[...]f 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, )
[...]