Aesthetics of Invisibility. |
From the very beginning, there has been a connection of the utmost significance between seeing and knowledge in Western intellectual history. The primacy of the visual consists in singling it out from among all modes of perception and in setting it up as the ultimate criterion for knowledge. Yet there is a deep-seated ambivalence in the sense of sight which renders the preferential treatment of visual perception to the exception of all else problematic, to say the least. Indeed, sight is – and has long been – known to be liable to deception and error. This fundamental paradox in the privileged position of the visual in the registry of sense perceptions is the point de départ of a history of visibility in which the changing conditions of visual perception shall be reflected in their mutual relations to processes of intellectual history.
Imagination, understood as the precondition of the visible in general, is the active link between the perceiving senses and the cognizing mind and therefore marks the very centre of the ambivalence of the visual outlined above. In the course of the eighteenth-century revaluation of sense perception, the imagination gained wide acceptance as an essential faculty of the human mind and figured prominently in the autonomization process of the aesthetic. The moment of transition from neo-classical poetological concepts of mimesis to the romantic poetics of imagination is a promising opening into the unexplored territory of the history of visibility. The largely overlooked visual dimension of imaginative poetics informs the majority of romantic texts and, indeed, pervades the entire intellectual project of romanticism. First and foremost of the works to be taken into account are those of E.T.A. Hoffmann who realized most fully the romantic imaginative program. But also the prose works of other German Romantics – Tieck, Brentano, Arnim, Eichendorff, Chamisso and Fouqué – offer the opportunity to trace out the problematic history of visibility. Out of the ambivalent signature of visibility and invisibility arises the chance of access to contexts, which would remain unexplored due to their heterogeneous elements. Thus is the prospect of an 'Aesthetics of Invisibility' unobstructed – an aesthetic springing up in romanticism and greatly influencing the course of the aesthetic tradition of modernity.