The wild effects of the light enchained me to an examination of individual faces; and although the rapidity with which the world of light flitted before the window, prevented me from casting more than a glance upon each visage, still it seemed that, in my then peculiar mental state, I could frequently read, even in that brief interval of a glance, the history of long years.
Edgar Allan Poe, "The Man of the Crowd," 1840. My emphasis.
...a countenance which at once arrested and absorbed my whole attention...
Edgar Allan Poe, "The Man of the Crowd," 1840.
And, as the shades of the second evening came on, I grew wearied unto death, and, stopping fully in front of the wanderer, gazed at him steadfastly in the face. He noticed me not, but resumed his solemn walk, while I, ceasing to follow, remained absorbed in contemplation. 'This old man,' I said at length, 'is the type and the genius of deep crime. He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd. It will be in vain to follow; for I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds. The worst heart of the world is a grosser book than the Hortulus Animae, and perhaps it is but one of the great mercies of God that "er lasst sich nicht lesen."'
Edgar Allan Poe, "The Man of the Crowd," 1840. My emphasis.
| The face in the crowd: | "I could frequently read, even in that brief interval of a glance, the history of long years." |
| The crowd in the face: | "The worst heart of the world is a grosser book than the Hortulus Animae, and perhaps it is but one of the great mercies of God that er lasst sich nicht lesen [it will not be read].'" |
Edgar Allan Poe, "The Man of the Crowd," 1840. My emphasis.
Faces in the Crowd
Flash Epistemology from Poe to Pound
Natalia Cecire, University of Sussex
n.cecire@sussex.ac.uk | @ncecire
Lady Eleanor Holles School, 6 December 2018
These slides are available at: http://natalia.cecire.org/presentations
Image: Weegee (Arthur Fellig), Brooklyn School Children See Gambler Murdered in Street, 1941.
Source: MoMA.
Epistemic virtues are virtues properly so-called: they are norms that are internalized and enforced by appeal to ethical values, as well as to pragmatic efficacy in securing knowledge.
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity, 2007.
the turn of the twentieth century:
- the Gilded Age through the Roaring Twenties?
- the Jim Crow era (1877-1964)?
- the era of Chinese Exclusion (1882-1948)?
biopolitics (Michel Foucault):
the politics of the management of how people live, the major way that modern power manifests itself
Stephen Crane (1871-1900)
Jacob Riis (1849-1914)
Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
The simple treatment of the death of Waite [sic] is too good, too terrible. ... I felt ill over that red thread lining from the corner of the man’s mouth to his chin. It was frightful with the weight of a real and present death. By such small means does the real writer suddenly flash out in the sky above those who are always doing rather well.
Stephen Crane to Joseph Conrad, 11 November 1897.
Flash at the turn of the twentieth century
- manages certain kinds of social-scientific knowledge problems (epistemological effect)
- produces a nonverisimilar reality-effect (aesthetic effect)
Flash's forms:
- Condensation
[Synthetic dioramas] brin[g] together in one composite picture a number of animals that probably would not be found in so small an area at any one moment of the season depicted, but might all be found there at some moment of the season. [...] In this, the day of moving pictures, we may say that as the moving picture condenses into five minutes’ time the events of days or weeks, so these groups depict in a few square feet of space the life and happenings of a much larger area.
Frederic A. Lucas, The Story of Museum Groups, American Museum of Natural History Guide Leaflet Series, no. 53, 1921.
University of Kansas Museum of Natural History.
Library of Congress.
Flash's forms:
- Condensation
- Instantaneity
The New York Sun, 12 February 1888.
With their way illuminated by spasmodic flashes, as bright and sharp and brief as those of the lightning itself, a mysterious party has lately been startling the town o’ nights. Somnolent policemen on the street, denizens of the dives in their dens, tramps and bummers in their so-called lodgings, and all the people of the wild and wonderful variety of New York night life have in their turn marvelled at and been frightened by the phenomenon.
Jacob Riis, "Flashes from the Slums: Pictures Taken in Dark Places by the Lightning Process," The New York Sun, 12 February 1888.
What they saw was three or four figures in the gloom, a ghostly tripod, some weird and uncanny movements, the blinding flash, and then they heard the patter of retreating footsteps, and the mysterious visitors were gone before they could collect their scattered thoughts and try to find out what it was all about.
Jacob Riis, "Flashes from the Slums: Pictures Taken in Dark Places by the Lightning Process," The New York Sun, 12 February 1888.
To-day three-fourths of [New York’s] people live in the tenements, and the nineteenth-century drift of the population to the cities is sending ever-increasing multitudes to crowd them.
Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 1890.
Statistics and censuses...appear throughout How the Other Half Lives, each attempt at authenticity is accompanied by acknowledgment of likely error.
Cindy Weinstein, “How Many Others Are There in the Other Half? Jacob Riis and the Tenement Population,” 2002.
Their night pictures were faithful and characteristic, being mostly snap shots and surprises.
Jacob Riis, "Flashes from the Slums: Pictures Taken in Dark Places by the Lightning Process," The New York Sun, 12 February 1888.
In the daytime, they [the investigators] could not altogether avoid having their object known, and, struggle as they might against it, they could not altogether prevent the natural instinct of fixing up for a picture from being followed. When a view was of interest and value as they found it, they were sometimes unable to stop the preparation and posing from almost destroying the interest in it.
Jacob Riis, "Flashes from the Slums: Pictures Taken in Dark Places by the Lightning Process," The New York Sun, 12 February 1888.
Flash's forms:
- Condensation
- Instantaneity
- Chiaroscuro
[T]he generality of flashlight photographs...are distinguished by the glaring whites of the eyes and the harsh blacks and whites.
Cassell’s Cyclopædia of Photography, 1912.
Photograph: Jacob Riis, "Five Cents Lodging: Bayard Street," 1889.
Their formulaic character is clear in titles such as: The Miseries of New York; The Mysteries and Miseries of New York; The Mysteries and Miseries of New Orleans; New York by Gaslight: With Here and There a Streak of Sunshine; Sunshine and Shadow in New York; New York by Sunlight and Gaslight; Lights and Shadows of New York Life; Lights and Shadows in San Francisco; Chicago by Gaslight; and Boston Inside Out! Sins of a Great City!
John F. Kasson, Rudeness & Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America, 1990.
The Birth Of A Nation
Date of Review: 1923-11-27
Company Name: States Rights
Starring: [Not Stated]
Notes: Film was approved with elimination. Sam Silverman submitted a sound version on 3/23/31 which was examined and disapproved 11/12/31 because of tendency to debase & corrupt morals.
Contains Smoking? Not Stated
Eliminations: Reel 2: Reduce to flash mulatto woman on floor with bare shoulders. Reel 2: Eliminate scene of Stone embracing mulatto woman. Reel 4: Eliminate scene of soldier piercing body of fallen man with bayonet. Reel 5: Eliminate scene mulatto woman fondling arm of Stone. Reel 9: Eliminate closeup of negro’s face looking through trees. Reel 9: Reduce scenes of negro chasing girl. Reel 11: Reduce scenes of Lynch holding Elsie and looking sensually at her.
Box Number: 35-06-05-12
Kansas Board of Review Movie Index record for The Birth of a Nation, 1923. Emphasis added.
Adventures Of Tarzan #5
Date of Review: 1922-03-21
Company Name: CRESCENT FILM CO
Starring: [Not Stated]
Contains Smoking: [Not Stated]
Eliminations: REEL 1 - ELIM. ALL SCENES OF APE STRUGGLING WITH GIRL. SHOW ONE SCENE OF HIM CARRYING HER OFF AND A FLASH OF WHERE ROKOFF AND COMPANION TAKE HER FROM THE APE.
Box Number: 35-06-06-04
Kansas Board of Review Movie Index record for Adventures of Tarzan #5, 1922. Emphasis added.
[T]he method of Luminous Detail [is] a method most vigorously hostile to the prevailing mode of to-day—that is, the method of multitudinous detail, and to the method of yesterday, the method of sentiment and generalisation.
Ezra Pound, “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris (I-II),” The New Age, December 7, 1911. Modernist Journals Project.
In the history of the development of civilisation or of literature, we come upon such interpreting detail. A few dozen facts of this nature give us intelligence of a period—a kind of intelligence not to be gathered from a great array of facts of the other sort. These facts are hard to find. They are swift and easy of transmission. They govern knowledge as the switchboard governs an electric circuit.
Ezra Pound, “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris (I-II),” The New Age, December 7, 1911. Modernist Journals Project.
Dichten = condensare.
[to write poetry = to condense]
Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading, 1934.
An ‘Image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.
Ezra Pound, “A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste,” The New Age, December 7, 1911. Modernist Journals Project.
Modernist Journals Project.
The wild effects of the light enchained me to an examination of individual faces; and although the rapidity with which the world of light flitted before the window, prevented me from casting more than a glance upon each visage, still it seemed that, in my then peculiar mental state, I could frequently read, even in that brief interval of a glance, the history of long years.
Edgar Allan Poe, "The Man of the Crowd," 1840. My emphasis.
[B]etween the letter and the meaning, between what the poet has written and what he has thought, there is a gap, a space, and like all space, it possesses a form. This form is called a figure, and there will be as many figures as one can find forms in the space that is created between the line of the signifier ("la tristesse s'envole"—sorrow flies away) and that of the signified ("le chagrin ne dure pas"—sadness does not last), which is obviously merely another signifier offered as the literal one.
Gérard Genette, "Figures," 1966. Trans. Alan Sheridan.
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear. … If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays. … Greece and Rome civilized BY LANGUAGE. … Rome rose with the idiom of Caesar, Ovid, and Tacitus, she declined in a welter of rhetoric, the diplomat's 'language to conceal thought', and so forth.
Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading, 1934.
Thanks to Lauren Klein and Nihad Farooq for comments on an earlier version of this talk.
This presentation was made using reveal.js 3.5.0, created by Hakim El Hattab / @hakimel.
A bibliography follows this slide.
Bibliography
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———, and Peter Galison. Objectivity. New York: Zone Books, 2007.
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Griffiths, Alison. Shivers down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
Bibliography continued
Gunning, Tom. “In Your Face: Physiognomy, Photography, and the Gnostic Mission of Early Film.” Modernism/modernity 4, no. 1 (1997): 1–29.
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Jones, Bernard Edward. Cassell’s Cyclopaedia of Photography. Cassell, 1912.
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Bibliography continued
Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Man of the Crowd.” In Poe: Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays, 388–97. New York: Library of America, 1996.
Pound, Ezra. ABC of Reading. New York: New Directions, 2010.
———. “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste.” Poetry: A Magazine of Verse 1, no. 6 (March 1913): 200–206.
———. “How to Read.” In Literary Essays, edited by T. S. Eliot. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1954.
———. “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris (I-II).” The New Age, December 7, 1911. Modernist Journals Project.
Riis, Jacob. “Flashes from the Slums. Pictures Taken in Dark Places by the Lightning Process.” The Sun. February 12, 1888.
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Bibliography continued
Stange, Maren. “Jacob Riis and Urban Visual Culture: The Lantern Slide Exhibition as Entertainment and Ideology.” Journal of Urban History 15, no. 3 (May 1989): 274–303.
Trotter, David. “Becoming Media: Modernist Writing, Hollywood Cinema, and the Scene of Female Toilette.” University of Sussex Centre for Modernist Studies, April 16, 2015.
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