a circuit between the lighted shoulders of the woman tracer, the illuminated statue of the goddess of wisdom Athena in the place of Butades’s kiln, the foregrounded reclining and now nude male model, and the cupid’s shadowed and yet modeled buttocks in the delineated and only relative obscurity of the model’s very visible lap. This protean exchange of desire thinks in the shadows of the origin stories to bring into relief its “negative” potentialities. The poem accompanying the engraving gives a par­ ticular voice to the woman tracer’s “silent” desire in the metaphor of the marriage contract and wedded fidelity: “And still to this sketch she brought her vows / In silent adoration, and the faithful image / Accepted the troth she plighted the model.”64 And yet note that her desire is directed onto and wed with the act of sketching while the model is freed by the writing of shadows to the embrace of the embodied eros in his lap. I would argue that we mistake the importance of this version of the myth if we do not see in the statue of Athena an instigation to look for other knowledges and ways of knowing beyond such doxas as the presumption that the language of marriage is synonymous with heterosexuality and that contracts, verbal or visual, can settle or fix the vagaries of desire and bodily form. In the mythic beginnings of representation was a figure who traced the outlines of the cast shadow of a face on the wall in order to counter absence with imagination. The retellings of this myth in the decades of the beginnings of photography would have us believe that, at the origin of the photograph and even representation itself, was the flame of desire and it was legible and normative. Yet, there is a shape-­shifting shadow in this story of flaming desire, obscure images, and elusive objects, a shaping negative, a skiagraphic origin of photography in which the burning desire that sets this history in motion defies representation in terms of the binary script and has not gone up in smoke.

Shadow Flesh: Volatile Bodies and the Archive In Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995), Jacques Derrida most famously asserts that every archive is erected on the site of the structural

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breakdown of the memory it reinscribes. Far from a positive, restorative repetition, the reiterations of archival desire are traced by a destructive repetition compulsion, the death drive, or what Derrida calls the threatening internal principle of the archive, its mal d’archive, or archive fever.65 Less rehearsed is the question Derrida asks regarding the temporality of the archive, its relation to the future and to possibility. “Good sense tells us,” Derrida writes, “there is no history or archive of the future to come. A historian as such never looks to the future, which in the end does not concern him. But meaning something else altogether, is there a historian of the promise?”66 To do the work of a historian of the promise means, I think, reading not just for evidence of injury but also for signs of potential that may be actualized.67 To bring out the volatile potential of what I am calling the Enlightenment’s shadow archive, I turn to contemporary U.S.-­based artist Kara Walker’s recent experiments with the cast shadow body and specifically her installation Insurrection! Our Tools Were Rudimentary, Yet We Pressed On (2000) (Figure 27).68 “I always wind up going back to the very beginning of everything with my pieces,” Walker explained in a PBS interview about the exhibition of Insurrection! at the Guggenheim.69 Walker’s named historical referents, in the interview, are slave revolt in the antebellum South, the cyclorama, the narrative exhibition, and the surgical theater paintings of Thomas Eakins. The rudimentary or beginning tools of the title are pictured in the shadow figures in the form of domestic instruments, tools of the kitchen such as the ladle and the frying pan, and yet extend in a kind of dark continuum to include the tools of intimate colonization and the tortures of slavery as well as the props of master/slave erotics such as the whip, the pike, the chain, the dagger, and the spiked collar. The tools of intimate violence and the kitchen with its stoked fires, the blackened shadow bodies, and the title’s reference to insurrection—­the most famous of which, the 1791 slave revolt that led to the republic of Haiti, was carried out largely by means of the torch—­may also reference another sense of the shadow archive, the notion of the shadow archive as the mnemic trace burned into the surface of the body pursued extensively by film and visual studies scholar Akira Mizuta Lippit in his work on the history of the cinema in the wake of the invention of the X-­ray and the atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.70 Rendered out of the same shadow material, the tools in Walker’s installation appear undifferentiated from the

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Figure 27. Kara Walker, Insurrection! Our Tools Were Rudimentary, Yet We Pressed

On, 2000. Cut paper silhouettes and light projections, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Purchased with funds contributed by the International Director’s Council and Executive Committee Members: Ann Ames, Edithe Broad, Henry Buhl, Elaine Terner Cooper, Dimitris Daskalopoulos, Harry David, Gail May Engelberg, Ronnie Heyman, Dakis Joannou, Cindy Johnson, Barbara Lane, Linda Macklowe, Peter Norton, William Peppler, Tonino Perna, Denise Rich, Simonetta Seragnoli, David Teiger, Ginner Williams, and Elliot K. Wolk. 2000.68. Photograph by Ellen Labenski of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.

polymorphously perverse bodies that wield them. The dagger extends as if from the buttocks or hip of one little running figure, the ladle appears a third hand, and the pike, in carrying a head, takes the place of its body. The frying pan that is held aloft by an androgynous, little Pan-­ or satyr-­like figure becomes its pseudoerection while the whip emerges from the backside of one gender-­ambiguous figure riding the back of another and yet also seems to extend from the rider and pierce through the back of the mount to form the human-­horse’s illusion of a penis. These tools of the body, which are neither decidedly organic nor precisely prosthetic, both stand in for and question the status of certain body parts privileged as foundational signs of gender, racial, and sexual difference.

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The possessive “our” in the title phrase “our tools were rudimentary and yet we pressed on” ambiguates whose tools, which tools and, in that multivalence of reference, also includes the Enlightenment tools of shadow projection with which the installation is composed. It is in this appropriation of Enlightenment technologies of knowledge that Walker’s installation also goes back to the rudimentary beginnings of representation to unsettle the certainties of race, gender, and eroticism in the myth of the use of the shadow to capture and act on the body by fixing its shadow. While Insurrection! is the first of Walker’s installations to employ shadow projection, others soon followed such as Darkytown Rebellion (2001), They Waz Nice White Folks While They Lasted (Says One Gal to Another) (2001), and the installation and performance (in which Walker employed video projection for the first time in her work) at the Fabric Workshop (Philadelphia) titled Fibbergibbet and Mumbo Jumbo: Kara E. Walker in Two Acts (2004).71 Extending the projections of these installations yet further, Walker has added live shadow puppet performance and the projection of a film, 8 Possible Beginnings: or the Creation of African-­America. A Moving Picture by the young, self-­taught, Genius of the South K.E. Walker, to the installations comprising the show Kara E. Walker’s Song of the South (Fall 2005 at Redcat, Los Angeles).72 In Insurrection!, like other recent pieces by Walker, overhead projectors cast light through transparencies, with the silhouetted figures and colored gels creating layerings on the three walls of the installation that give the illusion of depth. Rather than employing shadow projection as a device for precision rendering, Walker’s figures are hand drawn. The shadow projection is used as both a theatrical and pedagogical demonstration device of mise-­en-­scène and exhibition harkening back to the use of projection as a technology for the traveling educational show and perhaps to the fascinating case of the freed slave and Baptist minister Dr. J. W. Toer who toured the South in the aftermath of the Civil War lecturing to audiences of recently emancipated slaves with a “magic lantern show” entitled “The Progress of Reconstruction.” The link seems a likely one as Toer’s use of the visual projection technology of the magic lantern as a device for possible consciousness raising and political transformation was the subject of a widely distributed peoples’ history documentary film, Dr. Toer’s Amazing Magic Lantern Show (1987), about the active role of African-­Americans in the still unfinished business of reconstruction produced by the American

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Social History Project, the Center for Media and Learning, City University of New York Graduate Center, and written by the project’s then educational coordinator, Bret Eynon.73 Walker’s dynamic use of cast shadows for the purposes of spectacle is also not without precedent.74 Take, for example, the metal shadow puppets in the collection of the French Cinematheque and attributed to the showman Séraphin (Séraphin Dominique François, 1747–­1800) who contributed to a “shadow craze,” performed at Versailles in 1772, and later produced at the Paris fair theaters.75 The shadow-­skirted feminine form changes visage and character, back and forth, from ribboned human to ribboned donkey (Figure 28) and crowned lady to crowned witch.

Figure 28. Woman Disguising Her Face behind a Mask of a Donkey’s Head, ca.

1790–­1830. Shadow made of metal and wood, attributed to Séraphin (Séraphin Dominique François, 1747–­1800). Courtesy of Cinémathèque française, Paris.

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Rather than solve the question of which is the first or true form, they give the sense, via the shadow specter, that they not only contain one another but that these are only the beginnings of the possible forms these figures may take. But, further, such shape shifting in shadow performance leads not only to the alterations inherent in identity or the forms of the “I” but also to the inhering potential queer trajectories of desire, the forms of its objects, and even the volatility of its energies. This capacity may be demonstrated by the example of the transparent lithograph, a related device of projected shadows. Placed before a projecting light source, such prints with images on both sides would reveal occulted aspects of the scene. One example, The Talisman (Figure 29), explicitly connects the light source of the projector used to create shadows to Aladdin’s lamp, the lamp of dreams and wish fulfillment activated by touch that would make the heretofore invisible or seemingly impossible materialize for view as it does in the apparition of a crowned and veiled beauty held out over the canopied bed in the arms of a winged androgyne.76 The scene conjures some of the basic elements of a western fantasy projection of a fantastic east as harem, including the undecidability of what sort of act this embrace represents or what eroticized

Figure 29. The Talisman, from a series of transparent lithographs printed recto/verso

(France, ca. 1830). Courtesy of Cinémathèque française, Paris.

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actions it sets in motion. What I would most like to remark is that already in the shadow version of the not so easily located bedroom dreamspace of this French transparent lithograph from the 1830s is the queerness as temporal and spatial instability exploited by Walker’s use of the projector in her installations. When interviewed, Walker has explained that, in such installations as Insurrection!, she “had been using the overhead projectors as a kind of shadow play tool.”77 The modifier “play” here signals the metamorphic optical-­trick quality of these shadowy shape-­shifters. In the middle scene of Insurrection!, transacted on a table before great windows, we can discern a figure with toes lifted and head thrown back and the suggestion of a cascade of hair. Is this a woman or a man or something else? Is this an attitude of terror or ecstasy? The scenes both appeal to and mock ready recognition and the reduction of elements to familiar names. While there are suggestions of the carnivalesque inversion of the hierarchical binaries of a master/slave universe in the skirted figure with cornrow braids astride an overturned top-­hatted potential stand-­in for a kind of master, the other smaller long-­haired and skirted figure holding an inflated boot complicates this scene with a third, challenging viewers with the sense that the ability to affix the names hetero or homo, black or white, master or slave will not supply the knowledge that will help us navigate this scenario. Further, the tremendous two-­faced figure with the haystack-­sized skirts and two pairs of feet of different sizes holds fantastic couplings within a single dress, suggesting not just the capacity for one form to turn into another but the extent to which, in this shadow rendering of the order of things, bodies are already complex, holding within themselves chaotic and unpredictable potential. Walker has been most criticized for drawing on what we might call the archive of racism with its blackface cartoons, collectibles, and paraphernalia of minstrelsy shows.78 Confronting such criticism in her perceptive book Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker (2004), a study of Walker’s early installations prior to such work with light projection as Insurrection!, art historian Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw looks for evidence of the “‘racial profiling’ of African Americans by silhouettes during the antebellum period that pervades Walker’s work,” and she finds this silhouette of Flora in the Stratford, Connecticut, Historical Society, a sepia-­washed pencil profile produced as the cover for a

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bill of sale dated December 13, 1796.79 Shaw directs our attention to the soft curves of the nose, lips, and chin that contrast sharply with the spikes of hair crowning the head like the petals of a flower and from the hairlike petals to the woman turned “Flora” as a blossom pressed between two pieces of paper: her silhouette and her bill of sale, each turning her into a shadow-­object to be possessed.80 The renaming of this woman after Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers, is repeated in three different places around the perimeter of the silhouette as if the terrible analogy between human flesh and botanical specimens as objects of economic sale and exploitation under the colonial plantation system required repetition to fix the identification of the shade. This attempt to fix the shadow Shaw connects to one of the probable functions of the silhouette, that is, like the criminal mug shot, to quite literally bond the body. Attached to the bill of sale, the silhouette thus becomes a means to ensure perpetual ownership, a way to recapture a fleeting shadow should she run. However, though fixity may have been the main goal and the exercise of policing ownership its primary function, there remain the wavering repetitions of the name Flora and their insufficiency against the silhouette’s stylized lines, their interior evacuated of facial detail and expression, and the haunting intimacy of the scale of her head and neck. I would like to suggest further that the silhouette of the nineteen-­year-­ old woman renamed Flora remains no less fugitive in the way its washed interior points to what is here unnamed and remains only partially visible: the document’s relation not only to the desires of the Asa Benja­ min who laid out twenty-­five pounds sterling for Flora but also to those of the woman of whom we have only this brown-­washed shadow tracing on yellowing paper. Walker’s installation Insurrection! does not mine only the public archive of negative representation. The installation’s insistent dredging of the intimate acts that are neither publicly recorded nor entirely private also points to another aspect of the shadow archive: images recorded for private erotic use. While many such images fall prey to censorship and literal destruction, those works that have been salvaged, reprinted, and reinstitutionalized in the museum also point to those that have been lost. We might take the example here of the early 1900s glass-­plate negatives of New Orleans Creole photographer Ernest J. Bellocq that were discovered in 1967 by Lee Friedlander and made their way into the Museum of Modern Art.81 At the same time that Bellocq worked commercially

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producing lantern slides of the monuments of New Orleans, he used a large-­format camera to produce a series of portraits of the sex workers of the city’s district of legalized prostitution, Storyville. As contemporary writer Natasha Trethewey brings out in her book of poems Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002) dedicated to one of the prostitutes photographed by Bellocq around 1912, such photographs do not so much document as produce the bodies they represent. This “very white-­skinned black woman—­mulatto, quadroon, or octoroon” is posed in this photograph (Figure 30) against a black drape that, in Trethewey’s words, turns her body into a “reversed silhouette.”82 Anxiety about the truth-­value of the portraits made of traced shadows already haunts the eighteenth-­century manufacture of silhouettes. In response to innovations that reversed the form of the silhouette by making the ground black and the figure mirrored or white, and to concern that such reversals might pull the truth-­claiming ground out from under the silhouette, making it seem an arbitrary design or just a “pretty effect” rather than an instrument of knowledge, an instruction manual published in Frankfurt and Leipzig in 1780 insists that producers of silhouettes blacken inside their traced lines for, “If the background be black and the portrait the mirror, the effect is pretty, but it is as contrary to nature as a white shadow.”83 Such a reversal of white and black, figure and ground, lighted and obscured in Bellocq’s photograph may be read to question the reliability and truth of what we see without resolving into hardened distinctions of what is true and what is contrary to nature. The black drape behind the reverse silhouette provides only a minimal background for the figure. The framing of the shot makes no effort to hide the window and doorway of the brothel, and yet the drape is set up in such a way that we are not allowed to see into that space. The way in which the showcased figure is set up in the place of something suggested and yet unseen points to another aspect of the shadow archive: the figures that stand in for that which is not directly represented and yet latent. While Trethewey’s book of poems sees in the figure of enwhitened Ophelia a surrogate for the life and inhabitants of the segregated colored or black brothels not directly represented in Bellocq’s prints, we might ask as well about the traces not just of the obligatory dyke acts performed in the bordellos of Storyville but also such figures as brothel owner Fanny Sweet who was called a “Thief, lesbian, Confederate spy, poisoner and procurer” and Miss Big Nelly who ran a house catering to male same-­sex

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Figure 30. Ernest James Bellocq (1873–­1949), untitled, ca. 1912. Gelatin silver

printing-­out-­paper print, printed 1966–­69. Irregular 913/16 x 713/16 inches (24.9 x 19.8 cm). Gift of Lee Friedlander. Copyright Lee Friedlander. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital image copyright Museum of Modern Art. Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

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desires described as the site of “large scale, noisy interracial functions.”84 Furthering this effect of surrogacy, the 1978 Louis Malle film Pretty Baby that took Bellocq’s photographic project as its theme appropriated African-­American ragtime player Tony Jackson’s song “Pretty Baby” for its title.85 While Jackson (1876–­1920), like Jelly Roll Morton, worked as a “professor” in New Orleans bordellos, the pretty baby of the song’s desiring address was not one of the whitened girl prostitutes of Bellocq’s most famous photographs but a young male prostitute we don’t directly see. And yet the song’s lyrical refrain, “Everybody loves a baby, that’s why I’m in love with you, Pretty Baby, Pretty Baby, And I’d like to be your sister, brother, dad, and mother, too,” messes with the family romance.86 The refrain insinuates into the well-­reproduced pictures of bourgeois heterosexual family and the enwhitened sex worker both the malleability of same-­sex erotic role-­play (in terms of age, race, and familial relationship) and same-­sex desire as a kind of universalized current running through all relationships including those of siblings and parent–­child. While Walker’s installation Insurrection! may not directly recover lost, buried, or marginalized histories such as these racial segregation–­ challenging and queer aspects of nineteenth-­century New Orleans, its representation of desire as protean mixture using the old or rudimentary tools of shadow projection does suggest a longer genealogy for the malleable queer erotic solicitations and combinations of its tableaux to be found in yet another sense of the shadow archive, that is, the shadow archive of fantasy. By working through the visual grammar of stereotypy and specifically the figural forms of what Walker calls “historical romance,” the fantasy representations of the Southern plantation landscape and slavery that have had an extended life in the form of cartoons and collectibles, Walker’s installation particularizes this shadow archive of fantasy, suggesting that what has been disavowed onto the antebellum South is the unconscious material of the national imaginary in need of insurrection.87 The projected colors of red and blue work with the white walls to further nationalize the particularities of fantasy. Yet the projection of light through the red and blue gels and the layerings of shadow also insist on thinking about unstable particularities by suffusing the installation in the red, white, and blue of the flag that also shades into and is mixed with the pink and light blue of gender binarism and the black and white of race in Manichean terms.

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A final aspect of the shadow archive I want to pursue is the body of the spectator that is not literally represented and yet is placed nonetheless by representation. That the camera and the projector promised a kind of prosthetic disembodied vision separating eye from body and subject from object is a critical commonplace, and yet projected shadows (though they may be produced by pasteboard substitutes of the body) nonetheless imply both a body that casts them and further a body in the place of the spectator, suggesting a relationship of continuity or similarity between the body of the spectator and the represented body. Walker’s installation drives this uncanny sense home by using overhead projectors to further populate the sparsely inhabited scenes with the cast shadows of the bodies of exhibition visitors. We are all, thus, not only physically implicated but also turned into black shadow. Thinking through shadow projection enables us to see the body in ways that revolatilize the hardened differences of race and sexuality and that galvanize the transformative instability in the universal pretensions of Enlightenment technologies—­namely, the fact that we all cast a black shadow. The way in which the portrait silhouette bathed its subject in its black shadow presented an anxious problem for the historical practitioners of the honorific shaded silhouette. Born in France and practicing transatlantically between England and the United States in the decades that witnessed the introduction of photography and the continuation of slavery in the United States, one of the more prolific cutters of portrait silhouettes, Augustin Edouart, published a treatise on Silhouette Likenesses in 1835. In the course of defending his use of the blackened silhouette against rival practices that finished the shade with colored paint, Edouart’s treatise also betrays the anxieties that attended the universal extension of the blackness of the shade. Rather than demarcate and contain blackness as the particular properties of separately and distinctively raced bodies, efforts to turn the shade blonde or bronze effected a kind of comic travesty that exposed the racializing economy of the shade’s colors. Note how the repetitions of the term “harlequinade” (after the commedia dell’arte figure Harlequin with the multicolored costume and blackened face) call our attention to the way in which Edouart’s defense of the shade anxiously retraces the same ground: As something was wanting to revive the expiring taste of the public for these black shades, some of the manufacturers introduced the system

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of bronzing the hair and dress. To what species of extravagant harlequinade this gave rise, the public is sufficiently aware. . . . Every day there is to be seen in the shops this kind of profile, with gold hair drawn on them, coral earrings, blue necklaces, white frills, green dress, and yellow waistband, etc. Is it not ridiculous to see such harlequinades? The face, being quite black, forms such a contrast that everyone looks like a negro!88

The repeated reference to the harlequinade, a form of eighteenth-­century comedic pantomime, further betrays the concern over the truth-­value or “likeness” of the silhouette, here articulated as an anxiety that the introduction of contrasting colors upsets the controlling boundary of the silhouette’s contour and exposes the performative nature of the negative space of the shade. Playing with the unstable racial logics of the shade, Walker’s installation introduces the colors of the universal extension of rights (the red, white, and blue: the bleu, blanc, rouge) to demonstrate the competing and even incompatible significations of the black silhouette: the black of the supposedly eloquent outlines demarcating fetishized features of difference, the black-­inked figure as the opposite of white in a Manichean epidermal schema, black as the shadow all bodies cast, and black as the negative space or ground of continuity of the claimed capacity of the shade to represent all. The version of the universal in Walker’s landscape scenes extends not only beyond the bounds of the human but also across animate and inanimate matter, the framing palms of transplantation and the implements of a kitchen revolt. It is with this universal extension of the black shadow-­casting property of all bodies (animal and vegetable, animate and inanimate) that I would like to conclude. Returning to Sekula’s Foucauldian characterization of the shadow archive as a meta-­archival surveillance system within which we are all subjected, Walker’s use of shadow projection allows us to see another potential in the overshadowing dimension of the archive. The dark projected shadow figures float through a space composed by the interaction between the floor and walls of the gallery and the projected blue-­grey shadows of a small corner of architectural elements and the floor-­to-­ceiling twist of abstracted trees that both frame and dwarf the figures. While the postures and forms of the figures cross, intermingle, and ambiguate signs of race, gender, and erotic orientation

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as well as distinctions between animate and inanimate and human and animal, these layerings also unsettle the relation of figure to ground. At the same time, these grand and overshadowing trees affect a kind of naturalizing frame attributing all this mutability and crossing not solely to culture or to the aftereffects of industrialization, colonization, or slavery but also to nature. It is with this universalizing gesture that the installation suggests not only that the Enlightenment may have its shadows, but also that the shadow as a property or potential within representation and identity may also lend itself to the unfinished projects of modernity such as the extension of rights, and not so much the rights of specific identity groups but rather the right to unpredictable trajectories of desire, change, and insurrection. But this mobilization of shadow projection is a universalizing tactic that trades in the shadow’s negativity, not as absence but as the not-­not there of the protean immanent. Returning to the question raised by Kant, in his own rehearsal of the question “What Is Enlightenment?,” Foucault maintains that Enlightenment is not a bounded historical period or even an event but rather an attitude or mode of relating to contemporary reality that, in a reading of Baudelaire’s precept “You have no right to despise the present,” he extracts as a rhetorical attitude concresced in the rhetorical device of litotes or negative understatement.89 While I have spent this chapter pulling a cord of disavowed desire or love through scenes of shadow projection from Freud and Fanon through the colonial archive, physiognomy and the silhouette, the history of photography, and the shadow projections of Kara Walker’s installation Insurrection! Our Tools Were Rudimentary, Yet We Pressed On, enlightenment as a negation that performs a labor of love for liberty is an attitude toward the present that refuses the blackmail of being for or against the Enlightenment as if it were a static event or finished process. It is, as well, an exercise in the scene of projection that refuses the dangerous purities that would insist that hope or freedom or alternatives or repair depend on banishing our shadows and pressing on by moving on as if the shadow archive of colonial history does not haunt, as if it were not also the site of eruptive possibilities, however ambivalent and undecided.

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chapter five

Following the Rainbow

The inextinguishable color comes from nonbeing. Thought is its servant, a piece of existence extending—­however negatively—­to that which is not. The utmost distance alone would be proximity; philosophy is the prism in which its color is caught. —­Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics

Not of detention is Fruition—­ Shudder to attain. Transport’s decomposition follows—­ He is Prism born. —­Emily Dickinson, “Which Is the best—­the Moon or Crescent?”

I open this chapter on the potentiality of the prism as an instrument of method with the figure of the prism deployed in Adorno’s and Dickinson’s techniques of negation as a tactic of production, a philosophical and poetic method for moving beyond oppositions (being and nonbeing, for instance, or, as in Dickinson’s opening query, “Which Is the best—­the Moon or the Crescent?”) toward possibilities that extend between and also beyond such binaries, toward colors caught in and released by the possibilities of a refracting decomposition that also composes.1 That method might be intrinsic to the instrument is not particular to Adorno or Dickinson. While method may be a technology for the production of knowledge, the instrument has long materialized the possibilities for theoretical speculation, for thinking otherwise, for projecting beyond the opposition between what is and what is not or, rather, 195

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not yet. Theories, indeed, are already immanent in the “scientific instruments” ostensibly developed to rein in and test their future flights.2 Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620) positioned itself as inaugurating a new science of method founded upon the development of instruments, physical and mental, that would make up for an anxious “want” of mind and hand, thus marking the convergence of methodology and technology in and as the “new instrument” required not merely to “guide” the “hand” but also to “supply either suggestions for the understanding or cautions.”3 Echoing the Baconian gesture of founding a new science, Sigmund Freud represented the internal archivization of psychoanalysis’s new object, the unconscious, by a compound set of instruments, from the camera obscura—­as discussed in chapter 1—­to the external technical apparatus of the mystic writing-­pad (der Wunderblock).4 Taking up the mystic writing-­pad in particular, Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995) explores the way in which this technology functions as far more than an analogy for the unconscious in the founding of psychoanalysis. By telling a “retrospective science fiction” about the history of psychoanalysis and its instrument metaphors for the unconscious, Derrida sketches not the stable recording of that history but, rather, its reproduction in and through the substantively shaping alterations of its technologies. The “new technical mechanisms for archivization and reproduction” that have come to replace the mystic writing-­pad do not just represent the psychic apparatus with more refinement or affect it differently from the outside.5 Were new digital instruments (such as Derrida’s principal example of electronic mail) to have existed already at the time that Freud developed the model of the psychic apparatus, Derrida rear-­projects, they would have introduced an “entirely different logic,” a complete transformation of the psychic apparatus and, by extension, of the very events of desire and thought.6 But the mystic writing-­pad, of course, was hardly the e-­mail of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Wunderblock is an old, cast-­off, and seemingly insignificant child’s toy consisting of a waxed substrate beneath a plastic surface on which what is written or drawn disappears when the sheet is lifted, leaving only the faint, trace impression in the wax below of the path of the writing implement on the translucent layer above. As a material metaphor for the operation of the unconscious as a shaping historical instrument haunted by what would

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seem to have been outgrown, discarded, and replaced (the instruments of childhood, the devices of earlier eras), the Wunderblock’s palimpsestic place in the crossed histories of technology and psychoanalysis points to a different history of the relation of instruments to method. Rather than new methods emerging from new instruments, the Wunderblock offers us an alternate account of the history of the unconscious, one in which we are deeply shaped by the old toys we believe we have left behind whether they be the stuff of childhood or the wonder objects of a supposedly bygone moment. “New” methods, the Wunderblock’s traces insist, are latent in the trace residue of the lost wax ghosts haunting the ostensibly new media in the wake of the digital. The “digital” in digital media carries with it the fingered impression of a lost yet trace touch of the digits of the hand that draws on the touchpad of such devices as the Wunderblock. But, despite the theorizations and enactments of a haptic optics, it remains an adhesive commonplace of characterizations of postdigital representation that the screen of the dark room is the screen of the world. We now inhabit a delirious universe of the ubiquitous screen image that would seem to threaten the most basic of traditional methods: reading and writing.7 In their introduction to the collection Digital Delerium (1997), techno-­ chroniclers Arthur and Marilouise Kroker narrate how the effects of the (post)digital have turned reading into a de-­lire run by the operating command that we “image the world, but understand nothing” such that “image vectors entrap us, entrance us, and disappear us in an electronic labyrinth of the red sky night.”8 But we need not put in opposition the de-­lire and the activity of the “lire,” imaging and reading, speculative imagination and demonstrative proof, the transports of affect and the parsing of analysis. This chapter pursues an alternate route of possibility activated by employing as a method the instrument of an analytics of wonder: the prism. At once a child’s toy that refracts white light into a rainbow of colors in the devised night of the dark room and a scientific device of projection that elucidates a methodology of looking without clearing out or abjecting, the prism illuminates the potentialities of a practice of the both/and or the methodology of what I call “projective prismatics.” Pursuing the old media that haunt the new, this chapter revisits the lingering effects and possibilities of the instrument central to what is called the Scientific Revolution. It is perhaps no accident that the image

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of what Isaac Newton called his “crucial experiment” still circulates popularly as the abstracted triangle of a prism casting an intensified rainbow set against a densely dark field on the cover of Pink Floyd’s classic hallucinogenic rock album The Dark Side of the Moon (1973).9 As an object-­sign of transporting affective conversion and hallucinatory dazzlement—­the iconic Pink Floyd album cover, the new age crystal, the key metaphor for the “glad game” of converting the cruelties of everyday life into an exercise of optimism in the children’s story Pollyanna (first published in 1913)—­it is all too easy to find the prism absurd, a philosophical instrument that, in this moment of compounded precarity, has quite lost its luster. Yet this culminating chapter takes up the prism as a projective instrument related to the other devices for casting images in a darkened chamber (the camera obscura, the magic lantern, the solar microscope, and devices for casting shadows) to perform the possibilities of thinking and imagining otherwise—­beyond the impasse of the cutting choices of optimism versus realpolitik or reparative versus paranoid reading. In promising the demonstration of the essential properties of light and color occulted within what would otherwise deceive the eye as a reified, unitary whiteness, the prism offers another logic of projective speculation and its potential materialization. Looking materially at the historical case of the image cast by light shown through the prism illuminates the productive instabilities of the scene of image projection as a vehicle for not only the visible proof of natural laws but the affective transports of wonder and the kinds of transformative effects on matter associated with the work of alchemy.10

A Projective Prismatics of Reading In the tradition of the demonstration lecture, this chapter enacts its method through the instrument, the prism. This projective prismatics performs the reading that it theoretically elaborates by focusing this reading on and through the projections of the primary text that already evinces the possibilities of such a methodology: Newton’s Opticks (1704).11 Since Marjorie Nicolson’s study Newton Demands the Muse (1946), it has been well known that many eighteenth-­century British poets such as James Thomson found Newton’s writings “a rich source of poetic material.”12 However, as Austrian scientist, inventor of a version of Newton’s chromatometer (the device that showed the recomposition

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of colors into white), and novelist Robert Musil suggests in The Man without Qualities (1930–­42) through the use of speculative rhetoric and prismatic character (each character being at least nine) to develop “new method[s] of thought,” Newton’s Opticks, with its use of the prism to compose a theoretical argument by speculative question and sensual demonstration, is already poetic in the classical sense of a composition that shows the imaginative extension of thought.13 A prismatic reading of Newton’s Opticks shows how the text carries with it a disavowed potential from the early modern demonstration of the device for casting an image, proleptically anticipating its revision in the classic U.S. film The Wizard of Oz (1939).14 In so doing, this reading takes the space-­time journey I am arguing that the prismatic projection enables, tracing a many-­hued, transatlantic arc from Bacon’s New Atlantis and Cornelis Drebbel’s use of transformative image projection in the seventeenth century to Newton’s Opticks, The Wizard of Oz, and further still into an uncertain future.15 The case study of method I pursue here builds on the work of previous chapters exploring the power-­and knowledge-­producing functions of projection technologies as “philosophical instruments” that were to demonstrate and provide training in the first steps of a methodology of rational judgment, namely the separation of viewing subject from the object in the form of a thrown screen image.16 One of the Enlightenment’s oft-­cited essays on method, John Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690) imagines cognition as “not much unlike a closet wholly shut from light, with only some little opening left, to let in external visible resemblances.”17 The negative formulation “not much unlike” quickly gives way to a reformulation of this differential gap between “human understanding” and the projective technology of the dark room as one of order/disorder: “would the pictures coming into such a dark room but stay there, and lie so orderly as to be found upon occasion, it would very much resemble the understanding of a man” (228). The implied failure of these pictures to “stay” and “lie” in an orderly fashion signals what escapes the machine metaphor in its approximation of human understanding. And yet the wish articulated in the subjunctive for well-­behaved, docile project pictures also betrays a real epistemological fear, not of the analogy’s inadequacy but of its formulation of the “understanding of man” as the imposition of a static order and constructed divisions

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of inside and outside on a space of unruly and transformative potential. Technologies of projection like the magic lantern and prism thus signaled the permeability and precariousness of the camera obscura model of vision. With their sensual and illusionistic effects, such projection technologies made visible not only the possibilities of invention and fantasy inherent in the dark closet but also the dissolution of the very distinction that the chamber’s walls were to construct. We have already seen how technologies of projection and the colonial machinery of terrorizing were allied with paranoid processes of the defensive fortification of the ego in which the subject endeavors to cast out feared and hated aspects of the self and in which an exterminating energy is directed toward the disavowed material or abject object. In this last chapter I build on the counterpossibilities of incorporative introjection (chapter 3) and the mutable shadows not just cast on the ego but that hold out the possibility of reshaping it from within (chapter 4) to open up the Scientific Revolution’s teaching of method in order to elicit and elaborate on transformative ways of knowing occulted in these scenes of observational training, namely alternate dynamics of affectively and somatically porous projection activated by the hallucinatory effects of immediacy or presence in technologies for casting a sumptuously magnified, colored, and textured image. Post-­Freudian psychoanalytic accounts of the construction of the subject of colonial authority have used morbid projection to expose how the fortress ego is negatively constituted by the attempt to cast out its abjured heart, the materiality and “otherness” with which it, nonetheless, cannot part.18 Without looking for a way out of the fortress ego, we may find other possibilities in the dark and even locked room of and for the negatively fortified subject—­not just the nots of the negatively constituted ego cut off from the not-­me but also the not-­yet of possibility, the potential substantial transformations of the relations of subject and world out of the extimate “otherness” within. Closely scrutinizing the language of the alchemical corpus from the Middle Ages to the early modern period, Jung extends the sense of projection, the alchemical term for the action of casting onto the philosopher’s stone, to formulate a concept of projective imagination.19 In “The Psychic Nature of the Alchemical Work” in Psychology and Alchemy (1944), Jung writes: “As a result of projection there is an unconscious identity between the psyche of the alchemist and the arcane

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substance, i.e., the spirit imprisoned in matter.”20 He explains this triangulated directionality of projection by redefining imagination in the terms of the material potentialities laid out in The Lexicon (1612) of Martin Ruland in which the early modern alchemist writes that “Imagination is the star in man, the celestial or supercelestial body.”21 From the corporeal aspect of this sense of imagination, Jung further defines projection as projective imagination, a hybrid process by which unconscious traces of possible selves and possible worlds are worked out through something beyond the phantoms of mere fantasy, Jung’s corporeal “subtle bodies” that seem to approach the self from the other direction, from the external world. As a way of resisting the contraption of the fortress ego and of working with the transformative potential of such technologies of projection as the magic lantern and the prism we need not search for unruly spectators. Rather, Jung’s elaboration on the significance projection had in early modern books of secrets and alchemical texts highlights the already emergent but disavowed place of the embodied spectator in a subtle yet tangible between-­realm in which the act of mattering imagination brings the utopian into transformative contact with the mundane.

Projective Imagination and Transformation In their study of instruments and the imagination, Hankins and Silverman explore the anxiety that instruments are not neutral mediating screens between subject and object but rather makers of fact and shapers of what is even thinkable, considering in particular the case of the “instrument that wasn’t,” the ocular harpsichord devised by Jesuit priest and professor of mathematics Louis-­Bertrand Castel (1688–­1757) for the demonstration of color-­tone analogy. Proposing to take the external form of the ordinary harpsichord and replace the internal mechanism, Castel imagined not just keys that would create tones and attendant vibrations with corresponding colors to link eye and ear, music and painting, but also the possibility of what he called an “auricular prism” that could fan out the multiplicity of colors condensed in a musical chord.22 Arguing for the theoretical and practical validity of this rivalrous, synaesthetic, and speculative version of the prism, Castel endeavored to distinguish the ocular harpsichord as a device of transparent revelation, a tool one could trust, by displacing the specter of a monster-­making magic onto Newton’s prism experiment:

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I distrust the prism and its fantastic spectrum. I regard it as an art of enchantment, as an unfaithful mirror of nature, more proper by its brilliance to create flights of imagination and to serve error than to nourish minds solidly and to draw obscure truths from deep wells.23

The distrust Castel casts onto the prism betrays two primary nodes of concern about the specter of “magical” transformation haunting the instrument as a technology of enchantment that creates the facts it claims to reveal and that conjures a speculative universe from a “fantastic,” even “monstrous” instance of facture, a tripled anxiety generated by projection’s capacity to alter the object of sight (making it monstrous or fantastic), its potential for giving potent form to the imagined (making the imagined take on and vie with the power of the real) as well as its immersive, disorienting, and interpellating power to affect and even transform the spectator. Such were the transformative and imaginative capacities of image projection dominant in the historical example that historians of pre-­ cinema and writers on the magic lantern may be compelled to mention and yet dispatch quickly: the case of the Dutch inventor, alchemist, instrument maker, and engraver Cornelis Drebbel (1572–­1633).24 Perhaps best known as an inventor, particularly of the submarine, it was Drebbel’s showmanship, the demonstrations that Drebbel made of his inventions—­a compound microscope, a thermometer, a telescope, an incubator, a perpetual motion machine, and a device to produce lightning, rain, and freezing temperatures—­at the court of James I of England that have made him of lasting interest. Rosalie L. Colie’s now classic studies from the 1950s argue that Drebbel’s demonstration experiments constitute the material source for Francis Bacon’s imaginative projection of a society governed by philosopher-­scientists, his New Atlantis (1626).25 While Drebbel’s practical alchemy extended to the application of imperial botanical knowledge and experimentation with the cochineal insect indigenous to Mexico to develop the perfect red dye or “the color of desire,” he does not appear in Deborah Harkness’s recent ethnographic account of the collaborative communities and Elizabethan projection techniques out of which Bacon’s “Salomon’s House” emerged.26 Whether or not Drebbel is indeed the source, “Salomon’s House,” the research institute of Bacon’s new Atlantis, features “houses” or parts

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of this imagined institute dedicated to the study of optical devices and their effects. In what are called “perspective-­houses,” “demonstrations” are made of all lights and radiations; and of all colours; and out of things uncoloured and transparent, we can represent unto you all several colours; not in rain-­bows, as it is in gems and prisms, but of themselves single. We represent also all multiplications of light, which we carry to great distance, and make so sharp as to discern small points and lines; also all colorations of light: all delusions and deceits of the sight, in figures, magnitudes, motions, colours: all demonstrations of shadows.27

In this ambition to encompass total knowledge and to include all optical phenomena and all possibilities, it is notable that Bacon’s perspective-­ houses do not exclude the demonstration of “delusions and deceits of the sight.” While Colie suggests that with these references to “perspective-­ houses” and “deceits of sight” and the “senses,” Bacon may be citing Drebbel’s work “with a kind of proto-­magic lantern or image projecting device,” what interests me more is the marked difference to which Bacon puts this display of optical deception.28 Reference to “deceits of the sight” and “deceits of the senses” recurs strategically in the monologue presentation of the “riches of Salomon’s house” set within the narrative of Bacon’s tale. The description concludes not with the perspective-­houses or the mathematical house with its astronomical instruments but with houses devoted to “deceits of the senses.” These “houses” that are designed for the presentation of experiments with conjuration and illusion and in which “we represent all manner of feats of juggling, false apparitions, impostures, and illusions, and their fallacies” do not seem to diverge from the model of paranoid projection I have elaborated across the preceding chapters, namely the presentation of illusion in order to de-­monstrate, that is, to cast out the monstrous possibility of “strangeness,” “imposture,” and, ultimately, the possibility of being taken in or altered. But let us look closely at the turn given to “deceits of the senses” in the culminating lines of this description of the research institute at the center of Bacon’s new Atlantis: And surely you will easily believe that we that have so many things truly natural which induce admiration, could in a world of particulars deceive the senses, if we would disguise those things and labour to make them seem more miraculous. But we do hate all impostures

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and lies: insomuch as we have severely forbidden it to all our fellows, under pain of ignominy and fines, that they do not shew any natural work or thing, adorned or swelling; but only pure as it is, and without all affectation of strangeness.29

Notice the way that “could” changes to “would” and that, while the knowledge and power to deceive are readily claimed with the phrase “But we do hate all impostures,” the will to do so is sharply denounced, legally banished, and made subject to punishment both financial and social. Rather than seeing this incorporation and then consignment of “deceits of the senses” as a contradiction, we may rather understand this charged and seemingly conflicting command in the context of the New Atlantis’s parable of the “true miracle,” the “genuine heavenly sign” of the great pillar of light capped by a cross at sea witnessed off the coast of the island of Bensalem.30 As Lorraine Daston elaborates, what is to distinguish the “truly natural” from deceits or—­as Bacon parses the preternatural according to the agential “finger” of the human, the demonic, or the divine—­“divine miracles, works of nature, works of art, and impostures and illusions of all sorts” is the public witnessing and demonstrable exercise of discerning visual judgment (including, as Daston puts it, “inspection for fraud” and “interpretation in light of doctrine”) by a community of experts.31 But such demonstration, exercise, and training demands development of such a technics for the management of deception, a practice that makes of illusion the disciplinary medium through which a capacity to determine causes and assign agency is demonstrated by and for an authoritative witnessing elite. Thus animated by the hatred of “imposture,” Bacon’s management of deception departs dramatically from what little we know of Drebbel’s use of optical projection at the court of James I, the only description of which is a letter among the Huygens manuscripts (1608 or 1609) writ­ ten from London by Cornelis Drebbel and addressed to Ysbrandt van Rietwijck.32 As the letter contains a lengthy and quite particular description written by Drebbel himself, let me quote this passage in full: I appear only in a room, without having anyone else with me. And first of all I change my clothes in front of all those who are in the room. Now I am dressed entirely in black velvet, and in a moment, nay, as quickly as one can imagine, I am dressed entirely in green velvet, in red velvet, changing my dress in all the colours of the world. And not

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this alone, but I change my clothes into all kinds of garments, as I myself desire, e.g. now in satin, of all colours, then in silver cloth, then in gold cloth, now presenting myself as a king, decorated with diamonds and all kinds of stones, and in a moment transforming myself into a beggar, all my clothes being patched and torn, while nevertheless I have on only one set of clothes which I never put off. Moreover I transform myself into a real tree without anyone else noticing it, the leaves fluttering as if stirred by the wind; and not only into a tree, but into all manner of things, as I wish. Thereafter I transform myself into some creature, as I myself desire, now into a lion, then into a bear, then into a horse, then into a cow, a sheep, a calf, a pig, etc. And moreover it appears as if the earth opens and the spirits rise up from it, first in the form of a cloud and then changing themselves into such a shape as I think fit, to wit into the shape of Albertus Magnus or into the shape of some prince or king, as I myself choose. Nay, I make the giants, such as they existed in former ages, to seem to rise up from the earth, twenty, thirty feet tall, moving and stirring so wonderfully and perfectly as if the parts of their bodies seem to live in a natural way. And I do all this by a new invention, which I have found by means of optics, with I can do wonderfully ingenious things, too many of them to mention them all here, about which I tell you more another time.33

Whether the show was devised with the aid of painted glass sliders, prisms, concave mirrors, convex lenses, or some combination of projective apparatus, most important in Drebbel’s account is that the show elaborates a performance exercise of the principle of imaginative projection animated by “what I myself desire” to make things appear as if from nowhere but also in such a way as to take on life-­rivaling and mobile forms. Drebbel’s sequence of conjured scenes effects a destabilizing metamorphosis, a substantial dissolution of self without fixed end, moving as it does from alterations to the color (green to black to the red of the cochineal) and texture (velvet to silk to tatters) of garments (likely a performative reference to Drebbel’s material experiments with colored pigment dyes) to the alternating status of the underlying body in profound, species-­defying physical transmutations from human into plant and animal. This body that is only one and yet not one also demonstrates without abjection the plasticity of the body, not only in terms of size and scale but also number, power, and worth, generating not just multiplicity but a multitude out of what begins as the repetitively

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marked singular of the “only one.” Especially significant is that the scientist showman’s body is no transparent authority but rather the surface and the ground upon which the show’s imaginative projections take place. In its emphasis on the persuasively lifelike appearance of subjective transformation, Drebbel’s “new invention by means of optics” comes close to that other sense of projection taken from the early modern discourse of alchemy and employed by English playwright Ben Jonson in his comedy of disguise The New Inne (1629). In act 3, scene 2 “reason” and “knowledge” give way to the “alchimy” of passion, effecting so deep a change in the body that one of the characters proclaims, “I feel that transformation o’ my Blood / As I were quite become another creature. / And all he speaks, it is projection!”34 But unlike Jonson’s erotic romp of a New Inne in which the characters’ disguises are ultimately taken off and their passions directed into a resolution of heterosexual pairs, or Bacon’s New Atlantis where the primary passion is hatred of all “imposture,” the fascination of Drebbel’s performance with his “new invention” remains its embrace of transformation on the body of the scientist himself and its “desire” for ongoing metamorphosis. If Drebbel’s description is distinctive for the extent to which it emphasizes a desire for image transformation enacted in and on the screen of the body, it is not unique to the alterity of the early modern. The transformative capacities of prismatic projection reverberate into the Enlightenment and beyond, from the scene of crucial experiments to those of popular performance with “curious machines” of image projection. An eighteenth-­century British handbill (Figure 31) for a show of natural philosophy invites “Lovers of Arts and Sciences” to an exhibition of “figures” produced by a “Curious Machine.” This “Optical Machine” promises at once to span the distance between here and there by presenting views of “Home” and “Abroad” and to rival nature with a presentation “Properly adapted to the Philosophical System of Sir Isaac Newton’s Opticks.” The Getty museum catalog for the exhibition Devices of Wonder interprets the handbill as a call to a magic lantern show of topographical sliders, dismissing the reference to Newton as an example of advertising puffery intended to increase profit and prestige with a false promise of scientific education.35 As demonstration instruments, however, the magic lantern and its variant the solar microscope cannot be so readily dissociated from

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Figure 31. Unknown, To the Curious in General, And in Particular to all

Lovers of Arts and Sciences. There is to be seen without Loss of Time, at the White Hart: A Curious Machine, Properly adapted to the Philosophical System of Sir Isaac Newton’s Opticks . . . [17–­?]. Courtesy of the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (96.R.102).

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scientific instruments deployed in the trial or experiment understood as the show of philosophical principles. Whether the specific eighteenth-­ century curious machine show publicized by this handbill involved magic lantern and prism projections or just the magic lantern, the advertising strategy of this appeal to the “Curious” exploits the visual enticements of the projective device at the center of Sir Isaac Newton’s treatise on optics: the prism. The likelihood that this optical show would have been a presentation combining various projection apparatus is suggested further by this plate (Figure 32) from Edmé Guyot’s Nouvelles recreations (1772) in which one may note that the phantasmagoria lantern referred to as “painting on smoke” is assembled with the magic lantern and prismatic projections. A later edition of William Hooper’s Rational Recreations (1787), a text of educational experiments based upon the work of Guyot, gives us a different version of what the combination of the prism and the camera obscura might have entailed. Hooper includes a discussion of what he calls the “prismatic camera obscura.” This spectacular device involves a dark room to be fitted with a shutter against the window with two holes, two prisms placed perpendicularly in the holes, and a paper placed opposite the light to catch the cast spectrum. Hooper’s prismatic camera obscura experiment also recommends cutting out the shapes of flowers, trees, and animals, placing them in line with the different divided colors of the spectrum, placing a dark cloth or paper behind these shapes, and rotating one of the prisms on its axis to change the colors of the different shapes to create a spectacle of “pleasing variety.”36 What these examples indicate is that by the mid-­to late eighteenth century, the spectacular and transformative possibilities of the projecting prism had been incorporated into the image-­ casting devices of the dark room.

Through Newton’s Prism The passionate search for causal explanations through visual experiment that would account for how an image is produced and perceived occupied the center of inquiry and the basis for a methodology of induction in what is retrospectively called the Scientific Revolution, in which the experimental scene of the projected optical image also became a privileged figure for the rational pursuit of knowledge. According to the assertions of Sir Isaac Newton’s Opticks, images and specifically the

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Figure 32. Edmé-­Gilles Guyot, “Painting on Smoke” with magic lantern and

prismatic projections from Nouvelles recreations physiques et mathematiques, 4 vols. (Paris: Chez Gueffier, 1772–­75), vol. 3, pl. 16. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Wisconsin–­Madison.

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diagrammatic and rhetorical figures for the optical phenomenon of the rainbow cast onto the screen of the sky and for the production and appearance of colors in the world are to persuade us that there is a “Science of Colours” and that this science of color, though a form of “Speculation,” is, nonetheless, based on ordered mathematical projection that can be visually proven.37 And yet Newton’s assertions concerning this “Science of Colours” are qualified by the admission, nonetheless, that the image of color may depend not just on the nature of light but also on its production or alteration by another aspect of speculative projection, which Newton refers to as the “Power of Imagination” (244). While the diagrammatic outlines of the prism experiments promise visual proof in the form of the sensation of colors impressing themselves on the spectator’s sensorium, the black-­and-­white lines of the Opticks’s engraved plates require an act of projective imagination to produce out of the spare tracings the beautiful, colorific images of the spectral rainbow they offer as proof. The sequence of experiments that form the Opticks concludes with a further leap of projective imagining in response to the question addressed to the colorific and wonderful image of beauty the text conjures for our view: “and whence arises all that Order and Beauty which we see in the World?” (369).38 And so the beautiful image, the rainbow, the cast spectrum, the peacock’s tail, or cauda pavonis becomes visual evidence of the steps by which natural philosophy is supposedly taking us toward knowledge of the first cause. The sign of movement along this trajectory toward knowledge is to be found in the process by which these images of beauty are viewed or, as Newton phrases it, “the Images only carried through the organs of sense into our little Sensoriums, are there seen and beheld by that which in us perceives and thinks” (370). The “only” may be there to keep the imagination at bay as an additional origin. And yet what interests me here is how this precarious “only” in the phrase “only carried through” also carries with it the submerged and yet necessary invocation of projective imagination and aesthetic experience as essential ways of knowing. Newton’s experiment with projecting white light from the sun through a prism to produce a spectral rainbow of colors or what he phrased the “Solar Image” was one of the most reproduced set-­pieces of the Scientific Revolution (28).39 Let me focus consideration of the central performative role of the projecting prism on one of Newton’s drawings of what he called, at least in 1672, the “experimentum crucis.” This

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diagram (Figure 33) from one of his later notebooks (i.e., after 1672) sets the scene of not just any philosophical instrument or optical experiment, but the “crucial experiment”—­a two-­prism demonstration that was to prove Newton’s theories about the color properties of light and the role of the prism itself. On the right a lightbeam from the sun streams down through a small aperture in the window shutter. The sunlight falls through a tabletop lens onto a triangular prism. Dispersed by the prism, the light casts what Newton termed “a colour’d image of the Sun,” an image of the chromatic spectrum, onto a rigged sheet before the opposite wall (26). This standing screen also bears an aperture, a small slit through which only the red light can travel. By the use of a second prism, we are to see that the red light cast through the prism emerges as a solitary color, a lone perceptible spot of red on the far wall without its six spectral companions. While rough sketches of the crucial experiment had their own private life in Newton’s notebooks and papers, the textual narration of what Newton called the “Event of the Experiment” occupied a central, public place in his printed Opticks (26). The narration of the visual experiment was to perform proof of Newton’s theory that the sun’s light, like the projected “Solar Image” or “colour’d Image of the Sun,” is a “heterogeneous mixture of colors and differently refrangible rays” (63). And yet to perform its effect on its readers as viewers of the “Event of the Experiment,” it employs a sensualist, visionary rhetoric: the experiments are said, for example, to “stir up the sensation of whiteness”—­ that is, a whiteness composed of many colours (141). And while this rationalized scene of the “science of color” is supposed to focus the readers’ sensibilities on colors as experimentally controlled phenomena of light, Newton’s admission that the appearance of color may be effectively produced by other means reintroduces the specter that, to do its demonstrative work, the Opticks’s visual experiment may depend on very different kinds of projective imagination, whether fantastical, delusional, or pathological: I speak here of colors so far as they arise from Light. For they appear sometimes by other causes, as when by the power of Phantasy we see Colours in a Dream, or a Mad-­man sees things before him which are not there; or when we see Fire by striking the Eye, or see Colours like the Eye of a Peacock’s Feather, by pressing our eyes in either corner whilst we look the other way. (160–­61)

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Figure 33. Sir Isaac Newton, drawing of the so-­called crucial experiment that shows

light from the sun being refracted through one prism and then being refracted through another prism. Pen and ink on paper. Oxford, New College, MS 361/2, fol. 45v. By permission of the Warden and Scholars of New College, Oxford.

The passage maintains that Newton’s work pertains to colors produced by light and that already inhere in and arise from light. However, the passage also directly acknowledges and confronts the “power of Phantasy,” madness, and a blow or pressure to the eye that causes the subject to see color that is “not there,” making the eye an organ vulnerable to touch. Further, by painting these phenomena in terms of such attractive and redolent images as the “Eye of a Peacock’s Feather,” the passage not only makes induced colors rival those that supposedly “arise” naturally from light but also casts them in terms that resemble the peacock’s tail, the alchemical symbol for a stage on the path of transformation.40

The Queer Technology of the Prism Tracing this complicated spectrum of the science of light and color, projective imagination, and waking dream from Newton’s experiments along the yellow brick road and somewhere over the rainbow, to the emerald prism city of Oz and the rainbow pride flags and rainbow tents of queer solidarity is to see over time, not the appropriation of Enlightenment techniques and signs, but rather the unfolding of the potentialities

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for a transformative queer way of knowing and becoming already inherent in the projecting prism and the spectral rainbow image it casts. “Queer,” in its eighteenth-­century English usage, signified not only the strange or uncanny aspects of mundane realities but also dazzling, transverse crossings and twisting refractions. Derived from the German adjective quer or “transverse” and the Latin verb torquere or “to twist” and related to the English synonym for question (“query”), the word “queer” raises the speculative, utopian questions of what habitable planets we might yet actualize, what passionate affiliations we might perform across the groups to which we are assigned, what becomings beyond the legislated norms of bodily and social form we might materialize.41 One need not “queer” Newton’s Opticks. Rather, Newton’s Opticks already trains its readers and spectators in a kind of queer practice of embodied, sensual looking that both refracts white light into its component colors as well as recomposes multiplicity into unity, that brings together experimental and fantastical modes of projective imagination, and that speculates—­as in the Opticks’s closing “Queries”—­through the “main Business of natural Philosophy” to “the very first Cause, which certainly is not mechanical” (369). To read Newton’s images of and produced by the projecting prism as a queer technology is to suggest how we might trouble the tomblike construction of the archive of the past and move beyond the opposition of readings as either presentist or historically bounded, deconstructive or creatively propositional. The prism offers a rhetorical and visual device of sensual experience and experiment that at once performs several effects. It illuminates and exposes occulted qualities, diffuses white light into the color spectrum and recombines the spectrum into a whiteness that is no longer purely white, and suggests a logic other than binary logic, that is, a prismatic intelligence capable of working with multiple factors, multiple possible answers, and dynamic change. This is not just my own projection from the present into the past and out of the horrors of the present into an uncertain future. Projective reading techniques may be developed as something less freighted by charges of anachronism than retroactive identification from the present into the past. Following the refracted path of the spectral rainbow cast by Newton’s experiments elucidates a projective prismatics of reading that explicates the anticipatory dimension enfolded in early modern philosophical experiments that arguably are not yet over.

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While the tense of Newton’s Opticks is often the past tense of the recording of experiments that have already been tried, Newton also employs active narration. The present-­tense narrative works with the diagrams to convey the illusion that the experiments are happening before our eyes. Experiment number eight, for instance, takes place in the summer and involves a prism, a lens, and an open book. Newton narrates the motion of the sun and “the motion of his Image on the Book” so that as we pass our eyes over the printed words and diagrams that compose Newton’s Opticks the spectrum from red to blue appears to shimmer and glide across the pages of our own reading (53). While the individual prism experiments each express a sense of complete action, there is a sense in which the experiments as a whole have not reached a terminus. The book’s opening advertisement projects an experimental future by calling for “farther Enquiry” (cxxii), and Query 30’s speculation that the “Course of Nature . . . seems delighted with Transmutations” (374) opens the ending and the outcomes of the Opticks’s scenes of experimentation onto a vision of projective imagination and into a future domain of possibility in which the spectral colored images may convert into bodies and vice versa: “And among such various and strange Transmutations, why may not Nature change Bodies into Light, and Light into Bodies?” (375). The past-­tense narration of experiments already tried and the search for primary causes in the Opticks would seem to reinforce a sense of Enlightenment science’s closure, and indeed, such a reading would appear sealed by Alexander Pope’s epitaph for Newton that, in its rearticulation of Genesis in and as the Scientific Revolution, makes Newton’s experiments with light at once the origin and the terminus of an Enlightenment achieved in a single, decisive, and determining stroke of illumination: “Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night: / God said, Let Newton be! And all was Light.”42 Yet even though the Opticks may be read as reinforcing the status quo through the invocation of natural law, the prismatic effect of the Opticks and its projective imaginings from the spectral rainbow to the various and strange transmutations of light and bodies also has a utopian dimension, an opening up of future possibilities, of possible becomings. Let me remark the obvious about the Opticks’s prismatic imagination. The differentiated, coloured bodies of Newton’s Opticks are unmarked by the stigmatic brands of identification and the identifying terms of injury—­woman, black, pervert—­that continue to subject bodies

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to social and political regulation and that, at the same time, reformulate their injustices by appeals to natural law.43 The frequent invocation in intersectional feminist, queer, and critical race studies of the rhetorical “through the prism of” (think of Maxine Baca Zinn’s Through the Prism of Difference: Readings on Sex and Gender and Manning Marable’s Beyond Black and White: Transforming African-­American Politics) and the use of the term “prism” as shorthand for multiple inter­ sectional differences in the formation of activist organizations such as Yale University’s queers of color group called PRISM attest that the visual tool of the prism—­the centerpiece of an Enlightenment science that might seem to be primarily and even exclusively about producing and confirming the imagined universality of that mythic unmarked white, presumptively “straight,” European man of science and reason—­ already holds within it another way to apprehend difference, a way of looking that diffuses and transforms imagined, disembodied centers of vision.44 Following the cast spectral arc of a whiteness diffused into its component diversity of colors, the speculative gaze through the projecting prism yields an attractive sense impression of colored bodies whose transformative potential cannot be anticipated or predicted. This prismatic way of seeing does not reduce differences to sameness nor does it make of difference an absolute and static attribute of certain bodies. The chromatic spectrum resists hierarchization into an epidermal caste system or pigmentocracy and, indeed, any ready reduction to the binaries of race, gender, or sexuality: the black/white, male/female, hetero/homo that are made to stand for not only compulsory division into a cutting logic of either/or but also the polarized values of good/ bad and the power relations of top/bottom. The forecasting arc of Newton’s experiments in projection emits a desire not merely to demonstrate how light and color shape and affect bodies but also how subject and object, light and bodies may be transformed. These scenes of experimental pedagogy suggest how the sensory impression of color and the aesthetic experience of wonder and surprise are ways of knowing linked to world remaking. There is also something seductively tangible about the prism itself, a bit of cut glass (or now plastic) that fits so easily in the hand and can so quickly be put into practice by holding it up to the eye. The transmutation of Newton’s laborious prism experiments into the seemingly simple “crucial experiment”—­a set piece of rhetorical deception in its own right—­

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made it possible to conceive of the observer as part of the experimental apparatus and of the device in turn as incorporated into the experimenter, offering an almost ready-­made way of revisioning the scene of observation from the spectator’s bodily perspective. In an effort to resexualize the history of Galilean science and return the body and specifically the body of pleasure to the practice of knowledge making, Dušan I. Bjelić’s Galileo’s Pendulum: Science, Sexuality and the Body-­ Instrument Link (2003) devotes its practical engagement chapter not to the pendulum of the book’s title but rather to the prism. The chapter Bjelić calls a “case study” does not concern Newton or color but rather consists of what he calls a “respecification exercise” in which the reader is coached via a series of diagrams to hold, move, and look through the prism with the objective being the discovery of a sense of how certain kinds of knowledges or “praxioms” are forged only in and through practice.45 Ironically, in its intense hyperfocus on Galileo and the homosocial scientific community of the Jesuits, the book misses the Enlightenment pedagogical history of practical engagement with the prism that it so closely replicates without acknowledging. The Dutch scientist and popularizer of Newton’s philosophy of experimental physics Willem Jacob ’s Gravesande (1688–­1742), for example, designed and commissioned special display apparatus for his lectures as professor of mathematics and astronomy at the university of Leiden. His widely circulated and translated publication Mathematical Elements of Natural Philosophy, Confirmed by Experiments (1720–­21), one of the earliest textbooks in Newtonian physics, makes clear, however, that the practical involvement of the student and the student’s own bodily participation was a requisite part of the pedagogy.46 The illustration of experiments involving the prism that appeared in the sixth edition of 1747, which was advertised as “greatly improved by the author, and illustrated with 127 copper plates” (Figure 34), does not just display the prism and the light shining through it as a spectacle to be viewed from a distance, a sight separated from the body of the spectator, but rather juxtaposes the prism on a stand next to the figure of a young student holding the prism up to the eyes with carefully poised fingers. The prism presents itself as available to and for the experimenting body-­in-­the-­making and for knowledge making in practice not against but out of its history as a queer technology.

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In Chroma: A Book of Color (1994), the late filmmaker Derek Jarman argues for a profound historical and material link of sensibility and perspective between the queer libidinal currents of Renaissance Neoplatonism and the philosophical, scientific, and sensual investments in the investigation of color from Leonardo da Vinci to Isaac Newton.47 Jarman confronts directly the problem of what is conventionally deemed the main historical narrative and what is relegated to the status of the deviation, that is, the ways in which same-­sex love, alchemy, and color are often mapped as superficial digressions. Jarman acknowledges that some might take the connection the narrative rerouting he suggests in positioning queerness, color, and alchemical science as shaping forces in the story of technological change to be a perverse detour, one as bent and twisted off the main track of histories of science and technology as the curve of the rainbow or the twists of the yellow brick road. “I know,” he writes, “this is a long way from light and colour . . . but is it? For Leonardo took the first step into light, and Newton, a notorious bachelor, followed him with Opticks. . . . Colour seems to have a Queer bent!”48 Jarman’s exclamation over the queer bent of color might seem not just a deviation but a projective delusion, a promiscuous presentism along the dandified stitches of the weak seam of the “seeming.”

Figure 34. Willem Jacob ’s Gravesande, Mathematical Elements of Natural Philoso-

phy, trans. J. T. Desaguliers, 2 vols. (London: Printed for W. Innys, et. al., 1747), vol. 2, pl. 116. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, Washington, D.C.

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But whatever one may make of the bachelors (or, for that matter, the spinning spinsters) of history, a responsible, engaged, historical reading of the scene of image projection must contextualize and follow through on its catalyzing potentials for queer transmutations of light and bodies.

Over the Rainbow of Newton’s Prism Experiments: Oz and the Future Perfect The “queer bent of color” in Newton’s prism experiments takes us from a darkened London chamber in the 1660s to the Technicolor landscape of Oz with its projection of “strange and beautiful sights.” These include L. Frank Baum’s 1900 children’s novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; Baum’s multimedia illustrated lecture, “The Fairylogue and Radio-­ Plays” (1910) that employed magic lantern and film projection; the 1914 film versions of other Baum tales from the Oz series, The Patchwork Girl of Oz and The Magic Cloak of Oz; the novel’s adaptation in the form of the 1939 Technicolor film; and, according to the novel’s narration of Dorothy’s first glimpse of Oz, “the queerest people she [Dorothy] had ever seen.”49 The magic lantern show version of “The Fairylogue” (Figure 35) takes us to the lands of fairy changelings in the world of Oz, inhabited by brilliantly and diversely colored bodies projected by means of colored slides and advertised as having been specially hand painted in Paris.50 Other technologies are at work in the 1914 Oz films, which use the device of changeling cloth as an embedded material metaphor for not just the screen itself but also a viewing practice that reconstitutes the flat black and white of projected images into the vivifying colors of a patchwork girl and a magic cloak. The trick film techniques central to The Patchwork Girl of Oz work to convey the illusion that the cinema screen, like the patchwork quilt, assembles itself into the outlines of a body that, with the application of a magician’s powder, becomes a robustly sized, living drag doll. The Magic Cloak of Oz, on the other hand, presents the illusion that the screen onto which the film is projected has been transformed into a translucent fabric sheet behind which we glimpse a dancing circle of changeling bodies, the fairy-­weavers of the cloak’s magical texture. When the fabric screen comes into direct contact with the bodies whose possible presence it mediates, the magic cloak turns homeless boys (played by girls) into drag kings and grants an old queen a youthful reflection in

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Figure 35. L. Frank Baum surrounded by the characters in “The Fairylogue and

Radio-­Plays,” 1908. Photograph from the L. Frank Baum Papers. Courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library.

the mirror to match her beautiful body image. In an interesting turnabout of the classic relation between the screen as mirror and felt body-­ image, the film holds out a double promise: not only that the fantasized spectral mirror reflection of the screen might actually transform to correspond to our ideal sense of embodiment, but also that the viewer’s eye might touch and be touched by the screen through a kind of mutually transformative contact. Baum’s 1900 novel and the 1939 Hollywood classic take visual and narrative turns from the familiar grey landscape of home and familial bonds into a queer utopian nowhere of color, a land of magic, the Oz of the inside of the prism that enables seeing the world as livable rainbow of “marvelous beauty” in which the “magic art” of a kiss between an old woman witch and a young girl initiates a transformative journey on a yellow brick road and in a carriage pulled by a horse of many colors.51 This refracted line catalyzes

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a profound and substantial transformation from lack into the proliferative gold of passionate interactions between girls, witches, dogs, tin men, lions, scarecrows, and magicians, an erotics of promiscuously mixed bodies that not only defies the limits of binary consignment but, following the arc of the rainbow, is visibly plotted by the kind of never-­ ending wonder of its projection into viable and habitable futures. To make this argument is not to appropriate the prismatic device of the screen of many colors for a queer aesthetic survival politics alien to it. Despite its title, film scholar Alexander Doty’s Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon (2000) snaps back at the accusation that Oz would even require queering. Doty turns the direction of projection around to recast presumptively heterosexual readings of The Wizard of Oz as, rather, “wishful reading into the text.”52 In the chapter “‘My Beautiful Wickedness’: The Wizard of Oz as Lesbian Fantasy,” Doty comes out as a gay lover of the classic 1939 film shown annually on television screens in the United States as “family entertainment”—­a lover, he asserts, of a lesbian fantasy that enables the pleasures of cross-­ gender, crossed-­sex projective identification with what is already there. But as a lover of mutable crossed-­sex, cross-­gender, animate to inanimate, and trans-­species identifications, passions, and affiliations among a fabulously motley array of colored bodies, I would like to argue further not that the various versions of The Wizard of Oz support projective identifications between an imagined unitary self and other but rather that the film’s queer prism effect, its projective imagination, transits us out of that either/or.53 These versions of The Wizard of Oz prismatically recast the story of modernity as a shift from grey into a projective color that challenges us to rethink the origins and beginnings of cinema in relation to alchemy and queer desire, transmutations of gender, and alternative forms of reproduction. The 1939 film visually plots the steps of projective imagination by taking us through Dorothy’s window as screen.54 In his British Film Institute “Film Classics” volume dedicated to the film he says made him a writer, Salman Rushdie reads this sequence as the movie within the movie. But in taking us from the phantasmagoria show of the magic lantern to color film, the opening sequence also initiates a recapitulation of the history of cinema. Through the window-­framed magic lantern sequence of cloudy bodies that cycle through the air to transform, for example, from spinsters on bicycles into witches on broomsticks, we

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follow the colored rainbow—­now curled into a gold-­brick road—­to the emerald prism city of Oz drawn by its “horse of a different color” for which “difference” means turning from one shade to the next, and from there to an audience with the wizard down a hallway that gives the illusion of traveling inside a prismatic refractor. The famous scene of the “reveal” exposing the man behind the curtain troubles and queers the tale of modernity as the progressive disenchantment of the world, for it effects a transfer of agency from a would-­be magician to the queer technology of projective imagination itself, the prismatic gaze that allows one to see that one will have had the activating powers of the red shoes, the heart, the brain, and the courage all along. Let me conclude with that oft-­quoted Socrates line, “In wonder begins philosophy.”55 Actually, according to translations of the dialogue, Theaetetus admits, “Yes indeed, by the gods, Socrates, I wonder exceedingly as to why (what) in the world these things are, and sometimes in looking at them I truly get dizzy.”56 To this question of wonder, Socrates replies by framing the experience of wondering thus: The reason is, my dear, that, apparently, Theodorus’ guess about your nature is not a bad one, for this experience is very much a philosopher’s, that of wondering. For nothing else is the beginning (principle) of philosophy than this, and, seemingly, whoever’s genealogy it was, that Iris was the offspring of Thaumas (wonder), it’s not a bad one.57

As the concluding queries of Newton’s Opticks attest, the question is, like the prism, a way of opening up a space for transformative thought, feeling, and action. Given that the hallucinogenic wonder-­filled genealogical trip version of the origins of the pursuit of knowledge extends from Thaumus or Wonder to Iris, goddess of the Rainbow, and, if we follow Plutarch’s dialogue on love, to Eros, I wonder why it is that the dizzying, questioning “wonder” spoken of here and reiterated in Newton’s Opticks is so often translated blandly.58 In the stanza from Emily Dickinson with which I began and her famous formulation of passion as a revealer of a spectrum of potentialities with the lines “the love of thee—­a prism be,” the prism is a creative technology of queer reproduction, a way of seeing and making that is at once impassioned and yet not limited to specific acts of gendered bodies.59 This connection between prismatic reading and an erotics of sight is already projected

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by the rhetoric of Newton’s Opticks and its query concerning the transformation of bodies into light and light into bodies that proposes a speculative genealogy in which eros is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow but, rather, a potential inherent in the chromatic gaze. In her conclusion to the collection of essays Vision in Context (1996), feminist philosopher Teresa Brennan writes, “The gaze may be a powerful force, and yet it is not a force at all. It is immaterial, symbolic, indeed, ‘metaphorical.’”60 Brennan goes on to use metaphor to chart a genealogy of other versions of the gaze from Galen through Lacan, a genealogy of vision as not merely constructed but constructing in both a psychic and material sense. Her genealogy of vision returns the gaze to discarded theories of extramission (light projected out from the eye) in order to explain both the denied shaping capacity of its morphing projections as well as the substantial internal transformations of an occulted, deeply receptive version of the gaze. But, as the Opticks suggests, speculation by query about the potential transformations that inhere in vision depends on the aesthetics of metaphors to take us from here to a there not yet realized. Newton’s Opticks may be used to confirm conventional tropes: those of the “crucial experiment,” the scientific method, and the Enlightenment perhaps most obviously come to mind. And yet reducing the text to such standardized expectations does some violence to the text’s own shaping projections of multiple possibilities. Traveling through the prism of the Opticks’s visual and rhetorical devices makes it possible to reopen a canonical text and to see how it holds an uncanonical science of method, a means of thinking with and out of the multiplicities and particularities of space, time, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity, our passionate investments and potential transformations. But such a prismatic reading, one that does not queer but queries a text to find its refractive potential, can and should be performed with other texts. The projective imagination condensed in the prism promises further refraction of its potential color effects, a transformative embrace of the twisting imbrications of the complex multiforms of eros and embodiment. Just as Newton’s Opticks projects experimental futures through a concluding rhetoric of the query, I in turn close by invoking the methodology of a projective prismatic reading with a question posed in the future perfect, the tense that anticipates fulfilled promise. The future perfect is a tense that seems out of sync with the tenseness of this moment

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of intense precarity in which we are well schooled by scholars such as Lauren Berlant to interrogate our attachments to future promise as the cruel optimism of what wears us out in the yellow-­brick hallways of labor without any prospect of even adequate compensation.61 Thus, the question is posed with the force of negation. In the same year (1925) that Freud wrote “A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing-­Pad,’” he developed his ideas about the related processes of introjection and projection in the rivalry between the reality-­ego and the pleasure-­ego (“I should like to take this into myself and keep that out”) in the essay titled simply “Negation.”62 Whether judgments are affirmative or castigatory (or, as Freud offers, “I should like to eat this” or “I should like to spit it out”), Freud maintained that what is alien and threatening to the ego (and alien pleasures may be as threatening as familiar terrors) can be admitted to consciousness only on the condition that it is negated.63 Negation does not reveal the unconscious nor lift a repression, but its nots pry an opening in the knots of what we cannot allow ourselves to admit. And so I wonder. Why will the prism’s queer technology not have effected its promised alchemical transformations of the everyday conditions of injustice, shame, and waste in catching the inextinguishable colors (to rephrase Adorno) of that which may yet be, of what we may yet become?64

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Conclusion

Queer Projection: Theses on the “Future of an Illusion”

A rhizomatic relation to the historical in relation to the activity of the world gets the point that critical recontextualization is an opening in the direction and force of matter, mattering, and interrelating. This is what criticism can be for now, not just an archive of forces directed toward wisdom or a universal theory but also a performance of virtual realism about living on, with all of its overdetermined constitutive antagonisms and attachments. That’s why I do it: converting the object into a scene, then holding open the door. —­Lauren Berlant, “Cruel Optimism, Becoming Event: A Response”

I opened this book with seven scenes of projection to endeavor to open and reeventilize a variety of projection devices: the fossilized fetish instruments of the history of the origins of scientific method; the machine metaphors for the unconscious that risk the danger of not just instrumentalizing the unconscious but converting the unconscious into a scientific object as a transparent and even knowable and predictable object (an empirical positivity for which there need be no analysis, only operations); and the predetermined machine boxes of familiar narratives about the camera obscura as the beginning of a now nostalgic history of photography and its wet and analog processes, and of the magic lantern as the quaint precursor to cinema, the PowerPoint lecture, the immersions of virtual reality, and the everyday ubiquity of digital projection on screens both massive and miniature. Of course, I have my own stubborn object attachments. Attachments, as Lauren Berlant reminds us in Cruel 225

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Optimism, can wear us out, erode us on the yellow brick road not to Oz but along the one-­way street of the slow death of promises that do not and perhaps cannot materialize and yet bind us by their glimmers of hope.1 But I also have a passionate attachment to the not-­pessimism (but not exactly optimism either) for what propositional criticism can do as an act of history writing that sets scenes to hold the door open. This is what I understand Berlant to incite by the rhizomatic relation-­ forging of “virtual realism” that maps possibilities besides the trapping and stalling binary of pessimism versus (cruel) optimism.2 Setting the scene of projection as an apparatus of power in the wake of colonization is not to set up yet one more “scopic regime” as if power were only a matter or function of the static and stabilized position from which we see, and of what is or is not in view.3 The scene of projection is also not yet one more diagram of power the misprision of which we can exercise by imagining we can dispel the specter of its function by testing it against existing architectures (as in whether they do or do not resemble Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon).4 Setting the scene of projection as an apparatus of power is not just to insist on encountering these image-­casting machines in performative action and as event. It is also to refuse the lure of imagining that we can resolve or tame the apparatus of the scene of projection by enacting history-­writing as if it were a global positioning system of containerized contextualization. Setting the scene of projection as an apparatus of power that produces its subject is to reeventilize the object as a reckoning with the performative magic of the apparatus (that is, the shaping mise-­en-­scène, not just the machine-­as-­object), pushing us to encounter the “imminence” of the “immanent” potentials within the scene—­not in the everland of makers/authors, “contexts” or “receivers” that reifies the object (in this case, the machine for casting an image) as ever more inert by displacing any eventful and agential performative action elsewhere. To confront the imminence, the about-­to-­happen that projects outward as that which juts out, overhangs, foreshadows but also back-­ casts precisely as immanence is to understand the scene of projection as an apparatus of power that produces its subject by action. The event, in this case, may have its singularities, but it is also repetitive, action that acts over and over as what I have called a pedagogy, a training or exercise in how to see that operates by inversion (the technical-­in-­common of all devices of image projection, the upside-­down or turnabout, the

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bottom-­up that is to be “righted” or “corrected” to affirm the normative orientation whether geopolitical or sexual); transport (the carrying off scene of the spectator’s disavowed vulnerable and susceptible embodiment); and denunciatory, satiric, or violent displacement (the casting off of what the fortress ego will not admit onto those “others” made to carry that disavowed susceptibility). Across the scenes of projection of the introduction’s propositions and the chapters’ demonstrations, Scenes of Projection engages in the activities of psychoanalyzing history while historicizing psychoanalysis and of psychoanalytically approaching the scene of projection as an apparatus of imperial power while decolonizing psychoanalysis. It proposes these urgent prompts for acts of analysis that cannot be reduced to stable laws or rules that are confirmed or overthrown and cast off, acts that are never over, if we are to enact any not-­pessimism or “virtual realism” to circumvent the (re)consolidation of the fortress ego of the “ego’s era.” Taking its im­peratives from the state of emergency that is the everyday of the situation of precarity and its prompts from the work of Teresa Brennan and Michel de Certeau on the enfolding of what we attribute to the premodern, early modern, and contemporary as effects within the scene of projection and the act of analysis, Scenes of Projection engages in the rewriting of history as a matter and action of the revolatilizing charge of contact with the disavowed and cast off in the making of connections across scenes but also within them. To return to these critical propositions at this juncture is not to conclude by closing the book, but to throw open the door with a resetting of the scene of projection in the redoubled vision and multiple directionality of a reckoning with the future that the scene of projection casts via negation. That the scene of projection is also an action of negation is not to reduce the valence to negativity in terms of affect or value. This is to say that the scene of projection is an apparatus of power that produces its subject in relation not just to a notion of “reality” or, rather, what is supposed to be, but also to a wish or dream about what should and what will be smuggled in under the cover of the not, the never, and the no (the not-­here, the no-­where, the not-­now, the not-­yet, the never-­again, the never-­was, the no-­more). As negation, the scene of projection is another way to think about the closed box trap of realism versus illusion, rationality versus delusion, and the real versus its simulation by insisting on the agencies and world-­shaping

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effects of the virtual as the shaping imminence of the immanent—­not necessarily as a positivity. Perhaps most curious and compelling about the scene of projection is the prismatic dazzle of its negations that don’t settle into the black-­and-­white Manichean binaries of good and bad. In the concision of Freud’s essay “Negation” (1925) published just two years after “A Seventeenth-­Century Demonological Neurosis,” Freud’s analysis of the case of Haitzmann the possessed painter, projection and introjection are reformulated as dynamics of intellectual judgment in the formation (and erosion as well as transformation) of the ego. Projection and introjection are reformulated as a challenge to the taming of perception as a purely passive process. But the active vectors of projection and introjection are actions of judgment or “intellectual activity” that push or revolt the postponements of thinking into action, action conceived in and as the machine metaphor of a transport vehicle of the “as if” testing of palpable action, that is, the palpable machine metaphor of a “motor palpating” the “object.” The palpating motor of the no, not, and never in the act of judgment can be an exercise in morbid projection, but it can also cast the force of negation to release thinking from the consequences of repression. Negation is also the no, the not, and the never that frees the wish or the dream in and across the scene of projection. While negation can certainly take the form of the negativity cast off the present, projection can also take the form of a complex negation of the present in an insistence on reactivating the potential in the disavowed, including the ostensibly dead media that haunt our present. In this spirit of prismatic projection from negations of the present that enable us to live in the present, I turn to set eight additional scenes of projection neither as nostalgia nor as a cockeyed optimism about the return to ostensibly old media as a resolution of the past for the future, but as a way of not foreclosing how the future may still be shaped by the shadow the present casts on the past and the shadows of the ostensibly surpassed that haunt the present.

Scene of Projection 8: While the exterminating or eliminating negativity may be thrown back into a rejected past, the scene of projection is an apparatus of power that also produces its subject by casting ahead in the paranoid gesture of the anticipatory dystopia we hope to avert.

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In his 1958 return to the terrain of his famous science fiction novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley endeavored to “correct” its efforts at anticipation by recounting what he overlooked. To better anticipate the future, Huxley turned to Freud, pulling out a detail that might pass unnoticed in our reading of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, one that provides the central material metaphor and instrument for Huxley’s chapter on “subconscious persuasion” in Brave New World Revisited.5 In his chapter that is to better anticipate the “brave new world,” Huxley directs us to notice the footnote added to the 1919 edition of The Interpretation of Dreams with which I began Scenes of Projection. In a mise en abyme of vertiginously nested versions of the detail-­that-­might-­ pass-­unnoticed, Huxley maintains in his chapter on “subconscious persuasion” that Freud draws our attention to the work of the Austrian neurologist Pötzl and his published paper on the tachistoscope, a device used as both the test for and demonstration of the theory of “preconscious perception.” But, of course, the reference is just a little footnote; it is not integrated into the main part of the text, nor is it incorporated into either Freud’s analysis in the texts or his recommendations for techniques in clinical practice. Rather, the note or detail is its own brief flash we might barely register, and this is in keeping with the machine metaphor and technical operation of the machine that is its subject, the tachistoscope. An instrument that flashes an image for a very brief period of time using either the form of a camera obscura viewing box into which the subject peers at an image flashed for a small fraction of a second or a magic lantern projector with a high-­speed shutter that fleetingly casts an image on a screen, the tachistoscope was a variant of projection in the dark room used experimentally to test whether details of the image that were not drawn by the test subjects immediately following exposure to the flashing projected image would appear in the second round of the subjects’ sketches that were produced to account for the significant parts of their dreams the following night. Ultimately, the tachistoscope was to provide empirical evidence not just of the extent to which subjects might see more than they consciously know that they see, but also how much they are also substantially influenced by that which exceeds their immediate and “conscious perception”—­to the point of invading their dreams. Huxley exploits the little detail of this overlooked projection instrument to stage a rhetorical exercise in counterprojection. As a paradigmatic example of the precariousness of the projection devices of what

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Huxley contrastively calls “pure science,” Pötzl’s tachistoscope variant of the magic lantern would soon, Huxley forecasts ominously, transform into not just an exploited technology of the dangers of “applied science” but a tool of mass political exploitation, a device not for the demonstration of “preconscious perception” but rather a mechanism of “subconscious persuasion” enlisted to alter it. Using the speculative exercise of shedding of light on Freud’s footnoted machine and its potential “techniques of subliminal projection,” Huxley transforms the tachistocope into a rhetorical demonstration of the kinds of grand affective and ideological captivations the subliminal (or what goes under our conscious perception) can effect by the exploitation of a device of limited image exposure as a tool of ideological control and subjection. Huxley asks us to imagine what the political meeting of tomorrow will look like “in light of what has been said about persuasion-­by-­association [a dramaturgy of linked images, words, values, and affects] and the enhancement of emotions by subliminal suggestion“ (86). In answer, we get a projected future image of what would be, the terrifying dystopia of political and affective control orchestrated by the “tachistoscopes, the whispering and squeaking machines, the projectors of images so dim that only the subconscious mind can respond to them” that the essay attempts to cast out by the anticipation of a future far from perfect. The whispering tachistoscopes are not the metaphor machines but the agents of the will-­have-­been as the loss of will to the influencing machine of the flashing magic lantern turned device of “strobonic injection”—­ Huxley’s ominous phrase for the power of projection to cast inward below the threshold of controlling perception. And to a chorus of the sound of whispering tachistoscopes, Huxley intones: “what is now merely science will have become everyday political fact” (86). Whether Huxley’s forecast future never was, is not, or will never be, what lingers in this key of the whispering quickness of the scene of projection in which we can never be sure what we have heard or seen, what we have overheard, overlooked, or overinterpreted, misperceived, or absorbed without our noticing is the persistent noise of the question of the agency and performative magic of machines and what is not literally in the scene of either the “pure science” or “applied science” of the tachistoscope or Huxley’s dystopic deployment, the precarious susceptibility of the analyst and critic but also the other possibilities that, nonetheless, get smuggled in under the cover of the negation.

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Scene of Projection 9: The negation of the present is not just a negative lesson in dystopic projection; it also opens the door to other schools, for every school begets its counterschool. In his collection of political essays, Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking Glass World (1998), the Uruguayan writer, journalist, and historian Eduardo Galeano takes aim at the psychic and social effects of ideology with a now familiar metaphor machine of inversion, transport, and negation: the magic lantern. Galeano opens with a pointed parody of the sort of advertisement that would have hailed eighteenth-­or nineteenth-­ century viewers to a spectacle and that calls his readers to attend the magic lantern show of his own text. The “upside down” of Galeano’s title and his framing device of the magic lantern show are contemporary instances in the long history of troping on technologies of projection as materializing metaphors of reversal for the unconscious, foresworn, and upending workings of ideology and desire. The trope was perhaps most famously put to use by Marx in The German Ideology, where he used the camera obscura to reveal how materialist method can work to write (and right) the ways in which historical social conditions have produced what he called an inverted “social consciousness” or the political unconscious. For Marx this task begins by demonstrating, with the aid of the cast image in the dark room, that ideology and its psychosocial effects only appear natural, exploiting the technical feature that, without an additional lens to “right” the projection, technologies of projection share the material fact of casting an inverted image.6 Following the phantasmagoric specter of Marx quite deliberately, Galeano employs the magic lantern to condemn and endeavor to resist postnational global empire by characterizing the way of seeing that it teaches as a negative distortion. Galeano calls this scene of projection the “looking-­glass school,” characterizing the imperial way of seeing, knowing, and acting in terms of the schoolroom in order to portray this educated vision as fully trained. Galeano analogizes the schoolroom of empire to a kind of trapping hall of mirrors in which the damaging reality it helps to construct seems unalterable because these halls give the illusion of democratic freedom: Whoever is not a prisoner of necessity is a prisoner of fear, deprived of sleep by anxiety over things he lacks or by terror of losing the things he has. The looking-­glass school trains us to view our neighbor as a

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threat, not a promise. It condemns us to solitude and consoles us with chemical drugs and cybernetic friends. We are sentenced to die of hunger, fear, or boredom—­that is, if a stray bullet doesn’t do the job first. Is the freedom to choose among these unfortunate ends the only freedom left to us? The looking-­glass school teaches us to suffer reality, not to change it; to forget the past, not to learn from it; to accept the future, not to invent it. In its halls of criminal learning, impotence, amnesia, and resignation are required courses. Yet perhaps—­who can say—­there can be no disgrace without grace, no sign without countersign, and no school that does not beget its counterschool.7

With the material metaphor of the magic lantern, Galeano attempts to project or cast out the paranoid projection of the looking-­glass school as a phantasmatic construction with real and devastating material effects. We might be reminded here of Walter Benjamin’s angel of history in the essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” a vivid image for the difficulties of developing a historical vision that faces the traumas we have not gotten over but not by refusing present or future, that is, a historical vision that can also be open to future possibilities that do not assume any inevitable progress but do not lapse into the never-­will-­be of dejection. Developed from Paul Klee’s “Angel” that formed part of Benjamin’s collection, this figure for the imperatives of a different kind of historical seeing shows us the angel of history gazing on the ruins of the past as it is blown ass-­backward into the future, hurtling toward this future, seeing where it has been, what has been done, but not the future or futures that it is being projected toward. A real reckoning with those future possibilities is our task. Scene of Projection 10: The scene of projection is not a new apparatus of power, but it is also not one of the master’s tools better left behind. The scene of projection may not be a tool for dismantling the master’s house, but it is an apparatus of power that can be catalyzed as a metaphor machine and transport device that, rather than transporting vulnerability, may be activated to intensify transports in the occulted and potent sense of passion, somatic response, and fervor by refusing both the drive to the new and the insistence on renovation that removes the adhesive sediment of time and attachment. Scenes of Projection

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offers itself as a kind of counterschool in refracting potentials of projection but through negation. In the last five scenes, I do so through the close consideration of five queer, feminist artist projects, all of which take up old and seemingly surpassed technologies to recast the counterpossibilities of projection imminent in the magic lantern, the camera obscura, and the prism. These theses reconsider the status and function of illusion in Freud’s 1927 essay “The Future of an Illusion” (first translated into English in 1928).8 In this classic text Freud sets himself the task of demonstrating, through the structure of an agonistic argument with a projected opponent (a device used in his 1926 discussion of lay analysis and his 1899 essay “Screen Memories”), that religion is a dangerous illusion derived from infantile wishes that disavow reality. While “illusion” (the same word in German and in English) is that which must be cast out in order to clear the way for a future founded on scientific method and reason, the technique for dispelling illusion depends on the exercise of a version of paranoid projection, that is, on the performance of an argument that, “rather than push aside thoughts that threaten to break into it,” interrupts itself with the plotted interjections of an “imagined opponent” (20). And it is a demonstration that takes the experimental classroom of everyday life as its site, conjuring the prospect of “hope for the future” (47) in the form of the subjects to come, those that might emerge from the “experiment of an irreligious education” (47) or what he subsequently calls an “education to reality.” Indeed, Freud writes, movement toward such an “education to reality” (48) is the sole purpose of “The Future of an Illusion.” What is most interesting is that such an education to reality relies on the scene of staged agonism between religion qua illusion and science qua reality in which it is the contrastive gesture of dispelling illusion that methodologically produces the vision of a future, a prospect beyond it, indeed, of the future as precisely the beyond of illusion. The “to” in the phrase “education to reality” is a key preposition: the future emerges as a habitable place toward which one may move only by this agonistic staging of “chasing an illusion” (47). In admitting that following his own god of reason might be its own version of the “chasing of an illusion,” Freud unveils a poetically conceived earthly garden in the future perfect: “Of what use to them is the mirage of wide acres in the moon, whose harvest no one has ever yet seen? As honest smallholders on this earth they will know how to cultivate their plot in such

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a way that it supports them. By withdrawing their expectations from the other world and concentrating all their liberated energies into their life on earth, they will probably succeed in achieving a state of things in which life will be become tolerable for everyone and civilization no longer oppressive to anyone” (49). Quite a vision! In leaving heaven for earth, Freud’s demonstration of the future beyond illusion may rearticulate a historically overdetermined trope of cultivating one’s own garden plot familiar from the ancient Georgics through Voltaire’s Candide as figure for the good life in the here and now. What is most striking is the technique of the ostensible reveal, the peeling away of the mirage over the earth that extends into the culminating chapter’s insistence that “science is no illusion” (55) because it “shows” the ways in which what Freud calls the percipient mental apparatus or the mental apparatus of perception (crucially including the unconscious) is not an “empty abstraction” (55) but a part of the very world it investigates, that is shaped by that world, and can itself be analyzed. Freud’s educational demonstration exercise in defense of scientific method generally and psychoanalysis in particular (the science of the unconscious) as the means to a better life beyond the consolations of illusion does not just depend on illusion as device and traffic in the illusion displaced onto religion but, most interestingly, makes of illusion the necessary veil or screen through which an alternate future may be projected. Whether illusion may be said to have a future or not, what is ongoingly gripping about Freud’s argument is that the future, the coming community, the subjects to come, the capacity to bear disappointment, the fragility of our relations to the earth, our bodies, and ourselves that is our future, depend on what we do with projection. This is a grave burden and one with no easy resolution. I propose thinking the counterschool of and for the future in terms of a pedagogy in aesthetics with political implications to address the complex challenge of justifying the mining of the archive and doing historical readings in order to develop a general, subjectless theory about the dangers and the potentials of projection. I turn here to five contemporary art projects by feminist and queer artists that reactivate the magic lantern, the camera obscura, and the prism: Susan Hiller’s three-­channel, 35 mm slide projection with synchronized sound titled Magic Lantern (1987) (Figure 36); Zoe Beloff’s 3-­D black-­and-­white film Shadowland or Light from the Other Side (2000) (Figure 37);

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Lindsay Seers’s film installation Extramission 6 (Black Maria) (2009) (Figures 38 and 39); Zoe Leonard’s installation of a camera obscura in her exhibition Observation Point at Camden Arts Centre, London (2012) (Figure 40); and Marget Long’s photograph of a found piece of glass from the skylight of nineteenth-­century photographer Mathew Brady’s studio from her series Mathew Brady’s Skylight (2010) (Figure 41). These works function as imaginative metamachines, new tech­ nologies of the self that project future possibilities for psyche and felt embodiment out of damaged and difficult pasts embedded in devices that are not surpassed. They do not merely work to provide an archaeology of new media or to reenchant the digital age by poetic returns that revitalize dead media. Rather, thinking closely with and through these projects that activate the potentials imminent in these ostensibly superseded devices enables us to directly confront the question of what projection might be for, if it is not about the casting out of abject material. As these artists demonstrate, projection can be a practice other than disavowal. It can give palpable shape to the subjects to come. But this is not an easy, feel-­good set of propositions. These scenes reckon—­ from within these creative exercises in imaginative, dynamic introjection and projection—­with how unattractive and troubling but also vital being open to the material, affective, and somatic transports and transformations of projection can be. And yet at the same time, I take up the challenge Berlant offers: “Once we see that an aesthetic encounter is a training in converting objects to scenes; once we see pedagogy and aesthetics as teachings in a kind of attention that transforms convergences and patternings by materializing them, we become queerly aestheticized, alive in curiosity about what had seemed a fateful object, and with political implications.”9 To convert the object into a scene of a projection is to reset the scene of a pedagogy in power and in the production of the subject as a pedagogy in aesthetics in that other Enlightenment sense not of casting out the susceptible body but an attention to the senses that may quicken and intensify sensation. This political risk of becoming “queerly aestheticized” is a risk that, for many of us, never feels like a choice: that is the point of the lateral agency of the scene of projection. For those of us carried along by the transports of the scene of projection, the connections that can be forged not least between the ostensibly private world of affects and dreams and the domain of the public and political have so often been the ones that

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position us as the carriers of the discharged feelings and embodiments and vulnerability others will not own. While such sensations described in the stigmatic terms of shame and injury may be refused or cast back onto those who would hurl them, the scene of projection can also be a situation of necessary encounter for the forging of another relation to what is never so easy to fling off. Scene of Projection 11: The projected image is not on the screen, but it is also made (and remade) in sensory and affective encounters without end or resolution. In its aesthetic investigation of twinning the production of retinal afterimages from the intersecting combinations of projected colored discs on the screen and an acoustic track that combines voice improvisation and rerecordings of the tests done by Latvian scientist Konstantine Raudive on the “ghostly voices” registered by amplified recordings of what seems to be silence, Susan Hiller’s installation Magic Lantern (Figure 36) gives us a semblance of a test site and a lesson in subliminal suggestion and subconscious perception, but one that is both aesthetically captivating and ironizing in its voices—­not least the one that chastises with the echoes of schoolroom and test instructions gone awry: “Agnes, terribly bad.” The reminders in the sound and image orchestration of bad recording conditions and missed perceptions resonate with the ways in which, as Hiller remarks, the installation also resists photographic documentation. What we cannot see and hear in the photograph points to a counterlesson of the scene of projection: the projected and amplified image is not merely visual but also acoustic and tactile and holds within it worlds and possibilities that may unfold belatedly and in registers that defy “normal” perception or everyday perceptibility.10 Scene of Projection 12: In the scene of projection as an apparatus of power that produces its subject, the machine of the box or room with lenses and light source is not the only projector. Zoe Beloff’s stereoscopic 3-­D film Shadowland or Light from the Other Side (Figure 37) takes it narrative—­traversing the naughty schoolroom scene (seen in this screen grab supplied by Beloff) of the self-­described

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Figure 36. Susan Hiller, Magic Lantern, 1987. Three-­channel, 35 mm slide

projection with sound, synchronized, 12 minutes. Dimensions variable. Edition of 3. Commissioned by the Whitechapel Gallery, London. Copyright Susan Hiller. Courtesy of the Timothy Taylor Gallery, London.

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Figure 37. Zoe Beloff, Shadowland or Light from the Other Side, 2000. Three-­

dimensional film. Courtesy of Zoe Beloff.

“queer vixen” who cannot learn the normative lessons of “nature”—­ from the 1897 autobiography of Elizabeth d’Espérance, a materializing medium who was able to produce full-­body apparitions.11 As the image cast by the magic lantern projection that opens the film moves off the screen, out of the enclosure of house or schoolroom, and over the waves of the sea only to be supplanted by d’Espérance’s or hope’s body that, in turn, becomes the active projector not of the illusory or immaterial but bodily matter that also acts on bodies, we encounter a mobile machine metaphor for Beloff’s felt investigation into the archaeology of the virtual and its residue. Beloff’s film and its frame-­scene of the schoolroom gives us a counterlesson about the old in new media: the rogue, ephemeral, and processual image made and remade not only materially affects bodies but is also materialized out of bodies in processes best described by the discredited accounts of hysterics, mystics, and spiritualist mediums. Whether one believes in worlds beyond this one or not, the “shadowlands” of mystical accounts point to the ways in which projection upsets any easy distinctions between image, the apparatus that produces the image, and spectator. The figure of the medium as materializing projector of forms that do not safely stick to the discrete

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“screen” but extend onto and into the porous screens of body and world opens the plasticity of a nature that is queer in the sense of volatile and metamorphic. This is body and world that act on one another in ways that exceed the cutting classifications of binary sex and gender. Scene of Projection 13: The scene of projection is not progressive, but that does not make it regressive in any stable sense either. And this is also the good news. Lindsay Seers’s Extramission 6 (Black Maria) places digital video (Figure 38) that mixes the autobiographic, the autoethnographic, and the autonarration of the psychiatric case study inside a “camera obscura” (Figure 39) built on the model of Edison’s “Black Maria,” the black tar-­paper-­covered structure erected in 1879 by the Edison Company for shooting moving images.12 Seers deploys her own body as the compounded and enfleshed camera, projector, screen, and developing medium for retelling the story of optics, film, and photography cast back through the counterdevelopment tale of the girl, who, as a child in Mauritius, tried to produce a substitute for speech by making her body a camera that develops film exposures through her mouth and later turns herself into a projector of extramitted light. Just as the film intermines the story of colonization and the history of technology (the Daguerreotypes that are to function as aide-­mémoire do not help Seers remember the house in which she grew up but do lead to the house of the plantation owner who brought one of the first cameras to Mauritius), the exterior of the structure concresces the history of filmmaking and the violence of colonization with not just the adhesive tar paper but the suspended rope that is and is not the overdetermined sign of the lynchings and the photographs of scenes of lynching that may be disavowed but recur in the question of the implications of how the scene of projection hails us. Seers’s installation provocatively demonstrates how the scene of projection as an apparatus of power that produces its subject does not correlate to any simple developmental model, nor does it move in only one direction geographically, psychically, or in terms of time. The dark room of imperial fantasy and violent encounter, the dark studios of the invention of cinema, the dark rooms of the demonstration for how sight is supposed to work with the eye (the chamber into which light is cast and the retinal screen onto which images are projected): all these sites

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Figure 38. Lindsay Seers, Extramission 6 (Black Maria), 2009. Installation view at

Tate Britain. Tate Collection, London. Courtesy of Matt’s Gallery, London.

and sightings may be occupied, reimagined, and crossed in counternarratives of personal and also cultural origin and becoming. Introjection and projection, camera and projector, image and material reality are enfolded, and rather than separate from the body of either the operator or the spectator, the body, an interdependent mobile machine-­ body of moving parts, is at once screen, image, and also part of the active audience for the images it makes, at once a dark room for the ingestion and exposure of images and a projector as well as a generator of light that gives new life to ostensibly superceded concepts of vision that reverse direction and understand sight as a matter of extramission or rays extending from the eye out into the world—­to hail us to remember in multiple senses.

Scene of Projection 14: The scene of projection that produces its subject in the dark room of the camera obscura is not closed off from the world, from the scenes of the political, the affective, the social, and the relational.

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In the encounters and conversations invited by the bean bag chairs on the floor of Zoe Leonard’s installation of a camera obscura at the Camden Arts Centre, London (Figure 40) we are prompted to feel how, rather than the isolation chambers of the fortress ego or the imperial dark rooms of disavowed exotica, the camera obscura with its enchanting versions of the world outside may also be restaged to open more than an aperture that lets other worlds filter through the altered image of a sliver of this one.13 What may yet happen when and where, for example, we hear the noise of the street and feel the clouds in the sky as inverted and yet habitable scapes? Might the dark room—­ even this dark room—­not become a social and affective laboratory for new communities of feeling and imagining not separate from the material world out there, but on the floor of the real, enfleshed encounter with the palpable stuff of illusion, a ground suffused with the pink light of the sky?

Figure 39. Lindsay Seers, Extramission 6 (Black Maria), 2009. DVD in installation.

Courtesy of the artist and Matt’s Gallery, London.

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Figure 40. Zoe Leonard, Camera Obscura, 2012. Installation. Camden Arts Centre

and the exhibition Observation Point. Copyright Zoe Leonard. Photograph by Jill H. Casid. Courtesy of Camden Arts Centre, London.

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Figure 41. Marget Long, “Glass with Flare” (Mathew Brady’s Skylight), 2010. C-­Print,

20 x 16 in. Copyright Marget Long. Courtesy of the artist.

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Scene of Projection 15: The scene of projection need not be large or enlarged to release its queering and querying prismatic effects. Marget Long’s “Glass with Flare” from the project Mathew Brady’s Sky­light (Figure 41) provocatively raises the question of the flare, flash, and flair of scale (in the sense of size, weight, and even value) and provocatively points to the ways in which projection’s effects may be in inverse relation to the scale of their machinery.14 Diamonds may not be a girl’s best friend, but even an old, worn, and dingy fragment of broken glass from a once august skylight of a vaunted studio in the narrative of the development of media may hold within them the camp logics of recycling alchemy that can turn even the tiny cast off and cast out into world-­making and world-­altering tools. There is no resolution to such unfinished and volatile projects that activate the potentials lurking within projection without rehabilitating or repairing the pleasures and the pains with which we are asked to linger and reckon. I have cast the arc of this book’s propositions across fifteen scenes of projection, opening this book onto the scenes I cannot anticipate, the parts of the scenes that may admit light but are not only not transparent but also cannot be resolved into easy lessons, and the propositions and the burning question not yet dared: these are the untaught lessons and conjurations of the counterschools of the future not-­ not here, the not-­not foreclosed that is what makes the future a query ventured and lived now and queerly in its most volatile and intensifying sense.

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Acknowledgments

“Live through this.” As I was beginning this project and finishing my doctoral dissertation, one scene of projection appeared to be at a dead end. The pedagogical system of slide projection in which I had received my training was in crisis—­which made the slide projector, the instrument for the pedagogies of desire in such works as Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency, all the more compelling. As the slide projector turned from a transparent instrument to charged fossil, it took hold of me as both an opaque object of fascination and refracting tool for the long road of figuring out how to live the bristle of criticality and creativity. Still immersed in shooting slides for research and teaching, I also began using a slide projector for art performance produced collaboratively from 1992 to 2002 with María DeGuzmán and in a range of richly dynamic situations, including events at the University of Texas–­ Austin; the University of North Carolina–­Chapel Hill; the University of Chicago; the Slade School of Art at University College, London; George­ town University; the Massachusetts College of Art; Carnegie Mel­lon; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Sackler Museum, Harvard University; and the Photographers’ Gallery, London. This project began in the context of the conversations sparked by this collaborative practice about the challenge of the mesh of art practice and scholarship. At about this time I first read Teresa Brennan’s History after Lacan (1993), which made an indelible impression with its prompt about combining what she calls the “propositional” and the “secondary” modes for practice to which I am still learning how to respond. She enjoins, “The question of course is how to combine the propositional and secondary modes and thus transcend them. To combine them is to regard and yet disregard the other, to regard the right to understand, and thus 245

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communicate, to disregard the desire for recognition, and thus risk going beyond the fixed points governing social approval at the time of writing. It is to balance confidence and context, the movement of ideas and fixed points. And that can only be done if one gives out more than one takes in” (xiii). This book may always have wanted to be a transformative combination of the propositional and the secondary or citational, a “theory book” in the sense of a set of propositions about the scene of projection as an apparatus of power that produces its subject across early modern science and psychoanalysis, across the dense geopolitical and historical sites of the wake of colonization and the Enlightenment, and yet as an apparatus of queer potential. But how does one give out more than one takes in? Along the way to becoming a semblance of the book I projected, Scenes of Projection and I have both lost and taken in more than any set of acknowledgments could trace. I doubt this project could have been conceived without Norman Bryson, who supported the perverse directions of my interests not just from the garden (or the plantation machine in the garden) to the machine or from the early modern archive to contemporary theoretical and creative practice, but in their crossing. For his early support of this project, for the invitation to include a version of “His Master’s Obi” in the second edition of the Visual Culture Reader, and for what he makes possible, my appreciation goes to Nick Mirzoeff. The preliminary research for this project was supported both intellectually and materially by postdoctoral research fellowships at the UCLA Center for Seventeenth-­and Eighteenth-­Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Library and at the Dibner Library of the Smithsonian Institution. Particular thanks go to Ron Brashear, head of Special Collections at the Dibner Library; Felicity Nussbaum, then director of the UCLA program “The Global Eighteenth Century”; the other Ahmanson–­Getty fellows that year (Philippe Rosenberg, Ben Schmidt, and Anna Neill); and the UCLA faculty then connected with the center, particularly director Peter Reill as well as Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob, and Kirstie McClure. For guiding my research at the William Andrews Clark Library I thank Bruce Whiteman, and for their great help in allowing me to explore hands-­on the “wonders” of the Nekes Collection at the Getty Research Institute, I thank Beth Ann Guynn and Fran Terpak. For the offer of a summer residency fellowship that I regretfully had to decline, I thank the Clark Art Institute.

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For the opportunity to share work in progress at key junctures, I am grateful most recently to timely invitations that came as I was reconceiving the book’s conclusion from Vanessa Lyon to visit Grinnell College (with a special thanks to Vanessa and to Jenny Anger for their thoughtful provocations) and from Esther Choi to meet with the “Conversations on Writing” PhD Forum at Princeton University’s School of Architecture (with appreciation to Esther for her ever-­penetrating questions), and, over the longer course of this project, to lecture invitations from the visual studies programs at Cornell University (particular thanks to Salah Hassan and Iftikar Dadi) and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (a shout out to Maud Lavin), to the conveners of the “Changing and Exchanging” conference at Princeton University (warm thanks to Stephanie Smith, Tim Watson, and Daniela Bleichmar), to the organizers of the interdisciplinary Humanities Center symposium “Rethinking Reading” at the University of Wisconsin–­Madison (with thanks to Sangeeta Desai, Dämcho Finnegan, Charlie Hallisey, and Laura Mueller), to the organizers and participants in the Visual Culture Studies Faculty Research symposium on “Sex” (ongoing thanks to Laurie Beth Clark, Lisa Nakamura, and Anne McClintock), and to then curator at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art Jane Simon. I thank faculty and students at the California College of the Arts, SUNY–­Binghamton, University of California–­Santa Cruz, and Wellesley College for response to early versions of these chapters, which were also tried out at a number of conferences: the Modern Language Association convention, the Modernist Studies Association meeting, the College Art Association convention, and the “InterseXions: Queer Visual Culture at the Crossroads” conference at CUNY Graduate Center. The pursuit of my own solo photographic work—­and not only that substantial part of the work that technically engages shadow projection—­ sustains my thinking for this project and beyond. For the opportunity to exhibit the installation Intimographies at the Charles Allis Museum in Milwaukee, I thank Amy Powell and Martha Monroe, and for the chance to show the installation Her Lover’s Shadow . . . Traces from the Snuff Box Archive of Desire, I thank the organizers of the group exhibition Objects in/and Visual Culture at the Palmer Art Museum, Penn State University, especially Sallie McCorkle and Laurie Beth Clark. This book followed me through a number of institutional frames and passages. In the expanded field of my work in visual studies (from

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conversations begun in graduate school to the conversations I curated for the Visual Culture Caucus of the College Art Association and as a cluster hire in the developing program in the transdisciplinary study of visual cultures and then founding director of the Center for Visual Cultures at the University of Wisconsin–­Madison to the conversations forged by others and from which I benefited), I have been inspired and provoked by talk that reverberates across these pages and for which I thank especially Lauren Berlant, Barbara Browning, Patty Chang, Rey Chow, Kandice Chuh, Tom Conley, Ann Cvetkovich, James Delbourgo, David Eng, Jennifer González, Judith Halberstam, David Halperin, Liza Johnson, Amelia Jones, Brent Keever, Ranjanna Khanna, Dian Kriz, Cassie Mansfield, Michael McMillan, José Muñoz, Erica Rand, Lisa Saltzman, Rebecca Schneider, Tanya Sheehan, Karen Shimakawa, Kaja Silverman, Marquard Smith, Shawn Michelle Smith, Barbara Maria Stafford, Valerie Traub, Aileen Tsui, Allen S. Weiss, Marcus Wood, and Joanna Zylinska. I thank former colleagues and students with whom I worked at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, especially Tracy Cilona, Tyler Curtain, Aiden Graham, Kee-­Lee Lee, Carol Mavor, Mary Sheriff, Davinia Thornley, and Rashmi Varma. Vital research support came from the University of Wisconsin–­Madison in the form of a Hamel Faculty Fellowship and Romnes Fellowship (particular thanks to Tom Dale, Gary Sandefur, and Sue Zaeske). For understanding and supporting a visual studies practice built on integrations of criticality, speculation, and creativity and the pleasures and challenges of the hybrid of studio practice, theoretical speculation, and archival research, there are many at the University of Wisconsin–­Madison from whom I have taken in much: friends and colleagues in the Visual Culture Cluster; the Center for Visual Cultures (particular mention here of the work and commitment of Preeti Chopra, Laurie Beth Clark, Guillermina De Ferrari, Frieda High W. Tesfagiorgis, Michael Jay McClure, Gene Phillips, Shiela Reaves, and Ellen Sapega); the Department of Art History; and the departments and programs with which I am affiliated (the Department of Art; the Department of Comparative Literature; the Department of Theatre and Drama; the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies; the LGBT Studies Program; the Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies Program; Jewish Studies; and the Global Studies Program). Special Collections at the University of Wisconsin–­

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Madison are notably strong in the history of science, especially optics, and I thank Robin Rider for being such an extraordinary guide. I am grateful for preliminary research assistance from Christina Sours and, for the monumental task of obtaining permissions, formatting, and final manuscript preparation, to the superlative research assistance of Melanie A. Saeck. Scenes of Projection is not just about the scene of projection as an apparatus of power that produces its subject through repetitive, normative pedagogies and has the potential to recast and usher in the subjects to come by the practice of counterpedagogies; it also emerges from a commitment to the scene of pedagogy, and the imperatives and possibilities of the classroom. Galvanic conversations were ignited by the faculty development seminar “Visuality” co-­led with Terry Kelley (and with, among others, Russ Castronovo, Guillermina De Ferrari, Susan Lederer, Mario Ortiz Robles, and Aliko Songolo) and the Mellon Workshops “Visualities beyond Ocularcentrism” (thanks to the extraordinary project assistance of Amy Powell and Beth Zinsli); “Audio Culture in the Visual Era,” conceived by Steve Ridgely and Nicole Huang; and “Art and Scholarship” at the organizing impetus of an exciting collective (River Bullock, Kat Lieder, Sylvie Rosenthal, Andrew Salyer, Katrina Schaag, and Anna Vitale). It has been my privilege to try out these possibilities in lecture classes and seminars on topics but also in direct engagement with tactics explored in this book. I thank Ann Pellegrini for the invitation to discuss projection across the technological and psychoanalytic with the graduate students in her New York University seminar “Spaces of Enchantment: Psychoanalysis, Religion, and the Politics of Performance.” The scenes of pedagogy and mentorship are, at their best, spaces of enchantment. For that and for thought that sings in both literal and figurative senses, a brava/bravo with thanks to current and former students and to my finished and finishing MA and PhD students River Bullock, Jessica Cooley, Meghan Doherty, Marcela Guerrero, Amy Hughes, Marina Kliger, Lex Lancaster, Meekyung Macmurdie, Sonia Meyers, Alex Newman, Amy Powell, Matt Rarey, Cole Rizki, Melanie A. Saeck, Emma Silverman, Lucy Traverse, and Beth Zinsli. Having taken in so much, this project has benefited from interactions with many whom I have not named directly but whom I trust will understand that their contributions were appreciated. I thank Zoe

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Beloff, Susan Hiller, Zoe Leonard, Marget Long, and Lindsay Seers for allowing me to reproduce their work and for practice that has directly inspired my thinking for this book as well as my own experiments more generally. A special nod to Marget Long for her reading of the prism chapter. My deep gratitude goes to the University of Minnesota Press and especially to Doug Armato and Richard Morrison. Scenes of Projection and I are much the better for the spur from Lisa L. Moore and the anonymous readers of the manuscript. As the dedication to this book attests only in part, the mesh of intimacies and networks of family and friendship that have supported Scenes of Projection shifted radically over the course from project to book. Kristin Hunt’s presence lit the first version of the manuscript. I will always be grateful for the love and support of Michael, Edwina, Jonathan, and Nicole Casid; Paddy Epstein; Ann Levine; Nancy Marcus; and Lisa Mellow. This book and much else would not have happened if not for the incandescent filaments of sustaining conversation with Chele Isaac, Michael Jay McClure, and Carla Raushenbush and the dancing conversations and “methodologies in motion” with P. A. Skantze and Matthew Fink. For the igniting push through rethinking, revising, and recasting, I thank Ann Pellegrini. For the spark of friendship and the generosity of thinking and writing with, I thank Florence Hsia. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick hauntingly concludes her Introduction to The Epistemology of the Closet with Marcel Proust on the strange gift of the book and those aspects of who we are, what we produce, what we take in, and what we give out that queerly exceed us: “The book whose hieroglyphs are not traced by us is the only book that really belongs to us” (63). For the gifts I am only beginning to learn how to receive, for the charged prompt of the crate emblazoned with the shadow hieroglyph of the Ladies of Llangollen, for the shadow projector that crosses garden and machine in the form of a studio clamp-­lamp with grow light, and for more than I can say, thank you, Anna Campbell.

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Notes

Introduction   1. On the task for criticism of reeventilizing the object or “setting the scene,” see Lauren Berlant, “Cruel Optimism, Becoming Event: A Response,” Public Feelings Salon with Lauren Berlant (Barnard Center for Research on Women, April 12, 2011): responses published on December 19, 2012, http:// bcrw.barnard.edu/videos/public-feelings-salon-with-lauren-berlant/ and, for the PDF, http://bcrw.barnard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/Public-Feelings -Responses/Lauren-Berlant-Cruel-Optimism-Becoming-Event.pdf.   2. Carl Gustav Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. Aniela Jaffé, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (1962; New York: Vintage, 1989), 323–­24. Hereafter, page numbers are cited in the text.   3. See also Lee Worth Bailey, “Skull’s Darkroom: The Camera Obscura and Subjectivity,” in Philosophy and Technology: Practical, Historical and Other Dimensions, ed. Paul T. Durbin (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988), 63–­79; Bailey, “Skull’s Lantern: Psychological Projection and the Magic Lantern,” Spring, 1986, 72–­87; and Bailey, “The Bottomless Subject,” in The Enchantments of Technology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 58–­82.   4. Jung himself wrote on the flying saucer as a “modern myth.” See “Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies,” in Civilization in Transition, vol. 10 of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, ed. Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, and Gerhard Adler, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York: Pantheon, 1964), 307–­433. On the UFO as symptom of mass hysteria, see David Clarke and Andy Roberts, Flying Saucerers: A Social History of UFOlogy (Loughborough: Alternative Albion, 2007).   5. On the emerging early modern practice of using a telescope to project solar phenomena, see Mario Biagioli, Galileo’s Instruments of Credit: Telescopes, Images, Secrecy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) and the 251

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252  notes to introduction

introduction by Eileen Reeves and Albert Van Helden to Galileo Galilei and Christoph Scheiner, On Sunspots (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). For the problematic distinction between projecting “nature” and artifice or invention, see Michael John Gorman, “Projecting Nature in Early-­Modern Europe,” in Inside the Camera Obscura—­Optics and Art under the Spell of the Projected Image, ed. Wolfgang Lefèvre, Preprint 333 (Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, 2007), 31–­50.   6. For general surveys of the magic lantern, see Ernst Hrabalek, Laterna Magica: Zauberwelt und Faszination des optischen Spielzeugs (Munich: Keyser, 1985); Jac Remise, Pascale Remise, and Régis van de Walle, Magie lumineuse: Du théâtre d’ombres à la lanterne magique (Paris: Balland, 1979); Dennis Crompton, Richard Franklin, and Stephen Herbert, eds., Servants of Light: The Book of the Lantern (Ripon: Magic Lantern Society, 1997); Richard Crangle, Mervyn Heard, and Ine van Dooren, eds., Realms of Light: Uses and Perceptions of the Magic Lantern from the 17th to the 21st Century (London: Magic Lantern Society, 2005); David Robinson, Stephen Herbert, and Richard Crangle, eds., Encyclopaedia of the Magic Lantern (London: Magic Lantern Society, 2001); Optisches Spielzeug und Laterna Magicas aus der Sammlung Harald Hansen: Ausstellung im Städtischen Museum Schloss Rheydt, Mönchengladbach, vom 25. November 1990 bis 3. April 1991 (Mönchengladbach: Städtisches Museum Schloss Rheydt, 1990); Franz Paul Liesegang, Dates and Sources: A Contribution to the History of the Art of Projection and to Cinematography, trans. Hermann Hecht (London: Magic Lantern Society, 1986); and Derek Greenacre, Magic Lanterns (Aylesbury: Shire Publications, 1986).   7. Extant examples of early magic lanterns may be seen in the collections of the Science Museum in London, the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., the Scientific Instrument Collection at Harvard, and the Werner Nekes Collection; see also the holdings of the Museum Boerhaave in Leiden in the exhibition catalog Magische Optica: Toverlantaarns, kijkdozen en andere vermake­ lijkheden (Leiden: Museum Boerhaave, 1996); the holdings of the Barnes Museum in Cornwall cataloged in John Barnes, Catalogue of the Collection, Part 2: Optical Projection (St. Ives: Barnes Museum of Cinematography, 1970); the collection of the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris cataloged in Lanterne magique et fantasmagorie: Inventaire des collections (Paris: Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, Musée National des Techniques, 1990); and the Minici Zotti collection at the Padua Museo di Magiche Visioni cataloged in Carlo Alberto Zotti Minici, Magiche visioni prima del cinema: La collezione Minici Zotti (Padua: Il Poligrafo, 2001).   8. For a general survey of the camera obscura, see John H. Hammond, The Camera Obscura: A Chronicle (Bristol: Hilger, 1981). Much of the literature on the camera obscura revolves around interest in Vermeer’s use of the

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device in his painting practice. See, for example, Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Daniel A. Fink, “Vermeer’s Use of the Camera Obscura— ­A Comparative Study,” Art Bulletin 53, no. 4 (December 1971): 493–­505; Charles Seymour, Jr., “Dark Chamber and Light-­Filled Room: Vermeer and the Camera Obscura,” Art Bulletin 46, no. 3 (September 1964): 323–­31; Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr., Perspective, Optics, and Delft Artists around 1650 (New York: Garland, 1977); Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr., “Constantijn Huygens and Early Attitudes towards the Camera Obscura,” History of Photography 1, no. 2 (Summer 1977): 93–­103; and Philip Steadman, Vermeer’s Camera: Uncovering the Truth behind the Masterpieces (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). See also the papers in Lefèvre, Inside the Camera Obscura, some of which have been published in Early Science and Medicine 13, no. 3 (2008).   9. Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (2006; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 11. On lateral agency, see Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011). 10. Karen E. Starr and Lewis Aron, “Women on the Couch: Genital Stimulation and the Birth of Psychoanalysis,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 21, no. 4 (2011): 373–­92. 11. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, ed. and trans. James Strachey (1919; New York: Science Editions, 1961), 181–­82. Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams was first published in 1899. 12. On the use of the magic lantern in Charcot’s experiments and lectures, see Jonathan Marshall, “Nervous Dramaturgy: Pain, Performance and Excess in the Work of Dr. Jean-­Martin Charcot, 1862–­1893,” Double Dialogues 4 (Winter 2003), http://www.doubledialogues.com/archive/issue_four/ marshall.htm. 13. On the letter from Italy, see The Letters of Sigmund Freud, ed. Ernst L. Freud, trans. Tania Stern and James Stern (New York: Basic Books, 1975), 261–­63. On the mirror, see Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means, trans. Gloria Custance (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 95. On Freud’s arrangement of the mirror, see Peter Weibel, “Freud und die Medien/Freud and the Media: Foto Fake II,” Camera Austria 36 (1991): 3–­21. 14. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, 538. 15. Ibid., 536. 16. Sigmund Freud, “A Note on the Unconscious in Psycho-­analysis,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1953–­74; repr. London: Vintage, 2001), 12:264.

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17. Sigmund Freud, “Resistance and Repression,” Lecture XIX in “A General Theory of the Neuroses,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, 16:286–­302. 18. Ibid., 295. 19. Sarah Kofman, Camera Obscura: Of Ideology, trans. Will Straw (1973; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 21–­23. 20. Freud, “Resistance and Repression,” 296. 21. Ibid. 22. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 79; Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, 538. 23. Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 330. 24. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 81. 25. For a discussion of the different meanings of projection, see Dominique Païni, “Should We Put an End to Projection?,” trans. Rosalind Krauss, October 110 (Autumn 2004): 23–­48. The essay is an abbreviated translation of the essay that appeared first in the catalog Projections: Les transports de l’image (Paris: Éditions Hazan, 1997). For a different investigation into the meanings of projection, see the recent work of art and media studies scholar Siegfried Zielinski, “Es gebt Bilder . . . / There Are Images . . . ,” trans. Gloria Custance, in Siegfried Zielinski et al., Andreas M. Kaufmann: Here You Are (Cologne: Salon, 2000), 10–­30. 26. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). 27. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-­Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon, 2000). 28. William Hooper, Rational Recreations, in which the Principles of Numbers and Natural Philosophy Are clearly and copiously elucidated, By a Series of Easy, Entertaining, Interesting Experiments, 4 vols. (London: L. Davis et al., 1774), 2:41. 29. Ibid., 2:42. See Edmé-­Gilles Guyot, Nouvelles recreations physiques et mathematiques, 4 vols. (Paris: Chez Gueffier, 1772–­75), 3:184–­85, pl. 21. 30. On metaphor as device of transport, see Michel de Certeau, “Spatial Stories,” in The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 115. 31. See, in particular, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003); Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London:

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notes to introduction  255

Routledge, 1994); Teresa Brennan, History after Lacan (London: Routledge, 1993); and Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-­Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (1992; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). An account of feminist psychoanalytic critiques of the gaze and of the cinematic apparatus is beyond the scope of this project, but see especially Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996), particularly 125–­61. 32. Jonathan Crary, “The Camera Obscura and Its Subject,” in Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 33. 33. David Robinson, The Lantern Image: Iconography of the Magic Lantern, 1420–­1880 (London: Magic Lantern Society, 1993), 27, fig. 52. See also the first of a series of planned supplements, David Robinson, The Lantern Image (London: Magic Lantern Society, 1997). 34. Ségolène Le Men, ed., Lanternes magiques: Tableaux transparents; 18 septembre 1995–­7 janvier 1996, musée d’Orsay (Paris: Editions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1995), 27, cat. 118. 35. Jean-­Pierre Claris de Florian, “Le singe qui montre la lanterne magique,” in Fables de M. de Florian (Paris: P. Didot l’aîné, 1792), 78–­80. 36. “Lanterne,” in Le Petit Robert: Dictionnaire alphabétique et analogique de la langue française, ed. A. Rey and J. Rey-­Debove (Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1985), 1073. 37. Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe, “Art History and Technology: A Brief History,” http://arthistoryresources.net/arth-technology/. For a web-­ based experimental intervention and discussion of the slide lecture and its reconfiguration of image as a site of ideological production and also invention, see Suzanne de Villiers Human, “Gender, Ideology, and Display,” Image [&] Narrative: Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative 2, no. 2 (September 2002), http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/gender/suzannedevilliershuman .htm. 38. On what he calls art history’s “discursive machine,” a critique that opens with a reproduction of one of Kircher’s magic lantern diagrams, see Donald Preziosi, “The Panoptic Gaze and the Anamorphic Archive,” in Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 54–­79. For a brief history of the use of slide projection that sets the stage for a proposal for the integration of digital media in a pedagogy of interaction, see Ingeborg Reichle and Thomas Lackner, “Von der statischen Präsentation zur dynamischen Interaktion: Über die Integration www-­basierter Informationssysteme in den Lehr-­und Forschungsalltag kunst­ geschichtlicher Institute,” in EVA 2001 Berlin: Elektronische Bildverarbeitung & Kunst, Kultur, Historie (Berlin: GFaI, 2001), 41–­47, and Ingeborg

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Reichle, Thomas Lackner, and Dorothee Wiethoff, “Neue Medien in der Bildung: Chancen und Herausforderungen kooperativen Lehrens und Lernens in der Kunstgeschichte,” Kritische Berichte 28, no. 3 (2000): 87–­90. 39. Victor Tausk, “On the Origin of the ‘Infuencing Machine’ in Schizophrenia,” in Sexuality, War, and Schizophrenia: Collected Psychoanalytic Papers, ed. Paul Roazen (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1991), 185–­219; hereafter, page numbers are cited in the text. The essay is a reprint of the English translation by Dorian Feigenbaum published in Psychoanalytic Quarterly 2 (1933): 519–­56. 40. Brennan, History after Lacan, 35, 42. See Jacques Lacan, “Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis,” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1980), 8–­29. 41. Michel de Certeau, “What Freud Makes of History: ‘A Seventeenth-­ Century Demonological Neurosis,’” in The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 287–­307. 42. See, especially, Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); Homi Bhabha, “Postcolonial Authority and Postmodern Guilt,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg et al. (New York: Routledge, 1992), 56–­68; and Butler, Psychic Life of Power. See also Douglas Crimp, Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002). 43. On the project of alternate versions of reason, see, for example, Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999); Walter Mignolo, “(Post) Occidentalism, (Post)Coloniality, and (Post)Subaltern Rationality,” in The Pre-­Occupation of Postcolonial Studies, ed. Fawzia Afzal-­Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-­Crooks (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), 86–­118; and Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan©_Meets_ OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997).

1. Paranoid Projection and the Phantom Subject of Reason   1. On the magic lantern in the history of science, see Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman, “The Magic Lantern and the Art of Demonstration,” in Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 37–­71; Thomas L. Hankins, “How the Magic Lantern Lost Its Magic,” Optics & Photonics News 14 (January 2003): 34–­40; and Koen Vermeir, “The Magic of the Magic Lantern (1660–­1700): On Analogical Demonstration and the Visualization of the Invisible,” British Journal for the History of Science 38, no. 2 (June 2005): 127–­59. For art historical perspectives, see

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Jonathan Crary, “The Camera Obscura and Its Subject,” in Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 25–­66; Barbara Stafford, “Revealing Technologies/ Magical Domains,” in Barbara Stafford, Frances Terpak, and Isotta Poggi, Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2001), 1–­142; and Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994). On the magic lantern as part of the prehistory of cinema, see C. W. Ceram, Archaeology of the Cinema, trans. Richard Winston (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965); Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema, trans. Richard Crangle (1994; Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2001); Mannoni,“The Art of Deception,” in Eyes, Lies, and Illusions: The Art of Deception (London: Hayward Gallery, 2004), 41–­52; Mannoni, Trois siècles de cinema: De la lanterne magique au cinématographe; collections de la Cinémathèque française; [exposition “l’art trompeur”], Paris, Espace Électra, 13 décembre 1995 –­3 mars 1996 (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1995); and Laurent Mannoni, Donata Pesenti Campagnoni, and David Robinson, Light and Movement: Incunabula of the Motion Picture, 1420–­1896 (Gemano: Giornata de cinema muto, 1995). For a brief survey of the magic lantern as a popular and itinerate medium, a “prodigious conjuring device” in the hands of magicians and performers, see Mervyn Heard, “Now You See It, Now You Don’t: The Magician and the Magic Lantern,” in Realms of Light: Uses and Perceptions of the Magic Lantern from the 17th to the 21st Century, ed. Richard Crangle, Mervyn Heard, and Ine van Dooren (London: Magic Lantern Society, 2005), 13–­24.   2. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1982) and Jacques Rancière, Le spectateur émancipé (Paris: La Fabrique éditions, 2008).   3. Michel de Certeau, “What Freud Makes of History: ‘A Seventeenth-­ Century Demonological Neurosis,’” in The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 292.  4. The literature on early modern scientific instruments is vast and growing. See especially Hankins and Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination; Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-­pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985); David Gooding, Trevor Pinch, and Simon Schaffer, eds., The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and Helmar Schramm, Ludger Schwarte, and Jan Lazardig, eds., Instruments in Art and Science: On the Architectonics of Cultural Boundaries in the 17th Century (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008). For general studies

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258  notes to chapter one

of the manufacture of scientific instruments in this period, see Maurice Daumas, Scientific Instruments of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries and Their Makers, ed. and trans. Mary Holbrook (London: Batsford, 1972); Anthony Turner, Early Scientific Instruments: Europe, 1400–­1800 (London: Sotheby’s, 1987); and Gerard L’Estrange Turner, Scientific Instruments 1500–­1900: An Introduction (London: Philip Wilson, 1998).   5. Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, ed. and trans. Ida Macalpine and Richard A. Hunter (1903; New York: New York Review of Books, 2000) and Eric L. Santner, My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996). On Schreber’s submission to and transformation by the shaping agency of pedagogical machines, including those of his father Moritz Schreber’s orthopedic devices as a “becoming machine,” see Mark S. Roberts, “Schreber as Machine, Technophobe, and Virtualist,” in Experimental Sound and Radio, ed. Allen S. Weiss (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 27–­41.  6. Sigmund Freud, “Psycho-­ Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides),” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1953–­74; repr., London: Vintage, 2001), 12:77.   7. Ibid., 65.   8. Ibid., 62–­63.   9. Santner, My Own Private Germany, xii. 10. Eric L. Santner, “Toward an Ethics of Singularity,” in On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 48. Hereafter, page numbers are cited in the text. 11. Freud, “Psycho-­Analytic Notes,” 65. 12. Ibid., 70. 13. For reproductions of these paintings, see Ida Macalpine and R. A. Hunter, Schizophrenia 1677: A Psychiatric Study of an Illustrated Autobiographical Record of Demoniacal Possession (London: Dawson, 1956). On Haitzmann, see also David Lederer, Madness, Religion, and the State in Early Modern Europe: A Bavarian Beacon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 14. Sigmund Freud, “A Seventeenth-­Century Demonological Neurosis,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, 19:72. Hereafter, page numbers are cited in the text. 15. For a discussion of the contrastive significance in early modern alchemical discourse of the terms “projection” and “projector” as signifying positive transformation and charlatanism, see Pamela H. Smith, The Business of Alchemy:

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Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 269. 16. Guy Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, trans. Daniella Dangoor (1972; Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993). 17. Hankins, “How the Magic Lantern Lost Its Magic.” 18. William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994). See also William Eamon, “Technology as Magic in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance,” Janus 70 (1983): 171–­212. The classic study is Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1923–­58). 19. Giambattista della Porta, Magiae naturalis libri XX . . . in quibus scientiarum naturalium divitiae, & delitiae demonstrantur (Naples: Apud Horatium Salvianum, 1589), book 1, chap. 2. Hereafter, page numbers will be cited in the text from the English translation, Natural Magick . . . in Twenty Bookes . . . Wherein are set forth All the Riches and Delights of Natural Sciences (London: Printed for Thomas Young and Samuel Speed, 1658), 1–­2. 20. Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 233. 21. Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow, 8–­10. 22. Teresa Brennan, “‘The Contexts of Vision’ from a Specific Standpoint,” in Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight, ed. Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay (New York: Routledge, 1996), 220. 23. See David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-­Kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 182–­206, and Sven Dupré, “Inside the ‘Camera Obscura’: Kepler’s Experiment and Theory of Optical Imagery,” Early Science and Medicine 13, no. 3 (2008): 219–­44. 24. Sven Dupré and Michael Korey, “Inside the Kunstkammer: The Circulation of Optical Knowledge and Instruments at the Dresden Court,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 40, no. 4 (2009): 405–­20. 25. Johannes Kepler, Optics: Paralipomena to Witelo & Optical Part of Astronomy, trans. William H. Donahue (1604; Santa Fe: Green Lion Press, 2000), 194. Hereafter, page numbers will be cited in the text. 26. On Kepler’s characterization of the camera obscura as a social space of intellectual games, see Dupré, “Inside the Camera Obscura,” and Dupré and Korey, “Inside the Kunstkammer.” On the camera obscura and magic lantern in terms of ludic play and the imagination, see Marina Warner, “Camera Ludica,” in Eyes, Lies and Illusions, 13–­23. Warner’s essay draws explicitly from art historian Claudia Swan’s work on the early modern imagination. See Claudia Swan, Art, Science, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Holland: Jacques de Gheyn II (1565–­1629) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)

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and Swan, “Eyes Wide Shut: Early Modern Imagination, Demonology and the Visual Arts,” Zeitsprünge 7, no. 4 (2003): 560–­81. On the ludic as a means of retelling the history of the Scientific Revolution, see Paula Findlen, “Between Carnival and Lent: The Scientific Revolution at the Margins of Culture,” Configurations 6, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 243–­67. 27. François de Aguilón, Opticorum libri sex (Antwerp: Ex officina Plantiniana, apud Viduam et filios J. Moreti, 1613), 47. See Hermann Hecht, “The History of Projecting Phantoms, Ghosts, and Apparitions,” New Magic Lantern Journal 3, no. 1 (1984): 5. 28. On curiosity as a form of cognition and highly contested appetite for knowing bound up with the regulation of knowledge, see Barbara M. Benedict, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Peter Harrison, “Curiosity, Forbidden Knowledge, and the Reformation of Knowledge in Early Modern England,” Isis 92, no. 2 (June 2001): 265–­90; and Neil Kenny, The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 29. While Stafford positions the eighteenth century as the age of the popularization of the educational lecture on natural phenomena, texts such as the Récréations mathématiques, first published anonymously in 1624, proved so popular that, according to the work of historian of science Albrecht Heeffer, this compilation of experiments or “problems” was translated into English and Dutch, and in French alone went through more than twenty-­five editions over the course of the seventeenth century with a new edition by Jacques Ozanam in 1694. Heeffer links the substantially illustrated small octavo book not to the work of Jean Leurechon (to whom it is most frequently attributed) but to the work of master engraver Jean Appier Hanzelet. See Albrecht Heeffer, “Récréations Mathématiques (1624): A Study on its Authorship, Sources, and Influence,” Preprints of the Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science, Ghent University, Belgium, revised October 7, 2004, http://logica.ugent.be/albrecht/ thesis/Etten-intro.pdf. 30. Mathematicall Recreations, Or a Collection of sundrie Problemes extracted out of the Ancient and Moderne Philosophers (London: by T. Cotes, for Richard Hawkins, 1653), 6. Hereafter, page numbers will be cited in the text. Consistent across the many translations and editions of this collection is the special place given to optical technologies, particularly those for casting an image in a darkened room or chamber. 31. Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-­Century Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Robert Cockcroft, Rhetorical Affect in Early Modern Writing: Renaissance Passions Reconsidered (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); and Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-­Wilson, eds., Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in

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the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 32. For recent work on Hooke, see Jim Bennett et al., London’s Leo­ nardo: The Life and Work of Robert Hooke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); and Michael Cooper and Michael Hunter, eds., Robert Hooke: Tercentennial Studies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). On Hooke’s relation to natural magic, see John Henry, “Robert Hooke, the Incongruous Mechanist,” in Robert Hooke: New Studies, ed. Michael Hunter and Simon Schaffer (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1989), 149–­80. For a discussion of the microscope in terms of magic, see Catherine Wilson, “Visual Surface and Visual Symbol: The Microscope and the Occult in Early Modern Science,” Journal of the History of Ideas 49, no. 1 (January–­March 1988): 85–­108, and Mary Baine Campbell, Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). 33. Robert Hooke, “Preface,” Micrographia: or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses (London: Printed by Jo. Martyn and Ja. Allestry, 1665), sig. [a2]r. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., sig. [d2]r. 36. Margaret Cavendish, “The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World,” in Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader, ed. Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2000), 170. On Cavendish and Hooke, see also Mary Baine Campbell, “Outside In: Hooke, Cavendish, and the Invisible Worlds,” in Wonder and Science, 181–­220. 37. Robert Hooke, “A Contrivance to make the Picture of any thing appear on a Wall, Cup-­board, or within a Picture-­frame, &c., in the midst of a Light room in the Day-­time; or in the Night-­time in any room that is inlightned with a considerable number of Candles,” Philosophical Transactions 3, no. 38 (August 17, 1668): 741–­42. 38. Ibid., 743. 39. On the ambivalent relation of the members of the Royal Society to belief in the possibility of demonic magic, see Charles Webster, From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 75–­100. 40. H. Mark Gosser, “Kircher and the Lanterna Magica: A Reexamination,” Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers Journal 90, no. 10 (October 1981): 972–­78; Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow, 34–­ 45; Sebastiaan I. Van Nooten, “Contributions of Dutchmen to the Early History of Film Technology,” Janus 58 (1971): 81–­100; and W. A. Wagenaar, “The True Inventor of the Magic Lantern: Kircher, Walgenstein or Huyghens?,” Janus 66 (1979): 193–­207.

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41. Joseph Needham, Wang Ling, and Kenneth Girdwood Robinson, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 4, pt. 1: Physics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962). 42. See A. I. Sabra, Optics, Astronomy, and Logic: Studies in Arabic Science and Philosophy (Aldershot: Variorum, 1994). 43. On Huygens’s scientific work, see particularly H. J. M. Bos et al., eds., Studies on Christiaan Huygens (Lisse: Swets & Zeitlinger, 1980) and Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis, Lenses and Waves: Christiaan Huygens and the Mathematical Science of Optics in the Seventeenth Century (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2004). On his immediate context, see Dirk J. Struik, The Land of Stevin and Huygens: A Sketch of Science and Technology in the Dutch Republic during the Golden Century (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1981). 44. Crary, “The Camera Obscura and Its Subject,” 33. 45. Christaan Huygens, Treatise on Light, trans. Silvanus P. Thompson (1690; New York: Dover, 1962), 62, 105. For Huygens’s instruments and lenses, see Anne C. van Helden and Rob H. van Gent, The Huygens Collection (Leiden: Museum Boerhaave, 1995) and Anne C. van Helden and Rob H. van Gent, “The Lens Production by Christiaan and Constantijn Huygens,” Annals of Science 56, no. 1 (1999): 69–­79. 46. “Voilà encore une autre commission que mon Père me donne, de luy ajuster une lanterne avec 2 ou 3 diverses peintures dont elle face la representation. Je n’ay rien à luy respondre sinon que je feray ce qu’il desire, et le plus promptement qu’il me sera possible; mais à vous j’avoueray bien que ces commissions m’incommodent fort, et que tout autre que mon père me demanderoit en vain des choses semblables. Vous ne scauriez croire avec quelle peine je m’occupe a des telles bagatelles qui me sont desia toutes vielles, outre que j’ay honte que l’on scache par de là qu’elles vienent de moy. L’on y est assez complaisant pour faire semblant de les admirer, mais après on s’en mocquera et non pas sans raison. Pour l’avenir, s’il y a aucun moyen detournez moy je vous prie des pareilles corvées.” Christiaan Huygens to Lodewijk Huygens, April 5, 1662, in Christiaan Huygens, Oeuvres complètes de Christiaan Huygens, 22 vols. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1888–­1950), 4:102. 47. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology: Parts I and III, trans. R. Pascal (1932; New York: International, 1947), 14. 48. Sarah Kofman, Camera Obscura: Of Ideology, trans. Will Straw (1973; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 51–­53. 49. “Vous voyés donc assés que pour sentir, l’ame n’a pas besoin de contempler aucunes images, qui soyent semblables aux choses qu’elle sent mais cela n’empesche pas qu’il ne soit vray, que les objets que nous regardons, en impriment d’assés parfaites dans le fonds de nos yeux; ainsi que quelques uns ont desia tres-­ingenieusement expliqué, par la coparaison de celles qui paroissent

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dans une chambre, lors que l’ayant toute fermée, reserué un seul trou, & ayant mis au devant de ce trou un verre en forme de lentille, on estend derriere, à certaine distance, un linge blanc, sur qui la lumiere, qui vient des objets de dehors, forme ces images. Car ils disent que cette chambre represente l’oeil; ce trou, la prunelle; ce verre, l’humeur cristaline, ou plustost toutes celles des parties de l’oeil qui causent quelque refraction; & ce linge, la peau interieure, qui est composée des extremités du nerf optique. Mais vous en pourrés estre encores plus certain, si prenant l’oeil d’un homme fraischement mort, ou au defaut, celuy d’un boeuf, ou de quelqu’autre gros animal, vous coupés dextrement vers le fonds les trois peaux qui l’envelopent. . . . puis l’ayant recouuerte de quelque cors blanc . . . vous y verrés non peut-­estre sans admiration, & plaisir, une peinture, qui representera fort naïuement en perspectiue tous les obiets, qui seront au dehors.” [René Descartes], Discours de la methode pour bien conduire sa raison, & chercher la verité dans les sciences plus la dioptrique: les meteore: et la geometrie: qui sont des essais de cete methode (Leiden: Jan Maire, 1637), 35, 37. 50. Kofman, Camera Obscura, 53. 51. On the construction of subjectivity in terms of the impossible vantage point of “I see myself seeing myself,” see Jacques Lacan’s critique of Cartesian thought. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan, ed. Jacques-­Alain Miller (New York: Norton, 1981). For Descartes’s distrust of vision as a means to truth and the complexity of what has come to be described in a shorthand manner as “Cartesian vision,” see Margaret Atherton, “How to Write the History of Vision: Understanding the Relationship between Berkeley and Descartes,” in Sites of Vision: The Discursive Construction of Sight in the History of Philosophy, ed. David Michael Levin (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 139–­65; Karsten Harries, “Descartes, Perspective, and the Angelic Eye,” Yale French Studies 49 (1973): 28–­ 42; Dalia Judovitz, “Vision, Representation, and Technology in Descartes,” in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, ed. David Michael Levin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 63–­86; and Lyle Massey, “Anamorphosis through Descartes or Perspective Gone Awry,” Renaissance Quarterly 50, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 1148–­89. 52. For a reading of Descartes’s use of the camera obscura to construct a vantage point analogous to the eye of God, see Crary, “The Camera Obscura and Its Subject,” 47–­50. 53. “Apres avoir bien arrondi le verre dans quelque ecuelle fort creuse, et l’avoir rendu egalement espais part tout, je luy donne la premiere forme avec du gros sable sans eau, et puis avec du sable passè par un tamis fort fin, je travaille encore a sec pour oster les marques du sable premier. Puis en mettant de ce sable rendu si fin qu’il s’est pu faire a sec, un peu moins qu’en peut tenir un dez a coudre, j’y adjoute de l’eau, et avec se sable j’acheve a doucir le verre,

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a quoy j’emploie quelques 8 ou 9 heures pour chasque costè de ces grands verres.” Christiaan Huygens to C. F. M. De Challes, 1665, in Huygens, Oeuvres complètes, 22:83. For a discussion of Kalthof, see p. 457 of the same volume. 54. On the difficult class position of early modern natural philosophers, see Mario Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Stephen Pumfrey, “Ideas above His Station: A Social Study of Hooke’s Curatorship of Experiments,” History of Science 29 (1991): 1–­44; and Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-­Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 55. “Puis que j’ay promis d’envoier la lanterne il faut qu’elle aille, car aussi bien ne scaurois je inventer d’excuse valable pour l’esquiver. Mais lors qu’elle sera arrivée si vous le trouvez a propos vous ferez aisement qu’elle ne puisse point servir, en ostant un des 2 verres qui sont proche l’un de l’autre, de sorte qu’il en demeurera encore 2 de reste, car il y en a 3 en tout. Je seray semblant d’ignorer ce qui y manque, et parmy ces eclaircissements il se passera du temps autant qu’il en faut. Et tout cecy pour le mieux; parce qu’il me semble que ****** à mon Pere de faire jouer de telles marionettes au Louvre, et que je sçay bien que vous ne seriez pas bien aise de l’y servir comme le cousin Micheli au Seigneur d’Aumale.” Christiaan Huygens to Lodewijk Huygens, April 19, 1662, in Huygens, Oeuvres complètes, 4:111. 56. For a history of marionettes in early modern France and, in particular, the fungible boundaries between operators in the sense, for example, of surgeons and the operators of entertainment devices, see Jean-­Luc Impe, Opéra baroque et marionnette: Dix lustres de répertoire musical au siècle des lumières (Charleville-­Mézières: Institut International de la Marionnette, 1994). 57. “Vous ferez de la Lanterne comme le ciel vous inspirera: la defaite la mieux fondée sera celle de la longueur des jours, car tant que le jour dure il est impossible de faire ces representations quoy qu’on se mette dans une chambre obscure; ce qui vient de l’impression que la lumiere a faite dans les yeux, qui ne s’en efface pas qu’apres un assez long temps.” Christiaan Huygens to Lodewijk Huygens, May 3, 1662, in Huygens, Oeuvres complètes, 4:125. 58. “Je ne scay pas encore quand Monsieur Chieze partira, tantost Busero tantost Ketting le lanterne. Il semble au moins qu’il fait ce qu’il peut pour se faire depescher. J’avois dessein de le lanterner encore a son depart, c’est a dire de le charger de la Lanterne, que j’ay fait faire pour Mon Pere, mais il en sera delivrè, par ce que malgrè toute mon industrie et science je n’en puis venir a bout. Je parle tout de bon, et le frere de Zeelhem peut tesmoigner combien j’ay pris de peine en vain, sans que je l’aye pu ajuster de mesme qu’a estè la premiere que j’avois cy devant de la quelle ayant ostè les verres il y a long temps, je ne scaurois retrouver a cet heure quel ils ont estè. Peut estre que il Signor

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Padre ne s’en souviendra plus, mais en cas que si, vous luy ferez scavoir ces raisons susdites, et au reste que je suis prest de luy fabriquer Lunette d’approche, microscope et tout ce qu’il voudra, exceptè la Lanterne, dont il faut compter l’invention inter artes deperditas.” Christiaan Huygens to Lodewijk Huygens, August 17, 1662, in Huygens, Oeuvres complètes, 4:197. 59. On Huygens’s pension, see Alice Stroup, A Company of Scientists: Botany, Patronage, and Community at the Seventeenth-­Century Parisian Royal Academy of Sciences (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 35–­38. 60. “Les verres pour la lanterne et pour la lunette de Monsieur le Mareschal de Grammont sont desia faits et seront bientost mis en œuvre.” Christiaan Huygens to Lodewijk Huygens, April 12, 1662, in Huygens, Oeuvres complètes, 4:109–­10. 61. “Je suis apres a en faire travailler un mais il me trompe tousjours a propos de travail & de lunettes, mandez moy sil vous plait la grandeur & proportion des deux verres que vous mistes & que vous jugez quil fault mettre a cette lanterne de peur. Car Je nay pas encores achevé la mienne despuis les premiers essays que Jen fis. Il me semble que celle du danois que jay veu avoit le verre des figures A tous joignant le trou de la lanterne & a 2 ou 3 pouces comme en B un convexe de 7 ou 8 pouces de foyer & au bout du tuyau C un autre denuiron 12 pouces qui seslognoit ou sapprochoit de B suivant quon voulut representer les figures pres ou loin.” Pierre Petit to Christiaan Huygens, November 28, 1664, in Huygens, Oeuvres complètes, 4:269 (for the date of this letter, see ibid., 5:129, n. 1 and 5:161, n. 1). “Lanterne, il y a longtemps que les verres en sont estez sans que je scache la mesure de tous, l’un de 6 pouces, ma lanterne n’estoit pas bien ajustée. Estoit sans miroir concave. Il faut mettre la flame au milieu, entre le centre et le miroir ou un peu plus vers le centre.” Christiaan Huygens to Pierre Petit, December 11, 1664, in Huygens, Oeuvres complètes, 5:161–­62. Both letters include visual diagrams. 62. For a discussion of the apotropaic function in ancient Rome of images of the evil eye attacked by animals, erect phalli to ward off the evil eye of invidiousness, and even the oversized phallus on figures of cultural “otherness” or “unbecomingness” who would ward off the evil eye by dispelling potential envy through laughter, see John R. Clarke, “‘Just Like Us’: Cultural Constructions of Sexuality and Race in Roman Art,” Art Bulletin 78, no. 4 (December 1996): 599–­603. 63. For the development of Huygens’s dioptrics, see especially Dijksterhuis, Lenses and Waves. 64. Huygens, Oeuvres complètes, 13:772. 65. Ibid., 786. 66. Manuscript A, p. 152, 1659, “Pour des representations par le moyen de verres convexes à la lampe.” Huygens, Oeuvres complètes, 22:197.

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67. “De sorte que le plus grand passetemps que j’aij me donne le craijonner, que j’exerce a toute force et de toute façon; J’aij peint en notre jardin des grandes figures comme le vif, avecq du charbon mis dans de l’huijle et ju craijon blancq, contre les aijs qui separent nostre jardin d’avecq celuij du Conte Maurice, ce sont des figures d’Holbeens Dodendans, que, de petites come let petit doict qu’elles sont, j’ay aggrandies à la hauteur susdite; Mais voijcij quelque chose de plus net que je viens de faire, d’ont l’original de l’un vous est assez conneu de l’autre est la teste de mort, comme nous en avons deux icij que vous avez veu.” Christiaan Huygens to Constantyn Huygens, August 14, 1646, in Huygens, Oeuvres complètes, 1:17. 68. “Behold the Sphere, which to thy View / My Right-­Hand now does hold, / By that the Fate which thou shalt find / May better be foretold,” The Dance of Death, from the original designs of Hans Holbein, Illustrated with Fifty-­two Wood Cuts, engraved by Thomas and John Bewick (Newcastle: Printed for William Charnley, 1789), fig. 27. 69. For a reconsideration of Holbein in relation to Lacan’s notion of the formation of the ego that emphasizes the effect of Holbein’s wit and the relation between text and image, see Tom Conley, “The Wit of the Letter: Hol­ bein’s Lacan,” in Brennan and Jay, Vision in Context, 47–­61. 70. Kircher claimed priority for his work with the casting of images (and words) using mirrors, shadow projection with lamps, and even glass painted with heat-­sensitive paints that would change color under illumination. But he also competitively acknowledged the first self-­contained and portable versions of the device attributed to Thomas Rasmussen Walgenstein (1627–­81). In the second edition of the Ars magna, Kircher makes reference to this Danish mathematician and architect who was acclaimed for his shows and sales of the portable magic lantern. On Walgenstein, see Mogens Skot-­hansen, “Det begyndte I 1660-­erne, Danskeren Thomas Walgenstein er filmes tipoldefar,” in Biografteatefforeningeme 1910–­1960 (Copenhagen, 1960); Van Nooten, “Contributions of Dutchmen”; and Wagenaar, “The True Inventor of the Magic Lantern.” 71. Wagenaar, “The True Inventor of the Magic Lantern,” 196–­200. 72. Vermeir, “The Magic of the Magic Lantern,” 150–­51. 73. See particularly Ingrid D. Rowland, “Athanasius Kircher, Missionary Scientist,” in The Ecstatic Journey: Athanasius Kircher in Baroque Rome (Chicago: University of Chicago Library, 2000), 6–­7; Paula Findlen, “Science, History, and Erudition: Athanasius Kircher’s Museum at the Collegio Romano,” in The Great Art of Knowing: The Baroque Encyclopedia of Athanasius Kircher, ed. Daniel Stolzenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Libraries, 2001), 17–­26; Paula Findlen, “Scientific Spectacle in Baroque Rome: Athanasius Kircher and the Roman College Museum,” in Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters, ed. Mordechai Feingold (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003),

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225–­84; and Eugenio Lo Sardo, ed., Athanasius Kircher: Il museo del mundo (Rome: De Luca, 2001). 74. See Giorgio de Sepibus, Romani Collegii Societatis Jesu Musaeum Celeberrimum Cujus magnum Antiquariae rei, statuarum imaginum, picturarumque partem Ex Legato Alphonsi Donini, S. P. Q. R. A Secretis, munificâ Liberalitate relictum P. Athanasius Kircherus, Soc. Jesu, novis & raris inventis locupletatum compluriumque Principum curiosis donariis magno rerum apparatu instruxit . . . (Amsterdam: Ex Officina Janssonio-­Waesbergiana, 1678), 40. On the Museo Kircheriano in Rome as a museum of the history of science and technology from antiquity to the seventeenth century, see also Silvio A. Be­ dini, “The Evolution of Science Museums,” in Patrons, Artisans, and Instruments of Science, 1600–­1750 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 1–­29. On science collections in seventeenth-­century Italy, see Silvio A. Bedini, Science and Instruments in Seventeenth-­Century Italy (Aldershot: Variorum, 1994), 249–­67. 75. Sepibus, Romani Collegii Societatis Jesu Musaeum, 40. See also Angela Mayer-­Deutsch, “‘Quasi-­Optical Palingenesis’: The Circulation of Portraits and the Image of Kircher,” in Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything, ed. Paula Findlen (New York: Routledge, 2004), 106. 76. See Rowland, “Athanasius Kircher, Missionary Scientist,” 6. 77. Joscelyn Godwin, Athanasius Kircher: A Renaissance Man and the Quest for Lost Knowledge (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979), 78, and Catherine Chevalley, “L’Ars magna lucis et umbrae d’Athanase Kircher: Néoplatonisme, hermétisme et ‘nouvelle philosophie,’” Baroque 12 (1987): 101. 78. Michael John Gorman, “Between the Demonic and the Miraculous: Athanasius Kircher and the Baroque Culture of Machines,” in Stolzenberg, Great Art of Knowing, 59–­70. 79. On the grotesque body, see Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (1965; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). 80. Athanasius Kircher, Ars magna lucis et umbrae (Amsterdam, 1671), 768–­70. 81. John Hedley Brooke and Ian Maclean, eds., Heterodoxy in Early Modern Science and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 82. For a major survey of the trial and its shifting interpretations, see Maurice A. Finocchiaro, Retrying Galileo, 1633–­1992 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Its explosive potential is evident in Pietro Redondi’s controversial argument that Galileo’s atomist theories and their challenge to the doctrine of transubstantiation and the Eucharist were at the root of the trial, not a Copernican view of the universe: Pietro Redondi, Galileo Heretic, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987). On the complexity of science and religion in the case of Galileo, see Maurice A. Finocchiaro, “Science, Religion, and the Historiography of the Galileo

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Affair: On the Undesirability of Oversimplification,” Osiris, 2nd ser., 16 (2001): 114–­32. 83. Rowland, “Athanasius Kircher, Missionary Scientist,” 1–­2. 84. The point here is not a reiteration of the myth that science was pitted against religion in the early modern period or that Galileo and Bruno were martyrs on the pyre of science. Nor am I suggesting that technologies of projection were threatening to the Catholic or heretical. On the “conflict thesis” (i.e., the thesis that represents science at war with religion) and the argument instead for a relation of subordination and, over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a process of differentiation between science and religion, see John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). On Bruno’s interest in Egyptian magic as a source and substrate of Christianity, see Francis A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). 85. Findlen, “Scientific Spectacle in Baroque Rome,” 249. 86. Charles Patin, Travels thro’ Germany, Bohemia, Swisserland, Holland: And other Parts of Europe (London: Printed for A. Swall and T. Child, 1696), 232–­36. Hereafter, page numbers will be cited in the text. Patin’s travels were first published as Quatre relations historiques (Basel, 1673) and were widely reprinted; a second edition of the English translation appeared in 1697. 87. See the discussion of his lanterns in Johann Christoph Kohlhans, Neuerfundene Mathematische und Optische Curiositäten (Leipzig: In Verlegung Friederich Lanckischen, 1677). 88. In his essay, “The Art of Deception,” Laurent Mannoni draws his argument about the independent agency of the light image from this account. Mannoni takes Patin’s account as a theoretical outline of his concept of deceptive art or the “great art of light and shadow” in that it presents the magic lantern show in terms of several key functions: the artificial duplication of reality, the reconstitution of life, and the incarnation of fantasy. See Mannoni, “The Art of Deception,” 42. 89. Johann Christoph Sturm, Collegium Experimentale, sive Curiosum (Nuremberg: Sumptibus Wolfgangi Mauritii Endteri, & Johannis Andreae Endteri Haeredum, 1676), 163–­66. For a discussion of Sturm’s use of experiments in education, see Thomas Ahnert, “The Culture of Experimentalism in the Holy Roman Empire: Johann Christoph Sturm (1635–­1703) and the Collegium Experimentale” (2002), http://sammelpunkt.philo.at:8080/archive/00000308/, and Ahnert, “‘Nullius in Verba’: Autorität und Experiment in der Frühen Neuzeit—­Das Beispiel Johann Christoph Sturms (1635–­1703),” Zeitsprünge 7, no. 4 (2003): 604–­18.

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  90. Johann Christoph Sturm, Mathesis Juvenilis: Or a Course of Mathematicks for Young Students, vol. 2 (London: Printed for D. Midwinter, 1708), 383–­85. Hereafter, page numbers will be cited in the text.   91. Malcolm Bull, Mirror of the Gods: How the Renaissance Artists Rediscovered the Pagan Gods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 427–­31.   92. On the reinterpretation of the Bacchus myth in the Renaissance, see also Andreas Emmerling-­Skala, Bacchus in der Renaissance (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1994).   93. On Conti, see Charles W. Lemmi, The Classic Deities in Bacon: A Study in Mythological Symbolism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1933).   94. [Natale Conti], Mythologie, ou explications des fables (1581; Paris: Chez Pierre Chevalier . . . et Samuel Thiboust, 1627), 482.   95. Francis Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, 14 vols. (London: Longman, 1857–­74), 6:742.   96. Ibid.  97. Jacques Ozanam, Recreations Mathematical and Physical; Laying down, and Solving Many Profitable and Delightful Problems of Arithmetick, Geometry, Opticks, Gnomonicks, Cosmography, Mechanicks, Physicks, and Pyrotechny (London: Printed for R. Bonwick et al., 1708), 253, 479.   98. Ibid.   99. On the magic lanterns, camera obscuras, and other optical devices made by the Musschenbroek workshop for ’s Gravesande’s private cabinet, the physics cabinet at the University of Leiden, and Czar Peter the Great, see Peter de Clercq, At the Sign of the Oriental Lamp: The Musschenbroek Workshop in Leiden, 1660–­1750 (Rotterdam: Erasmus, 1997). 100. Hankins and Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination, 50. 101. Andreas Blühm and Louise Lippincott, Light! The Industrial Age 1750–­1900: Art & Science, Technology & Society (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000), 50. 102. Willem Jacob ’s Gravesande, Mathematical Elements of Natural Philosophy, Confirmed by Experiments: or an Introduction to Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy, trans. J. T. Desaguliers, 2 vols (London: Printed for J. Senex and W. Taylor, 1720–­21), 2:98–­99. 103. For an excellent study of monstrosity and fears of transformation in relation to Baroque optical devices based on mirrors, see Zakiya Hanafi, The Monster in the Machine: Magic, Medicine, and the Marvelous in the Time of the Scientific Revolution (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000). 104. ’s Gravesande, Mathematical Elements of Natural Philosophy, 2:103. 105. For other examples of psychoanalytically informed historical criticism of early modern culture, see Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor, eds., Historicism,

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Psychoanalysis and Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 2000); Timothy Murray and Alan K. Smith, eds., Repossessions: Psychoanalysis and the Phantasms of Early Modern Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); and Meredith Skura, “Early Modern Subjectivity and the Place of Psychoanalysis in Cultural Analysis: The Case of Richard Norwood,” in Whose Freud? The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture, ed. Peter Brooks and Alex Woloch (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 211–­21. 106. For a critical and deconstructive history of paranoia as a concept, see David J. Harper, “Histories of Suspicion in a Time of Conspiracy: A Reflection on Aubrey Lewis’s History of Paranoia,” History of the Human Sciences 7, no. 3 (1994): 89–­109. 107. Paul Ricoeur, De l’interpretation: Essai sur Freud (Paris: Seuil, 1965). 108. For Freud’s writings on paranoia beyond the case of Schreber, see Sigmund Freud, “Preface to Reik’s Ritual: Psycho-­Analytic Studies,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, 17:260, and “Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, 18:225–­30. 109. Freud, “Psycho-­Analytic Notes,” 65. 110. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 95. 111. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is about You,” in Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 1–­37. For Klein’s work on the “paranoid position,” see Melanie Klein, “Some Theoretical Conclusions Regarding the Emotional Life of the Infant,” in Developments in Psycho-­analysis, ed. Joan Rivière (London: Hogarth, 1952) and Klein, The Psychoanalysis of Children (London: Hogarth, 1932), 232–­33. 112. Freud, “Psycho-­Analytic Notes,” 34–­58. 113. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-­Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (1972; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 2. 114. Ibid. 115. Ibid., 96.

2. Empire through the Magic Lantern    1. On this point as well as for the elaboration of postcolonial, countercolonial, and feminist psychoanalytic critique, see, for example, Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994); Teresa Brennan, History after Lacan (London: Routledge, 1993); Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (1952; Paris: Seuil, 1975); Ranjanna Khanna, Dark Continents:

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Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003); Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur: Essai sur l’abjection (Paris: Seuil, 1980); Octave Mannoni, Psychologie de la colonisation (Paris: Seuil, 1950); Albert Memmi, Portrait du colonisé: Précédé du Portrait du colonisateur (Paris: Payot, 1973); Ashis Nandy, The Savage Freud and Other Essays on Possible and Retrievable Selves (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995); and Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983).   2. Anne McClintock, “The Lay of the Land: Geneaologies of Imperialism,” in Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 22.   3. Ibid., 71–­74, and Homi K. Bhabha, “Sly Civility,” in Location of Culture, 100. See also Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).   4. For a brief discussion of the eighteenth-­century naming of the spectacle of European imaging technologies as a “new world” and their connection to the New World of the Americas, see Lia Camerlengo, “Il Mondo Nuovo, disincantato strumento d’incanto,” in Mirabili visioni: Vedute ottiche della stamperia Remondini, ed. Carlo Alberto Zotti Minici (Trento: Provincia Autonoma di Trento, Servizio Beni Culturali, 1996), 57–­60.   5. On the role of technologies of recording and measurement as well as the ideology of the “machine” in European colonization, see, for example, Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989).   6. On the production of reason in opposition to “Oriental despotism,” see Barbara Maria Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment Education and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994).   7. For a QuickTime animation version of Jaar’s logo that appeared on the spectacolor sign in Times Square, see http://www.alfredojaar.net/america/ america_o.html. On Jaar’s installation, see Alfredo Jaar: The Fire This Time; Public Interventions, 1979–­2005, texts by Mary Jane Jacob and Nancy Princethal (Milan: Charta, 2005).   8. Jesse Levine, A New World of Understanding: Turnabout Map of the Americas (San Jose, Calif.: Laguna, 1982) and Levine, “Turnabout Map of the Americas,” in Considering Cultural Difference, ed. Pauline Uchmanowicz (New York: Longman, 2004).   9. On mapping, see, for example, J. B. Harley, “Maps, Knowledge, and Power,” first published in The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design, and Use of Past Environments, ed. Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 277–­312; Harley, “Deconstructing the Map,” first published in Cartographica

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26, no. 2 (1989): 1–­20; reprinted with modifications in Writing Worlds: Discourse, Texts and Metaphors in the Representation of Landscape, ed. Trevor J. Barnes and James S. Duncan (London: Routledge, 1992), 231–­47; Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed. Paul Laxton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 2000); and Valerie Traub, “Mapping the Global Body,” in Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, and Empire in Renaissance England, ed. Peter Erickson and Clark Hulse (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 44–­97. 10. [Ann Taylor and Jane Taylor], Signor Topsy-­Turvy’s Wonderful Magic Lantern; or, the World turned upside down (London: Printed for Tabart & Co., 1810). Hereafter, page numbers will be cited in the text. 11. See B. W. Higman, Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807–­ 1834 (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 1995). 12. “calipash, n.” OED Online, March 2014, Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/26385?redirectedFrom=callepash. 13. Edward Nairne, The Description of a Single Microscope; And of an Apparatus Applicable to the same, in order to make it a Solar Microscope, Which will equally serve for a Camera Obscura, and also for viewing Prints in Perspective (London, n.d.), 4. 14. Priscilla Wakefield, Domestic Recreation; or Dialogues Illustrative of Natural and Scientific Subjects (London: Printed for Darnton and Harvey . . . by W. Darnton and Joseph and James Harvey, 1805), 66–­67. 15. For an excellent article that looks at the print in the context of other representations of the Hastings trial, see Finbarr Barry Flood, “Correct Delineations and Promiscuous Outlines: Envisioning India at the Trial of Warren Hastings,” Art History 29, no. 1 (February 2006): 47–­78. 16. “galanty show, n.” OED Online, March 2014, Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/76149?redirectedFrom=galanty+show. 17. See Jeremy Bernstein, Dawning of the Raj: The Life and Trials of Warren Hastings (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000) and Geoffrey Carnall and Colin Nicholson, eds., The Impeachment of Warren Hastings: Papers from a Bicentenary Commemoration (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989). 18. Pope’s version replaces “Wezell” with “Ouzle”: “Ham. Do you see yonder cloud, that’s almost in shape of a Camel? Pol. By the mass, and it’s like a Camel indeed. Ham. Methinks it is like an † Ouzle. Pol. It is black like an Ouzle. Ham. Or like a Whale? Pol. Very like a Whale.” And the note specifies: “† An Ouzle or Blackbird: it has been printed by mistake a Weesel, which is not black.” The Works of William Shakespear, ed. Alexander Pope, 6 vols. (London: Printed for Jacob Tonson, 1723–­25), 6:416.

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19. “blackbird, n.” OED Online, March 2014, Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/19688?rskey=agQFFc&result=1. 20. Henry Baker, The Microscope Made Easy (London: Printed for R. Dodsley, 1742), 23; see 21. 21. John Cuff, A Description Of the most valuable Kinds of Microscopes Now in Use: The Pocket Microscope . . . and, the Solar, or Camera Obscura Microscope: As they are Made and Sold by John Cuff (London: Printed for John Cuff, n.d.), 8. 22. Benjamin Martin, Micrographia Nova; Or, a New Treatise on the Microscope, and Microscopic Objects (Reading: Printed for J. Newbery and C. Micklewright, 1742), 9. 23. On cross-­cultural influence and appropriation of shadow displays and optical boxes between East and West, see Thomas Ganz, “Da est a ovest, da ovest a est,” in Zotti Minici, Mirabili visioni, 67–­75. 24. For an excellent discussion of the competing uses of magic and the invocation of spirits of the dead in colonial Jamaica, see Vincent Brown, “Spiritual Terror and Sacred Authority: The Power of the Supernatural in Jamaican Slave Society,” in New Studies in the History of American Slavery, ed. Edward E. Baptist and Stephanie M. H. Camp (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 179–­210. 25. Edward Long, The History of Jamaica or, General Survey of the Antient and Modern State of that Island: With Reflections on its Situation Settlements, Inhabitants, Climate, Products, Commerce, Laws, and Government, 3 vols. (London: T. Lowndes, 1774), 2:447. See also Michael J. Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982). 26. Long, History of Jamaica, 2:451–­52, 473. 27. Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-­Gebert, “Introduction: Religious Syncretism and Caribbean Culture,” in Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santería, Obeah and the Caribbean, ed. Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-­Gebert (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 6. 28. In addition to Fernández Olmos and Paravisini-­Gebert, “Introduction,” see Joseph M. Murphy, Working the Spirit: Ceremonies of the African Diaspora (Boston: Beacon, 1994); Ivor Morrish, Obeah, Christ, and Rastaman: Jamaica and Its Religion (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1982); and George Eaton Simpson, Black Religions in the New World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978). 29. Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, 3 vols., 3rd ed. (London: Printed for John Stockdale, 1801), 1:537. See also Eugene Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution:

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Afro-­American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (New York: Random House, 1979). 30. Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, 2 vols. (London: Printed for John Stockdale, 1793), 2:88, 89–­90. Hereafter, page numbers will be cited in the text. 31. Raymond Phineas Stearns, Science in the British Colonies of America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970), 381. 32. The appellation “professors” as a means of parody has the status of a trope but one with a note of competitiveness over what constitutes correct belief and true science. Renny’s 1807 History of Jamaica refers to Obeah practitioners as “the professors of this occult science.” See Robert Renny, An History of Jamaica (London: Printed for J. Cawthorn, 1807), 169. 33. James Grainger, The Sugar Cane, 4:381–­86, in The Works of the English Poets, from Chaucer to Cowper, ed. Alexander Chalmers, 21 vols. (London: Printed for J. Johnson et al., 1810), 14:507. The discursive construction of Obeah in British Romantic literature is discussed in Alan Richardson, “Romantic Voodoo: Obeah and British Culture, 1797–­1807,” in Fernández Olmos and Paravisini-­Gebert, Sacred Possessions, 171–­94. However, Richardson does not link Grainger’s “georgic of the tropics” written in response to his work as a doctor on the island and published in 1764 and the Obeah Trials of 1760. 34. In his memoirs Robertson cites the Journal de Paris article that calls him a “physician, a mechanist, a painter, and an optician” and writes that, “He has everything needed to operate on the imagination with the greatest effects on the senses, except that he does not want to be a magician, a necromancer in this century in which all the sleight of hand tricks [les prestiges] have disappeared before the reason of man, perfected by the exact sciences.” É[tienne]-­ G[aspard] Robertson, Mémoires récréatifs, scientifiques et anecdotiques du physicien-­aéronaute E. G. Robertson, connu par ses expériences de fantasmagorie, 2 vols. (Paris: Librairie encyclopédique de Roret, 1840), 1:179. See also Terry Castle, “Phantasmagoria and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie,” in The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-­Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 140–­67, and Jann Matlock, “Voir aux limites du corps: Fantasmagories et femmes invisibles dans les spectacles de Robertson,” in Lanternes magiques: Tableaux transparents; 18 septembre 1995–­7 janvier 1996, musée d’Orsay, ed. Ségolène Le Men (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux), 83–­99. 35. See J. A. Leo Lemay, Ebenezer Kinnersley, Franklin’s Friend (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964), 96–­103. On electrical experimentation in the eighteenth-­century American colonies, see James Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006).

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36. See Brown, “Spiritual Terror and Sacred Authority,” 28. 37. “For the Entertainment of the Curious, There is Now to be Exhibited at the House of Messr. Alleyn & Williams, in Newgate Street, and to be continued for a few Weeks; A Course of Experiments on the Newly-­Discovered Electrical Fire . . . [St. John’s, April 25, 1753],” in Douglas C. McMurtrie, Early Printing on the Island of Antigua (Evanston: Privately printed, 1943). See also Brown, “Spiritual Terror and Sacred Authority,” 28. 38. See Douglas Hall, In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750–­1786 (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 1998), 160. On Thistlewood, see also Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-­Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 39. On eighteenth-­century demonstrations with electrical apparatus and the pedagogy of physics, see J. L. Heilbron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries: A Study of Early Modern Physics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). 40. William Hooper, Rational Recreations, in which the Principles of Numbers and Natural Philosophy Are clearly and copiously elucidated, By a Series of Easy, Entertaining, Interesting Experiments (London: L. Davis et al., 1774), 3:91. 41. Ibid., 95. 42. See, for instance, the “description of the most entertaining experiments performed by electricity,” in Joseph Priestley, The History and Present State of Electricity, with Original Experiments (London: Printed for J. Dodsley, et al., 1767), part 7. On eighteenth-­century instrument cabinets and the teaching of experimental physics, see Jean Torlais, “La Physique expérimentale,” in Enseignement et diffusion des sciences en France au XVIIIe siècle, ed. René Taton (Paris: Hermann, 1964), 619–­45. On the conjunction of pedagogy and entertainment, see Stafford, Artful Science. 43. See, for example, the work of Johann Heinrich Winckler, Gedanken von dem Eigenschaften, Wirkungen, und Ursachen der Electricität (Leipzig: Bernhard Christoph Breitkopfs, 1744). 44. “Il appartenait à une société incrédule d’envoyer Robert-­Houdin chez les Arabes pour les détourner des miracles.” Charles Baudelaire, Journaux intimes. Fusées. Mon coeur mis à nu, ed. Adolphe Van Bever (1867; Paris: G. Crès,1920), 14. See also Michel Seldow, Vie et secrets de Robert-­Houdin (Paris: Fayard, 1971), 10. 45. “Puissance,” in Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (Paris: Impri­ merie et Librairie de Firmin Didot Frères, 1835), 2:530. 46. Jean-­Eugène Robert-­Houdin, The Secrets of Stage Conjuring, trans. Professor Hoffmann (London: Routledge, 1881).

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47. Jacques Malthête, “Filmographie complète de Georges Méliès,” in Méliès: Magie et cinéma; Espace EDF electra, 26 avril–­1er septembre 2002, ed. Jacques Malthête and Laurent Mannoni (Paris: Paris musées, 2002), 242–­67. 48. Laurent Mannoni, “Méliès, magie, et cinema,” in Malthête and Mannoni, Méliès: Magie et cinéma, 38–­71. 49. “Prestige,” in Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, 2:498. 50. On the Marabouts, see Kamel Filali, L’Algérie mystique: Des marabouts fondateurs aux khwân insurgés, XVe–­XIXe siècles (Paris: Publisud, 2002). 51. “[On] espérait, avec raison, faire comprendre aux Arabes, à l’aide de mes séances, que les tours de leurs marabouts ne sont que des enfantillages et ne peuvent plus, en raison de leur naïveté, représenter les miracles d’un envoyé du Très-­Haut; ce qui nous conduisait aussi tout naturellment à leur montrer que nous leur sommes supérieurs en toutes chose et que, en fait de sorciers, il n’y a rien de tel que les Français.” Jean-­Eugène Robert-­Houdin, Confidences d’un prestidigitateur: Un vie d’artiste; suivi de, Le prieuré: Organisations mystérieuses pour le confort et l’agrément d’une demeure, ed. Christian Fechner (1858; Paris: Éditions Stock, 1995), 502. Hereafter, page numbers will be cited in the text. 52. On the exhibition Magie et Illusionisme: Autour de Robert-­Houdin (Musée d’Orsay, September 19, 1995–­ January 7, 1996), see Nicole Savy, “Robert Houdin et l’illusion romantique,” 48/14: La revue du musée d’Orsay 1 (Fall 1995): 48–­59. See also Brian Moore, The Magician’s Wife (New York: Plume, 1999). 53. André Keime Robert-­Houdin, Robert-­Houdin: Le magicien de la science (Paris: Champion; Geneva: Slatkine, 1986), 8. 54. On Robert-­Houdin’s cultivated persona and the relation between Robert-­Houdin’s sleight-­of-­hand magic tricks and automata, see Paul Metzner, Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skill, and Self-­Promotion in Paris during the Age of Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). On the relation between pedagogy and magic conjuring, see Barbara Maria Stafford, “Conjuring: How the Virtuoso Romantic Learned from the Enlightened Charlatan,” Art Journal 52, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 22–­30. 55. Jean Chavigny, Le Roman d’un artiste: Robert Houdin, rénovateur de la magie blanche (Orléans: Imprimerie Industrielle de l’Orléanais, 1970), 154–­55. 56. “Je jouais le rôle d’un marabout français.” Jean-­ Eugène Robert-­ Houdin, Confidences d’un prestidigitateur (1858; Paris: Librairie Nouvelle, 1859), 2:273. On Robert-­Houdin’s mission to Algeria, see also Chavigny, Le Roman d’un artiste, 119–­34. 57. “Cet état apathetique de mes spectateurs ne me satisfaisait pas; je n’étais pas venu en Algérie pour visiter un salon de figures de cire; je voulais autour de moi du mouvement, de l’animation, de l’existence enfin.”

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58. “Cependant il ne me suffisait pas d’amuser mes spectateurs, il fallait aussi, pour remplir le but de ma mission, les étonner, les impressioner, les effrayer meme par l’apparence d’un pouvoir surnaturel.” 59. “Je changeai de batterie.” 60. “Expérience,” in Dictionnaire de L’Académie française, 1:709. 61. “Comparées aux simples tours de leurs prétendus sorciers, mes experiences devaient être pour les Arabes de véritables miracles.” 62. “Un des moyens employés par les Marabouts pour se grandir aux yeux des Arabes et établir leur domination, c’était de faire croire à leur invulnerabilité.” 63. Alain Sergent, Le roi des prestidigitateurs: Robert-­Houdin (Paris: Seuil, 1952), 124. 64. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, “Elements of Anti-­Semitism: The Limits of Enlightenment,” in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London: Verso, 1979), 185 (hereafter, page numbers will be cited in the text), cited and discussed in Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1992), 63–­66. 65. For a different discussion of Horkheimer and Adorno’s investment in the sense of sight, see Martin Jay, “Dialectic of Enlightenment,” in Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-­Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

3. Empire Bites Back   1. On the abstraction and decorporealization of the camera obscura apparatus, see Jonathan Crary, “The Camera Obscura and Its Subject,” in Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 41.   2. See Zakiya Hanafi, “Monstrous Machines,” in The Monster in the Machine: Magic, Medicine, and the Marvelous in the Time of the Scientific Revolution (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), 53–­96.   3. For discussion and illustrations of eighteenth-­century magic lanterns with surface decoration and nineteenth-­century lanterns built in the shapes of pagodas and mosques, see Ernst Hrabalek, Laterna Magica: Zauberwelt und Faszination des optischen Spielzeugs (Munich: Keyser, 1985), especially figs. 3, 5, 44, 45, and 46.   4. See, for example, the “artificial eye” of Johannes Zahn, a Praemonstratensian and student of Kircher’s assistant Kaspar Schott. Johannes Zahn, Oculus Artificialis Teledioptricus sive Telescopium, ex Abditis rerum Naturalium & Artificialium principiis protractum novâ methodo, eâque solidâ explicatum ac comprimis è triplici Fundamento Physico seu Naturali Mathematico

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Dioptrico et Mechanico, seu Practico stabilitum (Würzburg: Sumptibus Quirini Heyl, 1685–­86).   5. “A man cannot see the satellites of Jupiter, unless assisted by a telescope: does he therefore conclude from this, that it is the telescope that sees those satellites? By no means; the conclusion would be absurd: nor would it be less absurd, to conclude that it is the eye that sees: the eye is a natural organ of sight, but the natural organ sees as little as the artificial. Our senses are instruments, so framed by the Author of our being, that they correspond with, or have a determined relation to, those qualities in objects which they are to manifest to us. It is thus with the eye; it is an instrument most admirably contrived for manifesting visible objects to the mind; for this purpose, it refracts the rays of light, and forms a picture upon the retina; but it neither sees the object, nor the picture. The eye will refract the rays of light, and form the picture, after it is taken out of the head, but no vision ensues.” George Adams, An Essay on Vision, Briefly Explaining the Fabric of the Eye, and the Nature of Vision: Intended for the Service of those whose Eyes are Weak or Impaired: Enabling them to form an accurate idea of the true state of their sight, the means of preserving it, together with proper rules for ascertaining when spectacles are necessary, and how to choose them without injuring the sight (London: Printed by R. Hindmarch, 1789), 52–­53.   6. On automata, see, for example, Otto Mayr, Authority, Liberty, and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). On the famous ingesting duck automaton by Jacques de Vauconson, see Jessica Riskin, “The Defecating Duck, or, the Ambiguous Origins of Artificial Life,” Critical Inquiry 29, no. 4 (Summer 2003): 599–­ 633, and Daniel Cottom, “Art in the Age of Mechanical Digestion,” in Cannibals and Philosophers: Bodies of Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 65–­98.   7. J. Laplanche and J.-­B. Pontalis, “Introjection,” in The Language of Psycho-­Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-­Smith (1967; New York: Norton, 1973), 229–­31.   8. For an outline of the differences between Ferenczi’s and Freud’s formulations of introjection, see Meir Perlow, Understanding Mental Objects (New York: Routledge, 1995), 17–­21.   9. Sigmund Freud, “Civilization and Its Discontents,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1953–­74; repr. London: Vintage, 2001), 21:57–­146. 10. Ibid, 122. 11. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, “Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation,” in The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of

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Psychoanalysis, ed. and trans. Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 125–­38. 12. William Chilcot, A Practical Treatise Concerning Evil Thoughts (Exon: Printed by Samuel Darker for Charles Yeo, John Pearce, and Philip Bishop, 1698), 57. 13. Sigmund Freud, “Civilization and Its Discontents,” 122–­23. 14. Michel Foucault, “Panopticism,” in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995), 195–­230. 15. “The original pleasure-­ego wants to introject into itself everything that is good and to eject from itself everything that is bad.” Sigmund Freud, “Negation,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, 19:237. 16. See especially Ranjana Khanna, Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003) and Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996). 17. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, 14:251. 18. See, especially, Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); Homi Bhabha, “Postcolonial Authority and Postmodern Guilt,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg et al. (New York: Routledge, 1992), 56–­68; and Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). See also Douglas Crimp, Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002). 19. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (1952; New York: Grove, 1991), 190. Hereafter, page numbers will be cited in the text. 20. On emerging global empire and resistance, see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000) and Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011). 21. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (1904–­5, revised 1920; London: Routledge, 2001), xxviii. On Weber’s controversial work, see Hartmut Lehmann and Guenther Roth, eds., Weber’s Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence, Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Alistair Hamilton, “Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Weber, ed. Stephen Turner (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 151–­71; Fredric Jameson, “The Vanishing Mediator; or, Max Weber as Storyteller,” in The Ideologies of Theory: Essays, 1971–­1986, 2 vols. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 2:3–­34.

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22. For a reconceptualization of the meaning of “ethnic” through Weber’s writings on both ethnicity and the Protestant work ethic, see Rey Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). 23. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 124–­25. Karl Marx, “The Leading Article in No. 179 of the Kölnische Zeitung,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 1 (New York: International, 1975), 189. 24. William Pietz, “Fetishism and Materialism: The Limits of Theory in Marx,” in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 119–­51. 25. [Charles de Brosses], Du culte des dieux fétiches ou Parallèle de l’ancienne Religion de l’Egypte avec la Religion actuelle de Nigritie (n.p., 1760). 26. Karl Marx, “Proceedings of the Sixth Rhine Assembly: Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood,” in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 1:262. 27. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, vol. 3 (New York: Vintage, 1981), 969. I am indebted here to the work of Fernando Coronil. See his “Challenging Colonial Histories: Cuban Counterpoint/Ortiz’s Counterfetishism,” in Critical Theory, Cultural Politics, and Latin American Narrative, ed. Steven M. Bell, Albert H. Le May, and Leonard Orr (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), 61–­80. 28. I also make these points to elaborate the theoretical and methodological import of Ortiz’s counter-­history for a way of rethinking the question of “from whence it comes,” in Jill H. Casid, “Turning the ‘Fearful Sphere’: Prepositional Tactics in and for the Global,” in Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn, ed. Jill H. Casid and Aruna D’Souza (Williamstown, Mass.: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 216–­19. 29. Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, trans. Harriet De Onís (1940; Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995). 30. Ibid., 97–­98. 31. Ibid., 206. 32. The most complete outline of relevant documents and technical analysis on this object may be found in the two-­part article by the automaton’s restorer. See Arthur W. J. G. Ord-­Hume, “Tipu’s Tiger: Its History and Description,” Music & Automata 3, nos. 9–­10 (1987): 21–­31, 64–­80. See also Arthur W. J. G. Ord-­Hume, Clockwork Music: An Illustrated History of Mechanical Musical Instruments (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1973), 312–­13. 33. On the use of staged spectacles of theatrical projection with large transparencies orchestrated by British colonial government in India, see Daniel O’Quinn, “Projection, Patriotism, Surrogation: Handel in Calcutta,” in Romanticism and Patriotism: Nation, Empire, Bodies, Rhetoric, Romantic Circles Praxis Series, http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/patriotism/oquinn/oquinn_essay.html.

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34. See, for example, G. N. Dhar, ed., Authentic Memoirs of Tippoo Sultan Written by an Officer in the East India Service [1799], rev. ed. (Delhi: Takshila, 1979); Life of Tippoo Sultaun: Extracted from Charles Stuart’s Catalogue and Memoirs of Tippoo Sultaun, Printed in the Year 1809 (Lahore: Pakistan Administrative Staff College, 1964); and Denys Forrest, Tiger of Mysore: The Life and Death of Tipu Sultan (London: Chatto & Windus, 1970). 35. “July 29th, 1808. Recd. Tippoo’s Musical Tiger,” Daily Account of Books and Curiosities received into the Library, 1801–­1814, India Office Library, MS Eur. E. 239.1. 36. “Memorandum relative to the Wooden Tyger, &c. found in Seringapatam,” in Asiatic Annual Register . . . for the Year 1800 (London: Printed for J. Debrett, 1801), 343–­44. On the history of the object prior to 1799, its seizure and transfer to London, and early description, see Mildred Archer, Tippoo’s Tiger (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1959) and Susan Stronge, Tipu’s Tigers (London: V & A Publishing, 2009). 37. For a study that places this object in a history of organs and particularly in relation to the automaton organ build by Thomas Dallam in 1599 as a state diplomatic gift from Elizabeth I to the sultan of Turkey, Mohammed III, see Arthur W. J. G. Ord-­Hume, Barrel Organ: The Story of the Mechanical Organ and Its Repair (South Brunswick, N.J.: A. S. Barnes, 1978), 28–­40. 38. Richard Davis, Lives of Indian Images (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 146–­53. See also John Guy and Deborah Swallow, eds., Arts of India, 1550–­1900 (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1990), 184–­88. 39. Kate Brittlebank, Tipu Sultan’s Search for Legitimacy: Islam and Kingship in a Hindu Domain (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997). 40. Ibid., 9. 41. On Tipu Sultan’s court, his trade policies, and manufacture, see B. Sheik Ali, ed., Tipu Sultan: A Great Martyr (Bangalore: Prasaranga, Bangalore University, 1993); Anne Buddle, Tigers Round the Throne: The Court of Tipu Sultan (1750–­1799) (London: Zamana Gallery, 1990); Irfan Habib, ed., Confronting Colonialism: Resistance and Modernization under Haidar Ali & Tipu Sultan (New Delhi: Tulika, 1999); Jean-­Marie Lafont, “Some Aspects of the Relations between Tipu Sultan and France, 1761–­1799: Tipu’s Embassy to Versailles in 1787,” in Indika: Essays in Indo-­French Relations, 1630–­1976 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2000), 150–­76. 42. Mir Hussain Ali Khan Kirmani, History of Tipu Sultan: Being a Continuation of the Neshani Hyduri, trans. W. Miles (1844; repr. New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1997). 43. On the lion in alchemical symbolism, see Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy, or “The Hunting of the Greene Lyon” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). For an image of the medal,

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see the catalog of the exhibition The Tiger and the Thistle: Tipu Sultan and the Scots in India, 1760–­1800, ed. Anne Buddle (Edinburgh: National Gallery of Scotland, 1999). 44. Kate Brittlebank, “Sakti and Barakat: The Power of Tipu’s Tiger. An Examination of the Tiger Emblem of Tipu Sultan of Mysore,” Modern Asian Studies 29, no. 2 (May 1995): 257–­69. 45. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). 46. Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-­Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (1992; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). 47. Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London: A Panorama History of Exhibitions, 1600–­1862 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1978). 48. John Keats, “The Cap and Bells; or, The Jealousies,” in The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard (London: Penguin, 1977). 49. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. L. G. Mitchell (1791; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). On the Rowlandson cartoon, see Diana Donald, The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996) and David Bindman, The Shadow of the Guillotine: Britain and the French Revolution (London: British Museum Publications, 1989). For a reading of the Gorgon figure, see also Neil Hertz, “Medusa’s Head: Male Hysteria Under Political Pressure,” in The End of the Line (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 161–­216. 50. For a related consideration using different case-­study material, see the discussion of the “bowels of the enlightenment,” in Cottom, Cannibals and Philosophers, 1–­34. 51. Ishmael Reed, “Forward,” in Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938; New York: Harper & Row, 1990), xv. References to Hurston’s text will be indicated in parentheses in the body of text. On the text’s prior invisibility, see Wendy Dutton, “The Problem of Invisibility: Voodoo and Zora Neale Hurston,” Frontiers 13, no. 2 (1993): 131–­52. For an earlier reading that traces Hurston’s interest in Vodou, see Ellease Southerland, “The Influence of Voodoo on the Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston,” in Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature, ed. Roseann P. Bell, Bettye J. Parker, and Beverly Guy-­Sheftall (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1979), 172–­83. 52. Deborah Wyrick, “Divine Transpositions: Recent Scholarship on Vodou and Santería Religious Art,” Jouvert 3, nos. 1–­2 (1999), http://english .chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v3i12/vodou.htm. 53. William Gibson, Count Zero (New York: Ace, 1986). See also Erik Davis, Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (New York: Harmony, 1998).

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54. Donald J. Cosentino, “Imagine Heaven,” in Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, ed. Donald J. Cosentino (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1995), 25–­55. Hereafter, page numbers cited in the text. 55. M. A. Greenstein, “The Delirium of Faith,” World Art 3 (1996): 30–­35. 56. Nelly Richard, “Cultural Peripheries: Latin America and Postmodernist De-­centering,” in The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America, ed. John Beverley, José Oviedo, and Michael Aronna (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 221. 57. Judith Butler, “Subjection, Resistance, Resignification: Between Freud and Foucault,” in Psychic Life of Power, 83–­105. 58. Ibid., 104. 59. On the “lesbian” as an unrepresentable figure in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, see Valerie Rohy, Impossible Women: Lesbian Figures and American Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000). 60. See, for example, Delia Caparoso Konzett, Ethnic Modernisms: Anzia Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Rhys and the Aesthetics of Dislocation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) and Susanna Pavloska, Modern Primitives: Race and Language in Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Zora Neale Hurston (New York: Garland, 2000). 61. Deborah Gordon, “The Politics of Ethnographic Authority: Race and Writing in the Ethnography of Margaret Mead and Zora Neale Hurston,” in Modernist Anthropology: From Fieldwork to Text, ed. Marc Manganaro (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 161. On Hurston’s use of ethnography, see also Roland E. Bush, “‘Ethnographic Subjectivity’ and Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My Horse,” Zora Neale Hurston Forum 5, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 11–­15, and Gwendolyn Mikell, “When Horses Talk: Reflections on Zora Neale Hurston’s Haitian Anthropology,” Phylon 43, no. 3 (1982): 218–­30. 62. Barbara Johnson, “Thresholds of Difference: Structures of Address in Zora Neale Hurston,” in A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 172–­73. 63. In a 1945 essay written in partial response of Hurston, then professor of psychiatry at the School of Medicine and of Social Psychology at the Institute of Ethnology in Port-­ au-­ Prince, Haiti, Louis P. Mars writes that he observed the woman claimed by the Mentor family as their late sister Felicia Felix and that he found her to be a schizophrenic not a lost soul or living dead woman. See Louis P. Mars, “The Story of Zombi in Haiti,” Man 45 (March–­ April 1945): 38–­ 40. On the figure of the woman Zombie, see Lizabeth Paravisini-­Gebert, “Women Possessed: Eroticism and Exoticism in the Representation of Woman as Zombie,” in Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santería, Obeah and the Caribbean, ed. Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-­ Gebert (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 37–­58. For a

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reading of Hurston’s use of the Zombie as a device of indirect language, see Amy Fass Emery, “The Zombie in/as the Text: Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My Horse,” African American Review 39, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 327–­36. 64. On Hurston’s “imperialist political rhetoric,” see Leigh Anne Duck, “‘Rebirth of a Nation’: Hurston in Haiti,” Journal of American Folklore 117, no. 464 (Spring 2004): 127–­46. 65. Kevin Meehan, “Decolonizing Ethnography: Zora Neale Hurston in the Caribbean,” in Women at Sea: Travel Writing and the Margins of Caribbean Discourse, ed. Lizabeth Paravisini-­Gebert and Ivette Romero-­Cesareo (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 258. On the problem of the transnational for Hurston’s project as well as black studies scholarship more generally, see Ifeoma C. K. Nwankwo, “Insider and Outsider, Black and American: Rethinking Zora Neale Hurston’s Caribbean Ethnography,” Radical History Review 87 (Fall 2003): 49–­77. 66. For a reading of Hurston’s Tell My Horse as a performative use of “voodoo” to create a global trans-­African identity, see Annette Trefzer, “Possessing the Self: Caribbean Identities in Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My Horse,” African American Review 34, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 299–­312. 67. On the gendering of Hurston’s pose and writing, see Nathan Grant, Masculinist Impulses: Toomer, Hurston, Black Writing, and Modernity (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004). 68. Meehan, “Decolonizing Ethnography,” 267. 69. Joan Dayan, “Gothic Americas,” in Haiti, History and the Gods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 264. 70. Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 1–­3.

4. Along Enlightenment’s Cast Shadows   1. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1953–­74; repr. London: Vintage, 2001), 14:237–­58 (hereafter cited in parentheses in the text); Sigmund Freud, “The Ego and the Id,” “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” and “Negation,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, 19:1–­66, 155–­70, and 233–­40.   2. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, 17:217–­56.   3. Ibid., 235.   4. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (1952; New York: Grove, 1991), 190.

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  5. Ibid., 189.   6. Ibid., 231.   7. See Elizabeth Freeman, “Deep Lez: Temporal Drag and the Specters of Feminism,” in Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 59–­93; Heather Love, “Spoiled Identity: Radclyffe Hall’s Unwanted Being,” in Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 100–­ 128; and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003).   8. On Lavater, see Melissa Percival and Graeme Tytler, Physiognomy in Profile: Lavater’s Impact on European Culture (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005); Ellis Shookman, ed., The Faces of Physiognomy: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Johann Caspar Lavater (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1993); John Graham, Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy: A Study in the History of Ideas (Berne: Peter Lang, 1979); and Barbara Maria Stafford, “‘Peculiar Marks’: Lavater and the Countenance of Blemished Thought,” Art Journal 46, no. 3 (Autumn 1987): 185–­92. On physiognomic studies in art and visual culture, see Laurent Baridon and Martial Guédron, Corps et arts: Physionomies et physiologies dans les arts visuels (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999) and Rotraut Fischer, Gerd Schrader, and Gabriele Stumpp, Natur nach Mass: Physiognomik zwischen Wissenschaft und Ästhetik (Marburg: Soznat, 1989). For an excellent long history of physiognomy as a way of forming knowledge of the character of the body, see Martin Porter, Windows of the Soul: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–­1780 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005).   9. On the colonial archive in general, see Carolyn Hamilton et al., eds., Refiguring the Archive (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2002); Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993); and Ann Laura Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance,” Archival Science 2 (2002): 87–­109. On the colonial image archive, see, in particular, Elizabeth Edwards, guest editor, “Anthropology and the Colonial Endeavor,” special issue, History of Photography 21, no. 1 (Spring 1997) and Christopher Pinney and Nicolas Peterson, Photography’s Other Histories (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003). On the visual production of normative and deviant bodies, see, for example, Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla, Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). 10. On the physionotrace, see Henry Vivarez, Le physionotrace: Un pré­ curseur de la photographie dans l’art du portrait à bon marché‬ (Lille: Lefebvre-­ Ducrocq, 1906); Peter Benes, “Machine-­Assisted Portrait and Profile Imaging in New England after 1803,” and Ellen Miles, “1803—­The Year of the Physiognotrace,” in “Painting and Portrait Making in the American Northeast,”

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special issue, Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife Annual Proceedings 19 (Spring 1996): 138–­50 and 118–­37; and Ellen Miles, Saint-­Mémin and the Neoclassical Profile Portrait in America (Washington, D.C.: A Barra Foundation book copublished with the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994). 11. For a general history of shadow projection, see the magnificently illustrated volume, Jac Remise, Pascale Remise, and Régis van de Walle, Magie lumineuse: Du théâtre d’ombres à la lanterne magique (Paris: Balland, 1979), 234–­313. 12. For a very different reading of the shadow in terms of desire, see “Drawing Desire,” in W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 57–­75. 13. For the German, see Johann Caspar Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente, zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntniss und Menschenliebe, 4 vols. (Leipzig: Weidmanns Erben und Reich; Winterthur: H. Steiner und Compagnie, 1775). The English translations (hereafter cited in the text) are from Johann Caspar Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy; for the promotion of the knowledge and the love of mankind, Written in the German language by J. C. Lavater, and translated into English by Thomas Holcroft, 3 vols. (London: Printed for G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1789). 14. On Lavater in relation to both discourses of race and the history of aesthetics, see David Bindman, Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002). 15. Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology, and Museums (Oxford: Berg, 2001); Elizabeth Edwards, ed., “A Question of Image: Papers from a Conference on Ethnographic Photography,” special issue, Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 1 (1989); and Jane Lydon, Eye Contact: Photographing Indigenous Australians (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005). On contemporary photographic and critical resignifying responses to the colonial archive, see, for example, Pinney and Peterson, Photography’s Other Histories, and Lauri Firstenberg, “Representing the Body Archivally in South African Photography,” Art Journal 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 58–­67. 16. On Talbot and botanical illustration, see Douglas R. Nickel, “Nature’s Supernaturalism: William Henry Fox Talbot and Botanical Illustration,” in Intersections: Lithography, Photography, and the Traditions of Printmaking, ed. Kathleen Stewart Howe (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998) and Graham Smith, “Talbot and Botany: The Bertoloni Album,” History of Photography 17, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 33–­48. 17. See Larry J. Schaaf, The Photographic Art of William Henry Fox Talbot (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000) and William Henry Fox Talbot: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: Getty Museum, 2002).

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18. For Herschel’s work at the observatory at the Cape of Good Hope, see J. F. W. Herschel, Results of astronomical observations made during the years 1834, 5, 6, 7, 8, at the Cape of Good Hope, being the completion of a telescopic survey of the visible heavens, commenced in 1825 (London: Smith, Elder, 1847). On the relation between Herschel and Talbot and for the text of Herschel’s lecture to the Royal Society in which he first uses the terms “positive” and “negative,” see Larry J. Schaaf, Out of the Shadows: Herschel, Talbot, & the Invention of Photography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). For a guide to highlights of their correspondence, see also Selected Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot, 1823–­1874, ed. Larry J. Schaaf (London: Science Museum and National Museum of Photography, Film & Televison, 1994). 19. See J. F. W. Herschel, “Note on the Art of Photography, The Application of the Chemical Rays of Light to the Purpose of Pictorial Representation” (March 14, 1839), MS, Papers of Sir John Herschel, Box 1a, St. John’s Library, St. John’s College, Cambridge, and Herschel, “On the Chemical Action of the Rays of the Solar Spectrum on Preparations of Silver and other Substances, both metallic and non-­metallic, and on some Photographic Processes,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 130 (1840): 1–­59. On Herschel’s lost paper, see Larry Schaaf, “Sir John Herschel’s 1839 Royal Society Paper on Photography,” History of Photography 3, no. 1 (Spring 1979): 47–­60. 20. In the entry of February 28, 1835, in “Scientific Notebook M,” Talbot writes, “In the Photogenic or Sciagraphic process, if the paper is transparent, the first drawing may serve as an object, to produce a second drawing, in which the lights and shadows would be reversed” (London, British Library, Add. MS 88942/1/193 [M] 1834, Talbot Collection). For a brief discussion of this early naming, see Schaaf, Out of the Shadows, 41–­42. Schaaf relates Talbot’s use of the term “sciagraphic” to Henry Gellibrand’s Sciographia (1635). See J. W., Henry Gellibrand, Henry Briggs, Sir John Cope, and John Moore, Sciographia, or The art of shadovves. : Plainly demonstrating, out of the sphere, how to project both great and small circles, upon any plane whatsoever: with a new conceit of reflecting the sunne beames upon a diall, contrived on a plane, which the direct beames can never shine upon. Together with the manner of cutting, the five regular platonicall bodies; and two other, the one of 12, the other of 30 rhombes, never discovered heretofore; also the finding of their declinations, and reclinations, and adorning them with variety of dials. All performed, by the doctrin of triangles; and for ease, and delight sake by helpe of the late invented, and worthily admired numbers, called by the first inventor logarithms (London: Printed by Thomas Harper, 1635). 21. William Henry Fox Talbot, “Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing,” The Athenaeum, no. 589 (February 9, 1839): 114–­17; also reprinted from The Athenaeum in Mechanics Magazine 30, no. 810 (February 16, 1839):

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345–­51; Philosophical Magazine, 3rd ser., 14, no. 88 (March 1839): 196–­208. These transcribe the manuscript of the paper preserved at the Royal Society (Archive Papers, AP23.19). See also the reprint in Beaumont Newhall, Photography: Essays and Images (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1981), 25. See the use of this passage to characterize the history of photography in Sarah Greenough et al., On the Art of Fixing a Shadow: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Photography (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1989). 22. Talbot, “Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing,” as reprinted in Newhall, Photography, 25. On the mining of Talbot’s language of “natural magic” to connect photography to a pre-­Darwininian system of “belief,” see Douglas R. Nickel, “Talbot’s Natural Magic,” History of Photography 26, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 132–­40. 23. Talbot also attempted to reproduce Newton’s prism experiments. See Talbot, Selected Correspondence, 35. For Talbot’s experimentation in terms of its transformative movement between living and dead, see Larry Schaaf, “‘A Wonderful Illustration of Modern Necromancy’: Significant Talbot Experimental Prints in the J. Paul Getty Museum,” in Photography: Discovery and Invention (Malibu: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1990). On Talbot’s use of the phrases “magic pictures,” “natures marvels,” and “words of light” as well as reference to a connection between Talbot’s interest in “latent images” and alchemy, in addition to Nickel, “Talbot’s Natural Magic,” see Larry J. Schaaf, Specimens and Marvels: William Henry Fox Talbot and the Invention of Photography (New York: Aperture, 2000), 9–­10. See also Talbot’s “Scientific Notebook P,” in the National Media Museum, Bradford: “Scientific Notebook P,” March/ April, 1839, 35. On the notebooks, see Larry J. Schaaf, Records of the Dawn of Photography: Talbot’s Notebooks P & Q (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1996); Mirjam Brusius, “Beyond Photography: An Introduction to William Henry Fox Talbot’s Notebooks in the Talbot Collection at the British Library,” eBLJ (2010), article 14, http://www.bl.uk/eblj/2010articles/arti cle14.html; and Mirjam Brusius, Katrina Dean, and Chitra Ramalingam, eds., William Henry Fox Talbot: Beyond Photography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 24. For a quite different study of photography’s relation to alchemy, see Jean Lauzon, “La photographie fille de l’alchimie,” Horizons philosophiques 11, no. 1 (Autumn 2000). 25. See especially the highly influential work of John Tagg, in particular “Evidence, Truth and Order: Photographic Records and the Growth of the State” (1984), in The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (1988; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 26. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (1976; New York: Random House, 1978).

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27. See, for example, Deborah Bright, The Passionate Camera: Photography and Bodies of Desire (New York: Routledge, 1998); Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005); Judith Halberstam and Del LaGrace Volcano, The Drag King Book (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1999); Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-­Century American Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Meyer, “Mapple­ thorpe’s Living Room: Photography and the Furnishing of Desire,” Art History 24, no. 2 (April 2001): 292–­311; José Muñoz, “Photographies of Mourning: Melancholia and Ambivalence in Van DerZee, Mapplethorpe, and Looking for Langston,” in Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 57–­74; and Jay Prosser, “My Second Skin,” in Light in the Dark Room: Photography and Loss (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). 28. Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986): 3–­64. 29. Michel Foucault, “The Statement and the Archive,” in The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (1969; London: Routledge, 1972), 79–­134. 30. For an extension of Sekula’s concept of the role of the “shadow archive” to retell the early history of photography in terms of the construction of race in a circum-­Atlantic context, see Nicholas Mirzoeff, “The Shadow and the Substance: Race, Photography, and the Index,” in Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self, ed. Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003), 111–­26. 31. On the issue of the role of the shadow in the history of scientific discovery and cognition, see the recent translation of the work of researcher in cognition Roberto Casati, The Shadow Club: The Greatest Mystery in the Universe—­Shadows—­and the Thinkers Who Unlocked Their Secrets, trans. Abigail Asher (New York: Knopf, 2003). 32. Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 681. On the Arcades Project more generally, see Susan Buck-­Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989). On the place of photography in Benjamin’s thought, see Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997). 33. Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music, trans. and ed. John T. Scott (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1998).

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34. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1967; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Derrida, Mémoires d’aveugle: L’autoportrait et autres ruines (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1990), 54; Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-­Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-­Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 35. For a beautiful mobilization of a reading of Pliny’s myth and the shadow to account for the persistence in contemporary art of memory work that uses a techniques of nonindexicality to craft a strategy of remembrance that does not fill in but rather preserves the outlines of loss, see Lisa Saltzman, Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 36. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (1971), in Language, Counter-­ Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 139–­64. Hereafter, page numbers will be cited in the text. 37. For an important but differently argued means of understanding the photograph as not a copy of the past, but rather as a projective visualization, see Vilém Flusser’s 1989 essay “Photography and History,” in Writings, ed. Andreas Ströhl, trans. Erik Eisel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 126–­31. 38. In the first patent, the drawing device has no such name. See “Specification of the Patent granted to William Hyde Wollaston, . . . for an Instrument whereby any Person may draw in Perspective, or may copy or reduce any Print or Drawing,” Patent No. 2993, December 4, 1806, Repertory of Arts, Manufactures, and Agriculture 10, no. 57 (February 1807): 161–­64. See William Hyde Wollaston, “Description of the Camera Lucida,” Philosophical Magazine 27, no. 108 (May 1807): 343–­47. Herschel, however, made even more use of the camera lucida as a drawing aid. See Larry J. Schaaf, Tracings of Lights: Sir John Herschel & the Camera Lucida; Drawings from the Graham Nash Collection (San Francisco: Friends of Photography, 1989). For a general survey of the use of the device, see John H. Hammond and Jill Austin, The Camera Lucida in Art and Science (Bristol: Hilger, 1987). On the effort to distinguish the camera lucida as a mode of prismatic seeing, see Erna Fiorentini, “Camera Obscura vs. Camera Lucida—­Distinguishing Early Nineteenth Century Modes of Seeing,” Max-­Planck-­Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Preprint 307 (2006), http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/Preprints/P307.PDF. 39. Schaaf, Out of the Shadows, 169, further discusses the fact that Hooke’s “light room” was not translated into the Latin “camera lucida” until the eighteenth century in George Lewis Scott, Supplement to Mr. Chamber’s Cyclopedia; or, Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, vol. 1 (London, 1753).

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40. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (1980; New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 8–­9. 41. On the release of the SX-­70 and its introduction as a “magic camera,” see the cover story “A Genius and His Magic Camera: Dr. Land’s Latest Bit of Magic,” LIFE Magazine, October 27, 1972. On the invention, development, and use of the Polaroid camera, see Steve Crist, ed., The Polaroid Book: Selections from the Polaroid Collections of Photography (Cologne: Taschen, 2005); Stefan Helmreich, “The SX-­70 Instant Camera,” in Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, ed. Sherry Turkle (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007), 210–­16; Barbara Hitchcock, Innovation/Imagination: Fifty Years of Polaroid Photography (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999); Victor K. McElheny, Insisting on the Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land, Inventor of Instant Photography (Reading, Mass.: Perseus, 1998); and Michel Nuridsany, Génération Polaroïd: Exposition présentée au Pavillon des Arts du 14 février au 17 mars 1985 (Paris: Éditions Paris Audiovisuel, 1985). For a theoretical meditation on the Polaroid SX-­70, see Hervé Guibert, “Polaroid,” in Ghost Image, trans. Robert Bononno (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 1998), 129–­33. 42. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 9. 43. On Daniel Boudinet, see Roland Barthes, “Sur les photographies de Daniel Boudinet” (Créatis, 1977), in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Eric Marty (Paris: Seuil, 2002), 5:316–­29, and the 2002 Centre Pompidou exhibition of the work of Roland Barthes accompanied by the photographs of Daniel Boudinet in the exhibition catalog, Marianne Alphant and Nathalie Léger, eds., R/B: Roland Barthes (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2002). 44. For a very different note on this image, one emphasizing “brilliant light,” see Margaret Iversen, “What Is a Photograph?” Art History 17, no. 3 (September 1994): 450–­64. 45. “I cannot hide the fact that I am burning with desire to see your experiments from nature.” Daguerre, in a letter to Niépce, February 3, 1828, As cited in Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), x. See also Helmut Gernsheim and Alison Gernsheim, L. J. M. Daguerre: The History of the Diorama and the Daguerreotype (New York: Dover, 1968). For the collected correspondence of Niépce, see Niépce: Correspondance et papiers, ed. Manuel Bonnet and Jean-­Louis Marignier (Saint-­Loup-­de-­Varennes: Maison Nicéphore Niépce, 2003). 46. Batchen, Burning with Desire, 112–­20. On Joseph Wright of Derby, see Judy Egerton, Wright of Derby (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1990). David Allan’s painting is in the collection of the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.

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47. Pliny, Natural History, vol. 9, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 271. Hereafter, page numbers will be cited in the text. 48. Batchen, Burning with Desire, 112–­20, and Ann Bermingham, “The Origin of Painting and the Ends of Art: Wright of Derby’s Corinthian Maid,” in Painting and the Politics of Culture: New Essays in British Art, 1700–­1850, ed. John Barrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 135–­65. 49. Batchen, Burning with Desire, 112–­20, and Robert Rosenblum, “The Origin of Painting: A Problem in the Iconography of Romantic Classicism,” Art Bulletin 39, no. 4 (December 1957): 279–­90. 50. For a feminist reading of Pliny’s myth in terms of its retelling by eighteenth-­century poet Amelie Opie, a version that emphasized the agency of the woman artist, see Shelley King, “Amelie Opie’s ‘Maid of Corinth’ and the Origins of Art,” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 37, no. 4 (Summer 2004): 629–­51. 51. For a different account of this origin story and its permutation that emphasizes a heterosexualized and legible version of “love,” see Frances Muecke, “‘Taught by Love’: The Origin of Painting Again,” Art Bulletin 81, no. 2 (June 1999): 297–­302. 52. Batchen, Burning with Desire, 119. 53. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, trans. Gaston C. de Vere, vol. 1 (1550; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 29. 54. This large color photograph (editions in 122 x 122 cm, 92 x 92 cm, and 82 x 82 cm) is reproduced on Karen Knorr’s website, http://www.karen knorr.com. On Knorr, see Karen Knorr, with contributions by David Campany, Rebecca Comay, and Antonio Guzman, Genii Loci: The Photographic Work of Karen Knorr (London: Black Dog, 2002); Antonio Guzman, Karen Knorr: Photography’s Shadow (Caen: FRAC de Basse-­Normandie, 2001); and Carole Boyer, “L’image allégorique de Karen Knorr entre subversion et imaginaire” (master’s thesis, University of Paris I, 2002). The photograph was used as the icon for the poster advertising the “Printemps des musées” event in spring 2003 with the theme of “Mystères et Découvertes.” 55. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (1974; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). For one of the many discussions of Irigaray’s use of Plato’s cave, see Lynne Huffer, Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures: Nostalgia, Ethics, and the Question of Difference (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). On the cave and the body’s interior as source and beginning of artistic production, see also Mark A. Cheetham and Elizabeth D. Harvey, “Obscure Imaginings: Visual Culture and the Anatomy of Caves,” Journal of Visual Culture 1, no. 1 (2002): 105–­26. 56. On Lacan’s acquisition of the Courbet painting thought lost or destroyed and only on public view at the Musée d’Orsay since the mid-­1990s, see Shuli

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Barzilai, Lacan and the Matter of Origins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 8–­18. For a study of the paradoxical significations of the vagina taking off from Courbet’s Origin of the World, see Jelto Drenth, Origin of the World: Science and Fiction of the Vagina (London: Reaktion, 2004). On the limitations of the recuperation of the speculum as a tool and way of seeing for feminist criticism and analysis, see Donna Haraway, “Fetus: The Virtual Speculum in the New World Order,” in Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.Female Man©_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997), 173–­212. 57. For a reading of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” that argues for an erotic investment in the matter of the world and one that does not, therefore, take restrictive hetero vs. homo forms, see Kaja Silverman, World Spectators (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). For a clever queer appropriation of Courbet’s painting, see Chicago-­based multimedia artist Mary Patten’s short film, My Courbet . . . Or, a Beaver’s Tale (1992) and her installation of the same title discussed in Harmony Hammond, Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History (New York: Rizzoli, 2000), 129. 58. “L’image ‘La fille de Dibutade’ fait partie d’une série qui date d’une dizaine d’années, basée sur les académies d’art. La photographie est un autoportrait, dans lequel je me penche sur les origines des académies d’art, je fais une allégorie sur les origines de la sculpture. J’ai assimilé tout cela afin de faire une réflexion sur la photographie. L’ombre que je dessine représente le négatif, qui pourra donner suite à la sculpture de Dibutade, comme la légende.” “Karen Knorr fait le printemps,” Photographie, February 28, 2003, http://www.pho tographie.com/?pubid=101960. 59. Samuel van Hoogstraten, Inleyding tot de hooge Schoole der Schilder­ konst: anders de zichtbaere werelt; verdeelt in negen leerwinkels, yder bestiert door eene der zanggodinnen (Rotterdam: by Fransois van Hoogstraeten, boekverkooper, 1678), 25. On van Hoogstraten, see Celeste Brusati, Artifice and Illusion: The Art and Writing of Samuel van Hoogstraten (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). For the illustration, see Athanasius Kircher, Ars magna lucis et umbrae (Amsterdam, 1671), 94. 60. Victor I. Stoichita˘ , A Short History of the Shadow (London: Reaktion, 1997), 131–­32. 61. See George Bauer, “Experimental Shadow Casting and the Early History of Perspective,” Art Bulletin 69, no. 2 (June 1987): 211–­19; Michael Baxandall, Shadows and Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Roberto Casati, “Methodological Issues in the Study of the Depiction of Cast Shadows: A Case Study in the Relationships between Art and Cognition,” in “Art, Mind, and Cognitive Science,” special issue, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 163–­74; and Thomas Da Costa Kaufmann,

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“The Perspective of Shadows: The History of the Theory of Shadow Projection,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 38 (1975): 258–­87. 62. “Deceptions . . . , Musical Glasses . . . The Skiagraphema or Phantasmagoria,” printed by P. Boyle, Piccadilly, London, 1803, Poster, in Laurent Mannoni, Trois siècles de cinema: De la lanterne magique au cinématographe (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1995), 107. 63. Anne-­Louis Girodet-­Trioson, “L’origine du dessin,” in Pierre-­Alexandre Coupin, Oeuvres posthumes de Girodet-­Trioson, peintre d’histoire: suivies de sa correspondance: précédées d’une notice historique, et mises en ordre, 2 vols. (Paris: J. Renouard, 1829), 1:xcii and pl. 58. However, see also George Levitine, “Addedenda to Robert Rosenblum’s ‘The Origin of Painting’: A Problem in the Iconography of Romantic Classicism,” Art Bulletin 40, no. 4 (December 1958): 329–­31, and Stoichita˘ , Short History of the Shadow, 154–­55. 64. Girodet-­Trioson, “L’origine du dessin,” 48. 65. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (1995; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 12. 66. Ibid., 70. 67. In calling for such work, I build on the important contributions of, to cite only a few, Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Susan Buck-­Morss, “Visual Studies and Global Imagination,” Papers of Surrealism 2 (Summer 2004), http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/papersofsurrealism/journal2/index .htm; Griselda Pollock,“The Aesthetics of Difference,” in Art History, Aesthetics, Visual Studies, ed. Michael Ann Holly and Keith P. F. Moxey (Williamstown, Mass.: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2002); and Michele Wallace, Dark Designs and Visual Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004). 68. On Walker, see especially the excellent exhibition catalog, Annette Dixon, ed., Kara Walker: Pictures from Another Time (New York: D.A.P., 2002) and the nuanced and thorough exhibition catalog Ian Berry et al., eds., Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003). 69. “Projecting Fictions: ‘Insurrection! Our Tools Were Rudimentary, Yet We Pressed On,’” interview with Walker, originally published on PBS.org in September 2003, http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/walker/clip1.html, and re­ published on Art21.org in November 2011, http://www.art21.org/texts/kara -walker/interview-kara-walker-projecting-fictions—insurrection-our-tools-were -rudimentary-. 70. See Akira Mizuta Lippit, “The Shadow Archive: From Light to Cinder,” Tympanum 4 (2000), http://www.usc.edu/dept/comp-lit/tympanum/4/ lippit.html. 71. The 2001 installations were exhibited in Walker, American Primitive, September 8–­October 13, 2001, at Brent Sikkema, New York. On the installation

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for the Fabric Workshop, see Fabric Workshop and Museum, http://www.fab ricworkshopandmuseum.org/Exhibitions/ExhibitionDetail.aspx? Exhibition Id=8f543216-eb56-4e6e-aed0-e02be1d8fb6e. 72. On the Song of the South exhibition, see the Gallery at REDCAT, http://www.redcat.org/exhibition/kara-e-walker. 73. Dr. Toer’s Amazing Magic Lantern Show, directed by Bret Eynon (New York: American Social History Project, 1987), VHS. See also the website Dr. Toer’s Amazing Magic Lantern Show: A Different View of Emancipation, American Social History Project, Center for Media and Learning, City University of New York, http://ashp.cuny.edu/ashp-documentaries/dr/. The film’s emphasis on the agency of African-­Americans may be compared with Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–­1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988). 74. Walker is certainly not the only modern or contemporary artist to use the shadow or shadow projection in her work. Indeed, the use of the shadow in works ranging from the prints of Andy Warhol to the installations of Christian Boltanski comprised the subject for numerous exhibitions. See, for example, Light and Heavy Light: Contemporary Shadow Use in the Visual Arts, intro. Frances Butler (Berkeley: Poltroon Press, 1985); Michel Nuridsany, Dialogues de l’ombre (Paris: Paris-­Musées, 1997); and Véronique Mauron, ed., Le signe incarné: Ombres et reflets dans l’art contemporain (Paris: Hazan, 2001). The “immaterial image” that, nonetheless, remains especially close to the body and to matter as a kind of “incarnate sign” or index remains of great interest as may be seen in the Fall 2005 orchestration by Nuridsany of a set of related exhibitions and public programs for the Centre Pompidou (and collaborating exhibition spaces) that revisits the theme of his 1997 exhibition for Espace Electra, Dialogues de l’ombre. Especially important is the work of photographer Carrie Mae Weems whose installation The Louisiana Project, while revolving centrally around the mirror, uses the shadow in provocative ways to cast the disavowed “commingling culture” of New Orleans history into its architecture. Her video projection in the installation explores race, gender, and sexuality through a “shadow dance” between white women, white men, and women of color. See Susan Cahan, Carrie Mae Weems: The Louisiana Project (New Orleans: Newcomb Art Gallery, 2004). 75. See “‘La belle humeur en habit noir’: Les ombres de Séraphin,” in Mannoni, Trois siècles de cinema, 23–­28. For eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century accounts, see [Séraphin Dominique François], Feu Séraphin, Histoire de ce spectacle depuis son origine jusqu’à sa disparition, 1776–­1870 (Lyon: Scheuring, 1875); L. V. Thiéry, Guide des amateurs et des étrangers voyageurs à Paris, vol. 1 (Paris, 1787), 285; Théâtre de Séraphin ou les ombres chinoises (Paris: Ferra, 1810). On Séraphin’s shadow theater as one of the origins of

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cinema, one of the first histories to make this argument is Martin Quigley, Jr., Magic Shadows: The Story of the Origin of Motion Pictures (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1948). 76. Series of transparent lithographs, Paris, France, ca. 1830, in Mannoni, Trois siècles de cinéma, 82. 77. “Projecting Fictions—­‘Insurrection! Our Tools Were Rudimentary, Yet We Pressed On,’” interview with Walker. 78. While the controversy surrounding Walker’s work and quick rise to acclaim including a McArthur Foundation Genius Grant in 1997 and the selection of Walker to represent the United States at the 2002 São Paulo Bienal in Brazil is discussed in the critical monographs on Walker, a number of key articles cover the terms of the criticism. See, for example, Karen C. C. Dalton, Michael D. Harris, and Lowery Sims. “The Past Is Prologue but Is Parody and Pastiche Progress?,” International Review of African American Art 14, no. 3 (Spring 1996): 29–­65; Pamela Newkirk, “Pride or Prejudice?,” ARTnews 98, no. 3 (March 1999): 114–­17; Hamza Walker, “Nigger Lover or Will There Be Any Black People in Utopia?,” Parkett, no. 60 (2000): 152–­60; Walker, “Kara Walker: Cut It Out,” Nka, nos. 11/12 (Fall/Winter 2000); and Holland Cotter, “A Nightmare View of Antebellum Life That Sets Off Sparks,” New York Times, May 9, 2003, E36. 79. Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004). 80. Silhouette of “Negro Slave” Flora, attached to bill of sale to Asa Benjamin of Stratford, December 13, 1796. The silhouette drawing shaded with ink is in the collection of the Stratford Historical Society, Stratford, Conn. For online digital reproductions of the image, see Editors of Northeast Magazine, “The State that Slavery Built: An Introduction,” Courant, September 29, 2002, http://www.courant.com/news/local/northeast/hc-newintro.artsep29,0,5335364 .story, and “Africans in America: Revolution, 1750–­1805,” PBS, http://www .pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part2/2h69.html. In the process of seeking permission to include this image, I learned that the historical society levies commercial publication fees for images even for educational use in scholarly publications. Though the curator Carol Lovell brought the question of educational use before the historical society’s board, the board decided to charge commercial one-­time-­use fees in all instances (Carol Lovell, letter to author, August 7, 2005). Given the importance of this rare eighteenth-­century document for the history of the reduction of persons to objects of sale, perhaps the historical society will rethink the politics and the ethical implications of a policy that so concresces the slave economy of which the silhouetted bill of sale is both shadow remnant and volatile commodity.

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81. The circulating photographs have two sources. Bellocq’s glass-­plate negatives were acquired by Larry Borenstein. In the early 1960s, a set of prints was made, at the request of Borenstein, by New Orleans photographer Dan Leyrer. Photographer Lee Friedlander acquired Bellocq’s glass-­plate negatives from Larry Borenstein in 1967. Friedlander’s prints were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970. See Lee Friedlander, E. J. Bellocq: Storyville Portraits; Photographs from the New Orleans Red-­light District, circa 1912 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970). The photographs were also used for Al Rose’s book Storyville, New Orleans, Being an Authentic, Illustrated Account of the Notorious Red-­light District (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1974). On the recent exhibition at the Julie Saul Gallery (New York, 2002) of the Leyrer prints and several Bellocq images not previously exhibited, see Rex Rose, “The Last Days of Ernest J. Bellocq,” Exquisite Corpse 10 (2002), http://www.corpse.org/archives/issue_10/gallery/bellocq/index.htm. 82. Natasha Trethewey, Bellocq’s Ophelia: Poems (St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 2002), 20. 83. As cited in E. Nevill Jackson, The History of Silhouettes (London: Connoisseur, 1911), 28. 84. See Rose, Storyville; Alecia P. Long, The Great Southern Babylon: Sex, Race, and Respectability in New Orleans, 1865–­1920 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004); and Roberts Batson, “New Orleans,” GLBTQ: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender & Queer Culture, 2004, http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/new_orleans.html. On the work of gay community researchers and activist preservationists in New Orleans, see Will Fellows, “Cherishing Old New Orleans and Louisiana,” in A Passion to Preserve: Gay Men as Keepers of Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004). See also Joseph R. Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-­Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), especially 224–­33. 85. Pretty Baby, directed by Louis Malle (Paramount Studio, 1978). On Tony Jackson and the ragtime players in the Storyville brothels, see Rose, Storyville, and Alan Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and “Inventor of Jazz” (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1950). 86. Tony Jackson, Pretty Baby, with additional lyrics by Gus Kahn and additional music by Egbert Van Alstyne (New York: Jerome H. Remick, 1916). 87. See Tara McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003). 88. Jackson, History of Silhouettes, 30. 89. Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” trans. Kevin Paul Geiman, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984),

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32–­50. First given as a lecture at the Sorbonne on May 27, 1978, and first published as “Qu’est-­ce que la critique / Critique et Aufklärung,” Bulletin de la Société française de Philosophie 84 (1990): 35–­63.

5. Following the Rainbow   1. Emily Dickinson, “Which Is best—­the Moon or the Crescent,” Poem 1376 in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 527.   2. On instruments as ways of knowing, see Davis Baird, Thing Knowledge: A Philosophy of Scientific Instruments (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).   3. “Aphorism II,” in “Aphorisms Concerning the Interpretation of Nature and the Kingdom of Man,” in Francis Bacon, “The New Organon; or, True Directions Concerning the Interpretation of Nature,” Part II of The New Instauration, vol. 8 of Francis Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900), 37.   4. Sigmund Freud, “A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing-­Pad,’” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1953–­74; repr. London: Vintage, 2001), 19:225–­32.   5. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (1995; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 13–­17.   6. Ibid, 15.   7. For the oft-­repeated assertion that contemporary life “takes place on screen,” see, for example, Nicholas Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999), 1. On imaging technologies as part of an organic, postdigital membrane transformatively connecting imagination and matter, see, for example, Robert Pepperell and Michael Punt, The Postdigital Membrane: Imagination, Technology, and Desire (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2000).   8. Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kroker, eds., Digital Delirium (New York: St. Martins, 1997), ix.   9. Pink Floyd, The Dark Side of the Moon, Harvest EMI, 1973, cover design by Hipgnosis and George Hardie. 10. This chapter also departs from Crary who takes Newton’s prism experiment as exemplary of the camera obscura model of vision. See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 40–­41. On the centrality of alchemical practice and thought to the art/nature debate and the understanding of alchemy as a coherent and challenging system representing creative power

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rivaling that of nature, see William R. Newman, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). On the importance of Newton’s alchemical practices for his work in what is now distinguished as chemistry, see the studies by Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, particularly, The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy, or “The Hunting of the Greene Lyon” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975) and The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 11. For the use of the prism as a philosophical method that stays close to its object, see Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (1967; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983); Jean-­Luc Marion, Sur l’ontologie grise de Descartes (Paris: Vrin, 1993); Marion, Sur la théologie blanche de Descartes (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1981); Marion, Sur le prisme métaphysique de Descartes (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1986); and Marion, On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism: The Constitution and the Limits of Onto-­theo-­logy in Cartesian Thought, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 12. See Marjorie Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse: Newton’s “Opticks” and the Eighteenth-­Century Poets (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1946). 13. On Musil’s development of a chromatometer and his prismatic writing, see the forward by Wilkins and Kaiser to Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser, vol. 1 (1930–­42; London: Picador, 1988), ix. 14. As demonstrated by Bernard Cohen’s work on Benjamin Franklin, Newton, and Newtonian science in the American colonies and Newton and the political thought of the framers of the U.S. Constitution, studying the development of “method” in the early United States entails reading Newton’s work not merely in a British or even just a European context but also transatlantically. See I. Bernard Cohen, Franklin and Newton: An Inquiry into Speculative Newtonian Experimental Science, and Franklin’s Work in Electricity as an Example Thereof (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1956) and Cohen, Science and the Founding Fathers: Science in the Political Thought of Jefferson, Franklin, Adams and Madison (New York: Norton, 1995). 15. For the theorization of the case history as a necessary means to play with as yet unhistoricized pasts for the purpose of survival, see Ashis Nandy, Time Warps: Silent and Evasive Pasts in Indian Politics and Religion (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002). 16. See also Crary, Techniques of the Observer, and Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” in “Seeing Science,” special issue, Representations, no. 40 (Autumn 1992): 81–­128.

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17. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: Printed for J. Dickson and C. Elliott, 1777), vol. 1, book 2, 282. Hereafter, page numbers will be cited in the text. 18. See, for example, Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994); Teresa Brennan, History after Lacan (London: Routledge, 1993); Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (1952; Paris: Seuil, 1975); Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur: Essai sur l’abjection (Paris: Seuil, 1980); Octave Mannoni, Psychologie de la colonisation (Paris: Seuil, 1950); Albert Memmi, Portrait du colonisé: Précédé du Portrait du colonisateur (Paris: Payot, 1973); Ashis Nandy, The Savage Freud and Other Essays on Possible and Retrievable Selves (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995); and Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). 19. C. G. Jung, “The Psychic Nature of the Alchemical Work,” in Psychology and Alchemy, trans. Gerhard Adler and R. F. C. Hull, vol. 12 of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung (1944; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968), 274–­80. 20. Ibid., 267. 21. Martin Ruland, Lexicon alchemiae sive dictionarium alchemisticum, cum obscuriorum verborum, et rerum Hermeticarum, tum Theophrast-­ Paracelsicarum phrasium, planam explicationem continens (Frankfurt: Cura ac sumtibus Zachariae Palhenii, 1612) as cited in Jung, “The Psychic Nature of the Alchemical Work,” 277. 22. Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman, “The Ocular Harpsichord of Louis-­Bertrand Castel; or, The Instrument that Wasn’t,” in Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 72–­85. See also Maarten Franssen, “The Ocular Harpsichord of Louis-­Bertrand Castel: The Science and Aesthetics of an Eighteenth-­Century Cause Célèbre,” Tractrix 3 (1991): 15–­77. For Castel’s own published account of the instrument, see Louis-­Bertrand Castel, “Clavecin pour les yeux, avec l’art de peindre les sons, & toutes sortes de pièces de musique,” Mercure de France, November 1725, 2552–­77. 23. Louis-­Bertrand Castel, L’optique des couleurs, fondée sur les simples observations, et tournée sur-­tout à la pratique de la peinture, de la teinture et des autres arts coloristes (Paris, 1740), 488, as cited in Hankins and Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination, 78. 24. On what she terms Drebbel’s “living instruments,” see Vera Keller, “Drebbel’s Living Instruments, Hartmann’s Microcosm, and Libavius’s Thelesmos: Epistemic Machines before Descartes,” History of Science 48 (2010): 39–­74. See also the classic monograph F. M. Jaeger, Cornelius Drebbel en zijne tijdgenooten (Groningen: P. Noordhoff, 1922), and for the more popular

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version, see Tom Shachtman, Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold (1999; New York: Mariner Books, 2000). 25. See Rosalie L. Colie, “Cornelis Drebbel and Salomon de Caus: Two Jacobean Models for Salomon’s House,” Huntington Library Quarterly 18, no. 3 (May 1955): 245–­60, and Colie, ‘Some Thankfulnesse to Constantine’: A Study of English Influence upon the Early Works of Constantijn Huygens (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1956), 97–­98. 26. On Drebbel’s red dye, see Amy Butler Greenfield, A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006). For further discussion of Elizabethan optics and perspective devices, see Deborah E. Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 27. Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis, in Francis Bacon: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (London: Oxford University Press, 1996), 484. On Bacon’s philosophy of science, see Stephen Gaukroger, Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-­Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); William Lynch, Solomon’s Child: Method in the Early Royal Society of London (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); Antonio Pérez-­Ramos, Francis Bacon’s Idea of Science and the Maker’s Knowledge Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Paolo Rossi, Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); Julie Robin Solomon, Objectivity in the Making: Francis Bacon and the Politics of Inquiry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); B. H. G. Wormald, Francis Bacon: History, Politics, Science, 1561–­1626 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). On The New Atlantis, see Bronwen Price, ed., Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis: New Interdisciplinary Essays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002). 28. Colie, “Cornelis Drebbel and Salomon de Caus,” 253. 29. Bacon, The New Atlantis, 486. 30. Ibid., 464. 31. Lorraine Daston, “Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 1 (Autumn 1991): 113–­14. 32. Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, Amsterdam, MSS Constantijn Huygens, vol. 47. Jaeger, Cornelis Drebbel en zijne tijdgenooten, 110; G. Tierie, Cornelis Drebbel (1572–­1633) (Amsterdam: H. J. Paris, 1932), 34, 49–­52. 33. S. I. Van Nooten, whose own research into Drebbel includes the most complete English translation of this letter, suggests that Drebbel’s device may have employed shadow projection rather than the projection of images on painted glass slides or sliders and that it might have been a kind of camera lucida

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or the use of plane or concave mirrors and a convex lens to project the forms of sunlit objects from outside into a light-­filled room. See S. I. Van Nooten, “Contributions of Dutchmen to the Early History of Film Technology,” Janus 58 (1971): 85–­86. 34. Ben Jonson, The New Inn, or The Light Heart, ed. George Bremner Tennant (1631; New York: Henry Holt, 1908), 240. The play was acted in 1629 and met with “censure” on the part of spectators, which Jonson lampooned in his “Ode to Himself on the Censure of his ‘New Inne,’” which was included in the 1631 publication. 35. 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), 194 and 299. 36. William Hooper, Rational Recreations, in which the Principles of Numbers and Natural Philosophy Are clearly and copiously elucidated, By a Series of Easy, Entertaining, Interesting Experiments, 4 vols. (London: L. Davis et al., 1787), 2:158–­59. 37. Isaac Newton, Opticks, or A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections & Colours of Light (1730; repr., New York: Dover, 1952), 244 (hereafter, page numbers will be cited in the text). Alan E. Shapiro, “Experiment and Mathematics in Newton’s Theory of Color,” in Newton: Texts, Backgrounds, Commentaries, ed. I. Bernard Cohen and Richard S. Westfall (New York: Norton, 1995), 191–­202, and Shapiro, “Twenty-­Nine Years in the Making: Newton’s Opticks,” Perspectives on Science 16, no. 4 (2008): 417–­38. 38. First added to the Latin Optice (1706), this “query” appeared in the Opticks (1717) and all later English editions as Query 28. 39. For an excellent historical study of the prism in the context of the notion of the experiment, see Simon Schaffer, “Glass Works: Newton’s Prisms and the Uses of Experiment,” in The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences, ed. David Gooding, Trevor Pinch, and Simon Schaffer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 67–­104. 40. See Dobbs, The Janus Faces of Genius. 41. Fabio Cleto, “Queering the Camp,” in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject; A Reader, ed. Fabio Cleto (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 12. 42. Alexander Pope, “Intended for Sir Isaac Newton, in Westminster Abbey,” in The Works of Alexander Pope (London: Printed for J. and P. Knapton in Ludgate-­Street, 1752), 4:98. 43. In a refracting formulation of the resignification of terms that wound, Judith Butler argues, “As a further paradox, then, only by occupying—­being occupied by—­that injurious term can I resist and oppose it, recasting the

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power that constitutes me as the power I oppose.” See Judith Butler, “Subjection, Resistance, Resignification: Between Freud and Foucault,” in The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 104. 44. See Maxine Baca Zinn, Pierrette Hondagneu-­Sotelo, and Michael A. Messner, Through the Prism of Difference: Readings on Sex and Gender (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1997) and Manning Marable, Beyond Black and White: Transforming African-­American Politics (New York: Verso, 1995) as well as Jane Goldman, The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-­ Impressionism, and the Politics of the Visual (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) in which the political aesthetic strategy Goldman elaborates is termed a “sapphist,” feminist prismatics. 45. Dušan I. Bjelić, Galileo’s Pendulum: Science, Sexuality, and the Body-­ Instrument Link (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 81–­113. 46. On ’s Gravesande, see Pierre Brunet, Les physiciens hollandais et la méthode expérimental en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Blanchard, 1926); P. Costabel, “’s Gravesande et les forces vives ou des vicissitudes d’une experience soi-­disant cruciale,” in Mélanges Alexandre Koyré: Publiés à l’occasion de son soixante-­dixième anniversaire, 2 vols (Paris: Hermann, 1964), 1:117–­ 34; G. Gort, La fondazione dell’ esperienza in ’s Gravesande (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1972); P. R. de Clercq, “The ’s Gravesande Collection in the Museum Boerhaave, Leiden,” Nuncius 3 (1988): 127–­37; and C. de Pater, ed., Willem Jacob ’s Gravesande: Welzijn, wijsbegeerte en wetenschap (Baarn: Ambo, 1988). 47. Derek Jarman, “Marsilio Ficino,” in Chroma: A Book of Colour—­June ’93 (London: Century, 1994), 57–­61. 48. Ibid., 58. 49. L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Chicago: George M. Hill, 1900), 6. 50. See Mark Evan Swartz, Before the Rainbow: L. Frank Baum’s “The Wonderful World of Oz” on Stage and Screen to 1939 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 169–­72. 51. Baum, Wonderful Wizard of Oz, 20, 191. 52. Alexander Doty, “‘My Beautiful Wickedness’: The Wizard of Oz as Lesbian Fantasy,” in Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon (New York: Routledge, 2000), 52. 53. I develop the queer gender-­and genre-­busting figurative potential of the chimera in “Chimerical Figurations at the Monstrous Edges of Species,” in Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-­First Century, ed. Stephanie Lemenager, Theresa Shewry, and Ken Hiltner (London: Routledge, 2011), 61–­83.

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54. See Salman Rushdie, The Wizard of Oz (London: British Film Institute, 1992), 30. 55. See Aristotle, Metaphysics, 982b; G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), 234; and John Llewelyn, “On the Saying that Philosophy Begins in Thaumazein,” in Post-­Structuralist Classics, ed. Andrew Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1988). 56. Plato, Theaetetus, trans. Seth Benardete (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 155c–­d. For a different discussion of this passage on wonder and the confrontation with the rainbow in Descartes and secondarily in Newton’s work, see Philip Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). 57. Plato, Theaetetus, 154b–­155c. 58. Theaetetus’s use of “wonder” has also been translated in terms of a link between philosophy and madness: “Oh yes, indeed, Socrates, I often wonder like mad what these things can mean; sometimes when I’m looking at them I begin to feel quite giddy.” See Plato, The Theaetetus of Plato, trans. M. J. Levett, rev. Myles Burnyeat (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1990), 155c–­d. 59. Dickinson, “Which Is best—­the Moon or the Crescent,” 527. 60. See Teresa Brennan, “‘The Contexts of Vision’ from a Specific Standpoint,” in Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight, ed. Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay (New York: Routledge, 1996), 219. 61. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011). 62. Sigmund Freud, “Negation,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, 19:237. 63. Ibid., 236–­37. 64. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (1966; London: Routledge, 2004), 57.

Conclusion   1. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011).   2. Lauren Berlant, “Cruel Optimism, Becoming Event: A Response,” Public Feelings Salon with Lauren Berlant (Barnard Center for Research on Women, April 12, 2011): responses published on December 19, 2012, http://bcrw.barnard .edu/videos/public-feelings-salon-with-lauren-berlant/ and, for the PDF, http:// bcrw.barnard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/Public-Feelings-Responses/ Lauren-Berlant-Cruel-Optimism-Becoming-Event.pdf. See also Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “Introduction: Rhizome,” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism

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notes to conclusion  305

and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (1972; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 3–­28.   3. Christian Metz introduced the conceptual term “scopic regime” to describe the particular structuring relationship of cinema between the spectator, the projected image, and the object in which Metz emphasizes the absence or occlusion of the object. See Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton (1977; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 61–­63. On the revision of Metz and the elaboration of competing scopic regimes for modernity, see Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1998), 3–­23. See also Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-­Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). For postcolonial revisions, see, for example, Tony Bennett, “Pedagogic Objects, Clean Eyes, and Popular Instruction: On Sensory Regimes and Museum Didactics,” Configurations 6, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 345–­71. On contemporary postnational empire as an invisible apparatus or machine, see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).   4. Michel Foucault, “Panopticism,” in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (1975; New York: Vintage, 1995), 195–­230.   5. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (1958; New York: Rossetta Books, 2000), 79. Hereafter, page numbers are cited in the text.   6. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology: Parts I and III, trans. R. Pascal (1932; New York: International, 1947).   7. Galeano’s device of the magic lantern show advertisement and the book as a whole are illustrated with engravings by José Guadalupe Posada. Eduardo Galeano, Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-­Glass World, trans. Mark Fried (1998; New York: Picador, 2000), 7–­8.   8. Sigmund Freud, “The Future of an Illusion,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1953–­74; repr. London: Vintage, 2001), 21:1–­56. Hereafter, page numbers will be cited in the text.   9. Berlant, “Cruel Optimism, Becoming Event: A Response.” 10. Mary Horlock talks with Susan Hiller, Paletten, July 17, 2001, http:// www.susanhiller.org/Info/interviews/interview-MH.html. 11. See Jussi Parikka, “‘With Each Project I Find Myself Reimagining What Cinema Might Be’: An Interview with Zoe Beloff,” Electronic Book Review, October 24, 2011, http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/image narrative/numerous. 12. See Michael Newman, Review of Lindsay Seers, Extramission 6 (Black Maria), Tate, 2009, http://www.lindsayseers.info/work_node/288.

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13. See also Charlotte Cotton, “Zoe Leonard, Camden Arts Centre,” Art in America, Summer 2012, http://murrayguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/ Cotton-Art-in-America-Summer-20121.pdf. 14. See the Brian McKinnell interview with Marget Long, December 12, 2011, Humble Arts Foundation, http://hafny.org/blog/2011/12/marget-long/.

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index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. abjection, 7, 14, 30–31, 40, 89–93, 102–19, 162. See also colonialism; disavowal Abraham, Nicolas, 128 Adams, George, 126, 278n5 Adorno, Theodor, 120–23, 195, 223 aesthetic pedagogy, 232–36, 244 affect: colonialism and, 90–91, 103–19; deception and delight and, 45–61, 65, 72, 198, 203–4, 214; disciplining of, 74–78, 84–85, 125–34, 169–70, 228; introjection and, 142–57; magic lantern and, 55–64, 97–102; prismatics and, 210–12; projection and, 22, 28–29, 38–39, 70–77, 83–87, 200–201, 229–30; spectatorship and, 15–19, 50–54, 93, 108–24. See also desire; introjection; senses, the Agamben, Giorgio, 1, 7 agency: bodily vulnerability and, 35–36; demonic, 128–29; introjection and, 130–42; performative magic and, 43–50; special, 38–39, 130, 159–61; subjectivity and, 7; technology and, 4, 6, 36–37

“Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis” (Lacan), 28–29 Aguilón, François de, 47–49 alchemy, 41, 113, 169, 200–201, 206, 220, 244 Algeria, 111–19 Allan, David, 170, 171, 175 “Allegory of the Cave” (Plato), 163, 172, 178, 180 Altick, Richard, 140 appetite, 79, 132–34. See also colonialism; desire; ingesting automata Arcades Project (Benjamin), 170 Archive Fever (Derrida), 181–82, 196 archives: colonialism and, 167–70; definitions of, 170; desire and, 181–94; imaginative projection and, 212–18; shadow archives and, 161, 180–95 Ars magna lucis et umbrae (Kircher), 4, 54–55, 66–67, 70, 179 “Art of Deception, The” (Mannoni), 268n88 Astronomiae pars optica (Kepler), 46 Athanasiou, Athena, 156 307

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308  index

attachments, 142–57, 159 Attack of an English Outpost (Méliès), 113 authority. See power Bacon, Francis, 76, 196, 199, 202–4, 206 bagatelles, 56–61, 66, 262n46 Baker, Henry, 101 Barthes, Roland, 173–74 Batchen, Geoffrey, 174–77 Baudelaire, Charles, 112, 194 Bauer, George, 180 Baum, L. Frank, 218, 219 Baxandall, Michael, 180 becoming: disavowals and, 163; future present and, 232–36; negation and, 195–98; paranoid projection and, 85–87; productive instability and, 170–81, 197–98, 212–18, 227–28; queer technologies and, 31–32, 93–97, 142–57, 212–23; shadows and, 180–95. See also epistemology; projection; shadows; technologies Begums, 100, 102 Bellocq, Ernest J., 188–89, 190, 191 Bellocq’s Ophelia (Trethewey), 189 Beloff, Zoe, 234, 236–38 Benjamin, Walter, 120, 170, 232 Bentham, Jeremy, 226 Berlant, Lauren, 223, 225, 235 Bermingham, Ann, 176 “Between the Demonic and the Miraculous” (Gorman), 70 Beyond Black and White (Marable), 215 Bhabha, Homi, 89

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Birth of a Nation (Griffith), 151 Bjelic´, Dušan I., 216 Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon), 131, 161–62 bodies: affect and, 93, 108–19; colonial projection and, 90–93, 111–19, 161–62; gendered difference and, 27; pedagogical demonstrations and, 110–11; photography and, 31–32, 167– 70, 189–91; physiognomy and, 162, 165–67; prismatic possibilities and, 16, 20–22, 33, 79, 97, 131–32, 147, 157, 167, 170, 173, 194–203, 208, 214, 238–43; projection’s disavowal of, 15–26, 32–33, 35–37, 86–87, 126–32, 172–81, 227; reason and, 163; shadows of, 181–82, 183, 184–88, 295n74; spectators and, 192–95; transformation and, 216–18; vulnerability and, 35–36, 58–66, 79, 122–23, 132, 196 “Body and the Archive, The” (Sekula), 170 Boudinet, Daniel, 174 Boulton, Matthew, 138 Brady, Matthew, 235 Brathwaite, Richard, 134 Brave New World (Huxley), 228–30 Brennan, Teresa, 28–29, 46, 222, 227 Britain, 99–102, 113, 135–42 Brittlebank, Kate, 137–38 Brosses, Charles de, 133 Brown, Vincent, 110–11 Bruno, Giordano, 71 Bull, Malcolm, 75–76 Burke, Edmund, 100, 102, 140 Butades, 175–77, 181

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index  309

Butades’ Daughter (Knorr), 178 Butler, Judith, 147, 156, 302n43 camera lucida, 173–74, 301n33 Camera Lucida (Barthes), 173–74 camera obscura: affect and, 50–54, 59, 126–27; colonialism and, 129–30; definitions of, 4; Enlightenment rationality and, 19–20, 26–27, 46–50, 57–66; Freud’s metaphors and, 12, 30, 85–87; images of, 4; magic lantern’s natural magic and, 42–50, 74–75, 126; photography and, 162; prisms and, 208, 212–18; subject formation and, 125–27, 172; vulnerability of, 200–201. See also epistemology; projection; rational vision Camera Obscura (Kofman), 57 Camera Obscura (Leonard), 242 Candide (Voltaire), 234 “Cap and Bells, or, The Jealousies, The” (Keats), 140–41 Capital (Marx), 133 capitalism, 122, 132–35, 137–38, 142–43 Caribbean, the, 142–57, 182 Casati, Roberto, 180 Casid, Jill H., 280n28 Castel, Louis-Bertrand, 201–2 casting: becoming and, 85–87; colonialism and, 89–93, 97–119, 161–62, 200–201, 239; disavowal and, 1–4, 19–25, 41–42, 84–85, 194, 202; entertainment and experimental purposes of, 42–50; projective prismatics and, 201–8; psychoanalytical valence of, 13, 35–42, 231–32; shadows and, 159–67; transport and, 1–2,

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30, 66–67. See also projection; technologies Cavendish, Margaret, 52 Chaosmosis (Guattari), 139–40 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 8–9 Chroma (Jarman), 217 cinema, 112–13, 182, 184, 218–23 “Civilization and Its Discontents” (Freud), 128–29 Clark, Stuart, 43 Cohen, Bernard, 299n14 Colie, Rosalie L., 202–3 Collegium Experimentale, sive Curiosum (Sturm), 74, 75, 76–77, 79 colonialism: abjection and, 31, 102– 19; decolonization and, 1–2, 30, 89, 152, 227; desire and appetite and, 79, 132–42; Enlightenment’s others and, 19–25, 91, 107–9, 120–27, 163; epistemology and, 93–97; gender and, 93, 135–42; introjection and, 31, 125–32, 138–42; inversion and, 97–102, 138–42, 162; the law and, 132; machine metaphors and, 97–102, 111–19; projection’s disavowals and, 19–26, 30–31, 87, 89–93, 100–101, 119–20, 125–34, 161– 62, 200–201, 239; race and, 148–49, 151; slavery and, 182– 88; technologies’ magic and, 90–93, 103–19, 142–57 colors. See prisms; race Combat in a Street in the Indies (Méliès), 113 Confidences d’un prestidigitateur (Robert-Houdin), 115 conjuration, 18, 26, 43, 48, 53–54, 90, 103–4, 112, 143–44, 155, 180, 202–5

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310  index

consumption. See desire; ingesting automata Conti, Natale, 76 Contrast, The (Rowlandson), 140 Corinthian Maid, The (Allan), 175–78 Cosentino, Donald, 143–45 counterschools, 232–44 counterscience (term). See magic; projection Count Zero (Gibson), 143 Courbet, Gustave, 178 Crary, Jonathan, 19–20, 55, 298n10 critical race studies, 215 Cruel Optimism (Berlant), 225–26 Cuba, 133 Cuban Counterpoint (Ortiz), 133–34 Cuff, John, 101 “Cultural Peripheries” (Richard), 145 “Curiosities of Sigmund Freud” (Hiller), 8–9, 11 DaCosta Kaufmann, Thomas, 180 Dae Sapientia Veterum (Bacon), 76 Daguerre, Louis, 175 Dance of Death (Holbein), 62, 64 Dark Side of the Moon, The (Pink Floyd), 198 Darkytown Rebellion (Walker), 184 Daston, Lorraine, 204 Davis, Richard, 137 Dayan, Joan, 155 death drive, 182 de Certeau, Michel, 29, 36, 86, 227 decolonization, 1–2, 30, 89, 227 “Decolonizing Ethnography” (Meehan), 152 Deep Time of the Media (Zielinski), 10

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Deleuze, Gilles, 86–87 “Delirium of Faith, The” (Greenstein), 143 della Porta, Giambattista, 10, 42–46, 71 delusions (deceptions, delights), 45–61, 65, 72, 198, 203–4, 214 DeMille, Cecil B., 143 demonology, 40–50. See also colonialism; disavowal; phantasmagoria machines; projection; spirit possession demonstrations. See pedagogy; projection; rational vision; spectators Derby, Joseph Wright of, 175–76 “Der Doppelgänger” (Rank), 160 Derrida, Jacques, 172, 177, 181–82, 196–97 Descartes, René, 13, 57–59, 262n49, 263n51 desire, 20, 74–78, 132–34, 169–70, 172–77, 181–94, 205, 217, 220, 232–36 d’Espérance, Elizabeth, 238 Devices of Wonder (exhibition), 206 Dialect of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno), 120–23 Dibutade or the Origin of Drawing (Suvée), 172 Dickinson, Emily, 195, 220 Digital Delirium (Kroker and Kroker), 197 Dioptrica (Huygens), 61 disavowal: colonialism and, 26, 89–93, 133–34, 142–57; ego’s relation to, 28–29, 41–42, 83–85; material bodies and, 15–26, 37, 161–63, 227; photography and, 172–81; prismatic projection

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index  311

and, 199, 210–12; projection and, 19–25, 41–42, 84–85, 194; superstition and, 13, 62–66. See also introjection discarnation of reason and vision, 7, 15, 19, 33–37, 42, 90, 124. See also bodies Discourse on Method (Descartes), 57–58 Dispossession (Athanasiou), 156–57 Domestic Recreation; or Dialogues Illustrative of Natural and Scientific Subjects (Wakefield), 98 Doty, Alexander, 220 dreams, 1–2, 4, 6–7 Drebbel, Cornelis, 199, 202–6, 301n33 Dr. Toer’s Amazing Magic Lantern Show (Toer), 184–85 Dupré, Sven, 46 dystopias, 228–30. See also possibilities; projective prismatics Eakins, Thomas, 182 Eamon, William, 42 East India House, 140–41 “Economic Problems of Masochism” (Freud), 159 Edouart, Augustin, 192 Edwards, Bryan, 104–7, 109–10 ego: disavowal and, 6, 15–19, 28–29, 128–32; melancholia and, 30; as object, 19, 31, 54, 131, 143, 169–79, 193; paranoia and, 7–8, 13, 19, 28, 31, 42, 86–87, 128, 132, 157–59, 200–201, 227, 241; projection and, 13, 37, 50–54, 200–201; special agency and, 38, 159–61; unconscious and, 6, 8; vulnerability and, 37–42. See also introjection

umpCasid.indd 311

“Ego and the Id, The” (Freud), 159 8 Possible Beginnings (Walker), 184 electricity, 93, 108–19 “Elements of Anti-Semitism” (Horkheimer and Adorno), 20–23 enchantment, 142–57. See also magic; rational vision; wonder enfolding, 213, 227, 240 “Englishman-eating tiger-organ” (automaton), 132 Enlightenment: metaphorical valences of, 23, 29, 43–50, 93, 108; method and, 13, 195–99, 201–12, 222, 225, 234, 299n14; optical and projective technologies of, 28–29, 32, 55–64, 70–85, 108, 160, 167–70, 179, 184, 192, 206, 212, 214; “others” of, 19–25, 91, 107–9, 120–27, 163; rational vision and, 43–50, 108–9, 122, 184; shadows and, 161–67, 179, 182, 184, 194. See also Scientific Revolution epistemology: colonialism and, 31–32, 87, 148–49; machine metaphors and, 6, 20, 23, 59, 85–86, 160, 199–208, 225, 228– 29, 238; method and, 13, 119, 195–98, 201–12, 222, 225, 234, 299n14; optics accounts and, 50–54, 57–58, 208–12; paranoia and, 83–84; plural possibilities of, 31–32, 119–24, 199–201, 212–18; potential or possibility and, 16, 20–22, 33, 79, 97, 131– 32, 147, 157, 167, 170, 173, 194–203, 208, 214, 238–43; projective devices and, 6, 30, 32–34, 43–46, 74–76, 85–87, 170, 173– 74, 199–201, 212–18; religion

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312  index

and, 103–11, 133–34, 142–57, 234, 267n82; representation and, 15, 50, 170–81, 184–88, 192; senses’ deception and, 45–61, 65, 72, 198, 203–4, 214, 229–30; tactile knowing and, 119–24. See also pedagogy; spectators Erica mutabilis (Talbot), 167, 168 Essay concerning Human Understanding (Locke), 199 “Essay on the Origin of Languages” (Rousseau), 170, 172 Essays on Physiognomy (Lavatar), 165–67 ethnography, 147–57, 283n63 event, 225–26 Extramission 6 (Seers), 235, 239, 240–41 eyes: disembodiment and, 7, 15, 19, 33–37, 42, 102, 124; mechanical models of, 4, 6, 43–46, 74–75, 125–26, 239, 298n10; permeability of, 122–23, 200–201. See also bodies; projection; rational vision; senses, the “Fairylogue and Radio-Plays, The” (Baum), 218, 219 Fanon, Frantz, 131, 161–62, 194 Felix-Mentor, Felicia, 149, 150 feminism, 28, 89, 129–30, 178, 215, 222, 233–34, 254n31 fetishes and fetishism, 133–43, 225 “Fetishism and Materialism” (Pietz), 133–34 Fibbergibbet and Mumbo Jumbo (Walker), 184 “Findings, Ideas, Problems” (Freud), 1 Findlen, Paula, 71 Flaming Classics (Doty), 220

umpCasid.indd 312

flesh. See affect; bodies; colonialism; epistemology; power; race Florian, Jean-Pierre Claris de, 23 Foucault, Michel, 1, 7, 129, 169–70, 172–73, 193–94 France, 111–19, 133 Freud, Sigmund: ego’s formation and, 159, 228; instrument metaphors and, 1, 7–15; introjection concept and, 127–29, 159–61, 223; melancholia concept and, 159–60; projection concept and, 30, 37–42, 83–85, 121, 194, 196, 228–30; uncanny concept and, 2, 29–31, 102, 121, 130, 140, 159–61, 192, 213; writing pad and, 8, 195–96, 223 Friedlander, Lee, 188, 297n81 Fusées (Baudelaire), 112 “Future of an Illusion, The” (Freud), 233 future perfect, 218–23, 233–36 future present, 235–36 Galante Show (Sayers), 98–99, 100–101 Galeano, Eduardo, 231 Galen, 46, 222 Galileo Galilei, 3, 71, 216, 267n82, 268n84 Galileo’s Pendulum (Bjelić), 216 Gay Science, The (Nietzsche), 173 gender: bodies and, 27, 79, 166–67, 170–81; colonialism and, 93, 139–40, 148–57; introjection and, 130, 138–39; projection’s disavowals and, 27, 125, 162, 179–82, 183, 184–88; rational vision and, 78–79, 123 genealogy (method), 37, 170–74, 222

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index  313

“General Theory of the Neuroses” (Freud), 12 Gérard, Jules, 118 German Ideology, The (Marx), 57, 231 Gibson, William, 143 Gillray, James, 92 Girodet-Trioson, Anne-Louis, 181 “Glass with Flare” (Long), 243, 244 Gordon, Deborah, 148 Gorman, Michael John, 70 Gosser, H. Mark, 54 Grainger, James, 108 Gramont, Antoine de, 61 Gravesande, Willem Jacob, 30, 81–82, 216, 217 Great Art of Light and Shadow, The (Mannoni), 44 Greenstein, M. A., 143 grieving, 159–60 Griffith, D. W., 151 Gründel, Johann Franz, 72–73 Guattari, Félix, 86–87, 139–40 Guélard, Jean-Baptiste-Antoine, 22, 23 Guttenberg, Carl, 91, 92 Guyot, Edmé-Gilles, 18 Haiti, 142–57, 182 Haiti, History, and the Gods (Dayan), 155 Haitzmann, Christoph, 30, 40–41, 228 Hall, Douglas, 111 Hallucination of the Alchemist, The (Méliès), 112 Harkness, Deborah, 202 harlequinade, 192–95 Hastings, Warren, 99–100 haunting, 20, 159, 163, 189, 228 Herschel, John, 167–70

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Hiller, Susan, 8–10, 11, 234, 236, 237 history: anxiety and, 36; Enlightenment reason and, 35, 42–50; future potential and, 182–95, 217–18, 225–43; genealogical methods and, 171–74; projection and, 35–42; psychoanalysis and, 1–3, 6–7, 19–25, 28–34, 36–37, 85–87, 196–97, 227; shadows and, 1, 170–81; temporality and, 14–15, 35–37, 39 History after Lacan (Brennan), 28–29 History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, The (Edwards), 104–7, 109–10 History of Jamaica (Long), 103–4 History of Jamaica (Renny), 274n32 Holbein, Hans, 62, 64, 65 Holcroft, Thomas, 165 homosexuality, 151–52, 153–57, 217–18. See also queer(ing); sexuality Hoogstraten, Samuel van, 179 Hooke, Robert, 50–54, 173–74 Hooper, William, 16–17, 18, 111, 208 Horkheimer, Max, 120–23 “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (Hurston), 149 Huet, Christophe, 22, 23 Hurston, Zora Neale, 142–44, 148–57, 283n63 Huxley, Aldous, 228–30 Huygens, Christiaan, 55–56, 58–66, 204, 263n53, 264n55, 265n61, 266n67 hybridity, 138–42, 149 hypnosis, 8–9

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314  index

Ibn al-Haytham, 4, 55 ideology, 231–32 imagination, 30, 42, 198, 200–208, 210–18 “Imagine Heaven” (Cosentino), 145 imminence as immanent, 226, 228 Imperial Leather (McClintock), 89 India, 99–102, 113, 135–42 ingesting automata, 30, 132–42 In Miserable Slavery (Hall), 111 Insurrection! (Walker), 182, 183, 184–88, 191–92, 194 Interpretation of Dreams, The (Freud), 10, 13, 229 Intimate Enemy, The (Nandy), 139 introjection: affect and, 142–57; agency and, 131–42; colonialism and, 31, 125–34; definitions of, 30, 127–28; Freud on, 159–60, 223. See also colonialism; disavowal; projection inversion: colonialism and, 97–102, 138–42, 162; distortion and artifice and, 43–46, 66–72, 74–85; imperial map projection and, 93–97; pedagogical uses of, 94–97, 226–27; projection devices and, 3–4, 49–50, 57–58, 94–97, 231–32; racialization and, 100–102; rational vision and, 70–77; satire and, 98–102, 192– 95; Vodou and, 149–57. See also delusions; magnification; projection; technologies; vision Irigaray, Luce, 178 Jaar, Alfredo, 93–94 Jackson, Tony, 191 Jamaica, 103–11 Jarman, Derek, 217 Johnson, Barbara, 149

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Jonson, Ben, 206 Jung, C. G., 1–4, 6–8, 161, 200–201 Kabylia, 118–19 Kalthof, Caspar, 59 Kant, Immanuel, 194 Kara E. Walker’s Song of the South (Walker), 184 Keats, John, 140–41 Kepler, Johannes, 30, 46–47, 49 Kinnersley, Ebenezer, 110 Kircher, Athanasius, 4, 54–55, 66–67, 70–71, 179, 266n70 Klee, Paul, 232 Klein, Melanie, 84 Knorr, Karen, 178 knowledge. See epistemology Kofman, Sarah, 12, 57–58 Korey, Michael, 46 Kristeva, Julia, 89 Küchler, Conrad Heinrich, 138 Lacan, Jacques, 28–29, 83–84, 178, 222 “Lanterne Magique, La” (Ouvrier), 20, 21 Laughable Musulman, The (Méliès), 113 Lavater, Johann Caspar, 162–63, 165–67, 169 law, the, 147, 151–53, 155–57, 170 Leonard, Zoe, 235, 241, 242 Leurechon, Jean, 49 Lexicon, The (Ruland), 201 Light! (exhibition), 81 Lind, Edwin, 174 Lippit, Akira Mizuta, 182 Lives of Indian Images (Davis), 137 Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (Vasari), 177–78

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Livingston, Jennie, 144 Locke, John, 199 Long, Edward, 103–4 Long, Marget, 235, 243, 244 Louisiana Project, The (Weems), 295n74 Love Ball, 144 Lovell, Carol, 296n80 lwa, 132, 147, 151–57 machine metaphors, 6, 20–23, 85–93, 97–102, 134–42, 196–99, 225, 228–29, 238 Magasin Pittoresque, 23, 24 Magiae Naturalis (della Porta), 42–46 magic: colonialism and, 103–19, 142–57; conjuration and, 18, 26, 43, 48, 53–54, 90, 103–4, 112, 143–44, 155, 180, 202–5; Enlightenment reason and, 25–29, 43–50, 169, 179–81; history and, 35–36; performative, 37–46, 52–54; prisms and, 201–2 Magic Cloak of Oz, The (Baum), 218 Magician’s Wife, The (Moore), 114 magic lantern: gender and, 27; images of, 9, 62, 66, 67–68, 80; introjection and, 126–27; natural magic demonstrations and, 42–50, 200–201; pedagogical demonstrations and, 16–17, 20, 30, 54–66, 70–85, 184–88, 206, 229–32; prisms and, 206–8; rational vision and, 2–3, 23–27, 90–91; technical descriptions of, 3–4; world maps and, 93–97 Magic Lantern (Hiller), 234, 236, 237 “Magic Lantern” (Lodge), 17 Magic Lantern, The (Méliès), 112–13

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Magie et Illusionnisme (exhibition), 114 magnification, 15, 20, 50, 72–85, 93, 97–102, 200 Maid of Corinth, The (Allan). See Corinthian Maid, The Malle, Louis, 191 Mannoni, Laurent, 44, 54, 268n88 Man without Qualities, The (Musil), 199 Marable, Manning, 215 Marabouts, 113–19, 276n51 Marathas, 138 Maroons, 104 Mars, Louis P., 283n63 Martin, Benjamin, 101 Marx, Karl, 57, 133, 231 materiality: affect and, 6, 93, 108–19; bodies’ disavowal and, 15–26, 37, 161–63, 227; conjuration and, 18, 26, 43, 48, 53–54, 90, 103–4, 112, 143–44, 155, 180, 202–5; desire’s effects and, 79, 132–42; epistemological technologies and, 195–98; future perfect and, 232–36, 238; precapitalist societies and, 134–42; projection scenes and, 3–4, 10, 32–34, 89–90, 93, 200–201, 229–32, 239–40. See also bodies; colonialism; epistemology; projection; senses, the Mathematical Elements of Natural Philosophy, Confirmed by Experiments (Gravesande), 216, 217 Mathematicall Recreations (Leurechon), 49–50 Mathesis Juvenilis, 74 Mathew Brady’s Skylight (Long), 235, 244 McClintock, Anne, 89

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Mechanica Hydraulico-Pneumatica (Schott), 70 Meehan, Kevin, 152, 154 megalopsychia, 74–85 melancholia, 7, 30–31, 130, 160 Méliès, Georges, 112–13 Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (Schreber), 38 Memoirs of the Blind (exhibition), 172 Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Jung), 1–4, 6–7 method, 13, 119, 195–98, 201–12, 222, 225, 234, 299n14 Metz, Christian, 305n3 Micrographia (Hooke), 50–54, 51 Micrographia Nova (Martin), 101 Microscope Made Easy, The (Baker), 101 microscopes, 8–9, 50–54, 51 mimesis, 120–21, 170–81. See also representation Mimesis and Alterity (Taussig), 120 mimicry, 84, 105, 107, 119–23, 129, 131–32, 135, 139, 142–44, 157. See also colonialism minstrel shows, 187–88 modernity. See Enlightenment; Scientific Revolution Monkey Who Demonstrates the Magic Lantern, The (Foulquier), 24 “Monkey Who Shows the Magic Lantern, The” (Florian), 23 Moore, Brian, 114 morbid projection, 30–31, 93, 119– 24, 127–28, 131, 157, 200–201, 228 Morton, Jelly Roll, 191 Mo Ti (philosopher), 55 Motte, Pierre, 67

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mourning, 159–60 “Mourning and Melancholia” (Freud), 130, 159–61 Mughals, 138 Mules and Men (Hurston), 149 Musil, Robert, 199 Musschenbroek, Jan van, 80 My Own Private Germany (Santer), 37–38 Mythologiae, sive explicationum fabularum (Conti), 76 Nairne, Edward, 97 Nandy, Ashis, 139 Natural Magic (della Porta), 10 Needham, Joseph, 55 negation, 6–12, 28, 86, 94, 121, 159–67, 194–95, 200, 223–31 “Negation” (Freud), 159, 223, 228 Nehru Gallery of Indian Art, 135–36 neuroses, 10, 12–13, 37–42. See also specific neuroses New Atlantis (Bacon), 199, 202–4, 206 New Inne, The (Jonson), 206 Newton, Isaac, 169, 198–99, 201–2, 208–14, 217, 220, 288n23, 298n10, 299n14 Niépce, Nicéphore, 175 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 173 “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (Foucault), 172 “Note on the Unconscious in Psycho-analysis” (Freud), 10 “Note upon the ‘Mystic WritingPad,’ A” (Freud), 223 Nouvelles recreations physiques et mathématiques (Guyot), 18, 208, 209 Novum Organum (Bacon), 196

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Obeah, 102–11, 123, 143, 274n32 Obeah Trials, 103, 109–11 Observation Point (Leonard), 235 Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (Cavendish), 52 O’Connor, Sinéad, 146 ocular harpsichord, 201–2 Of Grammatology (Derrida), 172 Of the Cult of Fetish Gods (de Brosses), 133 On the Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche), 173 “On the Origin of the ‘Influencing Machine’ in Schizophrenia” (Tausk), 26–27 On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life (Santer), 38 Opticks (Newton), 198–99 Opticorum libri sex (Aguilón), 47 optics: camera obscura and, 4, 43–50, 278n5; demonstrations of, 7, 42–46; prism experiments and, 202–8; rational vision and, 28–29, 50–54, 278n5. See also projection; rational vision; Scientific Revolution; technologies Orientalism, 100, 186 Origin of Drawing (GirodetTrioson), 181 Origin of Painting, The (Allan), 163, 164, 170, 171, 172 Origins of the World (Courbet), 178 Ortiz, Fernando, 133–34, 280n28 Ouvrier, Jean, 20, 21, 163, 164 Ozanam, Jacques, 79 “Painting on Smoke” (Guyot), 209 panopticism, 129, 226 paranoia: Cold War and, 1–2; collective, 121–23; definitions of, 83; projection and, 7–8, 13, 19,

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27–28, 30–31, 37–42, 83–87, 123, 127–28, 132, 157–59, 199– 201, 227–30, 233, 241. See also ego; epistemology; projection; subject, the “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is about You” (Sedgwick), 84 Paris Is Burning (Livingston), 144 passionate attachment, 151–54, 159, 225–26 passionate introjection, 142–57. See also introjection Patchwork Girl of Oz, The (film), 218 Patin, Charles, 72–73, 268n88 pedagogy: colonial demonstrations and, 103–26; demonstration lectures and, 7, 30, 41–42, 74–77, 97–102, 204, 206; epistemological training and, 43–46, 63–65, 83–85; inversion and, 94–97, 226–27; magic lanterns and, 54–66, 74–85, 94–97, 184– 88; politics and, 229–30; projection instruments and, 15–19, 25–29, 44–46 performative magic, 37–50, 52–64 Petit, Pierre, 61, 265n61 phantasmagoria machines, 16, 30, 67, 81, 92–97, 108–13, 169, 180, 208, 220, 231 Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein), 39 photography, 10, 12, 31–32, 167–81, 225, 235–36. See also shadows Physices elementa mathematica, experimentis confirmata (Gravesande), 81–82

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Physiognomische Fragmente (Lavatar), 165–67 physiognomy, 162, 165–67 physionotrace, 163 Pink Floyd, 198 Plato’s cave, 163, 172, 178–80 Pliny the Elder, 172, 175–79 Pocomania, 143 “Politics of Ethnographic Authority” (Gordon), 148 Pollyanna (story), 198 Pope, Alexander, 214 Porter, Cole, 145–46 possibilities: colonial encounters and, 131–32, 147, 157; disavowal of, 79, 97; enlightenment epistemologies and, 16, 20–22, 33; prismatic ways of seeing and, 194–203, 208, 214, 238–43; shadows and, 167, 170, 173. See also becoming; prisms; projective prismatics; shadows postcolonialism, 129–30 postmodernism, 143–45, 148 potential. See becoming; possibilities Pötzl, Otto, 8–9, 229–30 power: colonialism and, 19–25, 226; material projections and, 1, 4, 6–7, 30, 90–93, 111–19, 134–42; projection technologies and, 111– 19, 199; rational vision and, 57–66; the setup and, 15–19; spectators and, 192–95. See also affect; colonialism; materiality; projection prestige(s), 111–19, 206–7 “Pretty Baby” (Jackson), 191 Pretty Baby (Malle), 191 primitivism, 19–25, 91, 107–8, 120– 24, 127, 163 prisms, 30, 32, 195–98, 201–8, 288n23, 298n10. See also

umpCasid.indd 318

casting; epistemology; Newton, Isaac; possibilities; projective prismatics; queer(ing) “Progress of Reconstruction, The” (Toer), 184–85 projection: affect and, 38–39, 50–64, 83–87, 111–19, 200–201, 236; colonialism and, 19–25, 87, 97–119, 161–62, 200–201, 239; conjuration and, 18, 26, 43, 48, 53–54, 90, 103–4, 112, 143–44, 155, 180, 202–5; definitions of, 13; disavowal and, 3–4, 19–25, 84–85, 125–32, 163, 172–81; epistemology and, 6, 30, 32–34, 74–87, 199–201; gender and, 27, 181–82, 183, 184–88; history and, 35–42; imagination and, 30; introjection and, 127–32, 134– 42, 223; inversion and, 3–4, 43–46, 92–102; magic and, 103– 19; material production and, 32–34, 37, 42–50, 93, 238–43; metaphorical uses of, 6–15, 20, 23, 59, 85–86, 199, 225, 228–29, 238; morbid, 30–31, 93, 119, 124, 127–28, 131, 157, 200–201, 228; negation and, 6–12, 28, 86, 94, 121, 159–67, 194–95, 200, 223–31; paranoia and, 7–8, 13, 19, 27–28, 30–31, 37–42, 83–87, 119–20, 128, 132, 157–59, 199–201, 227–30, 233, 241; prismatic, 30, 32, 201–8, 232– 44; religious practices and, 103– 11, 149–57; shadows and, 31–32, 159–67, 170–81; subject’s production and, 7–19, 32–35, 74–85; transformation and, 218–23; transport and, 1–4, 10, 12, 15–19, 25–26, 31, 52–54,

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93, 227. See also Enlighten­ment; pedagogy; possibilities; psychoanalysis; rational vision; spectators projective prismatics, 30, 32, 197– 98, 201–8, 210–18, 232–36 Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The (Weber), 132–34 psychoanalysis: colonialism and, 30–31, 131, 161–62, 194; decolonization of, 30, 89, 227; Freud and, 8, 13, 30–31, 130, 160; history and, 1–3, 6–7, 19–25, 28–34, 36–37, 85–87, 196–97, 227; instrument metaphors and, 6–15; substitution and, 2–7, 27, 118, 146, 175–78, 192, 239. See also ego; rational vision; subject, the; technologies; specific terms and theorists “Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia” (Freud), 14, 38 Psychology and Alchemy (Jung), 200–201 Psychopathology of Everyday Life, The (Freud), 14 queer(ing): aesthetics and, 232–36; definitions of, 213; desire and, 174–77; epistemology and, 31–32; introjection and, 130–32; magic lantern’s capacities and, 93–97; photography and, 170–81; prismatics and, 212–18; spiritual technologies of, 142–57; temporality and, 162, 186–87; transformation and, 33–34, 142– 57, 212–13, 216–23. See also Enlightenment; epistemology; inversion; projection; sexuality

umpCasid.indd 319

race: colonialism and, 93, 103–11, 127, 140–41, 148–49, 151, 161– 62; disavowal and, 125–32; physiognomy and, 166–67, 187–88; projective technologies and, 32, 100–102, 127, 162, 179–82, 183, 184–88, 192–95; rational vision and, 78–79, 123; sexuality and, 144–45 Rank, Otto, 160 Rational Recreations (Hooper), 16–17, 18, 111, 208 rational vision: affect and the senses and, 45–61, 65, 72, 132– 34, 165–67, 170, 198, 203–4, 210–12, 214, 229–30; body’s vulnerability and, 57–58, 121– 24, 132, 163, 229–30; colonialism and, 90–97, 100–111, 119–20, 128–32, 138–42, 151– 57; experimental discourse and, 46–50; gender and, 79, 102; imaginative projection and, 198, 210–18; magic lanterns and, 55–64, 70–85; negation and, 159–67; pedagogy and, 25–29, 52–54, 74–85, 204; photography and, 167–70; projection’s disavowals and, 19–25, 29, 32–33, 41–42, 83–85, 94–97, 140–42, 226–27; queer technologies and, 142–45; surveillance and, 31, 54, 131, 143, 169–79, 193. See also Enlightenment; projection reason. See discarnation of reason and vision; epistemology; rational vision Reception of the Diplomatique & His Suite, at the Court of Pekin, The (Gillray), 92

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320  index

Récréations mathématiques (Leurechon), 49–50 Récréations mathématiques et physiques (Ozanam), 79 Red, Hot, and Blue (music compilation), 145 Redondi, Pietro, 267n82 Reflections on the Revolution in France (Burke), 140 religion, 30, 55, 70–77, 102–19, 133–34, 142–57, 234, 267n82 representation (term), 15, 50, 123, 170–81, 184–88, 192. See also epistemology; mimesis “Resistance and Repression” (Freud), 10, 12 Richard, Nelly, 145 Ricoeur, Paul, 83 Rietwijck, Ysbrandt, 204–5 Robert-Houdin (A. K. RobertHoudin), 114 Robert-Houdin, Jean-Eugène, 111– 19, 276n51 Robertson, Étienne-Gaspard, 108–9, 274n34 Robertson’s Phantasmagoria in the Cour des Capucines in 1797 (Robertson), 109 Rosenblum, Robert, 176 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 170 Rowland, Ingrid, 67, 71 Rowlandson, Thomas, 140 Rudolph II (of Prague), 46 Ruland, Martin, 201 Rushdie, Salman, 220 Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou (Cosentino), 143 Sam, Guillaume, 151 Santer, Eric, 37–39 Santería, 143

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satire, 71–73, 93, 98–99, 102, 127, 192–95 Sayers, James, 98–99, 100–101 scapegoat fantasies, 89–93. See also colonialism; disavowal; projection Schaaf, Larry, 173, 287n20 Scheiner, Christoph, 3 Schott, Gaspar, 70 Schreber, Daniel Paul, 14, 37–42, 83–86 Science and Civilisation in China (Needham), 55 Scientific Revolution: alchemical roots of, 41, 113, 169, 200–201, 206, 220, 244; becoming and, 85–87; colonialism and, 103–11, 113–19; disavowals of, 13; magic and, 103–19, 169; method and, 195–98, 200–201, 208–12, 222, 225, 234; mimesis and, 170–81; natural magic roots of, 43–50; optics and, 43–50; photography and, 167–70; physiognomy and, 162, 165–67; Plato’s cave and, 163, 172–73; projection devices and, 2–3, 6, 83–85, 197–98; senses’ vulnerability and, 45–61, 65–77, 198, 203–4, 214, 229–30, 263n51; shadows of, 182–95; superstition and, 30. See also alchemy; Enlightenment; magic; rational vision scopic regimes, 19–20, 226, 305n3. See also projection; vision “Screen Memories” (Freud), 233 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 84 Seeing the Unspeakable (Shaw), 187–88 Seers, Lindsay, 235, 239, 240–41 Sekula, Allan, 170, 193

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senses, the: epistemological vulnerability and, 45–61, 65, 72, 198, 203–4, 214, 229–30; training of, 74–78, 84–85, 125–132. See also affect; delusions; epistemology Séraphin (showman), 185 setup, the, 15–19, 25–29, 47 “Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis, A” (Freud), 13, 29–30, 36, 40–42, 228 sexuality: colonialism and, 142–46, 151–53, 155–57; disavowal and, 125, 127, 130, 161–62; projective technologies and, 32, 127, 162, 166–67, 170–82, 183, 184– 88, 191–92, 212–18, 225. See also affect; desire; homosexuality; queer(ing) Shadow Dance (Hoogstraten), 179 Shadowland or Light from the Other Side (Beloff), 234, 236–37, 238 shadows: casting of, 30–31; desire and, 172, 181–94; Freud’s special agency and, 159–61; history and, 1, 170–81; negation and, 159– 67; of the object, 30, 160–61; pedagogical demonstrations of, 99, 110–11; photography and, 31–32, 170–81; physiognomy and, 162; productive instability and, 180–95, 200–201, 295n74, 301n33; shadow writing and, 167–70, 172 shame, 130, 162, 223 Shaw, Gwendolyn DuBois, 187–88 Short History of the Shadow, A (Stoichita), 179–80 Signor Topsy-Turvy’s Wonderful Magic Lantern (Taylor and Taylor), 94, 95, 96–97

umpCasid.indd 321

Silhouette Likenesses (Edouart), 192 silhouettes. See shadows Simulachres et historiées faces de la mort (Holbein), 62–63 Singeries (Huet), 22, 23 skiagraphy, 163, 178–80 slavery, 182, 184–88, 192 Smoaking Age, The (Brathwaite), 134 Socrates, 220, 304n58 solar microscopes, 30, 97–102, 163, 206–7 “Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing” (Talbot), 169 Sontag, Susan, 143 space and spacialization. See transport, devices of special agency, 38, 159–61 spectators: agency of, 36; bodies of, 192–95; colonial performances and, 106–19, 127; pedagogical demonstrations and, 19–25, 43–46, 63–65, 71–77, 97–102, 125–26, 184–85; subject as, 122–24 speculation. See becoming; imagination; projective prismatics Speculum of the Other Woman (Irigaray), 178 spirit possession, 30, 40–41, 150– 57, 283n63 “Spirits Dark & Fair” (Hiller), 10, 11 Stoichita˘  , Victor, 179–80 Sturm, Johann Christoph, 74, 75, 76–77, 79 subaltern, the, 139 subject, the: abjection and, 119–24; becoming and, 228–43; colonialism and, 19–25, 102–11; disavowal and, 1, 19–25, 83–85;

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322  index

gendering of, 78–79; imperial, 89–93; instrument metaphors and, 10, 12–15, 201–8; introjection and, 125–32, 147, 151–57, 159–60; the law and, 147, 151– 53, 155–57, 170; pedagogical demonstrations and, 15–19, 50–54, 77–85, 129; projection and, 1, 7, 15–19, 22, 30, 32–35, 83–85, 160, 179–81, 236; rational vision and, 3–4, 7–15, 22–25, 44–46, 48–50, 62–66, 74–85, 121–23, 151–57, 159; surveillance and, 31, 54, 131, 143, 169–79, 193; technological production of, 6, 18, 25, 36–37, 84, 121. See also ego; Enlightenment; rational vision “Subjection, Resistance, Resignification” (Butler), 147 substitution, 2–7, 27, 118, 146, 175–78, 192, 239 Sugar-Cane, The (Grainger), 108 superego, 31, 54, 128, 131, 143, 193 superstition: magic lantern demonstrations and, 13–14, 70–85; projective devices and, 55–64; religion and, 102–11, 133–34. See also Enlightenment; rational vision; Scientific Revolution surveillance, 31, 54, 131, 143, 169– 79, 193 Suvée, Joseph-Benoît, 172 Sweet, Fanny, 189 tachistoscope, 229–30 Tacky Rebellion, 103–4 Talbot, William Henry Fox, 163, 167–70, 173, 179, 287n20, 288n23

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Talisman, The (shadow projection), 186 Tausk, Victor, 26–27 Taussig, Michael, 120–21 Taylor, Ann and Jane, 94, 95, 96–97 Tea-Tax-Tempest, or the AngloAmerican Revolution, The (Guttenberg), 91, 92 Techniques of the Observer (Crary), 19–20 technologies: agency of, 6, 36–37, 135–42; capacity for alteration of, 15, 20, 33, 43–46, 55–72, 74–85, 94–102, 192–94, 200, 208–18, 226–27, 231–32; colonial encounters and, 90–93, 103–19, 126–34, 142–57; epistemology and, 6, 20, 23, 31, 49, 59, 70–77, 84–86, 112, 123, 184, 195, 199, 225, 228–29, 238; objectivity claims and aims of, 15, 18, 25, 50, 170–81, 184– 88, 192; psychoanalysis and, 6, 13, 84, 127–32, 134–42, 197, 223; queer becoming and, 212– 23; spectator training and, 16–18, 25–26, 70–77, 94–102, 112–19, 138–42, 162, 226–27; spiritual practice as, 142–57; uncanny returns and, 162–69, 174–76, 179, 199–200. See also optics; projection; specific devices telescopes, 2–4, 6 Tell My Horse (Hurston), 142–44, 148–49, 150, 151 temporality, 14–15, 17, 28–29, 32–33, 35–37, 39, 162, 186 thaumaturgy, 55, 124 “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (Benjamin), 232

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index  323

They Waz Nice White Folks While They Lasted (Walker), 184 Thinking with Demons (Clark), 43 Thistlewood, Thomas, 111 Through the Prism of Difference (Zinn), 215 Tippoo’s Tiger, 134–42 Tipu Sultan, 132, 135–42 Toer, J. W., 184–85 Tomkins, Sylvan, 84 Torok, Maria, 128 Totem and Taboo (Freud), 13–14, 121 trace, the, 156–57, 160, 172. See also shadows Traité de la lumière (Huygens), 56 transformation: colonialism and, 92–93, 103–11; conjuration and, 18, 26, 43, 48, 53–54, 90, 103–4, 112, 143–44, 155, 180, 202–5; pedagogy and, 46–50; prismatic possibilities and, 200– 208, 215–23; projection’s distortions and, 33–34, 43–46, 84–85; shadows and, 161–62. See also becoming; possibilities; projective prismatics transparent lithograph, 186 transport, devices of: casting and, 1–2, 15–19; colonialism and, 16, 31; demonstration lectures and, 52–54; instrument metaphors and, 10, 12; projection devices and, 3–4, 25–26, 28–29, 93, 227, 232–36; queering of, 182–87; temporality and, 35–37. See also projection Trethewey, Natasha, 189 Trophaeum Mariano-Cellense, 40 “Turnabout Map of the Americas” (Jaar), 93–94

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uncanny, the, 2, 29–31, 36–37, 40, 102, 121, 130, 140, 159–61, 192, 213 “Uncanny, The” (Freud), 159–60 unconscious, the: ego and, 6, 38, 161; instrumentation of, 7, 10, 12–13; machine metaphors and, 6, 20, 23, 59, 85–86, 199, 225, 228–29, 238; projection devices and, 7–15, 32–34 United States, 143–48, 151–57 Upside Down (Galeano), 231 Upside Down World Map (Interarts), 94 Van Nooten, S. I., 54, 301n33 Vasari, Giorgio, 177–78 Vermeir, Koen, 66–67, 70 Victoria and Albert Museum, 135– 36, 138, 141 violence, 103–20 virtual, the. See becoming; possibilities vision: Enlightenment rationality and, 46–50; inversion and, 57–58, 93–97; magic lanterns and, 55–64, 125–26; mechanical reproductions of, 4, 6, 43–46, 74–75, 125–26, 239, 298n10; optical experiments and, 43–50; spectators and, 15–19, 25–29, 71–77, 111–24; vulnerability and, 50–66, 70–72, 74–85, 122– 24, 203. See also epistemology; projection; rational vision; technologies Vision in Context (Brennan), 222 Vodou, 104, 132, 142–57 vulnerability: ego and, 37–42; false belief and, 127–32; introjection and, 125–32; material body and,

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324  index

6, 15–19, 25, 132; pedagogical aims and, 48–50, 74–85; subject of reason and, 35–36, 122–23, 125–32. See also affect; bodies; epistemology Waesberghe, Joannes Jansson van, 66 Wagenaar, W. A., 54, 66–67 Wakefield, Priscilla, 98 Walgenstein, Thomas Rasmussen, 266n70 Walker, Kara, 163–64, 182, 183, 184–88, 191–92, 194, 295n74, 296n78 Wanderer and His Shadow, The (Nietzsche), 173 ways of knowing. See epistemology Weber, Max, 132–34, 142 Wedgewood, Josiah and Thomas, 176 Weems, Carrie Mae, 295n74 “What Freud Makes of History” (de Certeau), 29, 36 “What Is Enlightenment?” (Kant), 194

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“What White Publishers Won’t Print” (Hurston), 149 Wilde, Oscar, 143, 145 Wisdom of the Ancients, The (Bacon), 76 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 39 Wizard of Oz, The (film), 199, 218– 23 Wollaston, William Hyde, 173–74, 290n38 Woman Disguising Her Face behind a Mask of a Donkey’s Head (Séraphin), 185 wonder, 32, 74, 220–23, 304n58 Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The (Baum), 218 Wright of Derby, Joseph, 175–76 Wunderblock, 8, 196–97 “You Do Something to Me” (Porter), 146 Zielinski, Siegfried, 10 Zinn, Maxine Baca, 215 zombies, 149–57, 150, 151, 283n63

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Jill H. Casid is professor of visual studies in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin–­Madison. She is the author of Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minnesota, 2005).

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