Abstract-
Lorraine Daston
Dreams of a Perfect Medium
Wax, clouds, wombs, white screens, mirrors, photographic plates. Since
Greco-Roman antiquity, philosophers, naturalists, and artists have fantasized
about a perfect medium: perfectly yielding, perfectly faithful, perfectly
neutral, perfectly passive – in short, a medium that is immediate,
a medium that is no medium at all. It is not only a dream about representation;
it is also a dream about reproduction and cognition. Aristotle uses the
same metaphor of a seal imprinted in soft wax to describe how external
objects impress the sensorium and how the active male principle of form
impresses passive female matter. It is the same metaphor taken up some
two millennia later by John Locke to capture the ideals of empirical epistemology
and by Renaissance theorists of the imagination such as Marsilio Ficino
and Girolamo Cardano to explain how a mother’s thoughts and experiences
during pregnancy can form and deform the unborn child. Early modern opticians
and natural magicians invented ways of projecting images onto blank screens,
just as nineteenth-century philosophers and psychologists would study
projections of the subjective self onto the blank screen of the objective
world. But the fantasy is not always the same fantasy, and in defiance
of the dream of a completely self-effacing medium, the metaphors did matter.
This lecture traces the twists and turns of an astonishingly long-lived
and widespread fantasy that was reborn every time a new medium was discovered.
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