Jen Boyle
Carol G. Lederer Fellow, Pembroke Center, Brown University
Assistant Professor of English, Hollins University
jboyle@hollins.edu; Jennifer_Boyle@brown.edu
540.520.1756
The Anamorphic Imaginary: Perspective, Media, and Embodiment in Early Modern Literature and Technoscience
This project explores the emergence of perspective, a technology and media based in the spatiotemporal mathematics of the optical vanishing point that allows for the projection of three-dimensional space, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England. The methodology transverses the disciplines of cultural studies of technology and science, art history, media studies, and literature, and draws from extensive archival research related to the genre of “practical perspective” in early modern Europe. Envisioning perspective as a mediating technics that resists both subordination to philosophy (as a fixed historical "milieu"; "symbolic"; or materialization of mind), and being constrained by instrumentalist approaches that reduce perspectival technologies to closed representations of Cartesian cogitans and colonial geometries, I find that perspective media inflected a diverse set of knowledges and performances related to embodiment, individual affect, and collective consciousness.
Central to perspective media are questions of the collective "screening" of perception and embodied points of view; the affective response perspective evokes in its confusion over the 'in here' of cognitive-perceptual experience and the 'out there' of the object-world; and how mediated images cannot be relegated to vision when understood in the context of the performances and events of perspective practice and theory. As a laboratory for experimenting with mediating interfaces and embodied, cognitive experience, perspective serves as an example of the co-evolution of the technical interface with shifts in perceptual consciousness.
Joan Copjec in her recent return to the "question of perspective" charges that perspective came "knocking directly at [the] door as the problem of hallucinatory satisfaction" ("The Strut of Vision," Imagine There's No Woman 191). Perspective has been an intrusive specter (in every era since the Renaissance), conjuring in its wake the satisfying phantasies of mapped and regulated subjects, objects, bodies, and territories. Perspective comes knocking with promises of a mapped and objectified world. Yet, behind the door (screen) we find the images, events, and archives of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century perspective: the epicurean simulacra and its sensate objects; the "vanishing point" of the Commonwealth in Thomas Hobbes’ political theory; the fluid, doubled, and queered anamorphic bodies in the poetry and prose of John Milton, Daniel Defoe, and Margaret Cavendish; animated "lanskipts"; and, in Leibniz' terms, a city crowded with "troubling perspective monads." These fault lines between metaphysics and instrumentalist understandings of technological mediation -- mediating events imbued with both seductive power and ethical possibility -- are shot through our own hallucinatory geometries: games, satellites, webs, and interfaces.
Overview of Chapters
Introduction: Embodying Perspective: (Re) Mediating Literature, Technoscience, and Culture : My principal interest is in perspective as a mode of (new) mediation, as a site where material technologies of perception and communication are in flux with the changing forms of "bodies," mediating "contracts," and the production of new modes of meaning making. As such, mediated embodiment is re-imagined in this project as a space of affective potential and becoming. Charles Taylor, in his critique of the Western genealogies of early modernity, observes that while "the idea that the only two viable alternatives might be Hobbes or Descartes […] is a perfectly comprehensible thesis even to those who passionately reject it, such was not the situation in the 1640s" (“Philosophy and Its History” 21). Taylor's critique informs my approach to mediating technics more generally. That is, rather than a study of what modes of thought a reading, subjectivity crystallized in the wake of the "new media" and technologies of perspective, I am interested in the ways in which such media forms renewed possibilities for creative, imaginative, and affective agency. Conversely, the historical dimension of this work allows me to inhabit a space for critique of the utopian ideals and transcendent promise of the "new" in new media.
The appearance of anamorphic figures and technics is a central focus of this project. Throughout the last century perspective has been drawn as the material trace of a Western worldview where objects exist to be translated, “screened,” even targeted, and the body serves as an interface that translates experience into scopic representation. Anamorphosis (“morph again”), one of the most interesting variations on perspective space, projects two perspective planes within one viewing space to embed an alternate image, message, or scene within a single image space. Anamorphic perspective offers some significant challenges to existing treatments of perspective, particularly with respect to the attention it focuses on the contingencies of mediated perception and communication. I find in anamorphosis a competing genealogy to the development of perceptual technics. The prevalence of experimentation with anamorphics in the early modern period in literature, landscape design and public art, as well as political and natural philosophy reveals a contact between perception and mediation that faces rather than erases alterity. Such encounters produce "askew" temporal registers that call forth a somatic memory based in the experience of difference -- deferral in time, and its openings and possibilities -- as a kind of autonomic responsibility.
Chapter One: Embodying the Image: Empiricisms, Anamorphics, and the “desiring simulacra”:
The story begins with material ghosts: the extensive archive of perspective manuals from the mid-1600s to the mid-1700s. Initially cultivated in England and France as an "interactive" genre (appearing as textbooks on the artistic and engineering practices of projective and vanishing point perspective that included tubes, machines, and displays for modeling purposes), the production of perspective manuals triples in the seventeenth century. While these texts are slowly re-translated as demonstrations of English superiority in the fields of optics and empirical technoscience, throughout the early modern period and beyond they carry with them traces of earlier influences, including the rhizomatic theories and structures of 11th-century Islamic studies of cognition and optics, as well as the practices and poetics of Epicurean philosophy. Many of the perspective manuals that emerged on the Continent and were subsequently translated into English were the products of French Jesuit communities. The French Jesuit encounters with these texts emanate from one highly influential 11th-century Persian text, Al Hazen's Opticae Thesaurus. Al Hazen's explorations of perspective include not just Euclidean premises, but an investigation of projective perspective optics as a series of "flowes" between bodies. The fascination with Epicurean embodiment and perception in the mid-1600s in England, a philosophical poetics that refused the regulation of the boundaries between subjects and objects and the fixity of identity, exemplified how creative play with the idea of the simulacra -- perceptual "skins” and screens that move, transform, and affect bodily composition and response -- produced alternatives for thinking through mediation and alterity. The Epicurean model argued for a contingency to "bodies" -- natural, political, and corporeal --- as mediated potential. Perspective discourse draws extensively from Epicurean philosophies, and the blending of perspective technics with Epicurean perception brings forth an understanding of mediation as the dis-location of "sense." "Sensory" and "sensual" (indeed, ultimately, sentiment) become categories of experience that refuse immersion and identification in the interest of an intensity of unstructured feeling. Such affect stimulates confusion about the 'in here' of bodily experience and the 'out there' of the external world. Epicureanism offers a way of thinking through the materiality of technics that eschews the more familiar dialectic of essence and transcendence surrounding more contemporary approaches to technology. Epicurean perception haunts the Enlightenment and its afterlives: Henri Bergson, Gilles Delueze, and Karl Marx are all conjurers of Epicureanism. This "lost" perspective on materiality speaks to contemporary transformations taking place around perception and techno-mediation as well.
Chapter Two: Satan's Prospect and Milton's Lantskip: The Anamorphic Imaginary and Theological Affect:
W.J.T. Mitchell highlights the complex negotiations over the image in early modern England when he argues that it is only "a slight exaggeration to say that the English Civil War was fought over the question of images" (“What is an Image?” 503). The iconoclastic arguments in the mid-seventeenth century were central to debates over embodied representation and theo-political power (the persona and figure of the king, as well as the immersive power of theological icons and images). Layered with existing iconoclastic arguments where the emerging experimentations with projective and optical perspective devices and discourse. Iconoclasm and iconophilia are at base invested in the confluence of mediation, proximity, and the image's impact on embodied perception. Thus, image technologies that incur new openings and possibilities for perceptual and sensorial experience become crucial sites for investigating how the "idea of God" becomes incorporated in new ways with the technologically mediated image. Projective and anamorphic perspective figure prominently in Milton's Restoration-era epic, Paradise Lost. Why is Milton's text so invested in the poetics and technologies of perspective and projective space? The answer, I argue, lies in the ethical dimensions of mediated images that produce modes of affect via embodied experience, but which also result in an open-ended unfolding of sense and meaning. Milton draws on the embodied and interactive performances of perspective to explore theological affect, the "felt" experience of the divine as an embodied phenomenon. While familiar and engaging at the sensorial level, these mediated phenomena create bodily and mental confusion about the veracity of perception. Such affects offer up the experience of autonomic alterity -- spatial and temporal "difference" as embodied events.
Milton's particular interest in anamorphic performances in the poem draws on the experiences of a population immersed in a sudden proliferation of perspectival technologies and events: interactive gardens; curio sets; anamorphic wall murals; and scientific theatre. Perspective's attributes as an interactive media have been occluded from a focus on perspective's mirroring of the primacy of vision and perceptual distancing in Western thought and philosophy. Paradise Lost invites us to experience perspective as a lived technology in early modern England, as a geometrical, spatial, and temporal media that informed and enacted new modes of perception and made possible new imaginaries of communication and social interaction. The chapter ends with a discussion of the influence of perspective technics on Milton's "askew" take on space and time via allegory. These temporal and spatial registers inform Milton's investment in a model of temporality that is at once political and historical: an embodied, mediated temporality that incorporates "passion" (autonomic suspension and immediacy) as a model of progression that, while not outside of history, thrives separately from the linear plotting of time.
Chapter Three: Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World: Affective Perspective and Reproductive Fictions:
"The spider-men came first, and presented her Majesty with a table full of mathematical points, lines and figures of all sorts of squares, circles, triangles, and the like;... whether they did ever square the circle, I cannot exactly tell, nor whether they could make imaginary points and lines; but this I dare say, that their points and lines were so slender, small a thing, that they seemed next to imaginary." Margaret Cavendish, Description of a New World, Called The Blazing World
"The distinction between interior and exterior is needless..." Margaret Cavendish,
Observations on Experimental Philosophy
The merging of political life and natural life through biopolitics, understood as the mediation of politics through modes of living and in potentia life forms, has become a central concern of contemporary critical and political theory. This nexus is at the heart of some of the earliest ruminations on modern political representation, and as I pursue in this chapter, is imbued early on with the imaginary and real-time experiences of mediated embodiment. In the philosophical thought of Leibniz, for example, the very concept of the social body of the city is explored through the figures of "perspective monads." These geometrical yet animate monads thrive at the threshold of corporeality and imaginary social space. This chapter reads Margaret Cavendish's utopian science fiction romance with her work on experimental philosophy. Cavendish engages with many of the same concerns found in Leibniz's philosophy and mathematics, but extends these ideas to consider gender, embodiment, and mediated knowledge. In summary, Cavendish imagines an alternative to the empirical technoscience flourishing at her moment through her creative and philosophical explorations of choric and cabala spaces. The chora, a Greek concept of space that maintains a productive tension between flux and becoming and a mediating materiality that gives temporary form to bodies in space, is grafted in Cavendish's utopian romance with the mathematics of the "cabala," a system that brings together projective geometries, passion, and theories of mediation. Cavendish's writings anticipate a political and technological shift in Western philosophy toward biopolitics, a system that refigures the separation between projected imaginary spaces and the mediation of corporeality and affect.
Chapter Four: Camera-Rooms: Defoe's National Archive and Mediated Perspective
In a little known 1697 essay, Daniel Defoe refers to the spirit and action of his time as the "Projecting Age." Defoe makes clear that "projecting" is central to "matters of negotiation" and the methods of "civil polity, which we see this age arrived to." Defoe goes on to express his fears over the "inventions" of the projecting age, everything form "instruments for the art of war" to new "engines" that appear and then disappear like "abortions of the brain." The unsettling conjunction of metaphors of destruction and human reproduction in Defoe's description betrays a persistent genealogy to perceptual technologies. This chapter explores the centrality of mediated perception and geometrical perspective to a theme that informs much of the scientific and philosophical work of the two centuries to follow, social reproduction. The preceding three chapters of this project illuminate a fascinating tension that appears amid the capacity for new modes of techno-mediation -- namely, the embrace of the promise of reproduction (social and corporeal) attendant upon mediation struggling with the intense counter-desire for mapping, surveillance, and spatial definition. In Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year I trace these exchanges across mediation, descriptions of embodied affect, and projective surveillance.
Rather than a paradigm where bodies are surveilled and disciplined, Defoe’s fiction points to the instabilities surrounding projection.
Epilogue: The Ethics of the Interface: Empathic Phantasies and Denaturing Word and Image
This coda offers some thoughts on how early modern figures like anamorphosis, the epicurean simulacra, and the chora-cabala offer possibilities for thinking through our own current romance with the "new" in new media. At the heart of conversations about new media is rhetoric that promises new empathic possibilities -- immersion in and feeling for "other" spaces and subjectivities. The early modern interest in perception and mediation offers an alternate set of questions for thinking about how such possibility is less a matter of technological progress, than it is an opportunity to re-consider the openings that occur around new modes of mediation more generally. I am particularly interested in Samuel Weber's definition of the "virtual" as events that animate an "elevation in potentiality." Such a definition reimagines the limits we draw around form, content, and performative agency.
Finally, I turn to the figure of Ekphrasis to explore how familiar tensions around the word and the image appear in similar ways in the more conventional treatments of perspective in the early eighteenth century, as well as the rhetorical spaces of new media.
Appendix A: The Technology of Perspective: Projective Affect and Euclidean Myth
I offer an overview in this section of the performative and mathematical distinctions to be made between Euclidean "point" perspective and projective, geometrical perspective. The latter implies an affective, interactive context for perspective technologies and figures that cannot be reduced to textuality and a disembodied semiotics of images.
Appendix B: Alhazen's Opticae Thesaurus
Some brief translated excerpts and images from the sixteenth-century Latin translation (Basel, 1572) of Al Hazen's 11th-century optical treatise, Opticae Thesaurus.