The conception of a virtual image, to take an early instance, is probably an entirely new one to the reader’s mind. [It] may be described as an image that does not exist until there is an eye to receive the rays. The eye calls the image, though not the rays, into existence.
— Osmund Airy, Geometrical Optics: Adapted to the Use of the Higher Classes in Schools, Etc., 1870
You could be me and I could be you / Always the same and never the same / Day by day, life after life / Without my legs or my hair / Without my genes or my blood / With no name and with no type of story / Where do I live? / Tell me, where do I exist? / We’re just … / Im-ma-ma-material, immaterial / Immaterial boys, immaterial girls / Im-ma-ma-material, immaterial / We’re just, im-ma-ma-material (I could be anything I want) / Immaterial, immaterial boys (anyhow, anywhere) / Immaterial girls (any place, anyone that I want) / Im-ma-ma-material, immaterial
— SOPHIE, “Immaterial,” track #8 on Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides, MSMSMSM / Future Classics, 2018
Even though the history of the ‘virtual’ reaches back a lot further than its mention in a British secondary school book from 1870, Osmund Airy’s above definition of the ‘virtual image’ might still be unfamiliar to readers of the early twenty-first century, to whom virtual spaces are commonplace, or common places. In Airy’s description, we learn that an eye can call an image into existence. But – whose eye, and what kind of existence? With what voice does an eye call? Where is the virtual image, what reality does it inhabit when called, and how are we to understand the seeming contradiction between a passive eye that merely receives rays, and a conjuring, evocative eye that has the power to conceive an image?
The virtual image, as it is discussed below, holds a specific place within a distinctive scientific culture of the nineteenth century, but its resonances can be found and tuned into even today. As an encounter of rays, retina, and desire, it circumscribes not a thing but a moment; of crossing, of relaying, of complicating the boundaries between the physical world, the mind, and the incantations of an ocular. A ‘virtual image’, as opposed to a ‘real image’, is defined as formed by a lens or a mirror that reflects, refracts, or diffracts light rays which diverge rather than converge, meaning it, the image, cannot be captured on a screen. While this definition is specific, the nature of the image itself is abstract. Since the early seventeenth century, a familiar place to find an illustration of the phenomenon of the virtual image might be as a diagram in optical, philosophical, and psychological treatises, where, over the course of several hundred years, certain graphical tropes have become customary. Considered in and of themselves, these tropes may act as pointers toward a more general notion of the ‘virtual’, which must count among the most elusive and snake-like terms of Western philosophy. “Virtuality is admittedly difficult to grasp. Indeed, this is its very nature.”1 No single or shared definition describes the virtual, busy as it is with its own undoing, a constant shedding of skin.
The ‘virtual image’ on the other hand is, at first glance, much more easily demarcated, or literally delineated. Generally, the ray diagrams that describe it consist of an assemblage of lines, arrows, and symbols (fig. 9.1). A circular shape with several perimeter layers describes the eye; a gap in the line of one of these perimeters indicates the overture of the pupil (fig. 9.2). There might be a conical space that spreads out before the singular two-dimensional eye designating a ‘pencil of rays’ arriving from the object; a rainbow curve of a dissected spherical mirror; the slice of a lens; intersections; divergences; letters of the alphabet abbreviating the facets of vision. The diagram will inevitably contain the representation of a passage or transit from one side of the diagram to another, a change in course, a bifurcation: here the object, there the image; solid lines on the one hand, dashed and dotted on the other.
Osmund Airy, diagrams of virtual images, from Osmund Airy, Geometrical Optics: Adapted to the Use of the Higher Classes in Schools, Etc., London, Cambridge: Macmillan and Co., 1870.
René Descartes, diagram of ocular refraction, from René Descartes, La Dioptrique, Discours 5e, 1637. Image: Wellcome Collection Gallery, Wikimedia Commons.
What is signified as virtual can be found in those parts of the diagrams that appear in the form of interrupted and broken lines, as lower-case characters, in italics, and shadowed by apostrophes. An x to balance the X, an - - - - - - - - - to proffer the ⎻⎻⎻⎻⎻⎻⎻⎻⎻⎻⎻⎻⎻⎻⎻⎻⎻⎻⎻⎻⎻⎻. Even these diagrams in their reductive abstraction, deficiently describing a mostly monocular optical system and a permanently open black-and-white, two-dimensional eye, suggest that over there lies a realm of even lesser physicality, of semblance and resemblance, not quite equivalence, an appearance with unclear status. The dashed line indicates at once its own presence and absence, a stuttered indecision. The minuscule character symbolizing the image is the little sibling of its majuscule, the object. The italic type is the font’s mode of implying an ‘as-though’ in the form of a typographical conditional. The virtual image appears as the object’s revenant: as its spectre. These ray diagrams lack flesh and bone from the outset, but they offer even less meat in the realm of the optical virtual. Nevertheless, I would like to argue that the virtual image is in fact very much about the body.
As noted above, the basis for the distinction between ‘virtual’ and so-called ‘real’ images in lens-based optical systems is the difference between the convergence and divergence of rays: in the case of a real image, light rays extending from an object through a lens or reflected in a concave mirror come together in a single focus. This is where the image is located, and also where it can be intercepted, where its luminous points can be compelled by a screen. It “may be regarded as a new object.”2 A real image appears, for example, in front of a concave mirror, on a cinema screen, in a camera obscura, or by the same principle on the retina. “The real image is free-standing, formed in the air, can be seen from either side, can behave exactly as if it is a self-luminous object, but it is inverted and spectral.”3
To prove this functional analogy between camera obscura and eye, the Bavarian physicist and astronomer Christoph Scheiner, working at the court of Archduke Maximilian III in Innsbruck around 1619, conducted a deviant experiment (fig. 9.2):4 he removed the eyeball of a recently dead ox and replaced the retina with a semi-translucent membrane of paper or eggshell. Fitting the dead mammalian eye into a small hole in the wall of a darkened space with its pupil oriented outwards, he was able to see a picture – a real image – of the outside scene projected onto the membrane inside, quite literally perceiving the world through the eye of another species. This re-routing of embodied visual experience illuminated the mechanics of the eye and the eye as mechanical, and paradoxically provided proof exactly for the redundancy of any body’s eye’s presence in relation to the existence of a real image: whether anyone was watching or not, here was an accurate representation of visible things: “light could create images independently of sensation.”5
By contrast, the rays of the virtual image’s focus only seemingly converge at the location where its object appears. Instead, reflected by a mirror or refracted by a lens, the rays stray and wander and disperse. The virtual image can only be found in the subjunctive: “When we therefore say an imaginary [i.e. virtual] focus, we understand a point in which we imagine two real and true lines to converge, but which are not truly produced to such a concourse, but if they were produced, they would concur there… .”6 A virtual image, “hanging” or “formed in the air,”7 is what appears in a camera lucida, a stereoscope, or a plane mirror. A convex mirror also creates a virtual image, and so does a telescope. The location of the virtual image is a matter of debate in the field of catoptrics (the study of reflection) and dioptrics (the study of refraction): it cannot be captured on a screen, and, unlike a real image, it does not physically appear or exist without an observing, living eye – that is, outside of a conscious body. Whereas a real image remains immobile and appears whether there is a viewer or not, a virtual image changes position when the observer does and only appears for him or her in the first place. Although the virtual image has a physical reality and is in fact an optical correlate of a material object, it has no ‘outside’ existence independent from a viewer: its location is to be found in the folds of a seeing body and therefore also in embodied time; itself an intangible spectre, it is also a kind of durational-sensorial parasite. “It is not possible to fix a mirror image in order to examine it as an image: If one (or the object) moves away, the image, which indeed has no autonomy, also disappears. One can neither rotate nor enlarge nor tinge it: only acting upon the object can modify the image. One cannot step into the mirror.”8
Let ‘As-Though’ Drive the Expectation
A common reading of virtuality often places it in contrast with notions of actuality, reality, or physicality, in the register of binaries and dualisms. Something virtual is understood to be something unreal, or something uncannily hyperreal. In the advent of digitality, this simplification of the relationship between virtuality and its Other has at times culminated in an antagonising fear or violent fantasy of the corruption of the real by the virtual (“Its only aim is to prostitute, to exterminate reality through its double”9). On the other hand, the promise of liberation from physicality in the guise of virtuality also appears to offer the manifestation of a dream of transcendental metaphysics that has existed since antiquity: mere pulp and contingency here; limitless potential there. In terms of the virtual image, which describes an appearance created by rays of light that travel through a refracting medium or are reflected by a mirror, this binary is seemingly self-evident: it refers to what happens after, or beyond, a prism, designating a dematerialised and ineffective visual presence in the shape of a double or a simulation, a mere reflection, ein Abglanz, as opposed to the presence of the self-same and indubitable thing in front of it. The “curiously finite inaccessibility” and “almost lethal completeness and containment”10 of the virtual image teases a place that is both geometrically and figuratively liminal, a threshold that lends itself to endlessly profound and equally banal pairings of tropes, ricocheting off each other into infinity: reality / fiction, life / death, true / false, active / passive, introspection / vanity, embodiment / immateriality, sanity / madness, and so forth. The virtual might thus appear as a pure and immersive illusion, and thereby as a negation of real space and real bodies.
“But perhaps this negation is the real illusion.”11 In contrast to the desire and its long tradition to brush matters into a tidy binary, this text aims at knotting, weaving, complicating the correlations at play in the space of the virtual image. For rather than outlining one half of a twinned dichotomy, the optical category of the virtual image since its emergence in the seventeenth century at the very least triangulates the nodes that create it. The image behind the mirror fixes the viewer’s regard and repeats some kind of promise time and again and over and over, but indeed it has no existence in and of itself: neither as the exterminator of the real, nor in the realm of a timeless and immaterial sublime. Instead, leaving behind or going beyond the monotonous appeal of the binary, it exists precisely in the intersections of observer, medium, image, and object, brought about by repeated transitions and changes in the direction of light, as well as a gaze that is held over time, and that in turn manages to hold and reflect this entangled relationality. “The virtual is a lived paradox where what are normally opposites coexist, coalesce, and connect; where what cannot be experienced cannot but be felt – albeit reduced and contained.”12
When astronomers, opticians, and mathematicians began establishing the term ‘virtual’ in the field of optics in the seventeenth century, the word itself was present in common parlance in the meaning of something “in essence, potentiality, or effect, although not in form or actuality”.13 Etymologically, it stems from the Medieval Latin virtualis and classical Latin virtus, in turn evolving from vis (power, force) and vir (man). Connotations such as ‘efficiency, excellence, potency, virtue, virility, manliness, and manhood’ hark back to this gendered root and are still at play in the more modern sense of ‘virtue’ (‘moral life and conduct; a particular moral excellence; high character; goodness’). Virtue takes on the connotation of ‘valour, bravery, courage (in war)’ in regard to male conduct, and, since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, ‘chastity and sexual purity’ especially in regard to the demeanour of women.14 In post-classical Latin from around 400 CE, virtus can also mean ‘miracle’ or ‘sense of wonder’: “This latter meaning is particularly interesting here, because what is called a wonder is characterised by a certain kind of causality: it is non-predictable and contingent, the effects exceed their cause.”15
The virtual image as an optical system is a technology; as such, it complicates the relations of observer, medium, image, and object to higher dimensions, especially if the object and the eye are one and the same: self-recognition in the mirror image as alienation from the self, becoming aware of oneself as other in one’s own passing reflected glance, or recognising oneself in something not-I – this is the realm of the virtual. Turning towards a virtual image also means turning away from its object this side of the prism, looking at a thing as its own shadow, echo, iteration, looking at it awry, obliquely, cock-eyed, seeing multiple perspectives at once, superpositions (or superstitions) of hovering layers of reality, multiplicities. Sameness returning unfamiliar and unexpected, an alternative version of what is, an in-between, sham space, where “things go the other way,” as Alice remarks of the world she encounters through the looking glass.16
Lewis Carroll’s account of Alice’s transgressions into the virtual world behind the mirror may well have been encouraged by seeing, and collecting, works by the amateur photographer Clementina Hawarden at a fête organised to raise funds for the Royal Female School of Art in London in 1864. A stereograph now in the Collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum pictures the artist’s daughter (also called Clementina) seated at a large, angled mirror of the type that in French is called a psyché (fig. 9.3).17 The girl’s gaze in front of it seems to be directed toward her own reflection, but because of the angle of the mirror, her reflected gaze appears downcast and introverted, a strange misalliance of regards. Her mirrored body is truncated by the edge of the looking glass so that only her torso is visible. The lack of a lower body and hands in the mirror adds to the disquieting or “bothersome”18 atmosphere that creeps into the framework of the otherwise placid scene. The photograph(s), seen through a stereoscope, constitute a virtual image: the viewer’s eyes focus on the simulated and illusory space behind the picture plane. This is an impression that appears only for the duration of the viewer’s engagement with the device, him- or herself engendering the image at a location where it does not physically exist.
Clementine Hawarden, photograph, 1859–61, albumen print, 71 × 138 mm, Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum (457:284–1968).
The setting itself appears surprisingly plain in the historical context of the domestic Victorian interior, typically a feminised, softened, and ornate space: here we see walls without wallpaper or decoration, a bare and non-descript floor. A decidedly mundane and abstract non-space, the room’s configuration seems provisional or transitional, awkward like a backstage area (theatre without theatricality), or a shoddily assembled home. Several objects that belong to Hawarden’s repertoire of moveable props have been arranged for the picture. Their placement emphasises the pull at the heart of the photograph, the unsettling and mesmeric inward caverning of the stereoscopic image. Each of the objects and figures equally reveals and veils; ostensibly they hint at spatial potential: the seated girl’s shoes peek out from under the shadow of her crinoline; the draped curtain next to the cheval mirror obstructs what might be a doorframe; the inclined mirror multiplies and upends the Cartesian coordinates of photographic perspective; and the enigmatic (empty?) picture frame only visible in the reflection hovers on the wall behind both the girl and the invisible photographer (inexplicably perpendicularly aligned with the room outside of the slanted mirror). The image is arrested uncomfortably in this tilted moment, it is allowed to rest in a temporal interstice much like the hairbrush that lies unused in Clementina’s lap. Centrally, there is the girl’s unfathomable gaze, sulky and defiant. Seen in the lowered view of the angled mirror it seems aloof, disdainful, or bored, but in front of it in the profile view it rests attentively: a gaze that is duplicated two-fold; in and before the mirror on the one hand, as well as in the two different perspectives of the stereo image on the other.
Clementina’s avoidance of both her own gaze in the reflection and that of the camera, in every iteration of herself, dodges the potential for an event of (self-)recognition or identification. The viewer, taking the place of the binocular mother apparatus, is not met by the daughter’s eyes; she avoids acknowledging her own being-seen, her seen being, and in so doing also steers clear of avowing her own presence as a singular subject and multiple resemblance. In fact, it is frustratingly unclear what she is looking at: a part of the room that does not exist for us, try as we might to locate it. Paradoxically, this elusion of a returned gaze, which avoids mutual recognition, instead protects the integrity of her representation, a fragmented selfhood that comes to rest within the image and within the passive agency of its serene subject.
As noted above, both the mirror reflection and the stereograph create virtual images. Does this particular stereo pair then constitute a kind of second-order virtuality? One might also consider the familial relationship between the photographer and her subject: a work of art in the age of technical reproducibility and a portrait of a reproductive system, a play on resemblance and dissimilitude or self-identity and auto-alienation. Hawarden’s photograph is as much a record of childhood and adolescence as it is of female practices within the spaces that were available to her and her daughters, who often posed as her subjects. Hawarden, able to pursue her work by virtue of her family’s economic status, used two generous rooms of their new London home in 5 Princes Gate, South Kensington as her studio, repeatedly making use of mirrors, windows, and intermediate spaces such as the terrace to explore the liminal (dis-)comfort zones of the domestic, the familial, the public, the performative, the uninhibited, the self, or the many virtual selves. Even though the stereo pair expands into virtual depth, the distinctly unhomely (or unheimlich) and cobbled setting doesn’t quite allow this pictorial space to rally into a coherent spatial entity; instead, it remains both weird and eerie, replete with areas that exist only for the diegetic gaze.19
Looking Awry
In his first Seminar (1953–54), Jacques Lacan uses a diagram of a virtual image created by a double mirror reflection which closely resembles its historical predecessors in the realm of optical theory such as those shown above; here, Lacan has constructed a schema to illustrate the role of reflective images in the context of human identification. Earlier, in his “Mirror Stage” essay, Lacan famously described the experience of self-recognition in the mirror as the basis for the process of ego formation, “namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image”.20 This experience of “jubilance” is powerful enough to assemble a self that was previously discombobulated, fragmented, and at odds. “[I]t is in this unity that the subject for the first time knows himself as a unity, but as an alienated, virtual unity.”21 At the core of this unity is a splitting, a differentiation, a displacement, an uprooting by way of, and into, the virtual image. Here is the jubilance of the alien and the eerie, a glimpse of a world that is complete but immaterial, the recognition of the site of misidentification and performativity.
Here, I would like to return to the trope of the simplified, binary divide between this side and that side of the prism, lens, or mirror. Sadie Plant identifies another pairing, one that is at the core of a traditional patriarchal Western order of reality and that distinguishes between physicality and immateriality, matter and form, body and mind. Man’s dream of transcendence, of crossing over into a realm of pure thought unconcerned with the laws of physics, is, as Sadie Plant points out, also an attempt of “getting out of the meat”.22 This idealised fantasy of disembodiment, of liberation from the inconvenience of a body, reappears not least at the heart of a particular dream of the digital virtual. And so, to remain in the binary realm of zeroes and ones for a moment, it may seem as though the matrix of virtual reality could hold the long-awaited promise of mankind’s autonomy, immortality, and omnipotence, of the freeing of information and therefore of mind from matter. This space might resonate with text such as that quoted above, which reflexively refers to a subject who knows himself, and is jubilant about his image assumption, or, as Plant polemically puts it, “in which one could be anything, even God: a space without bodies and material constraints, a digital land fit for heroes and a new generation of pioneers”.23
But, at odds with this Cartesian dream of transcendence and immateriality, the virtual, even before its digital incarnation into microprocessors, undersea data cables, and server farms, is always already embodied, both through a sensorial system, through nerves, veins, and cells, and through duration as lived time, amounting to the organs of a physiological host. It is tied to a, to our body, and both resides in it and gives shape to it. In the process of its perception, it is made actual “into a dimension of intensity or intension as opposed to extension,” in effect continuously doubling the body “by this dimension of intensity,”24 a bit like Hawarden doubles and redoubles herself into her work as well as her offspring.
In the previous quote, Brian Massumi reiterates or reformulates the French philosopher Henri Bergson’s conception of the virtual, which, along with that of the virtual image, had made an epistemological reappearance in the context of Continental philosophy at the turn of the twentieth century. Bergson first wrote about the virtual image in 1896 after borrowing the term from its history in optics, a significant provenance in the context of the twentieth-century genealogy of virtuality.25 Gilles Deleuze in turn borrowed from Bergson when he wrote:
If we take this direction to its limit, we can say that the actual image itself has a virtual image which corresponds to it like a double or a reflection. In Bergsonian terms, the real object is reflected in a mirror-image as in the virtual object which, from its side and simultaneously, envelops or reflects the real: there is ‘coalescence’ between the two. There is a formation of an image with two sides, actual and virtual. It is as if an image in a mirror, a photo or a postcard came to life, assumed independence and passed into the actual, even if this meant that the actual image returned into the mirror and resumed its place in the postcard or photo, following a double movement of liberation and capture.26
The virtual image is, in a Bergsonian and Deleuzian sense, a space of genuine spontaneity and change, a matrix, a process of becoming, one “through which individuals become subjects, that is, tend towards an identity and personality that are never (entirely) pre-existing”.27 This rings true for Clementina Hawarden’s stereographic portrait of her eponymic, adolescent daughter, held throughout her mother’s practice in moments that never quite capture her.
The word matrix, in renewed use since the 1990s in the context of digital networks, is in fact the Latin word for womb: its etymology includes “that which encloses or gives origin to something”, the “place or medium where something is developed”.28 Plant, by way of Luce Irigaray, points out how the space of the womb, or the matrix, resembles the “wet, dark and tactile” cave that Plato urges man to escape from.29 Unlike Plato, Donna Haraway is emphatic about the embedded nature of the space she positions herself in. She speaks from “the womb of the pregnant monster, here, where we are reading and writing”. She makes explicit that she “turns on figures of pregnancy and gestation”, pointing out that every technology is generative, in a decidedly polymorphic way.30 And so, while “[v]irtuality, or our virtual dimension, has to do with the capacity we have to suspend any definition of ourselves, our capacity to ‘think of ourselves beyond ourselves’ in a cultivation of ecstasies or self-transcendence, self-overcoming or self-destruction”,31 it does so through immanence, in time, and with all the sensory and tactile tangents that make up a human.
This is not to say that the virtual as such is gendered or can be generalised as either masculine or feminine. Rather, the locus of the virtual image seems to open up a space that is linked to the body by an odd and elastic bond, one that can bend and stretch and twist, a ‘queer’ relation: the etymology of ‘queer’ derives from the Proto-Indo-European ‘terkw’, ‘to twist.’ Sara Ahmed quotes Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s reference to ‘queer’ space in his description of a subject’s movements as seen in an angled mirror, much like the one in Hawarden’s stereograph: “the subject at first sees the room ‘slantwise.’ A man walking about in it seems to lean to one side as he goes. […] The general effect is ‘queer.’”32 “Optical instruments are subject-shifters”,33 writes Donna Haraway, indicating that there is a relay at work between the object, image, and the subject, queered, as it were, by the optical system. As such it invokes a place and a placement that is both here and there, elsewhere, no-where, a u-topia. A common characteristic of the many heterogeneous readings of the virtual, from the Ancient and Scholastic beginnings to a modern deliverance by the likes of Bergson, Deleuze, or Haraway, is a notion of tending towards, a yearning.34 “My diminutive theory’s optical features are set to produce not effects of distance, but effects of connection, of embodiment, and of responsibility for an imagined elsewhere that we may yet learn to see and build here.”35
“Look Into the Sky Through Binoculars With Your Mouth Open”36 — Kepler’s imago
What ultimately transgresses the threshold of the lens is light. The study of refractive and reflective phenomena around the idea of images began in earnest at the turn of the seventeenth century with the availability of ground lenses and polished mirrors; only when objects appeared as images, by way of their diversion, mediation, even displacement and distortion, through prisms and looking glasses, could the study of their appearances generate complex optical ontologies. The German astronomer Johannes Kepler, conscious of the frustrating effects of human errors and phenomenological disparities in regard to the observation of celestial objects and their movements, published his optical treatise Ad Vitellionem paralipomena in 1604, in effect undertaking a paradoxical endeavour, as it examined the “science of visual experience of things that are beyond the power of one’s eyesight.”37 Contemporary rivals insisted that celestial bodies were essentially, necessarily, and eternally beyond the boundaries of human sensations and knowledge, and furthermore suspiciously viewed astronomy’s reliance on dubious new optical instruments such as the telescope, or mathematical systems often premised in conjecture. In a rebuke to the sceptics, Kepler inverted astronomy’s problem by expressly resorting to second-order visual experiences such as shadows or artificially constructed images “over direct experience of tangible entities.”38 Applying mathematical measurement to the optics of shadows (such as eclipses), and mediated images such as those seen in the camera obscura or the telescope provided the foundation for Kepler’s revolutionary theories about the movement of the planets that followed on the publication of his Optics.39
Here, in the Optics, he made the distinction between pictura and imago – analogous to the more modern terms of real and virtual images – to describe a geometrical or optical phenomenon on the one hand, and a physiological or psychological one on the other. Kepler was first to consider the eye as a camera obscura and, following on the optical theories of the eleventh-century Arab mathematician Ibn al-Haytham, he determined that rays of light passing through a lens (such as the pupil) connect corresponding points of the object and the image. The established understanding of an image (imago) was that of an ‘ens rationale,’ a mere being of the mind. Kepler specified a new optical category: “now let the figures of objects that really exist on paper or upon another surface be called pictures (picturae).”40 In creating the pictura, today’s real image, Kepler hauled the picture out of the retina and into the world, making it independent of an observer, and enabling light itself to become the prime carrier of information. Inversely, Kepler now thought of the imago as a mere glitch or chimera,
when the object itself is indeed perceived along with its colours and the parts of its figure, but in a position not its own, and occasionally endowed with quantities not its own, and with an inappropriate ratio of parts of its figure. Briefly, an image is the vision of some object conjoined with an error of the faculties contributing to the sense of vision. Thus, the image is practically nothing in itself, and should rather be called imagination.41
The term imago, also connoting the “seed- or chrysalis-like nature of art works” or the “projected embodiment or primordial image of the parent form, idea, or action, whose existence brings a thing, thought, or lie into being,”42 for Kepler, came to signify a deficient, illusory, erroneous impression: one that required completion by the spectator, in whose unreliable vision it may be supplemented with missing information. Both pictura and imago are formed as a result of refracted and reflected rays of light; however, “in image formation, some data is missing and the intervention of human imagination causes the final result to be a certain artificial entity, where things are not what they appear to be.”43 Kepler acknowledged that in regard to the imago, the human mind played “an active, creative role in any perceptual act.”44
By the mid-seventeenth century, the location of the imago as the place from which rays appear to diverge “was no longer considered to be an error of vision but a true appearance.”45 Following René Descartes’ diagrams of vision modified by prisms, lenses, and mirrors, which anticipated the modern geometrical definition of virtual images, the Aberdeen mathematician and astronomer James Gregory published a first description of this type of apparition in his Optica promota of 1663: “From the points of the pupil, draw through the points of reflection all the lines of reflection, in whose concours L (provided they concur) will be the apparent place of the image of the point B.”46 Along with a growing and more complex vocabulary, more aspects of the nature of images became apparent. In 1668, the Italian Francesco Eschinardi stated that plane mirrors created: “imagine non reali, sed fictitia & merè imaginaria,” introducing in one fell swoop not only the terms ‘real’ (or, in this case ‘not real’), but also ‘fictitious’ and ‘imaginary’ into the realm of optics.47
In 1674, Claude Francois Milliet Dechales published Cursus seu mundus mathematicus, a mathematical compendium written in Latin, including a section on dioptrics, in which he adopted Eschinardi’s terminology, and furthermore introduced the term ‘virtual focus’ as well as ‘virtual image.’48 The first use of ‘virtual focus’ and ‘virtual image’ in English appears in the Irish natural philosopher William Molyneux’s 1692 Dioptrica Nova; A Treatise of Dioptricks in Two Parts.49 By the time that David Brewster, the Scottish physicist who invented and patented the principle of the kaleidoscope in 1815 and constructed the first lenticular stereoscope in 1849, both of which produce virtual images, published his Treatise on Optics in 1831, the term ‘virtual image’ had become common terminology within the field, and his formulation resembles those of his predecessors: “[…] m n will be the virtual image of the object M N. It is called virtual because it is not formed by the actual union of rays in a focus, and cannot be received upon paper.”50
Kepler’s former misgivings about the virtual image came to prefigure an epistemological shift in the early nineteenth century which gave way to a psychophysiological turn in optics. Some years before the scientist and inventor Charles Wheatstone published his discovery of the binocular principle of depth perception as well as his invention of the stereoscope,51 he had translated the Czech anatomist Jan Purkinye’s Contributions to a Physiology of Vision (1823) from German into English.52 Purkinje had written about the retinal afterimage, which Jonathan Crary described as “the presence of sensation in the absence of a stimulus – and its subsequent modulations [which] posed a theoretical and empirical demonstration of autonomous vision, of an optical experience that was produced by and within the subject.”53 Along with that of other physiologists such as Johannes Müller and Hermann von Helmholtz, Purkinje’s work gave new credence to subjective phenomena, which were now accorded the status of optical truth and objectivity.
Wheatstone continued to work in the field of optics and space perception, among many other scientific research areas. He was the first to realise and experimentally prove, by way of the stereoscope, that binocular disparity – the fact that each eye sees a marginally different view – is responsible for human depth perception. Wheatstone showed that two disparate retinal images are synthesised into a unified and three-dimensional impression in the human sensorium. The stereoscope, which uses two flat images from slightly altered angles to produce the illusion of depth, redoubles binocular vision, suggesting a virtual profundity which is in fact the effect of an autofiction of the eyes and the mind. As soon as this new technology was coupled with the equally new medium of photography, viewers were swiftly and frequently transported to unknown places, even unknown dimensions that had no equivalent in the ‘real’ world.54 “The very absence of referentiality is the ground on which new instrumental techniques will construct for an observer a new ‘real’ world. It is a question, in the early 1830s, of a perceiver whose very empirical nature renders identities unstable and mobile.”55 Stereoscopic images moved their viewers beyond their heavy bones, but did so paradoxically through the medium of their bodily sensorium, into images that contained them and were contained by them.
“Always the same and never the same”:56 SOPHIE’s Beckettian hyper pop song lyrics cited at the beginning of this essay describe bodies that long to suspend themselves into immateriality. Repudiating legs, hair, genes, and blood, the song manages to invoke nothing more than a calling forth of these massless bodies’ legs, hair, genes, and blood, sung and danced into the here and now.57 A dissolution and a reconstitution, a relationship of mutual cross-identification (“You could be me and I could be you”): this is what Haraway terms “the promises of monsters,” and Sandy Stone elaborates as the “physicalities of constantly shifting figure and ground that exceed the frame of any possible representation.”58 A movement towards internal dissonance and tension that “produce[s] not an irreducible alterity but a myriad of alterities,”59 the queered experience of an optical system that is generated by way of the virtual.
In our time of techno-optical transgression into the virtual, “in which multiplicity and prosthetic social communication are common,”60 we may encounter a digital diaspora where bodies “have no single destination but rather take on a distributed nature, fluidly occupying many beings, many places, all at once.”61 And especially as the distinctions between either side of the divide (real / virtual or analogue / digital) fade, and as the media of virtuality pervade the side-lined concept of the ‘real’ (to which at any rate there is no more return), the “si(gh)ting device,”62 the interface itself, the place, time, and medium of the crossing or transgression, comes into focus.
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Image Credits
Fig. 9.1: Osmund Airy, diagrams of virtual images, from Osmund Airy, Geometrical Optics: Adapted to the Use of the Higher Classes in Schools, Etc., London, Cambridge: Macmillan and Co., 1870.
Fig. 9.2: René Descartes, diagram of ocular refraction, from René Descartes, La Dioptrique, Discours 5e, 1637. Image: Wellcome Collection Gallery, Wikimedia Commons.
Fig. 9.3: Clementine Hawarden, photograph, 1859–61, albumen print, 71 × 138 mm, Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum (457:284–1968).
Barad, “Transmaterialities. Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings,” p. 396.
Brewster, Treatise on Optics, p. 48.
Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds, p. 285.
Cf. Shapiro, “Images: Real and Virtual, Projected and Perceived, from Kepler to Dechales,” p. 292. Scheiner’s aim was to experimentally prove Johannes Kepler’s new optical concept of pictura, see below. His experiment was described and famously illustrated by René Descartes in La Dioptrique, Discours 5e, 1637; however, Descartes failed to acknowledge his source.
Pantin, “Simulachrum, Species, Forma, Imago,” p. 256. Not coincidentally, this notion anticipates the rhetoric around early photography (which produces pictures that technically also fall into the category of real images) by emphasising the agency of light and the expendability of an author as well as a viewer. In fact, lenticular photography and stereography endlessly reenact Scheiner’s experiment, the late-coming viewer granted a technologically facilitated glance through the camera’s aperture(s), machine and human vision amalgamated.
Eschinardi, Centuria problema tum opticorum, in qua praecipuae difficultates catoptricae, et dioptricae, demonstrative solvuntur, 1666–68, p. 31, quoted from Shapiro, “Images,” p. 297, italics E.W.
“As it was introduced in the last third of the 17th century, the modern, geometrical notion of optical image is the representation of a visible object actually or virtually hanging in the air.” Malet, “Keplerian Illusions,” p. 2. “An imaginary picture, or what in optics is called an image, is, or may be conceived to be, formed in the air, but it is not visible as a thing to an eye situated out of the direction of the rays which go to form it.” John Herschel, quoted from Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds, p. 9.
Esposito, “Illusion und Virtualität,” p. 192, translation E.W.
Baudrillard, “Aesthetic Illusion and Disillusion,” p. 114.
Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds, pp. 287 and 285.
Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters,” p. 325.
Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, p. 30.
Oxford English Dictionary.
Oxford English Dictionary. Cf. also Welsch, “Virtual Anyway,” p. 247, and Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, pp. 1062–67.
Sehgal, “‘Time is Invention’”, p. 172.
Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, p. 9.
Clementina Hawarden, photograph, 1859–61, albumen print, 71 × 138 mm, Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum (457:284–1968). Lewis Carroll published Alice in Wonderland in 1865 and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There in 1871. Carroll acquired five prints, some of which showed Hawarden’s adolescent daughters, who regularly modelled for her, caught “between a looking glass and a window.” Fagance Cooper, “Through the Looking-Glass”, p. 8.
Ibid., p. 8.
Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie takes its departure from Sigmund Freud’s notion of unheimlich to look closely at the not-quite-genres of the titular ‘weird’ (the out-of-place and the out-of-time) and the ‘eerie’ (something where there should be nothing; nothing where there should be something). All three terms seem useful in understanding aspects of Hawarden’s larger oeuvre, which can be found in the Collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Cf. Fischer, The Weird and the Eerie.
Lacan, “The Mirror Stage,” p. 76.
Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II, p. 50.
Plant, “The Feminine Cyberspace”.
Plant, Zeroes and Ones, p. 180.
Massumi, Parables, p. 31.
Bergson, Matter and Memory, pp. 29–30.
Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 68.
Rouvroy, “Technology, Virtuality and Utopia,” p. 131.
Online Etymology Dictionary.
Plant, Zeroes and Ones, p. 178.
Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters,” pp. 295 and 299.
Rouvroy, “Technology, Virtuality and Utopia,”, p. 131.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, quoted in Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, p. 65.
Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters,” p. 295.
A slightly more expansive list of different ‘utopian’ readings of the virtual would include writers and thinkers such as Aristotle, Duns Scotus, Thomas of Aquin, Giorgio Agamben, Elizabeth Grosz, N. Katherine Hayles, Homay King, Brian Massumi, José Muñoz, and Paul B. Preciado, among many others.
Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters,” p. 295. See also Muñoz, Cruising Utopia.
CAConrad, “Minding Thirst,” p. 98.
Chen-Morris, Measuring Shadows, p. 20.
Chen-Morris, Measuring Shadows, p. 20. Cf. also Gal and Chen-Morris, “Baroque Optics and the Disappearance of the Observer.” Aesthetic and religious discourse has a long tradition of working into and out of questions of visibility and invisibility, materiality and immateriality, visual evidence or presence and insurmountable absence or enigma. However, the Ancient and medieval scientific doctrines that came before Kepler considered direct perception (‘facie ad faciem’) as the only permissible source of academic knowledge, whereas mediated perception ‘per speculum’ had its rightful place in theological writing, mystical experiences, and philosophical treatises. Cf. Chen-Morris, Measuring Shadows, p. 13.
Kepler, Optics, 2000.
Ibid., p. 194.
Ibid., p. 77.
Howard, “Iconology, Intention, Imagos,” p. 6.
Chen-Morris, “From Emblems to Diagrams,” p. 163.
Malet, “Keplerian Illusions,” p. 4. ‘Imago’ is also a central term in psychoanalytic theory: first introduced by Carl Jung in 1911, it also features in Lacan’s writing, who ties it to its historical genesis in the “Mirror Stage” essay and understands it as a coming-into-being concurrent or identical with subjective alienation, or becoming-other. Cf. Lacan, “The Mirror Stage,” p. 76. Imago was also the name of the psychoanalytic journal founded by Sigmund Freud in Vienna in 1912.
Shapiro, “Images,” p. 289.
Gregory, Optica promota, 1663, quoted from Darrigol, A History of Optics, p. 72. Isaac Barrow used a similar definition in his Cambridge Lectiones of 1668/69.
Eschinardi, Centuria problematum opticorum, p. 102.
Shapiro, “Images,” p. 302.
Shapiro, “Images,” p. 303.
Brewster, Treatise on Optics, pp. 18–19.
Wheatstone’s invention of the stereoscope was first described in Mayo, Outlines of Human Physiology, p. 288. Wheatstone himself published his findings in 1838: Wheatstone, “Contributions to the Physiology of Vision, Part the First.”
Purkinje, “Contributions to a Physiology of Vision.”
Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p. 98.
Wheatstone, for example, experimented with the so-called pseudoscope, which swapped the left and right images of the stereograph to the effect of inverting spatial impression: a concave depression would appear as a convex mound and vice versa. David Brewster was offended by these distortions of what he valued as an ‘accurate representation of nature’ into a ‘monstrous representations of humanity, which no eye and no pair of eyes ever saw or can see’. Brewster, quoted from Hankins and Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination, p. 158.
Crary, “Techniques of the Observer,” p. 91.
SOPHIE, lyrics, “Immaterial.”
Along with the heaviness of the ultimate absence of the artist herself, who died in a tragic accident in Athens in early 2021.
Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back,” n.p.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Russell, Glitch Feminism, 2020, n.p.
Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters,” p. 295.