[...] seeing ==> semblance of a community”

(phantasmagoric character of his work) Wagner:
•eliminating lateral views ==> frontal engagement
•near-complete darkness ==> preventing peripheral distraction
•lowering the orchestra out of sight
--> systematic concealing and mystification of the process of production
--> (Wagner stands for) will to mastery over all aspects of the spectacle ==allow==> calculated production of states of regression, fascination, dream (synchronized sound --> cinema's attentiveness half a century later)
-control over emotional response
-remaking of spectator experience
-production of dreamlike clairvoyant

(-can theater stage be a place of distraction? again)

intelligible relation of distance between viewer and illusory scene
--> the way diorama commanded visual attention

in my stage design drawings from 2009:
•standardized perspectival expectations
•metric relations
•position of spectator
•luminous detached rectangle
- 

Wagner's Ring cycle: the last expression of a 19th century fantasy of the recuperation of tragedy and myth ~ the dream that culture could make whole what capitalism has broken --Crary+Lacoue-Labarthe--> [disturbing conviction/dream:] in an age where transcendence is undone, (the vacations of) art can recover an ancient destination and establish the type of mythological figure (in which humanity or a people could recognize itself)


-verisimilitude: the quality of seeming to be true, gloss, semblance


composite imaginary of the 19th century

______________


crowd
theater
phantasmagoria

Crary --> Seurat's Parade de Cirque = disclosure of *the absence at the heart of modern spectacle and perception*

vivid opening into a light-filled action-filled arena

@apass, a common way of criticism:
•*evoke, then withhold*
(fir example: evoke ‘entertainment commodity’ but withhold it. Laura, Ale ,)
•*invest, and dismantle* (we are invested in what we dismantle)
•*desolation of older scenes of representation* @Sina

Crary on Seurat Cirque --> investigation of the conditions under which a subject could be activated as an attentive perceiver
(forensic aesthetics --> conditions under which a subject could be arrested as a witness)
(Sina ajayeb bestiary --> conditions under which a subject could be contested as a knowing agent)

“frame: an isolating agent” (<== Wagner ~ to make an *autonomous and luminous field of attraction* with a deliberately ambiguous spatial identity)
--> explicit renunciation of the classical (and early modern) status of the image
=/= as a windowlike plane intersecting a cone of vision
=/= as a flat plane covered with colored patches

(Seurat's optics:) ***images apparitional value*** <== effect of image's detachment from a broader visual field (=/= diaroma and stereoscop)
--> 19th century optical experiences that severed the image from any continuous or intelligible relation to the position of the observing objects
(=/= Wagnerian aesthetics)
--> *collective visual experience* ~~--> precinematic forms of moving images

(@apass: hand drawing is not about being “trapped in older artisanal modes of production” --?--> “performance =/= projection”)

to assess (the relationships between):
•your own technological products
•makeup of your audience
•economical realities of the marketplace
}==> inventor of 19th century (Raynaud, Edison, )
--> modify your machines in terms of:
•performance
•shifting audience needs (and possibilities)

phantasmagoric: occultation of production by means of the outward appearance of the product (creating an experience for a solitary and immobile spectator)

(spectral) atopic image: literally not there

shimmering --> effect of detachment from the environment

Reynaud's projected moving images --> elastic and reversible temporalities (that had little to do with Lumieres's “real time”)

Cheret's posters (joyful modern women, advertisement for cosmetics, lighting fixtures, department stores, ballets, and so on) --> a technology of attention + a specific ornamental representation of commodity culture
(--> practical functionings of consumption culture in the 1870s) @OSP
*Cheret's “personal style” in graphic design = an abstract luster جلوه a decorative formula that could be applied promiscuously to any possible object of consumption* =/= Seurat's dream of universal style

****rich textures of entertainment and visual spectacle****

-which range of optical apparatuses are available for public consumption now?
[in 1880s: peep show, magic lantern, shadow theater, large-scale stethoscope, zeotropes, etc.]

my links with Seurat --> his interest in:
•contemporary popular visual culture
•perceptual modernization
•

Crary's reading of Seurat's cirque: new experience of form deployed in time --> kinematic (=/= semantic, iconographic significance of the clown and acrobat in the painting) --> *the illusion of movement*
beginning with the phenakistoscope and zoetrope in the 1830s --through--> innumerable optical devices all the way into 1890s --> endlessly fascinating and repetitive --> sites of attentiveness (~= attraction)

{ Seurat + Reynaud + Edison (~ producers of the ***machines of the visible***, allowing the constructed and synthetic nature of machine vision to coincide with their own rationalization of perceptual process) + forms of machinic vision developing through 1880s }--> (examples of an emerging) *****industrial art***** : from *artisanal practices* --to--> standardizing industrial modes of image-making

Crary reading Seurat without isolating him from the effects of what Raynaud, Edison and many others (Muybridge, Fuhrmann,) were developing through out the 1880s

{ the audience in Seurat's painting = the audience of the static backgrounds used in Reynaud's machines }--> the unchanging, unreflective, even unseeing nature of modern spectatorship : *a crowd of spectators permanently in place, installed as a fundamental component of the social world* (in which the specific content displayed to them is the matter of absolute inconsequence)

shadow show
clown as magician-engineer who with his right hand opens the curtains onto an illuminated and abstractly assembled plane of visual stimulation

(Seurat were disclosed to the) congruence of an immaterial, atopic and evanescent image with powerful reality effects and techniques of attraction

techniques of perceptual modernization --constituting--> an autonomous space of invention --> imposing its own constructed visions and truths on viewers

(Crary shows how) the mechanization of vision had no intrinsic link to objectivity, but rather to new capacities for simulation, illusion, conjuration

(my paintings? ...early) dreams of an impossible and inhuman vision, of a desire for perceptual ubiquity exceeding the spacial and temporal limits of human faculties --?--> remake the self into a sovereign eye would create and impose its own truths
-the horses of Gericault and Seurat, in their airborne oneiric trajectories, incarnate a deeper truth of the body: they become abstract correlates of psychological and kinetic response to perceived movement --> ideomotor experience (=/= truth of mechanical spatial movement)
(--> ajayeb description movement animal in motion)

***animal is arrested --> presence is not directly accessible to human vision, but can only be the product of technical procedures of simulation*** --> “nature = scenographic space” (--collapse--> precondition for the impossible unseeable apparition specter --Seurat--> spectacle)

phantasmal homeostasis
detemporalization of experience

management of attention <--> techniques of attraction

(Foad and) Seurat's efforts (in Cirque): abstract conceptualization of perceptual experience

(possibility of spectacle)
differed
displaced
denied
(image of spectacle)
derealized
drained of presence

*attentiveness of an observing subject* = site of increasingly specialized operations of power

...a twilight state of restricted consciousness ==> (Durkheimian solidarity --> what is at stake is that) the autonomy of the individual is reduced

--Crary--> importance of Seurat's work : to have intuited **how the collapse of scenic space allowed new imaginary figuration of immediacy** (of a regressive unity based on a corporeal engagement of the spectator) @Esther, apass, OSP, Femke

Seurat sensed something fundamental about the industrialization of contemplation (--> now fully matured in Hollywood cinema) + (he anticipated, like Wagner) the *effects of a phantasmatic luminous image on which essence had been displaced by appearance*

(you can still) escape into the psychological time (but don't erase the sense of the obdurate historical conditions out of which your dreams of equilibrium emerges)

Seurat's resisted the temptation of the phantasmagoric and of myth (=/= Wagner)
(--> are we the hairs of Seurat?)
•exposure of technical premises
•subversion of any stable “formation” (or Gestalt, on which the allure of the myth depends)
--Buchloh--> ***avant-garde: a continually renewed struggle over the definition of cultural meaning, the discovery and representation of new audiences, and the development of new strategies to counteract and develop resistence against the tendency of the ideological apparatuses of the culture industry to occupy and control all practices and spaces of representation*** (--> that is why i am interested in Walt Disney and Hollywood and Qur'an)
--> *to produce incompatibilities* (as an artistic strategy, visual or epistemic and otherwise; to make opacity, hostility to virtuosity and expressionism, )

your work could be adjacent to ____
but not identical to ____

your work might be built out if mechanisms for the production of subjective response --but--> it is never reducible to them
@OSP, Femke



Cezanne --> (nonoptical) art of attention
music --> a mode of experience =/= an art of time

(unstable status of an apprentice observer in 1900s) Cezanne = reinvention of synthesis (=/= Manet and Seurat's strategies of binding, homeostasis, fixation)

Crary highlighting the highly contested nature of the questions of attention (possibly of pure perception, presence, etc. in 1890s) --> recreation of attentive presence amid the impact of new conceptualizations and organizations of motion, memory, temporality (+ emerging technological arrangements)

[one of many sites in the late 19th century where a crisis in perception is diagnosed:]
Cezanne + Husserl: attempt to bypass the accumulated cultural and commonsense assumptions about the world as it appears in consciousness (heritage of phenomenology --> Sina, Foad... ~~> and fable of the artist:)
•Cezanne --> forgetting everything and make an image of what you see *beneath the imposed order of humanity* (19th century preoccupation with “innocent vision” <== to be completely estranged from the world <-- Schopenhauer) ==> access to things-in-themselves
•Husserl --> pure form of consciousness *stripped of all accretions of habit and socialization* ==> “seeing essences”
--> their work challenged (sought to exceed) features of perception that apparatuses (of production and consumption) regulated and standardized

Husserl
attempt of description of objectivists in a certain atemporal fixedness =/={attention: heightened awareness of a narrowed or focused range of perception, operation of selection, question of existence of content in consciousness, empathic function which belongs in the sense of intuitional experience ~= psychophysical, associationist, sensationalist, atomistic accounts of perception and cognition ==> how reliable and consistent the knowledge about the world is possible + (classical model of vision:) privileged point of view of a perceiving subject from which the objectivity of the world could be apprehended}
issue of cognitive and perceptual synthesis
•to resecure an unconditional basis for logic and science
•to escape from refined habitual patterns of perception inherent in various aspects of rationalization and compassion of experience in 1890s and 1900s (--> dynamic, kinetic, distracted texture of modern sensory life ==> attention: malleable entropic force susceptible to fatigue, distraction, and external management)
•to quest for the logic of meaning ==> primordial oneness of consciousness
----> (for Husserl) attention appears and appertains in the possibility of an *impersonal, preindividual, transcendental sphere free of anything empirical, of anything spatiotemporal* ==> attention: intentional act with an absolute structure, quasi-machine searchlight for an unwavering mode of looking at the act of looking
--Crary--> amid the dynamic dissolution of modernization (a world in which previously stable meanings, signs, social relations were being uprooted, made exchangeable, and put into circulation) Husserl proposes [in a hopeless quest] a monolithe technique of attention (to discern a halo of absolute authenticity around every object or relation) to determine the universal structure of (the authenticity of) subjective lifeworld [unable to go beyond ‘pre-cinematographic conditions’ (~ movement thought only from the anchorage of a static “pose”)]
 --Varela--> Husserl's (+ MerleauPonty) turn towards experience (the “things themselves”) was entirely theatrical : lacked any pragmatic dimension [---> go to Despret, Stewart]

what Cezanne did seek to “suspend” (to forget)?

(sensitivity to) perceptual experiences that had been ignored, marginalized, or incompatible (==> unarticulated)--within--> organization of knowledge about vision
}==> (Cezanne's) “attention to anomalous* --> ***engage a discordant exterior*** (that takes a hold on your recognizable world) [<-- our heritage in art]

Cezanne: “perception = process of its formation” : confronting and inhabiting the instability of perception =/= recording the evanescent appearances of the world

(Cezanne + Manet's discovery:) looking at one thing
=X=> fuller and more inclusive grasp of its presence (~ rich immediacy)
==> perceptual disintegration and loss, breakdown as intelligible form ==> invention and discovery of previously unknown religions and organizations of forces

dissolution inherent in attentiveness ==support==> (Cezanne's) radical desymbolization of the world + perpetually modulating set of relations between the exterior and sensations

Cezanne attentive to:
•activity of the eye
•visual sensation
•myriad intricacies of subjective vision
•(physiological) limitations of sensory experience
•the body (its pulsation, temporalities, intersection of that body with a world of transitions, of events, of becomings)
•discontinuous composition of visual field (to its “concentric” format)

19th century scientific research ==>
•comprehensive account of human perception
•disjointed nature of the visual field
•central area of retina: photoreceptor cells
◦peripheral area of retina: sensitive to movement
•subjective visual field <== complex aggregate processes of the eye movement (“short fast jumps” =/= instantaneous intake of an image) --> a new psychological model of the human subject

acuity did not correspond strictly to localized anatomy but rather was the product of a dynamic relation of fovea and periphery as well as external luminous factors

hearing: aggregate perpetual process

Wundt's optical model (polarity between:)
•Blickfeld: field of consciousness
•Blickpunkt: focus of consciousness (where apperception occur) ~= attention

=/=
Locke, Descartes, Leibniz
consciousness = camera obscura

apperception: focalization of some content in consciousness ==> structure experience

--Crary--> what is at stake (with Wundt) is a cognitive modality part of a larger ***modern process of decentering***

(+ James -->) a question of the primacy of ‘transitive’ states in which the shifting fringes of perception were constitutive features of psychic “reality”


modernization of perception
center =/= periphery
dispersed functioning of sensory response

(how in 19th century capacities of human eye was made into:)
1. architectural model of *panorama* = permanent activation of optical periphery + no stable center of focused attentiveness
2. *stereoscope* = decisive exclusion of the periphery + 3D image hypertangiblity (<-- our model of visual consumption)
}==> loss of *consistent and coherent relations of distance between image and observer* [<-- this lost consistency is now in 2020 what everyone in art is busy with or to reactivate]


...having the fixed eye many disconnected areas of the visual field at once = continual beginning at a new center = Cezanne ~= *radical rethinking the nature of [*]synthesis: rhythmic coexistence of radically heterogenous and temporally dispersed elements*

...a subjective immobilization
seeking to enter into the world's ceaseless movement of destabilization (=/= holding together the content) ==> a more intensive recreation of a subjective interface with the world (=/= reverie, disassociation)
}-->
•every object's identity is swallowed up in difference
•*vision: veritable theater of metamorphosis and permutations*

(Cezanne reexamining the composition of the visual world ==>)
fanatical attentiveness to the data of sense ==> dissolution of unity, destabilization of objects onto flux, dispersion, displaced the body to the world, into a stream of change, of time, *undoing the immediacy of the world* [<-- my reexamination of the composition of the epistemological world of fables in West Asia, my work's relationship with knowledge is like that. to gain control of myself in the midst of moving concepts, the circulation of concerns, jumble of paths and knots, whirlpool of velocities, and recourse to my capacity for forgetting...]

perceptual consistency is a phantom

(Lucretius:) [*]world: infinite Cascades of self-differentiation

-the question is: how to make aesthetic constructions [the task of the artist] (if the world is so fragile)?

-how to go back and forth between attention and reverie?

perplexity of the eye (related to a deeper and metaphysical perplexity)
an imageless vision
...a mind for which no visible form is visible enough


the fixed and monocular eye has been posed (in recent theatrical writing) as the formative element of classical system of representation **functioning to arrest duration and change in order to achieve a conceptual matey mastery of phenomena** {==> zoocentric animal anatomy =/= ajayeb}
--✕--> (Crary's suggestion that) ***the fixed immobile eye is what annihilates the “naturalness” of the world*** (disclosing the provisional and fluid nature of visual experience) =/= mobile glancing eye is what preserves the preconstructed character of the world

•moving eye --> habitually familiarly caresses objects (extracting previously established relations among them)
•fixed eye --> (immobile eye triggers a ferment of activity ==>) trance and perceptual disintegration --> dissolving the physiognomy of the everyday world [~=>? bestiary's perceptual uncanniness]

fixed truth-taking stare ==> perceptual uncanniness

the idea of un undistorted original perception ==> objects in some accessable state available for objective comparison and evaluation

fixation sets the world in motion
visual field begin vibration and oscillating
chromatic instability

the physiological apparatus (our bodies) incapable of stability =/= the aim of stabilizing the world to look at it analytically


perceptualism: the idea that (artists, cultures, etc.) expressions in varying degrees involves the transcription of the world “as it appears” to them

Cezanne ==> understanding of the world (as processes of becoming) that doesn't possess a *premade integrity* (--> world of ajayeb is full of premade integrities)


reckon & calculate
--✕--> (Nietzsche's) formless unformulable world of the chaos of sensation
--✕--> (Cezanne's) continual emergence and disintegration of constellations (of relationships + self)



production (of other kinds) of fixed vision (amid the increasing awareness of the transitive and unstable nature of perception):
•modern psychology (late 19th century): how to incorporate the vagaries and unpredictability of subjectivity into a set of constants --> quantify subjective perceptual experience [<-- question of artistic feedback: how to perceptually isolate stimuli? how to temporally control one's exposure?]
•tachistoscope (mid 1880s--search for elemental unit of attentive behavior): the idea of instantaneous perception, mechanically producted “presence” --Crary--> fantasy of a descrete quantifiable perception detached from the lives dynamics of the body + the idea that pure nonsense reveals specific aspects of attention that hermeneutics could not conceive {based on naive realism (ignoring the existence of transient iconic memory) presupposing:
1- the subject's visual experience directly mirrors the stimulus pattern
2- the subject's visual experience begins when the pattern is first exposed and terminates when it is turned off
•Muybridge's machine ==> reconstruct appearances through the production of consecutive images
•

tachistoscope (nonconsecutive visual stimuli) --> how within the context of technological modernization, faster mechanical speeds are reciprocally related to new bodily forms of stasis (---> go to Virilio)
•chronometric device: measurement of relation time

}--> the break or interrupting of vision becomes the primary element within perceptual experience, rather than a visual continuum that maintains the cohesiveness of the world

}==> *possibility of pure sensation without perception*


“mental test”
detailed psychometrics of individual performance and behavior --preoccupied--> features of a generalized consciousness

20th century behaviorism --> abandonment of interest in any internal or introspective experience (in favor of data resulted from objective external controlled observation)
 ==Cattel==> application of systematized knowledge to the control of human nature
--Crary--> **accommodation of subjective life to machine operations** (+ speeds, temporalities)



new objective world: decomposed into autonomous and abstract stimuli (+ machine rythmes that differed dramatically from those of the body) ==> repositioning of the perceiver (+ motor readiness) }-->
•new patterns of production
•spectacular consumption

*machinic interface is the body* ==> related temporal shaping of everyday life

computer ==> psychic field of expectant attentiveness <--within-- one inevitably trains one self to maximize the speed of response to specific commands and functions (and derive at least one satisfaction from these habitual operations of mechanical facility)

}<--Crary-- epistemic shift in 20th century to theorise of subjective vision


instantaneity: unproblematic presentness of vision

Helmholtz (discovery of slow speed of nerve transmission) ==> “present state” of perception is deployed within a temporally extended physiological set of events


19th century --Foucault--> the essence of human life ceased to be something representable in the tabular space of classical representation =/= human life understood in terms of it's existence in time, of functions and energies that unfolded and developed outside the **immediacy of classical visibility**


*the conditioned reflex*
a chimerical notion of the western imagination in the 20th century

reflex (central cerebral process, onset of stimulus ==> preparation of motor response)
•one of the ways in which attention was positioned within knowledge of human behavior
==producing==> new forms of sensory experience outside of (various myth of) organic wholeness of subjectivity (--> distinction between “natural” & “artificial” sensation [---> go to my work in WIELS bestiary characters: what was individual experience in middle ages?])
•practical reconfiguration of behavior + possibility of external intervention and control
=/= Dewey's (galvanic image of) subject in a perpetual sensory interface with the world = uninterrupted mass motion --> unity of activity -->{*continuity* ==sustain==> an ideal of unity and wholeness =/= disintegration of individual experience, *disconnected nature of reality*}

(domain of experience in urban capitalist lifeworld:)
•industrial production
•spectacular condonation
•technological modernization
•rational, social, managerial control

(apperceptive experience of) anticipation, memory, and preparation for future actions

(halfway modernist Dewey didn't consider) breaks in perception mi[...]