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Phillip Warnell en de 'Oculus Imaginationis'
Vier dagen lang kan je tijdens Homo Futuris in Vooruit komen kijken naar een gloednieuwe installatie en performance van Phillip Warnell. Voor ‘O-Unseen footage, Radiated Image’ ging de Britse kunstenaar onder andere te rade bij de 17de eeuwse wetenschapper Robert Fludd en diens theorie van de Oculus Imaginationis.
Vision of the Triple Soul in the Body
from Robert Fludd, Of This World and the Other, 1619.
Insubstantial Pageants: Spirit Visions, Soul Traces
Marina Warner
Excerpt
1:The Eye of the Imagination In the early seventeenth century, Robert Fludd, an Oxford-educated physician of wide-ranging and esoteric learning, pictured the interior of the brain containing several interlinked souls, including the imaginative soul: “fantasy or imagination itself,” writes Fludd, “since it beholds not the true pictures of corporeal or sensory things, but their likenesses and as it were, their shadows.”1 A later illustration shows an eye in the same position of the imaginative soul, labeled the “oculus imaginationis.” This “eye of the imagination” radiates a tableau of images: thought-pictures or phantasmata, as Aristotle called them, envisioned by human consciousness. This inner eye, as figured by Fludd, does not receive images: it projects them onto a screen that lies beyond the back of the head, floating in a space that does not exist except in fantasy.
The notion of an inner eye persisted, with both Descartes and John Locke offering different models for this human faculty of visualization and its relation to thinking itself. Locke conceived of “the human mind as an inner space in which both pains and clear and distinct ideas passed in review before an Inner Eye. . . . The novelty was the notion of a single inner space in which bodily and perceptual sensations . . . were objects of quasi-observation. . . . ”2 Since the novelty of this conception, communications media have made possible the material projections of these ideas into the public arena: the various dark chambers of modern experience, from the photographic apparatus itself to the cinema. The history of phantoms today is indissolubly entangled with the history of optics, the understanding of perception, and theories of imagination and consciousness.
Early models of our interior cinema have impinged with different force: Fludd hardly at all since he was a mystic and an eccentric, Descartes and Locke far more durably. Today, we are chiefly the inheritors of Romantic and Victorian adaptations of the metaphor: Wordsworth’s famous poem “Daffodils” evokes “That inward eye, /That is the bliss of solitude. . . .”
In l824, Dr. Samuel Hibbert published a book about visions, which included an elaborate foldout chart about dream states, on which he set out a “Formula of the various comparative Degrees of Faintness, Vividness, or Intensity, supposed to subsist between Sensations and Ideas. . . .” He tabulated eight transitions in his full cycle, ranging from Perfect Sleep to Somnambulism by way of “the common state of Watchfulness” to “the tranquil state” to “extreme mental excitement,” and graded no less than fifteen different phases in each of them. They start from “Degree of vividness at which consciousness begins,” where it is still possible to impose the will on vision, to “Intense excitements of the mind necessary for the production of spectres.”3
Dr. Hibbert (1782-1848) was not a singular man of his time; his efforts reflect a pervasive interest in the mind’s workings, with numerous counterparts in the literature of psychology, biology, medicine, and literature. Although he is himself pretty much forgotten today, his book created a stir because he went on to argue that stomach disorders were a chief source of hallucination, visions, déjà-vu, nightmares, and even mental distress, and that this physical organ could overbear the mind to the point of altering a person’s identity. In a still-Christian age, such radical materialism was extreme, and there was a flurry of counter-arguments.4
Contemporary artists have persevered, ever more intensely as the twenty-first century begins, in exploring the workings of fantasia; they have also transformed the character of modern media to suit this enterprise, pressing photography, video, film, sound recording, and other scientific technologies previously linked with indexical objectivity and documentary use to the expression of subjective vision and increasingly hallucinatory and spectral suggestion. These phantasmata need vehicles to take form, however. John Donne wrote:
. . . as an angel face and wings Of air, not pure as it, yet pure doth wear, So thy love may be my love’s sphere . . .5
Correspondingly, the eye of the imagination today also needs to clothe the uncanny and its emanations in metaphor-in air, light, and other qualities traditionally evoking the presence of the incorporeal. Paradoxically, consciousness of the immaterial has to cast its objects in elements borrowed from the physical and material world: it is impossible to imagine outside the frame of reference in which natural phenomena enclose us. Yet matter itself has been changing its nature, bodies dissolving and phenomena dematerializing with the discoveries of science, from the presence of virtually imperceptible gases, numerous waves, and the quanta of particle physics. Alongside the physiological mechanisms that produce phantasmata, the ethereal vesture that the mind has traditionally adapted to express the invisible presents a possible response to the question that arises: What does the inner eye think with?
2: The Logic of the Imaginary At the beginning of his remarkable study Thinking with Demons, the historian Stuart Clark writes, “To make any kind of sense of the witchcraft beliefs of the past, we need to begin with language. By this I mean not only the terms in which they were expressed, and the general systems of meanings they presupposed, but the question of how language authorizes any kind of belief at all.”6 To understand how scientific pioneers combined innovations and inventions that have shaped modern culture and mapping human consciousness according to new compass points, with their experiments in time travel, raising specters, talking to dead, and revisiting multiple past lives and past selves, we too need to look at language, in the wider sense of metaphor, visual and verbal, for this provides the material with which the inward eye clothes its visions.
Just as the “gospels of the poor” materialized on the walls of churches’ divine mysteries, such as the Last Judgment and the punishments awaiting the damned, so modern languages of spirit phenomena-the iconotexts of the modern uncanny-project their existence into our minds: everyone pretty much knows what a ghost looks like, in the same way as a seventeenth-century witch finder could identify the signs of a devil’s presence. The psychic experiments of the Victorian age, for all their use of the latest media, adapted an ancient syntax, grammar, and vocabulary of spirit communications. The very intelligibility of séance phenomena and ghost photography depends on handed-down expressions, on habitual ways of envisioning, on codes known, assembled, and disassembled in cognitive patterns that have been learned and passed on. But in their blur and fumble, they also show how these traces grasp at shared characters and figures in the effort to communicate. The apprehension of mysteries, within the natural and outside it, is as rooted in the mind’s freight of empirically acquired patterns of data and thought as is the mastery of a new skill. Unseen phenomena-spirits like angels and cherubs, shades of the dead, ethereal or astral bodies, subtle matter-have been visualized and communicated so effectively that the conventions they rely on and adapt have themselves become invisible. The metaphors that enflesh them introduce them into reality. But that reality can only be expressed through metaphor. Metaphor acts as the structuring principle for approaching these obstinate and wonderful mysteries. Poetry, poetic language, the imagery of art and literature give us the necessary tools in this impossible quest. As Mary Carruthers points out in her study of memory, “[philosophical] questions . . . proceed from assumptions embedded deeply within a culture’s habits of mind, those presuppositions about human and cosmic nature that are absorbed in earliest education and often survive to colour all subsequent experience. . . .”7
Nobody, except perhaps a child seeing a baroque angel for the first time, finds it strange that a naked boy could hurl himself sotto-in-sù from heaven’s ceiling on swan’s white pinions, or that lost loved ones should return with arms stiffly held by their sides and wrapped head to foot in the shroud in which they were buried. Yet these are conventions that govern “the logic of the imaginary”8; they authorize belief, and the story of their development can be told.
1:Robert Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi . . . historia (The History . . . of this World and the Other), Oppenheim, 1617-21.
2:Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton: Princeton University Press, l979, pp. 49-50, quoted in J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer on Vision and Modernity in the l9th Century, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993, p. 43.
3:Samuel Hibbert, Sketches of the Philosophy of Apparitions, Edinburgh and London, second edition l825; New York: Arno Press, 1975.
4: See Simon Wilson, “Gastric Fantastic,“ Fortean Times 180, February 2004.
5: John Donne, Poems of John Donne, ed. E.K. Chambers, London, l896, Vol. 1, pp. 21-22. See E.M.W.Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1943, pp. 45-60.
6: Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997, p. 3.
7: Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory, Cambridge, 1990; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 48.
(gepost op 19 sep 2006 door Tom Bonte)
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- Philip Warnell
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