Mirrors

Aura Satz is putting together a show at the Whitechapel Galleries whose a catalogue will include a bunch of academics and art theorists playing exquisite corpse on the theme of magic. Here’s my effort which starts from the sentence “Mirrors should reflect a little, before throwing back reflections”. It’s a kind of collage.

But mirrors twist and subvert those cultures that happen to invent them. With the arrival of mirrors, epistemologies buckle, new technologies spring into being, forms of entertainment are transformed (not least magical entertainments), the empire of illusion acquires a powerful, new weapon, a transformative metaphorics enters language with a life of its own, and the temptation to believe that the mind can mirror the real takes hold. Such drives do not work to a single end, in part because mirrors make more illusion and magic in the world at the same time as they take magic and illusion away from it (for instance as they help the category of mimesis replace that of divine inspiration). Then too: the mirror is both a real thing forming the basis for the production of other real things but also an idea, a model. No real mirror actually truly mirrors. And so mirrors lie at the epicentre of a cultural problematic: they make waves. Let's look at one especially intense moment in this history of the waves that mirrors make: the British eighteenth-century’s 'mature enlightenment'. Here's Lord Shaftesbury, the godfather of modern aesthetics and taste-cultures on magic mirrors: "And what was of singular note in these magical glasses, it would happen that, by constant and long inspection, the parties accustomed to the practice would acquire a peculiar speculative habit, so as virtually to carry about with them a sort of pocket-mirror, always ready and in use. In this, there were two faces which would naturally present themselves to our view: one of them, like the commanding genius, the leader and chief; the other like that rude, undisciplined, and headstrong creature whom we ourselves in our natural capacity most exactly resembled. Whatever we were employed in, whatever we set about, if once we had acquired the habit of this mirror we should, by virtue of the double reflection, distinguish ourselves into two different parties. And in this dramatic method, the work of self-inspection would proceed with admirable success." Here mirrors split the soul. About forty years later the French scientist Buffon thought of using mirrors with rather less subtlety: he deployed 168 mirrors to form one giant 'burning mirror' to fire up a pile of wood across the other side of the Thames. It was a notion imitated (mirrored) early in the career of Etienne-Gaspard Robertson, about to become the phantasmagoria’s greatest entrepreneur. Robertson presented his burning mirror to the Academy of Sciences in Paris hoping to produce a killer weapon in the service of the Revolution’s war against Britain. His main improvement was to increase its size and set it on wheels. But the idea went nowhere and Robertson’s mirror ended up in the collection of the powerful French state scientist Jacques-Alexander Charles. Indeed across the eighteenth-century, and leaving the magic lantern aside, mirror technologies were most widely disseminated through the vues d'optique that became extremely popular across Europe. English print publishers like John Bowles and Robert Sayer made fortunes from them: they were both a technical revolution and a fashion craze. Vues d'optique created the illusion of perspective when viewed with a zograscope, deploying a series of reflecting mirrors to enhance the illusion of three-dimensional depth in the print. Most contained heavily coloured, horizontal images of cities and landscapes which, disseminated by itinerant showmen, were seen by almost the whole European population. In an inverted sense they belong to the history of mass tourism: one historian has gone so far to claim that the vue d'optique was the first medium to bring the visible appearance of distant places to a large European public, in what was in effect a new stage in the mirroring of the world. But they could have more aestheticised applications too. Around 1770 Merlin's Museum in London advertised a domestic art gallery using the technology: "A Cabinet in which several coloured Prints, by the most celebrated Artists, may be caused to pass in succession before a large concave mirror, at the pleasure of the person who views them". As the actual manufacture of mirrors became more sophisticated, and mirror surfaces truer, more high-powered magical technologies were developed. The famous London optician John Cuff was deeply involved in the invention of one such, the solar microscope, whose invention is more usually assocated with the names of the European natural philosophers Lieberkuhn and Gabriel Fahrenheit who wanted to use it for anatomical research and pedagogy. Cuff made breakthroughs in microscope development because of the way he deployed mirrors to increase the brightness of the viewed image, including the famous Lieberkuhn reflector whose curvature was optimized to focus the maximum amount of ambient light onto a specimen’s surface. But, as was often the way, solar microscopes reached their biggest audiences in Britian not through science but through stage magic, and specifically in the shows of the comic magician, marketing genius and nostrum salesman, Katterfelto, whose shows and ads were a sensation in the 1780s. In these shows, using the solar microscope he projected images of bacteria (‘maggots’) fomenting in meat and cheese. He also performed conjuring tricks, including the gun-trick, in which he would catch with his teeth a bullet shot at him by a member of the audience. And he demonstrated electrical and magnetic phenomena. Towards the end of his career his daughter (wearing a huge steel helmet) was lifted to the ceiling by means of a magnet. He also exhibited ‘air pumps,’ and a ‘perpetual motion’ machine. Flirting with demonism, he conjured up an occult world— microscopic, electrical, magnetic, and illusory—controlled by devils led by his famous black cat, and declared himself master of this dark universe. On the back of this mock diabolism and natural magic, he proffered advice on how to avoid being duped by gamesters and confidence tricksters, whose wiles he demonstrated with further conjuring tricks. Collaborators masquerading as boorish members of the audience would interrupt his performances and try to vandalise his apparatus. These mock-disturbances enabled him to erupt in mock Germanic rage; putting on his ‘terrific Death’s Head Hussar’s Cap’ and drawing an immense rusty sword (both of which supposedly had belonged to his grandfather) he would break out into a comedy routine. He also sold phosphorous matches, nostrums against influenza, and alarms. From Katterfelto it’s not such a huge leap to Monk Lewis’s fictional sensation of 1795, The Monk. Here’s that bestseller’s key mirror scene: “She [Matilda] put the Mirror into his hand. Curiosity induced him to take it, and Love, to wish that Antonia might appear. Matilda pronounced the magic words. Immediately, a thick smoke rose from the characters traced upon the borders, and spread itself over the surface. It dispersed again gradually; A confused mixture of colours and images presented themselves to the Friar's eyes, which at length arranging themselves in their proper places, He beheld in miniature Antonia's lovely form. The scene was a small closet belonging to her apartment. She was undressing to bathe herself. The long tresses of her hair were already bound up. The amorous Monk had full opportunity to observe the voluptuous contours and admirable symmetry of her person. She threw off her last garment, and advancing to the Bath prepared for her, She put her foot into the water. It struck cold, and She drew it back again. Though unconscious of being observed, an in-bred sense of modesty induced her to veil her charms; and She stood hesitating upon the brink, in the attitude of the Venus de Medicis. At this moment a tame Linnet flew towards her, nestled its head between her breasts, and nibbled them in wanton play. The smiling Antonia strove in vain to shake off the Bird, and at length raised her hands to drive it from its delightful harbour. Ambrosio could bear no more: His desires were worked up to phrenzy."I yield!" He cried, dashing the mirror to the ground: "Matilda, I follow you! Do with me what you will!" The Monk’s big mistake here is to dash the mirror to the ground, it’s all downhill for him from there. Antonia only exists as sex goddess in the magic mirror, in the real world she’s a demonic illusion. Amongst much else, in taking the mirror image as real, the Monk forgoes his chance to become an artist, since, according to Richard Hurd, a leading theorist of the day, the artist is a kind of mirror who creates a 'shadowy ideal world, though unsubstantial as the American vision of souls, yet glows with such apparent life, that it becomes, thenceforth the object of other mirrors, and is itself original to future reflexions.’ The American vision of souls?

Richard Hurd and culture

I’m preparing for an essay on the pre-history of historical reenactments in the 18thc. (Don’t ask how I got into this one...it’s way off field...but it’s turning out strangely fascinating....) And in the process I am reading Richard Hurd’s essay on imitation and also his Moral and Political Dialogues, work which is remarkably little known. Hurd was a Anglican parson, who became a bishop, but who had grasped what we might think of the sociological, historicist turn that we usually associate with Scottish enlightenment about the same time as the Edinburgh/Glasgow crowd, if not completely independently. (I’m not entirely clear about influences here.) Hurd is no proponent of sympathy and emulation though: he’s a Lockean not a Shaftesbury person. But the point is: that for him the notion that nature and in particular human nature is uniform (that is, is formed in chains of cause and effects in the same way under different environments or contexts) leads to the embrace of cultural difference rather than it’s elision. (This is to speak our academic language not his.) The reason for this is: all varieties of human society and culture belong to nature (a nature which is basically an expression of God’s will) and none can be written off or demonised as pagan. The other important consequence of this line of thought is to marginalise the classical heritage. Hurd was an associate of those like Thomas Percy, another Anglican parson, who tried to bring the primitive literatures of the world into British circulation at exactly the time he was writing.

The aesthetics of resistance

I’ve begun reading Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance, a 3-vol novel, or rather essay-novel, with minimal paragraph or chapter breaks about adolescent German communist revolutionaries in the thirties and their involvement in the Spanish civil war.
1937 actually: an interesting year, the Communist party is underground and the Nazi ‘madness’ (as the characters call it) is overwhelming; their faith in the bolshevik experiment is being tested and about to be tested further. The Spanish civil war offers hope but in the main they retreat into aestheticism, wrestling with the problem of how to connect their love of art, including modernist art, to the increasingly utopian project of proletarian revolution.
It begins with a brilliant and conscious tour-de-force: a description of the Pergamon frieze in the Berlin museum, in a style which has clearly learnt much from Thomas Bernhard. And perhaps also from a nouvelle roman-ist like Claude Simon. But the difference is that the books written in the interest (or seems to be) of old-fashioned vulgar Marxism. History becomes the story of ceaseless class struggle: it looks like there’s a massive gap between the novel’s stylistic and literary sophistication and the characters’ (which may also be the author’s?) political analysis.
I’ll stay my judgment on the novel till I’ve read more, but I’m interested in it because I do have a sense that the strongest writing globally in the postwar period has been in German (Bernhard, Sebald, Grass, Jelinek, Kluge, Bachmann, Handke). The reason for this would appear to be that early twentieth-century history in Germany and Austria knocked ideologies of nationalism and progressivism off their perch, leaving writers particularly close to something we might call the real, capable of particularly hard critique and and then too attempting to rescue something of old German aestheticism out of the wreckage. (The emphasis on the Holocaust tends to miss what’s especially vital about postwar German writing.)
And of course these characters are almost of the same age as my father who was kicked out of school in Germany (Salem down south admittedly....but I think in ‘37), though god only knows my dad was no revolutionary.

The novel also speaks to two current politico-intellectual obsessions: 1) is revolution still possible? (and if so, by whom, and against and towards what?) and 2) what’s politically at stake with the aesthetic realm (an image of the good life, a critique of the bad life, or a retreat from social participation to take up just three options). The Weiss description of the Pergamon frieze is particularly apt in relation to the second of these questions since aesthetics is originally defined around sculpture in large part (Lessing, Winckelmann, Herder) since sculpture is the art of all arts in which more one sense is being appealed to (touch and vision) and in which the autonomy of each particular sense first becomes apparent to German theorists. Aesthetics is formed around the question: what’s the relation between the different senses, in terms of the pleasure and cognition they each may make available? Art is that which specialises in the communication of pleasures and cognitions stimulated by a particular sense, though it may seek to transfer these to another sense. For Weiss, his working class communists inhabit a profoundly aestheticised world, but one which speaks to them of their social oppression at the same time as it offers solace from the world organized through that oppression.