Sights of Enchantment: Magic – Vision – Metaphor

Workshop at Columbia University, New York
Friday, February 13, 2009, 2-8 pm
Deutsches Haus at Columbia University
420 West 116th Street (at Amsterdam Ave.)
New York, NY 10027

Even in our allegedly secular times, visual experience is often
described with reference to “magic”. Notions like enchantment,
fascination and glamour come from the lexicon of magic, and it is often
unclear if they are used metaphorically or meant more literally. Their
long-standing presence in the discourse of aesthetic experience and in
discussions of the power of eye contact are symptomatic of the continued
(if sometimes subliminal) efficiency of magical concepts of vision and
imagery, a diagnosis that prompts the question: what does “magic” mean
(here)?
Bringing together literary, historical, anthropological and media
perspectives, the workshop aims to provoke an interdisciplinary
discussion of magical concepts of vision and their rhetorical functions.
Given that the realm of this discussion has been described as “the
underside of vision” (by Lawrence Di Stasi, in his book on the evil eye
entitled Mal Occhio), one of the subjects might be how the concept of
magic took the form of an implicit psychology – long before
psychoanalysis delivered its influential interpretation of the relations
between visual experience, emotions, and the unconscious.

The workshop places this topic in a historical perspective. Later
rhetorical adaptations (e.g. in Romantic literature) can only be
appropriately described with regard to “literally” magic ideas of vision
and imagery (prevalent, for example, in discourses on the evil eye, on
image magic and in early modern demonologies). The shift from magic and
religion to aesthetics that marks the 18th century as the period of
Enlightenment led to a transformation of the idea of visual enchantment,
but not to its dismissal. In fact the arts of illusion that were
practised under the name of “natural magic” around 1800 can be
considered a site where Enlightenment and magic converged. These “smoke
and mirrors” sometimes even became a model for the literary poetics of
enchantment, and of course the history of film is inseparable from the
history of optical magic.

Magic – both as practice and discourse – is involved in the exertion and
reflection of power, and we might therefore consider how metaphors of
enchanted gazes and images function as verbal attempts to contend with,
and even banish, this power. The workshop will contribute to creating a
genealogy of what has recently been discussed as the “power of images.”
The idea that visual artefacts “take possession” of their spectators
(and, much to the regret of advocates of verbal discourse, more so than
words) is a standard trope of both popular and academic discourses on
media effects. The interdisciplinary exchange on the history and
function of magical concepts of vision might provide an opportunity to
engage with contemporary debates on inexplicable visual forces in a
historically informed way.

Program

2 pm Welcome

Mark Anderson (German Literature, Columbia University)

2.15 pm
Eye Contact, Enchantment and Contagion: fascinatio/fascination,
1600/1800
Brigitte Weingart (German Literature and Film, Universität Bonn/Columbia
University)

Response: Elisabeth Strowick (German Literature, Johns Hopkins
University, Baltimore)

3.30 pm
The Visions of St Anthony and the Art of Discernment
Stuart Clark (Early Modern History, Princeton University)

Response: Anselm Haverkamp (English Literature, New York University)

4.45 pm Coffee Break

5.15 pm
Mystery, Magic and the Late English Enlightenment
Simon During (English Literature, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore)

Response: Dorothea von Mücke (German Literature, Columbia University)

6.30 pm
The Magic Hour When the Sun Goes Down
Michael Taussig (Anthropology, Columbia University)

Response: Thomas Levin (German, Media and Theory, Princeton University)

7. 45 pm Wine & Cheese Reception

Organized with the support of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation,
Germany, and the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures,
Columbia University

https://calendar.columbia.edu/sundial/webapi/get.php?vt=detail&br=defaul
t&id=30151

Contact:
Brigitte Weingart
Columbia University (Visiting Humboldt Scholar)
Department of Germanic Languages
319 Hamilton Hall, MC 2812
New York, NY 10027
bw2263columbia.edu
www.uni-bonn.de/~weingart/