How is vision experienced? In what ways can visual experience be articulated? What points of reference might be used to communicate what it was like? How might someone who did not share the experience be made to understand it? What roles do technologies play in these questions?
This book considers these as historical questions, seeking to answer them within the historical situation of Victorian Britain. What is uncovered is a range of visual discourses that facilitated, informed, and shaped the way people conceptualised and articulated visual experience. The following pages form a detailed examination of discursive modes of expression alongside modes of perception in order to trace how sight, thought, and text converged to shape ideas and experiences in the nineteenth century. The purpose of this examination is twofold: first, to deepen our understanding of the roles played by visual technologies in imaginative cognition and perceptual experience; and, second, to move away from a paradigmatic historicising of monodynamic visual “experience” to a pluralistic understanding of polydynamic “experiences” which, while involving metaphors, figures, and discourses, often pushed back against these cultural forces in expressions of singular individuality. One of the arguments of this book is that the relationship between cultural discourse and individual subjectivity is constantly under negotiation in the nineteenth century and always open to intervention and interpretation. Paradigmatic models are useful for understanding one-half of this relation, but the other half requires a sensitivity to the individual, the contingent, and the singular. Equally, individual vision is not isolated vision and so must be understood, in part, through its discursive relations.1
In the decades since visual theory came to cross-disciplinary prominence in the 1980s, often captured using the term “visuality,” there has been a wide range of impressively detailed work on visual culture and its wider historical relations. Yet, as Nicholas Mirzoeff reminds us, the term “visuality” is not modern at all but was first coined by the eminent Victorian social commentator and philosopher Thomas Carlyle in the 1830s.2 It is perhaps, then, unsurprising that visual theory has in particular been embraced by scholars working in nineteenth-century studies, a field which has seen a proliferation of studies, either wholly or in part, concerned with visual culture. These studies have especially been influenced by Jonathan Crary’s argument that the nineteenth century experienced a broad cultural transition from objective to subjective perception that echoes into our present day.3 Alongside this argument, other theorists such as Martin Jay and W.J.T. Mitchell have suggested theoretical models for understanding visuality through concepts like “scopic regimes” and “hypericons.”4 These theoretical perspectives have then been fleshed out by wide-ranging historical work from scholars working in Victorian studies who have given richly historicised accounts of nineteenth-century forms of visuality.5 Despite this wealth of valuable work, however, a clear picture of the interactions between the different facets of nineteenth-century visual culture has yet to emerge.
The writing of this book was motivated by two questions: how was perceptual experience mediated by nineteenth-century British culture, and what effects did this mediation have on the way experiences were conceptualised and articulated? From these questions are derived the following hypotheses:
- 1.Spatio-temporal experience of the world has historically been primarily understood through visual perception and through images.6
- 2.In the nineteenth century, there was a significant increase in the development and accessibility of visual technologies which generated and replicated new ways of seeing.7
- 3.The nineteenth-century explosion in print culture radically enhanced the ability of textual and visual sources to shape individual processes of conceptualisation and articulation.8
- 4.This ability was practised, unconsciously and consciously, through cultural discourses formed around specific parameters of visual experience. While fluctuating across boundaries between texts and contexts, these discourses were most easily and most often expressed using visual technologies as relatively concrete commonalities.
- 5.These discourses were not intrinsically reductive but could be constructive.
- 6.This process, as a whole, constitutes an unprecedented cultural coupling of the technological with the imaginative.
The first of these hypotheses was already clichéd enough in 1888 to have prompted Friedrich Nietzsche’s facetious plea for philosophers to consider their noses and the sense of smell rather than continuing to privilege visual perception .9 The last of these hypotheses has been broadly propagated, often implicitly rather than as explicit argument, over the last couple decades of scholarship.10 However, there remains much to be learned about the historically specific discursive processes through which visual experiences were shaped. It is the contention of this study that perceptual experience, and specifically visual experience, was in many instances conceptualised and articulated via identifiable discourses using visual-technological metaphor and reference (the discursive process iterated in hypotheses 3–5).11
This book, then, begins at the conceptual end—with the idea of the “technological imagination”—in order to untangle the discursive formations and counter-formations by which this operated and came into being. Part of the motivation for this approach is the sense that our current understanding of nineteenth-century visuality is sometimes unwittingly caught between broad cultural trajectories and highly detailed explorations of specific works and contexts. Between this breadth and depth, it can be difficult to understand how the complications of the singular inform, and are in turn informed by, their interrelations with the broader whole. This book hopes to clarify these interrelations by showing that texts, media, and technologies operated within specific and identifiable discursive formations that Victorian readers and writers were aware of and, in some cases, made conscious efforts to utilise.
As will be seen, many of these discourses were organised around visual-technological metaphors. Terry Castle explains, for example, how discourses of “spectrerealization” were organised around the metaphor of the phantasmagoria to communicate the “absorption of ghosts into the world of thought.”12 Such an example shows us the importance of perceptual-technological metaphors. Without the central metaphor—the phantasmagoria—writers are left grappling with two abstract and intangible phenomena: ghosts and thoughts. The metaphor tethers the unfamiliar and the abstract to the concrete and familiar. Such discursive practices were as common as the technologies and shows they utilised, and constituted an unprecedented association between mechanical technological operation and imaginative cognition which for ease I have designated the “technological imagination.”
Beginning with the end as it were, it is helpful to consider here what kinds of relations are implied by a term such as “technological imagination.” The following section will give a brief overview of the changing relations of technology (in my account, primarily visual) and the imagination during the course of the nineteenth century.13 From this overview, we can then begin the process of reverse engineering these relations to investigate the building blocks that form them—the discourses that shape and inform the many singular moments and events that, en masse, constitute what might be termed “culture.”
The Technological Imagination
In 1855 Lewis Carroll wrote a short story about a “recent extraordinary discovery in Photography,” which, “as applied to the operations of the mind, has reduced the art of novel-writing to the merest mechanical labour.”14 The story, written in the style of a news article, describes a machine which transcribes narrative fiction directly from the human brain. It is powerful enough that “the ideas of the feeblest intellect, when once received on properly prepared paper, could be ‘developed’ up to any required degree of intensity.”15 The narrative follows the machine’s development of a story taken from the mind of a young man of the “very weakest possible physical and mental powers.”16 The story is mechanically intensified from the “milk-and-water School of Novels” into “the strong-minded or Matter-of-Fact School” and finally into “the Spasmodic or German School.”17 In this way, Carroll’s fictional machine, a kind of daguerreotype camera for narrative imagination, realises a fluidity between the visual and the textual, and the technological and the imaginative, that was recurrent in nineteenth-century culture. Indeed, questions about the relationship between the technological and the psychological, between artistic creation and cultural production, strike at the core of nineteenth-century culture and echo deep into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Beyond this short story, Carroll exhibited a comfortable familiarity with the newly important roles technology and visuality played in creative and artistic endeavours. Examples include his well-known interest in photography but also his frequent, sometimes implicit, references to visual and scientific equipment such as telescopes, microscopes, mirrors, stereoscopes, photographs, glass prisms, and, of course, chemicals that cause one to shrink or grow. These are all interests that were widely explored in the popular periodical press and in the wealth of fiction and non-fiction books that proliferated during the nineteenth century.
Carroll’s nonsense poem “The Jabberwocky” (1871) might, in this way, be considered as a literary expression of scientific discussions of the building blocks of language. Carroll would, after all, go on to invent a new linguistic form for his “Nyctograph,” a device he invented to allow him to take notes without having to light a lamp when inspiration struck late at night. Carroll’s poem, in its appearance in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), is written in mirror writing and thus viewable only through the medium of a common everyday visual instrument. The poem itself deconstructs language into nonsense words comprised of phonic elements devoid of recognisable meaning. Yet these words are not complete nonsense—readers can construct meanings based on syntax and homonymic patterns. Carroll even wrote detailed commentaries for the poem, offering definitions and etymologies that are often witty and mimic those one might find in a dictionary.
Such attention to the construction of language had been a feature of popular scientific discussions of technological innovation. The American physician, Jacob Bigelow, for example, considered linguistic formation in his book Elements of Technology (1829) which explained the new technological “arts.” Here Bigelow gives an account of printing presses that offers a speculative history of the development of language (including Chinese and Ancient Egyptian languages). Bigelow writes: “History must have remained uncertain and fabulous, and science been left in perpetual infancy, had it not been for the invention of written characters.”18 Bigelow’s emphasis on the importance of language and his practical deconstruction of its elements (to explain, fo...