I don’t know how I missed it this long.
The camera obscura. This simple Victorian trick everyone’s heard about but half forgotten, where you sit in a dark room, poke a little hole in the wall, and get an inverted projection of the outside scene on your musty chamber wall?
That’s exactly what modernity is. Right here are seen the dark roots of it all. The arbitrary separation. The cutting apart and the reductive analysis. The pervasive dichotomies. The simultaneous negation and detachment of the “objective” observer and his perfect information. The chasm of the correspondence theory of truth rather than the participatory view of common sense.
Even the joint stock company and the separation of liability from the natural person are implicit in this technological ritual.
All of this is just folded up right here in this simple visual experiment, and it did take me quite some time to figure it out. One of those things which are too close to be easily distinguished. The forest for the trees. The guy behind the camera.
But let’s just start from the top. The setup of this little curiosity whose real utility is rather limited, and basically extends to in studying optical phenomena, places the observer in a darkened room (literally a darkened chamber, a camera obscura), with some light entering this room through a tiny opening, projected onto an opposite wall. And the point of this setup is to focus the light that is let in so only what travels directly from different points of the scene or the object that is viewed.
So normally, light is reflected in every direction from the object that is lit, which means that a large opening such a window will let through both direct and indirectly reflected light from the objects outside. Everything will be mixed together and maybe give you a vague reflection of the color of the things outside, but not much else. If you have a building painted in a strong red color on the opposite side of the street from your window, when the sun then hits this building, it will then give off bit of red light into your room.
It’s the same thing when we have a camera maximally out of focus. In this situation, the light that gets projected on the wall of the camera’s own dark chamber is going to be blurred together and vague, but when you get it in proper focus, you have an almost perfect reproduction of the scene.
And the effect when you build of one of these is quite striking. They almost magically give us a projected image of whatever’s on the other side of the small opening, so in the above example, you can see this phenomenon occurring purely by accident when there was a broken tile in the roof of this building at the castle complex in Prague of the Czech Republic. This isn’t fake — the image is simply natural light coming in from the outside through a small hole in the roof, with no artificial projection going on here.
One of the first things people noticed when they built these things was that the complete information of the image is retained in this narrowly focused light that is reflected from it. It doesn’t get “mixed up in the air”, as the early Islamic scientists put it, so that the information would be impossible to separate out. If you only focus the rays that travel directly to the observer from those that are reflected in other directions, you can then recover this undistorted optical information from the illuminated object.
So it’s like you get this vivid example that all of the information about the object outside gets compressed into a little packet that can travel through a small opening, and this is how modern reductionism begins — this is how we started to imagine things like digital information, things like wireless communication and computer simulations, because it was obvious that somehow, all of this information was compressed into a tiny packet, while previously, the experience was that you had to receive the whole object immediately and all at once, but now it becomes possible to imagine the superiority of this kind of indirect and mediated perceptions of the world, and eventually, this got us thinking that all perception was actually indirect.
The camera obscura setup was probably first established as a tool in prehistoric astronomy. Even ancients like Aristotle made use of this approach to study the solar eclipse without having to look directly at it, and as an aid for making drawings of the process of the eclipse and calculating its various aspects more exactly. Johannes Kepler was able to observe sunspots in the 1600s using only this dark room setup, without even the aid of a telescope. And from it’s almost magical effects, and the fact that it enabled a more accurate and clear perception of the details of the world around us, there was a deep fascination with this technology within early modern science, from the Abbassid scientist of the Islamic Golden Age to da Vinci in the 1500s, where this idea that you can get a “pure” image from the outside world in this way played a significant role.
Da Vinci observed that even if you have a setup with the light from two openings intersecting, the images don’t mix or blend or distort, but remain untainted, so you got this seemingly strong example of entirely objective information somehow hidden from our everyday view, but which we could access if we only had the right approach or the right technique. And this idea, inspired by the camera obscura, is also what we see in the reception of the microscope or the telescope, these powerful symbols of how technology allows us to access an objective reality that is hidden from view, how technology can take us beyond our everyday experience — to get at the world as it really is. So you have this fascination with this setup, this measuring device, that in some ways seems to give us more exact information than our everyday experience, and it helps to inspire this idea that we have to get beyond our everyday experience, supported by technology, to access reality as it actually is.
Immanuel Kant, as I’m sure you can imagine, made a great deal out of his realization that the human eye can also be considered a type of camera obscura. This seemed to tell him that there’s already a kind of biological technology in place in the human body for unveiling important aspects of the surrounding reality. We have a kind of biological medium in our very bodies, a natural and immutable barrier that somehow separates our perceptions from the real world in itself.
And this fascination with a simple trick of light really took off in the 1700s, with the device emerging as something of a status symbol among the bourgeoisie, an expression of occult understanding and access to secret knowledge.
As reported by Julie Park in her essay “Watching the world in a dark room”, Horace Walpole, progenitor of the Gothic horror genre,
“wrote enthusiastically to William Mason in 1777 about the way a portable camera obscura makes ‘such pictures as you never saw’ and turned the very rooms and furnishings of his home into ‘Arabian tales’: ‘it improves the beauty of trees,—I don’t know what it does not do’. Encouraging his friend to acquire a similar device, Walpole promised it will ‘be the delight of your solitude’. Precisely for such domestic enjoyments, the entry for ‘camera obscura’ in a 1786 encyclopedia provided instructions for remaking a room in one’s home into such a device, along with the address to a London optician who sold the wooden boxes and the needed glass lenses for that purpose.”
The overall experience of this was that this technology could somehow access the essence, or the real nature, of the object that was observed, and in a clearer and more exact way than what human perception is capable of. The sense was that need a medium, an intermediary, between ourselves and the external world, to see it like it really is.
And already in this idea, we see a distance between experience and reality emerging. So what these early scientists and astronomers were saying was basically that there’s a real world out there that’s quite different from what experience tells us, and we have to radically modify our experience through these measuring instruments to know what the world is actually like.
But why would the modified experience be either more or less real than the unmodified experience? It was only because the interpretations built on this modified experience happened to support established theories in natural philosophy that you could argue it was somehow more real. But since these theories are also inevitably based in immediate experience, you get a circular argument here that hides a contradiction: Their argument is that the measuring instrument helps us to access a reality beyond immediate experience because what the new technique tells us confirms our immediate experience.
In other words — if the proof that this stuff is more real than the immediate experience lies only in the fact that it seems to confirm what we know from immediate experience, well, then we’re still moving within the framework of immediate experience, aren’t we?
So when people like Kant in the 1700s ran with this idea and concluded that this simplified projection is somehow more authentic than what gets projected onto a surface from a wider lens where a lot more information gets into the mix, they were then making an error of logic. But this is, crucially, also the birth of hyperreality. Of Baudrillard’s phenomenon of the mediated experience being framed and apprehended as more real than our immediate being-in-the-world.
So the camera obscura was both a symbol and ritual at the foundations of this myth that we somehow need technology to reveal the world as it really is. That we are incapable of even knowing the world around us without the crutch of technology.
Jonathan Crary, in his book The Techniques of the Observer, which explores the impact of measuring instruments and observational equipment throughout the history of science discusses the role of the camera obscura extensively. He argues that the camera obscura and its enormous cultural significance functioned as the key metaphor for the separation and the distinction between the observer and the external world. We can clearly see how it establishes these categorical distinctions between inside and outside, and crucially between the observer, the external world, and the representation. And it’s exactly this separation that we see in both Descartes’ distinction between consciousness and the external world, as well as in Immanuel Kant’s even more radical separation of the world, its representation, and the actual observer. These conceptual models are clearly mirroring the camera obscura’s setup with a demarcated outside, a hidden inside where the projection occurs, and the marginalized observer who receives an impression, two steps removed from reality.
And this is a very vivid example of how the measuring apparatus influences our theories about the world we live in, and how we think about our place in it as participants or observers. It’s an example of how a theoretical framework becomes reductive once you try to push it beyond its limits and explain all of the world on the terms of this framework. It’s like how the Pythagorean cult of the ancient period proposed the idea that everything is really only mathematics, or that reality can be reduced to music and nothing else — but the impact of the camera obscura is much more powerful, since it entails this radical separation between the observer and the world, symbolically and ritually enacted by enclosing her off into a darkened space, literally and figuratively cut off from the outside world, and rendering her completely dependent on an artificial technological setup between herself and reality if she is to know anything about the external world whatsoever.
So in a sense we’re still living in this technological myth of the camera obscura, a situation where the distinction between triumphant science and superstitious non-science can be mapped onto this distinction between this artificial experimental setup and the unaided and unfiltered observation of the outside world — where the sentiments such that all human behavior can be explained by genetics alone, or that all of reality can ultimately be described by particle physics, all stem from this early-modern superstition that the camera obscura is uniquely capable of giving us access to reality as it actually is.
We can also trace the impact of this metaphor through the development of later techniques of observation and communication throughout the modern period, where powerful visible or spectacular representations gradually attain a global cultural dominance in terms of how we access and think about the external world, especially when technologies for remote transmission of visual imagery provide the capability for visual mass media.
So in a way, us sitting within four walls and receiving highly precise, targeted radio waves, which are literally forms of light, for projecting imagery and stories of the outside world onto the computer screen or smartphone — all of this is an extension of the camera obscura technique, and the impact of digital technology on how we experience the world and think about ourselves and our place in it, is actually rooted in this medieval experimental setup that over the centuries has gained a disproportionate cultural influence.
And in the same way, we can trace the distinction between science and non-science to the separation between the unfiltered and unaided experience of the external world, and the supposedly more real information we receive through this targeted projection of certain aspects of the light that is reflected from an external object.
But it should be obvious that this assumption is arbitrary. The assumption that certain aspects of the reflected light taken by themselves would somehow be more real than the unfiltered mass of the whole spectrum of reflected light is not warranted.
You could make a better argument that the opposite is actually the case — that the undifferentiated reflection is more real since it contains more information about the object, and that the entire experimental setup builds on an artificial separation of the outside world from the darkened chamber. And we should also note that this separation has played a significant role in how modern society has detached the human being from the world, not least in the idea that there’s a deep and unbridgeable difference between the human consciousness and the outside world.
But all of this is really just a story about how things work that’s based in the early-modern fascination with a simple trick that allows you to project images of an outside space onto the wall of a darkened room.
And accordingly, many philosophers did recognize this early on. Johann Wolfgang von Göthe, the famous 18th century German scientist, writer, philosopher, statesman &c – he was what we call a polymath, an expert in many fields — he experiments with this setup of the camera obscura just like everybody else, but in a description from his work on color theory, he surprisingly just tosses aside the established formula. He abandons the normal structure of this experimental setup, and re-establishes the embodied subjectivity of the observer as a crucial aspect of the real world.
So while one’s own body and consciousness was left out from the traditional description of the experiment (there only the outside world and the dark inner chamber that receives the representation, and this in a sense makes the observer just disappear, and the observer is in a sense replaced by this dark inner chamber that can only receive representations of the outside world), Göthe instead argues that this actually makes no sense, and brings back into focus the observer as a crucial aspect of even this highly artificial experimental setup.
“Close up the hole”, Göthe says, so that there’s no input from outside of the room, and in your field of vision, there will remain a lingering circle of color, that slowly but surely transforms into another color. And so the body itself, in tandem with its consciousness, becomes the active producer of the experience of color. And this means that the subjective experience of vision is evidently a real thing on its own — it’s an independent factor that plays a necessary part in the perception of whatever information enters into the dark chamber, of whatever gets into the camera.
So to put it bluntly, there needs to be a guy inside the box for someone to actually see something. There needs to be a self in the brain for experience to occur.
And this simple fact will also challenge any kind of assumption of the sort that a certain mode of representing the outside world is somehow more or less true or real than another. Because once we realize that all possible modes of observation are all dependent upon an actual, real person experiencing them — once we figure out that there’s always someone behind the camera even if we can’t see them — this hierarchy of observational techniques becomes untenable. The results of one technique are not more or less real or true than another, all we can say is that we have different modes of experience of the world, or different techniques, that all depend on the real presence of a person perceiving reality as it presents itself.
Along similar lines, the German physicist Henry Stapp, observes that:
“… from the point of view of the mathematics of quantum theory it makes no sense to treat a measuring device as intrinsically different from the collection of atomic constituents that make it up. A [measuring] device is just another real part of the physical universe ... Our bodies and brains thus [also] become ... parts of the quantum mechanically described physical universe. Treating the entire physical universe in this unified way provides a conceptually simple and logically coherent theoretical foundation ...”
What is the sense here? That you are inevitably part of the “outside world”. The distinctions reproduced by the myth of the camera are unwarranted. It arbitrarily dissects, separates and dichotomizes, which is also the essence of modernity.
This brings us back to Thomas Kasulis’ remarks on classical Japanese philosophy — according to the findings of this tradition, there’s no way to make sense of an act of observation unless the observer and the thing observed are somehow collaborating and interdependent components of one and the same reality. It’s not possible to completely separate the object and the observer, because there’s inevitably an experience of something. We can’t deny the reality of neither the observer nor the external world, first of all because without the observer there’s no experience in the first place, and secondly, if we deny the object and say there’s only an observer, that would also fail, since then there’s nothing for the consciousness to receive, since consciousness has to be of something. “Pure consciousness” directed only towards itself would not be a distinctive experience of a world of objects.
So both in the history of science and the ideologies of the modern project, so clearly expressed and forcefully reified in this example of the camera obscura as a symbol of knowledge of the world, we first see this movement to separate the world from the observer, and then, with Kant, we reach a point where the external world is denied, and finally, in the modern period, we tend towards a perspective that also denies the reality of the observer, until we come full circle and move towards a position where the observer and the thing observed are both irreducible parts of an organic whole — and where different techniques of observation are all equally valid with no hierarchy in between them, since these techniques or observational devices must ultimately all also be considered part of the real world.
This is also reflectd in the conflict between science and non-science, since this categorization is essentially just such an artificial hierarchy between different modes of observing the world.
But the camera obscura both inaugurates and ritually establishes modernity as separation, as dichotomy, as cognitive hierarchy and detached, alienated observation. Even the ostensibly realist correspondence theory of truth, championed by critics of runaway reductionism, where truth is taken to mean correspondence between propositional and cognitive content and the outside world, reproduces this chasm between the observer and the thing observed.
A confused secularism which after having lost redemption, the Sublime, and even the Otherworld, is now frantically seeking some form of reenchantment through a neurotic preoccupation with its own mirror image, with a self-imposed and synthetic liminality.
And a return to participatory or collaborative epistemologies is the only path out of this darkened chamber.
A return to real relation.
This resonates.
Thanks
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