"A Something-Nothing Out of Its Very Contrary": The Photography of Coleridge

Acknowledging Samuel Taylor Coleridge's familiarity with the photochemical experiments that would later result in the invention of photography, this paper traces how Coleridge uses the language of photographic process to critique mechanical and materialist theories of the mind in Biographia Literaria and in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Coleridge's references to the camera obscura throughout his critique of David Hartley in Biographia suggest a connection between Hartleian associationism and photographic picturing that sheds light on Coleridge's dramatization of the fate of a subject whose "I" is subordinated to the regime of the "eye" in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Critiquing the agent-less mind's creation of "a something-nothing" that is very like a photograph in Coleridge's conception, the poet offers in its place an active poetic imagination capable of unfixing the dead image.