Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject by Jill H. Casid (review)

A book as theoretically provocative and methodologically transgressive as Jill Casid’s Scenes of Projection is bound to be fruitful, if not always for the reasons that the author intends. Casid deploys her impressive command of psychoanalytic and queer theory in a radical rethinking of how optical media, as social and technological apparatuses, construct the Enlightenment subject and validate a particular form of knowing based on disembodied veridical sight and a rigidly categorical form of reason. Her rejection of Enlightenment reason, which she characterizes as a “phantom” with no more substance than a magic lantern projection onto smoke, is more total, she insists (p. 123), than that of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno.

Projection, for Casid, is rich in psychoanalytic, alchemic, and optical allusion. Psychoanalytically it is a form of denial, a casting out of shameful aspects of the self onto an external object, an “other” to be despised and disciplined. Eighteenth-century scenes of projection, she argues, cast out unreason and carnal frailty onto others figured as non-human (animal or demonic), non-white, or sexually non-normative. In pursuit of this thread Casid uncovers wonderful evidence of the covertly seductive, dark imaginary of magic lantern projections. She also recognizes that the liberatory promise of critical rationality was reserved for privileged “Enlightenment subjects” at the cost of subjugating abjected others to new forms of rational domination.

Casid’s analysis of scenes of projection in the colonial context is particularly welcome and insightful. In an effort to quell a Marabout insurrection in Algeria in the mid-nineteenth century, the French deployed Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, a virtuoso practitioner of “natural magic.” Houdin’s aim was to awe his ignorant subjects with technological illusion, without revealing to them the hidden natural science and engineering, the “physiology” of technological mediation, comprehension of which was crucial to the Enlightenment subject’s capacity for detecting visual deception and thereby resisting political manipulation. Casid mentions but provides less evidence of class and (surprisingly) gendered constructions of Enlightenment others.

The author is interested in the scene of projection both as domination and resistance, understood in terms of an imagined liberatory potential of unreason. Scenes of Projection follows an extraordinary arc from recognizably historical scholarship which, while highly theorized, respects historical evidence in temporal context, toward something more akin to the queer feminist art projects that increasingly figure in the text, not so much as evidence as inspirational touchstones, where material from across time and space is linked according to a Jungian dream logic and given coherence less by theory than by political desire.

Each chapter is organized according to a different psychoanalytic concept: paranoid projection; morbid projection; introjection; melancholia; imaginative projection. Casid interrogates the featured artifacts of chapter 1—the magic lantern and camera obscura—less as material things with delimited properties than as texts with connotative possibilities. Abstracted as “scenes of projection,” the technical distinctions and contemporary social meanings of these two artifacts become occulted such that the dark imaginary associated with the magic lantern adheres to the “rational” camera obscura.

Faced with scant evidence that optical devices that project images figured in anti-colonial and queer projects of resistance, Casid conjures surrogate evidence—a tiger automaton eating an Englishman and Zora Neale Hurston’s 1938 text Tell My Horse—which are scenes and projections only in metaphorical and psychoanalytic senses. This move opens the question of why any and all forms of culture should not become objects of Casid’s psychoanalytic gaze. This is a gaze that too easily and opportunistically conflates. Another of numerous examples is the chain of dark equivalences Casid asserts between silhouettes, covertly suggestive because they are spatially unresolved (e.g., a pair of hands can project as a rabbit) and skiagraphy, a precise rendering of shadows to resolve spatial ambiguity.

Casid has written for “those engaged with [her] in the tasks of visual studies and queer studies” (p. 33) and outside that circle, few are likely to be...