Reimagining Communication: Mediation

Michael Filimowicz, Veronika Tzankova, Michael Filimowicz, Veronika Tzankova

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351015417
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Reimagining Communication: Mediation explores information and media technologies across a variety of contemporary platforms, uses, content variations, audiences, and professional roles.

A diverse body of contributions in this unique interdisciplinary resource offers perspectives on digital games, social media, photography, and more. The volume is organized to reflect a pedagogical approach of carefully laddered and sequenced topics, which supports experiential, project-based learning in addition to a course's traditional writing requirements. As the field of Communication Studies has been continuously growing and reaching new horizons, this volume synthesizes the complex relationship of communication to media technologies and its forms in a uniquely accessible and engaging way.

This is an essential introductory text for advanced undergraduate and graduate students and scholars of communication, broadcast media, and interactive technologies, with an interdisciplinary focus and an emphasis on the integration of new technologies.

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Media Archaeology and Mediation

The Magic Lantern as an Object of Theoretical Reflection

Francisco Javier Frutos-Esteban and Carmen López-San Segundo

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Magic Lantern

Media Archaeology

Phantasmagoria

Concept of Mediation

Early Visual Culture

Introduction

The public or private sessions of magic lantern that combined the projection of images, the recitation of texts and the interpretation of musical melodies reached an important sociocultural relevance at the international level in different contexts related to science, education and popular culture between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In order to reach their objectives, these sessions used a new device. This device adopted different names such as ‘phantoscope’, ‘megascope’, ‘solar microscope’ or ‘projection lantern’, and it was recognized as a very popular means of social communication under the generic term of ‘magic lantern’. It was a means that Charles Dickens himself compared, for its versatility and variety of content, to no less than the city of London. In 1846, in Lausanne (Switzerland), the British author when he started working on Dombey and Son confessed to his biographer and friend John Forster that he felt nostalgia for the London urban bustle with the following words:

It seems as if they supplied something to my brain, which it cannot bear, when busy, to lose. For a week or a fortnight, I can write prodigiously in a retired place (as at Broadstairs), and a day in London sets me up again and starts me. But the toil and labour of writing, day after day, without that magic lantern is immense!!

(Forster, 1873, p. 382)

If Dickens, who captured as much as anyone the social changes of Victorian England, was inspired by London to create his works, the city that was his muse and which he called his ‘magic lantern’, the French writer Henri Beyle – better known under the pseudonym Stendhal – also did so and compared the magic lantern with his own head. He did this in Rome, Naples and Florence in 1818, a book that is a declaration of his love for Italy and which has now passed into history to describe so-called ‘Stendhal syndrome’, the kind of ecstasy that occurs when contemplating an accumulation of art and beauty over very little space and time: ‘My head is a magic lantern; I am having fun with the crazy or tender images that my imagination presents to me’ (Collignon, 1868, p. 188).

The magic lantern sessions, which caught the attention of such illustrious celebrities, had as their central element the projection slides. Habitually they were made of transparent glass, the slides were the basis of any session – public or private, educational or playful – and they illustrated fables, tales, allegories, comedies, dissemination subjects or current events. One of them inspired Arthur Rimbaud to write in Roche, in 1873, part of his famous poem ‘A Season in Hell’. In the only work published by the French poet, one of the most popular religious magic lantern images is referenced; and he described himself as a ‘master of phantasmagoria’ (Rimbaud, 1970, p. 25).

By the end of the nineteenth century, after being a part of all areas of the social sphere, the magic lantern was an extremely versatile device. Therefore, it is not surprising that it was a very heterogeneous market, competitive and with a diversified demand articulated around it. A market consequence of a highly fertile industrial and commercial activity that was oriented to both dissemination and entertainment, it was aimed at two well-defined sectors: the professional, with products and services for institutions and public shows; and the domestic sector, for the amateur and children’s market. They were witnesses in both the public and in the private spheres, as the first pages of the famous novel By the Way of Swann showed, the first volume, published in 1913, of the seven that compose In Search of Lost Time. A text in which Marcel Proust evokes a typical domestic session of the magic lantern gives rise to the French author to introduce the conflicts of the protagonist of the work: ‘Someone had had the happy idea of giving me, to distract me on evenings when I seemed abnormally wretched, a magic lantern, which used to be set on top of my lamp while we waited for dinner-time to come’ (Proust, 2017, p. 37).

Although the magic lantern developed a successful equipment industry and satisfied a varied demand for consumer practices, from the development of various expressive forms, its interest as a scientific object unfortunately has been outside of the academic research focus until the late twentieth century. Frutos and López (2008) indicate the dispersion of its collections and its conceptual lack of definition as an object of study – both due to the chronological breadth of their history, which runs between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as the controversial interpretation which linked the magic lantern with the term ‘precinema’ – these would be two of the reasons that explain why the magic lantern was for decades a media in the shade. Fortunately, there has been a change of trend over the last two decades which has shed light on the magic lantern and has resulted in the redoubled editorial efforts of the prestigious English association The Magic Lantern Society, in the works of ‘Media Archaeology’ – Zielinski (2008), Hutahmo and Parikka (2011) – or in the development of international multidisciplinary research projects such as ‘A Million Pictures: Magic Lantern Slide Heritage as Artefacts in the Common European History of Learning’; ‘Dynamics of Educational and Scientific Renovation in Secondary School Classrooms (1900–1936): An Iberian Perspective’; ‘B-magic or The Magic Lantern and its Cultural Impact as Visual Mass Medium in Belgium (1830–1940)’; or ‘Educational and Scientific Challenges of the Second Spanish Republic: Internalization, Popularization and Innovation in Universities and Schools’.

To follow the previous trend the present text conceives the magic lantern as an archaeological object of study and for this reason it relies on current theory from media archaeology and the genetic-cultural approach. The present text has tried to provide a vision of ‘Media History’ – in which the magic lantern is inscribed as an object of study – it is closer to what would be a hypothetical ‘natural history of the sign’ in the terms Vygotsky formulated (1991). This approach would contribute to make an appropriate analysis of the role played by the mediated communication – mediation social and instrumental – in the formation and development of the human being as a historical-cultural being.

The Magic Lantern and Media Archaeology

In light of Frutos’s (2008) recent comprehensive review of magic lantern audiovisual projections, this second part of the text will only seek to update and expand that review via contributions that see magic lanterns as archaeological remains, and, therefore, as items that may be studied within the scope of media archaeology. In his study, Frutos (2008) attributes great value to the editorial work undertaken by The Magic Lantern Society in safeguarding memory related to magic lanterns. As for other contemporary monographs on magic lanterns, Frutos (2008) is more critical and claims that they have fallen victim to excessive isolation and statism as a consequence of decades in which they were constructed as a dependent object of study and understood as mere technical, expressive or industrial forerunners to other social communication media. For example, given the continuity that can be established between magic lantern audiovisual projections and cinematographic ones, among those who study cinema the idea took hold from the outset that the study of magic lanterns should be part of the history of cinema, and more specifically, the ‘archaeology of cinema’ (Ceram, 1965) or ‘precinema’, a period that has been so well established that it even constructs the archives and museums related to the history and heritage of the seventh art.

It is not only the history of cinema that has turned the magic lantern into a mere antecedent of its object of study. Historia de la Fotografía (Sougez, 1991) reproduces the same blueprint of estrangement proposed by cinematic historiography and places magic lanterns in a phase labelled ‘prephotography’: ‘Another kind of theoretical limbo that equally seeks to legitimize archaeologically the sectoral history of photography’ (Frutos, 2008, p. 168). Some accounts from the history of performing arts have also included magic lantern audiovisual projections within so-called ‘paratheatrical’ techniques, and other sectoral histories associated with the broad spectrum of the narrative tradition have placed them in fields such as ‘paraliterary’ and ‘intertextual’ studies (Fernández, 2006).

That said, it is true that Gombrich (1987), an art historian, was one of the first to raise the need to reflect on how art and aesthetics might relate to the visual technologies that arose from the fifteenth century onward. Gombrich’s reflections were continued by authors such as Bryson (1988) or Crary (1990) who openly suggested that the gaze is a cultural construct whose history may be related to the history of the arts, technology, the media and, by extension, all social practices involving the creation and reception of cultural content. For example, Bryson further explored the hypothesis of the gaze as a social construction and as a system of codes interposed between the perceived world and our conscience:

Inserted between the subject and the world is the total sum of discourses that manufacture visuality, that cultural construct, and make visuality different from vision, the notion of immediate visual experience. Inserted between the retina and the world is the screen of signs, a screen that consists of all of the many discourses on vision that are embodied in the social arena.

(Bryson, 1988, pp. 91–92)

In fact, Bryson went a step further and said that visual culture could not be accommodated in the definition of its object of study as the result of the ‘social construction of the visual field’ and that emphasis should be placed on exploring the reverse of this proposition, namely ‘the visual construction of the social field’:

Postmodernism has supposed that we are moving beyond this episteme and that we recognize that the visual field that we inhabit is a field of meanings and not only of forms and is penetrated by verbal and visual discourses, by signs; and these signs are socially constructed, just as we are … Visuality [is] something that is constructed cooperatively; we are therefore responsible for it.

(Bryson, 1988, p. 107)

Very recently – and as a result, Frutos (2008) does not include this contribution – media archaeology has continued to reflect along the same lines on social communication media such as magic lanterns. Media archaeology is an interdiscipline that claims authors such as Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky and Marshall McLuhan as precursors or fundamental sources of inspiration. Through academics such as Zielinski (2008) or Hutahmo and Parikka (2011), the emerging field of media archaeology has become a practice that ‘digs’ into cultural and media phenomena that are forgotten, marginalized or suppressed, to turn them into a powerful tool that makes it possible to discover underlying phenomena in the history of social communication media. As Zielinski comments:

The idea is to begin just a few inquiries into the different strata of the histories that we ourselves conceive as ‘histories of the media’ in order to pick out the signs of a ‘butterfly effect’, in a few places at a minimum, in reference to both the hardware and the software of the audiovisual.

(Zielinski, 2008, p. 23)

Media archaeology may be associated with the historiographical trend that, according to Burke (2000), understands historical knowledge as a ‘problem’ rather than as a ‘narrative’. If the latter considers the historian as an objective actor capable of eliminating the viewpoint in which he or she is installed, the former critiques not so much the construction of a narrative about historical knowledge – which has an educational value – as it does precisely the creation of a supposedly objective discourse about such knowledge, which it understands to be a serious theoretical and methodological error. According to Burke, because historical knowledge problematizes ways of understanding the past, it is in a position to overcome the limitations faced by more traditional history: the presumption of objectivity; the erasure of traces of the historian; the excesses of narrativism, linearity and teleology; the lack of reflection on the historical object and historiographic endeavour; and sector-based and thematic isolationism.

In barely a decade, media archaeology has developed an interesting practice of interdisciplinary knowledge that Natale (2012) groups around three principles: (1) criticism of the very idea of a linear progress in the development of media and of the idea that media forms are the result of an orderly development that goes from the simplest to the most complex and from the most primitive to the most sophisticated; (2) attention and inquiry in relation to episodes in media history that have been undervalued or little studied to offer innovative explanations that make it possible to discover underlying phenomena in the history of social communication media; (3) a certain theoretical and methodological freedom that makes media archaeology more of a series of fragmentary studies that communicate transversally or tangentially and fall far short of seeking to form a systematized corpus, hence Zielinski’s (2008) label of ‘anarchaeology’.

Although the principles set out by Natale show the strengths of media archaeology in offering a renewed understanding of the history of social communication media, Druckrey (2006) also detects internal weaknesses:

The mere rediscovery of the forgotten, the establishment of eccentric palaeontologies and idiosyncratic genealogies, an uncertain lineage, the excavation of old technologies or images, and the recounting of errant technical developments are in themselves insufficient for the construction of a consistent discursive methodology.

(p. 60)

It is therefore necessary to continue to promote the opening up of media archaeology as a discipline, incorporating new theoretical contributions. This is the task that the following section will undertake by connecting magic lanterns – as a part of media archaeology – with the genetic-cultural approach to apply them to what could be a chapter of a hypothetical ‘natural history of the sign’ dedicated to the phantasmagoria offered by Robertson in Madrid in 1821.

Madrid, 1821: Phantasmagoria and the Natural History of the Sign

Phantasmagoria as a stage show linked to the systematic use of audio-visual projections from magic lanterns spread throughout Europe in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, especially after the 1798 Paris debut of the sessions led by Frenchman Étienne-Gaspard Robert, better known by his nickname, Robertson. Until the end of 1830, Robertson offered his phantasmagoria shows in Paris, and during short periods, he travelled to other European capitals to exhibit his show: Berlin, between November 1809 and February 1810; Prague, in December 1810; and Madrid, between January and February 1821. This section does not seek to provide new data on the phantasmagoria offered by Robertson in Madrid in 1821. The present section of the text makes an attempt to explore phantasmagoria as an instrumental mediation, in the sense that this concept is understood in the historical-cultural approach, to then be able to assimilate it to the context of a ‘Natural History of the Sign’ in the terms posited by L.S. Vygotsky. For this, in the first place, it is necessary to put some value on Vygotsky’s legacy for science.

The Value of the Historical-Cultural Approach for Science

Although the historical-cultural approach has a long history of contributions, its greatest merit has to do with the way it conceives of the production of scientific knowledge (Rodríguez, 2010). It is a conception that is...