Terada - Looking Away (Selections).pdf - Townsend Humanities Lab

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46 looking away pearance is that they do not confine him to reshuffling the specific ideas that trouble him. Spectra may seem to be fancies, but in their repleteness they are opposed to mechanical recombination. Their coextensiveness with perception makes them as holistic as any natural phenomenon. Lingering over a purple afterimage, Coleridge does not thematize the struggle between child and adult or any other preoccupation, but brings about a wholesale shift in his way of engaging the world. On one occasion, Coleridge demonstrates this capacity of phenomenophilia to his son Hartley: March 17, 1801. Tuesday—Hartley looking out of my study window fixed his eyes steadily & for some time on the opposite prospect, & then said—Will yon Mountains always be?—I shewed him the whole magnificent Prospect in a <strong>Looking</strong> Glass, and held it up, so that the whole was like a Canopy or Ceiling over his head, & he struggled to express himself concerning the Difference between the Thing & the Image almost with convulsive Effort. (N 923) Hartley has a question about the most permanent natural facts of the earth, and seems to yearn for security. A conventional answer might go something like, “They’ll be there long enough”; answering in this way pretends to ignore the worry in Hartley’s question, and teaches that one doesn’t think too hard about this kind of thing. The literal answer is no, but that too fails to respond to the need implied in the question. Coleridge’s Zen-like response, bringing a looking glass to warp the landscape, respects the impetus of Hartley’s question by refraining from closing it off as either “yes” or “no” would do. Rather, it shows how the experience leading to the question can be adjusted, rather than erased, by reframing perception. It’s uncertain whether Hartley gets into the spirit of Coleridge’s gesture—he seems to take it as another emotional and epistemological struggle—but the gesture itself reveals Coleridge’s belief in the ability of self-modified perceptions to shift the terms of what seems to be given. In its ability to vary the terms of experience, looking away, like dreams, resembles art production. Whether one wants to say it is art depends
coleridge among the spectra 47 on how one feels about the peripheral artlikeness of tiny private performances. Kant and Adorno would say that such performances may be protoartistic but produce no art (I’ll consider this in Chapter 4). Coleridge, however, goes so far as to call the coal fire fantasy “a voluntary poem in ...picture-writing.” The metaphor of hieroglyphics—Freud’s metaphor for dreams—assimilates controlled perception, as in lucid dreaming, to the externalization of thoughts in writing, as though what Coleridge saw when he looked at the fire were his writing about it. Writing the account of a spectrum, too, is a final way of prolonging it. “I make this note ...topreserve the circumstance,” Coleridge writes of a double image of a single candle (N 1863). While all writing is intended to preserve a circumstance, Coleridge’s propensity to time spectra gives his common phrase an uncommon resonance. One of the appeals of always writing something is that writing comes to frame all other relations, and provides an index to appearance that seems to qualify its factive authority and loosen the perceiver’s obligation to it. (Of his hashish experiences, Walter Benjamin observes, “perhaps it is only for this reason that so much of what one sees presents itself as ‘arranged,’ as ‘experiment’—so that one can laugh about it” [On Hashish, 20]). Of course, the relief of spectra is fed by social dilemmas; their freedom is valuable in proportion to the problematic relations they momentarily suspend. “Like the Gossamer Spider, we may float upon air and seem to fly in mid heaven,” Coleridge remarks, “but we have spun the slender Thread out of our own fancies, & it is always fastened to something below” (N 2166). Coleridge locates the virtue of spectra especially in their consensual quality. When he comes upon spectra he is eager to log, he plays with them and extends them. He savors them, confirming his participation in their appearance, and often notes how long a spectrum lasts. A dose of “Castor Oil in Gin & Water” helps to bring on a double image of Coleridge’s seal “exactly as if seen thro’ a common Reading-glass”; notable in this event, Coleridge writes, is that “I saw and (after noticing the circumstance) still continued to see it, like a fixed reality not dependent on my will, without dimness or swimmingness of Vision” (N 2632). In another incident he experiments with the lines of sight that support “a phantom of [his] face upon the night cap which lay just on [his] pillow.”
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Postscript Freud begins Section VI
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postscript 201 also to be told wher
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postscript 203 dition for noncoerci
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Bibliography Index
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208 bibliography Ahmed, Sara. Queer
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210 bibliography ton Christensen an
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212 bibliography Guyer, Paul. Kant
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214 bibliography Machiavelli, Nicco
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216 bibliography Seel, Martin. Aest
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Terada - Looking Away (Selections).pdf - Townsend Humanities Lab

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