Working Papers

– ‘Tisn’t medical science.’

– ‘What?’

– ‘Things in a dead man’s eye.’
– ‘For goodness’ sake leave that horror alone!’ said Lowndes. ‘I’ve seen a native die of pure fright when a tiger chivied him. I know what killed Hummil.’

– ‘The deuce you do! I’m going to try to see.’
And the doctor retreated into the bathroom with a Kodak camera. After a few minutes there was the sound of something being hammered to pieces, and he emerged, very white indeed.
– ‘Have you got a picture?’ said Mottram. ‘What does the thing look like?’
– ‘It was impossible, of course. You needn’t look, Mottram. I’ve torn up the films. There was nothing there. It was impossible.’
– ‘That,’ said Lowndes, very distinctly, watching the shaking hand striving to relight the pipe, ‘is a damned lie.’[3]

In all these narratives, popular, scientific or literary, the images found inside the body (in the eye) are a pillar of truth, but we shouldn’t mistake this idea with some kind of association between vision and truth. As Jonathan Crary already demonstrated, the modern subject that is being constructed all along the XIX century is far away from transparency and truth. His vision is bodily centered, subjective, illusionary, ideological (as Marx, Freud and Nietzsche theorized) [4].
What is at work here is not something like an equation between vision and truth, but between automatism and truth, as the image is not an intentional one, but something that has been produced spontaneously by the embodied eye. The so-called eye-photograph depends upon a body automatism, a biological device (the visual purple) and not upon a conscious decision.
The all story of optography is somewhat surrounding some Freudian statements that will come out at the end of XIX century. But even before Freud, Charcot (his great master and inspirer) did some experiences about the doubled structure of human mind, with catalepsy patients, and Pierre Janet, a Charcot’s disciple, is acknowledged for having invented the concept of dissociation. Maybe it is not happenstance that in the same volume of Nature, next to the page where Prof. Gamgee, in a scientific report, relates all the experiences about retinal images by Boll and Kuhne, a little note communicates us about Charcot experiences in Paris:

Charcot has demonstrated that it is possible to provoke catalepsy by putting the patient in front of an electrical source of light; and it is possible to make it in just one side of the body, by closing one of the eyes; then, this side will remain in a stare of lethargy or somnambulism.”[5]

At the same time that these fantasies were at work, studies on psychological automatism were working about automated mechanisms, as the quotation about Charcot supposes. In 1889 Pierre Janet, a Charcot’s disciple, such as Freud was at that time, publishes is major work about dissociation and its foundations: L’Automatisme Psychologique, essai de psychologie Expérimentale sur les formes inférieures de l’activicté humaine[6]. In this work, the author points out a double nature of the human being, that would explain pathologies like Hysteria, and some cataleptic symptoms. That double nature supposes that we don’t control all of our acts, some of them being automated[7]. Later, in Freud and Breuer Hystery Studies (1895), we will be lead to the major opposition between the conscious and the unconscious that will be common to normal and pathological beings:

We call conscious representations those we can observe as they live inside us, even if we don’t pay so much attention to them” and that are, “at every moment, just a few, and, if there are other thoughts, we must call them unconscious.”[8]

There were to be a major conflict between the different concepts of unconscious of Janet, Charcot and other psychologists of XIX century and the one Freud will state, because the XIX century concept of automatism does not suggest yet a very dynamic differentiation between consciousness and the unconscious like the one Freud would state in “A Note on the unconscious in psychoanalysis” in 1911[9]. If in the popular and common sense the idea of optography echoes the epistemological context of Charcot’s works, its treatment in literary text joins Freud: in Kipling’s novel we are at terms with an image that is formed not of some external stimulus (the crime), but of an internal one: an hallucination, which can be associated with the touchstone of psychoanalysis in its maturity: the dream (or the nightmare) and the dream analysis.
The note about Charcot, that Nature publishes so discreetly, talks, through the lines, about the idea of a divided self, and, at the same time, about a self which body can do some actions dictated by external forces acting directly on the deeper levels of consciousness. This body, plenty of automatisms, seems to find in optography one of its figures, even if it is a very fantastic one. The realism of the camera is now projected over the body and the self as the result of a nature that reason cannot control. The image, kept by the retina, is not the product of a perception-conscience system; it can be a truly image because it is a driven, instinctual image, which comes from a kind of solitary, self-driven eye. The only trustful eye is the one driven by an automated body.
As Ulrich Baer has underlined, photography and psychoanalysis share a same interest on the importance of the detail, the little thing that sometimes we don’t see at a first sight[10]. This was central, for instance, in dream interpretation, where the latent contents, hidden behind some uninteresting (apparently) detail, play the main role to understand “the latent content“. The detective’s eye over the dead eye, which floats separated from its body, seems to underline these little something. Hidden under the eyelid, unsuspected until then, the eye reveals the crime, after being prepared, analyzed, scrutinized and photographed. It is from this fragmentation process that comes the possibility of the global sense of everything, as Edgar Poe pointed in “The Purloined Letter”[11].
In the Freudian theory, the Ego is surrounded by images that are not, in a traditional sense, of his entire “responsibility“. Most part of the Ego is unconscious, moved by instinct drives that are somewhere located in a new entity, an entity that throws back the classical opposition between mind and body, working upon a body that is at the same time a mind, and a mind which is always body, within a new concept: the unconscious[12]. Even if the Freudian theory was still to wait long to come to light, XIX century psychology was already working, although with the accent in the hypnotism and hysterical scene, in the idea of doubling or multiple personality and from the 70’s, as we have already underlined.
The body-automatic images supposed within this “optographic“ tale are indeed a very complex matter. They are contemporary of other ideas (and practice) on automatism: telepathy, hypnotic control (mesmerism), automatic writing, and spiritualism. They bring with them an insight of the main theories – which work against the evidence of a conscience and an idealist weltanschauung of the subject – that were to be constructed all along the XIX century about Man – that very recent invention, as Foucault called it.