Architecture of Thought

4. Technologies of Thought in Victorian England

Previous chapters have shown that, throughout history, Europeans have made various efforts to control symbolic thought. In the nineteenth century, the desire to merge material and symbolic technologies was still present, but the traditional—reductive and stable— ways of thinking could no longer deal with the dynamism of the emerging structures of sociopolitical relationships and practices of life triggered by the industrial revolution. It was no longer a question of a different system of interpretations; rather, there was a palpable need to liquefy traditional structures of thought, to keep symbolic thinking fluid, and endlessly open to manipulation. A new kind of tacit technology emerged and it successfully targeted the most elemental possibilities of symbolic meanings. The scientific disciplines, the arts, philosophy, and advertising mapped the very fabric of thought and gradually learned to control it. These efforts triggered and were powered by a general fascination with the mechanisms of perception, attention, desire, and memory. An empirical understanding of material and technically invented reality found its complement in a new appetite for explicitly constructed meanings, be it romantic spirituality, aesthetic appreciation for the arts, one’s identity, or history. Although this change was broad and involved complex sociopolitical processes, the new technology of thought emerged the way architectural ideas evolve.1 Architects became only a fraction of those who started to design lived reality. Buildings and cities were included in the category of mutable constructs that could explore the same issues probed by viewing devices and mass media. In this way, architecture was aligned with forces that succeeded in developing permanently ductile modes of symbolic thought—the foundation of the market economy and the culture of consumerism. Viewing Devices One way of exploring how and why ways of thinking changed during the industrial revolution is to look into the mass-produced material symbols of that shift. Never before had technical inventions gained a symbolic status and popularity even comparable to the array of optical devices that were invented, designed, and produced in the nineteenth 4 Technologies of Thought in Victorian England 154 Technologies of Thought in Victorian England century, primarily in England. Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer: On the Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century astutely asserts that new techniques and material practices of visuality were essential in the broader project of reconstituting the observer.2 According to Crary, the primary shift occurred when the camera obscura was replaced by those devices that construct the visual field as “a surface of inscription on which a promiscuous range of effects could be produced.”3 The camera obscura was designed to shut off the exterior world and then to make it visible again in the interior of the dark chamber as a figurative representation. Its single aperture selectively admitted a view, cropped it, and projected it onto a screen. If the lens was adequate, the image looked shockingly realistic. At the time when the best technique of duplicating visual appearances was to paint a picture, the dark chamber offered images that precisely replicated shapes, colors, distribution of light (chiaroscuro with a high range of contrast), and all that in motion. From the late 1500s to the end of the 1700s, this miracle of a device fascinated those who could afford to experience it. It was much more than a toy for the rich, however. The camera obscura was a material manifestation of a space of reason; its physical space symbolically recreated the relationship that, according to theories of the classical era, existed between the body and mind. The Cartesian dichotomy of matter and spirit distinguished between two independent phases in the process of visual perception: first, the optical, when the pupil of the eye admits light rays and the lens transforms the field of vision into an image on the retina, and second, the rational, when the conscious mind inspects the image and makes sense of it.4 The camera obscura represented this dichotomy because the optical (that is, material) spectacle did not require a human presence. Perfect images appeared in the dark chamber whether or not somebody was watching them. Also, as in the case of the human mind, whose operations are beyond the reach of one’s perception, a person inside the camera obscura could never see himself or herself in the projected image. The camera obscura symbolically proved that the physical act of visual perception was trustworthy because optical processes—those that produce figurative representations of the world—were unbiased, and the mind/person only witnessed...