Reconstruction Vol. 12, No. 3
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Kircher’s Musurgia Universalis – The Optical Apparatus in the “Theatrical” Court of Hamlet / Lori M. Martindale
"Media are spaces of action for constructed attempts to connect what is separated." – Siegfried Zielinski
<1> Media philosopher Sigfried Zielinski‘s book Deep Time and The Media “attempts to connect what is separated” with what is seen and unseen. Zielinski writes: "Media are spaces of action for constructed attempts to connect what is separated" (Zielinski, 2006, 7). Zielinski‘s book draws upon Athanasius Kircher‘s work, which emerged as a form of dialectics which bridge what is seen and the unseen. Kircher‘s magnetic clocks and the Renaissance trepidation of the spheres point to centers of hegemonic structures…and comprise various interrelated and layered discursive formations of consonance. The physiognomy of the history of music and one could argue, of surveillance, through an account of its discursive formations, of consonance and dissonance, is revealed through technological apparatus and archaeology of seeing and hearing via theatrics “by technical means.” [1]
<2> Panacousticon [2] is Kircher‘s design for a surveillance system of public space: primarily of courtyards where every word can be overheard and eavesdropping surveillance can take place. Theatrical machinery can thus be seen as a mode of scrutiny whereby the spectator “observes” the “court like” stage as a mirror for the observatory – to witness the court mirrored and performed as a subversive technique. The English Renaissance theatrical “Prospero,” John Dee experimented with theatrical apparatus of stage with this performance. Zielinski writes about how Dee…
impressed Oxford initially not with his mathematical genius but with a spectacular coup de theatre. At a performance in Trinity College in the late 1540s, he used pulleys, pneumatic apparatus, and mirrors to make one of the play‘s protagonists fly up into the stage‘s heavens, riding on a big metal scarabaeus. He also presented other kinetic effects with this mechanical monster. The audience of professors and students were enchanted, but at the same time they suspected Dee of practicing demonic magic. (Later Shakespeare is purported to have made use of Dee‘s theatrical tricks)” (129-130).
<3> Spiral shaped conduits serve as amplifiers in an Elizabethan court, where hearing and seeing (by “technical means”) purports to infest the surveillance power via the stage as mirror for court. Hamlet must navigate through the archaeological spheres of the watchtower, of eavesdroppers, of unseen “camera” in the court.
The interiority of the castle becomes the ultimate sphere of surveillance.
<4> Zielinski draws on Michel Foucault to reveal the written word and absolute authority through archaeological structures: “His [Kircher‘s] work stands, a monument made of splendid folios of paper, linen, and leather, like the very symbolization of Michel Foucault‘s thesis in his Archaeology of the Human Sciences that ‘such a linkage of language and things within the same space … is only conceivable if the written word is privileged absolutely‘ – whereupon the Vatican [as a symbol of power, like the castle] set the very score” (120). The representation imposed on the individual, as far as what is spoken, according to Foucault, rests on a “collective representation that is imposed” and, similar to the court, in which “certain figures”[3] may be named or remain unseen:
…we must understand by this a sort of communal opinion, a collective representation that is imposed on every individual; we must not understand by it a great anonymous voice that must, of necessity, speak through the discourses of everyone; but we must understand by it the totality of things said, the relations, the regularities, and the transformations that may be observed in them, the domain of which certain figures, certain intersections indicate the unique place of a speaking subject and may be given the name of author. 'Anyone who speaks', but what he says is not said from anywhere. It is necessarily caught up in the play of an exteriority (Archaeology 122).
<5> This center of power and knowledge is almost “all seeing,” as Foucault explains in his Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Whereupon the center of power and “anonymous voice” of exteriority is exemplified in the structure of authority (the King and/or the court) and wields surveillance and punishment in order to exercise command, which Foucault explains as “according to a continuous hierarchical figure” (4). This close examination of incarceration via interiority of surveillance in the castle is also illustrated in Foucault‘s Discipline and Punish:
This enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded, in which an uninterrupted work of writing links the centre and periphery, in which power is exercised without division, according to a continuous hierarchical figure, in which each individual is constantly located, examined and distributed among the living beings, the sick and the dead - all this constituted a compact model of the disciplinary method (p.4)
<6> In Hamlet, images of imprisonment, traps, and spies serve as symbols for the real incarceration and court surveillance. Hamlet explains how the space is like a prison to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: “A godly one, in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being one o‘ th‘ worst” (II.ii.264-266). Claudius speaks of times when ‘th‘offenders scourge is weighed‘ (IV.iii.6). The panoptic image of the Jeremy Bentham‘s prison system is again revealed through the motif of incarceration and continual spying in Hamlet. The lack of privacy, court surveillance, and the eyes on Hamlet lends itself to the mise en scene of capital punishment. The castle (and stage) can be compared with Zielinski‘s potent example of the mise en scene exhibit of Kircher‘s museum in Rome, [4] where the entrance of the museum is lined with a “gallery of metal heads, which stood at the walls of the museum entrance” where ”…as omnipresent watcher and prompter, the heads would begin to speak whenever anyone passed by, and no one knew where the voices came from” (127). The omnipresent viewers at the entrance of the museum were mysterious talking heads, sculptures would begin to speak to passersby down a long entrance, and no one knew where the amplified voices came from (129). One would feel the sense of being constantly staged, watched and listened to. This panoptic image brings to mind The Rainbow Portrait, of Queen Elizabeth‘s gown of embroidered images of eyes and ears, spies watching, as a reminder of heads on pikes and public execution.
<7> Zielinski draws on Kircher‘s Musurgia universalis “which contains many designs for eavesdropping, which used the other way round, can amplify sound and stage miraculous events” (127). Kircher‘s design for the surveillance system of courtyards is another form of the transparent prison, Zielinski notes how ”Foucault‘s claim that the faculty of sight is distinguished by its misuse as an organ of control does not appear to hold good in light of these sophisticated acoustic constructions for spying” (128). Zielinski‘s connections to the theatre, Mario Bettino‘s 1645 treatise on mirrors, are equally intriguing (and to optics and later portable projections). Kircher‘s illustrations of the “transformation of the observer” and “metaphor machine” through lantern and optics / catoptric theatre are quite incredible to study in regards to theatrics of stage and court spying.
<8> Kircher‘s powerful illustrative texts embody rhythmic structure and a wider epistemological meaning of being seen. However, aside from illustrations of surveillance, Zielinski writes of another media world: “The world that he creates in his prodigious oeuvre is highly ordered and beautiful. It is full of harmony, effects, illusions; it is calculated, dreamy, and fantastic: an ideal media world” (157). Much like the theatre, Kircher‘s illustrations establish a resemblance with a hidden mystery that one cannot otherwise always see – a bridge between the unseen and the seen - the heard and unheard in the archaeological sphere: one of eyes and ears. After all, what can be seen and unseen is often what is missed, what eludes certainty. In Hamlet‘s court, what optical apparatus still exists? What of Hamlet, as witness to the spy, the King… in a court of eyes and ears?
ENDNOTES
[1] Zielinski, Siegfried. Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006).
[2] Ibid. p.129.
[3] Foucault, Michel. Les mots et les choses, Paris: Gallimard, 1966 (The Order of Things, New York: Vintage, 1973).
[4] Zielinski, Siegfried. Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006). Reference to Giorgiode Sepibus‘s book (1678).
REFERENCES
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
________.Les mots et les choses, Paris: Gallimard, 1966 (The Order of Things, New York: Vintage, 1973).
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine. NY: Folger, 1992. Print.
Zielinski, Siegfried. Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006).
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