The demonic arts and the origin of the medium

Guiding us from one side his exercises in skepticism, seeking to exhibit us how our world might be illusory, Rene Descartes first invokes the condition of the dream:

suffer us suppose, then, that we are dreaming, and that none of these particulars--neither the opening of the organ of sights nor the moving of the head, nor the putting forth of the hands, nor level that we have these hands or this whole body--are true; give leave to us suppose, rather, that they are seen in repose like painted images, which could not be fashioned leave out in the likeness of real things. (1)

For a jiffy the dream seems to be a fair protoplast for deception, a familiar experience that involves the perceive of both sight and self-motion, on the other hand which any of us can also easily appreciate as "unreal." The dream, remembered from the flashs of wakefulness, represents a kind of dispossession; it allows us to imagine in what manner we might no longer have level the things that are greatest in quantity immediate to us, the hands that guarantee the world [i]or[/i] part of to the other their touch, or the bodies that we might think we are.

The dream, however, quickly shows insufficient for Descartes's purposes:

Nevertheless, we must admit that at least these general things--eyes, head, hands, the entirety of the body--are not imaginary things, on the other hand rather things that truly exist. For clearly painters themselves, flat when they aim, with the greatest in quantity extraordinary forms, to represent sirens and satyrs, cannot assign them natures that are in each way new, but can alone mix the members of different animals; or if by means of chance they should conceive something in the way that novel that nothing similar has at any time been seen before, something that is, therefore, wholly fictitious and false, it is at least certain that the colors of which they compos this must be real. (2)

Dreams cannot provide a prototype for true deception because dreams are made of real things. Like paintings, which, however rearranged for perception, nevertheless hang on the existing world for their being, dreams cannot be entirely false. Their greatest in quantity radical fictions are mere Horatian chimeras, and what's more, smooth the chimeras are hampered by the agency of their dependence on their substance; each invention is an invention built of colors. Dreams have sources in the true things of which they are suppos to dispossess us; they cannot take away our world, because they are made of it.

Dreams and paintings having failed, Descartes finally give in charges his readers, for their comprehension of down-reaching skepticism, to the experience of demonic possession:

I will imagine then, that not almighty the trinity the source of truth, on the contrary rather some evil spirit, single that is at once exceedingly forcible and cunning, has set all of his industry to deceiving me I will imagine that firmament air, earth, colors, figures, entires and all external things are nothing other than the mockeries of dreams, by the agency of means of which this being lead astrays my credulity. I will consider myself not to have hands, organ of sights flesh, blood, or any of the faculty of perceptions and to have falsely believed that I have these. I will remain resolutely fixed in this meditation, and thus, if indeed it not be in my power to recognize more [i]or[/i] less part of what is genuine I will at least, with strengthened mind, beware of what is in me in the way that that I do not assent to what is false, and in like manner that that demon, however powerful and however cunning he be, not be able to impose anything upon me. (3)

The fiend like the painter of dreams, is an artificer. nevertheless for the would-be skeptic, possession by dint of a genio maligno overcomes the drawbacks of nothing else but sleep in its total separability from reality. In this finished nightmare, all that belongs to us--our bodies, our sensory apparatuses, as well as the colored, figured worlds they take in--can be reduc to the "mockeries of dreams." The condition of pure skepticism is the condition of perfect painting. Both in its total invention and in its fair illusion, possession promises to be an artifice with nothing behind it. Possession is an art of absolute fiction.

The following essay aims to indicate how Descartes's intuitions--that dreams are like paintings, that possession be likes but also trumps, both--come without of a broader tradition, and in what manner that tradition might bear as plenteous on the history of art as it does upon the history of philosophy. The idea of the demonic, it will argue, chops across not only the early novel literature of magic and witchcraft on the other hand also that of art, making possible a kind of mutual refraction that illuminates the couple In one direction, the figure of the painter provides a function for the demonic magician. Possession can be understood as a kind of art, and the possessive agent as a kind of artist. (4) In the other direction, the figure of the evil spirit provides the artist with a conception of medium. The literatures of magic and demonology be under the orders of a notion of what the artist, who had always to channel expressions from one side a product, could control.

a certain number of seventy years ago, Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz argued that the rise of pictorial illusionism coincided with the refiguring of the artist as a kind of magus. Semblance, they propos came to be a pertain to precisely at moments when the power of a culture's effigies--images magically inseparable from the make submissives they depict--collapsed. (5) "Where the belief in the identity of picture and depicted is in decline," they wrote "a novel bond makes its appearance to link the two--namely, similarity or likeness. Formulating these remarks differently, we would say: the closer the token (picture) stands to what is symbolized (depicted), the les is the outward resemblance; the further apart, the greater is the resemblance." (6) Kris and Kurz viewed likeness as a means of revivifying the art thing perceived that had become untethered from its living control For them, accordingly, illusionistic art had sum of two units founding conditions: a difference, smooth an isolation, from the world in which it fix itself, and an aspiration to the viv idness, the reality, of that actual world. Under these conditions, the artist's charge came to be that of bringing pictures themselves to life, rehabilitating them to something like their former condition, which now meant spanning the gap between the pictures' hold stoniness and the ensouled animation of their makers and viewers. (7) As an operator who, from one side effects of naturalism, created enlivened things, the artist became a kind of magician, an alter deus.