ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Artisanal Contributions to the Critique of Enlightenment Theories of Perception

• In Event: Debating Science in the Enlightenment

English Abstract

I will use experiential media archaeology to question persistent academic myths about the camera obscura as an Enlightenment epistemological figure. I invite participants to re-experience media artefacts that explore alternatives to the idea that seeing is viewing perspective paintings on the retina. These include dynamic viewers such as Kepler’s rotating camera obscura and optical machines for hybrid projections that widened the angle of view well beyond the 60º of the fixed perspectival eye. We will examine the theatrical coulisse: its use in optical boxes and sometimes in glass with concave mirrors. These exploit motion-parallax and variations in focus. In all cases the visual is not an image but a temporal flow of visual-tactile sensations that the mind re-constructs as spatial experience.

This mysterious process of construction, that many likened to the hidden machinery of theatre illusions, was seized upon by philosophers like Descartes and Berkeley who drove home its skeptical implications for empiricist epistemology. Commitment to empiricism made other theorists hesitant or willfully blind to these new ideas. The dominant paradigm had its own seductions which we will explore: Brunelleschi’s proof of the truth of perspective, and Hoogstraten’s demonstration (and implicit critique) of perspective’s reliance on a fixed point of sight.

Finally, we will consider an anti-camera obscura – a projection device that was Kant’s metaphor for the constructive work of the mind. Through a novel methodological approach, I recover the marginal “voice” of artisanal knowledge embedded in artefacts and thereby bring into sharper focus contestation of prevailing Enlightenment ideas concerning perception and representation.

Author

• Rod Bantjes, St. Francis Xavier University