The Mind Is a Collection. Sean Silver

merely takes an image, as though a toll at a custom house, on its way from oculus to eye; nor is it enough for it merely to capture, as though by chance, an image which will depart as soon as the whole gaudy contraption is swung around to a different field of view. It must also create the possibility of stilling that image down and capturing it. This is why there is room for the artist’s hand, bearing a pen, within its dark room. Hooke’s design has made room for art, turning the observer into what, in his day, would have been called the “designer,” the one who draws. And, as Hooke elsewhere avers, the importance of drawing is not so much to make it possible to communicate ideas to others; the principal importance of being able to design well is to allow artists to see their own ideas on paper.³³ The screen is not merely a passive surface; it is the site of an interaction between the stuff of perception and the hand that carves back into it. Hooke’s design reminds us of the activity of perception, which, etymologically, means to “take”; Hooke’s eye ceaselessly seeks, culls, sorts, and arranges.³⁴ Seeking and taking is after all the very purpose of Hooke’s object; it is an object designed to allow a traveler “to take a draught of a picture of any thing.”

      This raises a final point about the engraving of Hooke’s design. Hooke’s man, enclosed in his own little world, is set against something that appears at first to be superfluous, a picture of a setting where the camera may be employed. It is clearly not London, where Hooke’s camera obscura (if it was built) might have been found; it is not a meeting of the Royal Society at Gresham College. It is a view of a bit of foliage in the foreground, a small island town or fortification in the middle distance, and a larger landmass beyond it; it is either the sort of thing that an Englishman might see on the ramble, or what might be instantly summoned up in the engraver’s mind, merely to make clear the camera’s work out of doors. The camera obscura, write Lance Mayer and Gay Myers, was “considered especially useful for rendering in two dimensions the complex lines of recession in a landscape.”³⁵ The English observer endlessly divided the wilderness into bands or zones of space—foreground, middle distance, and far distance; this, too, was what the camera obscura was good for: for streamlining complex fields of color and movement into discrete breaks and outlines of things.³⁶ The drive to divide was more than a pictorial convenience; capturing an outline, especially in the case of complex landscapes, was more than a convenient way of representing some thing in itself. Delineating landscape was about, in the words of John Barrell, “the world conceived of and grasped as though it were a picture.”³⁷ There is no word in English, Barrell observes, to refer to a view of the outdoors that does not conceive of it as already pictorial—that is, a “landscape,” a word that marks what one scholar on the question calls “a felt difference unrecuparable by the usual designators of place.”³⁸ This felt difference, this endless superadded partitioning, is something added by the eye that picks and chooses, isolating out certain things according to their present purpose. And it is therefore ideological; it was historically connected, Barrell compellingly demonstrates, to contemporary struggles over land rights, the division and enclosure of commons and wastelands into agricultural plots. The elegance of design, the outline in the image, would appear, therefore, to be the discovery of a familiar ideology in the world ordered as the eye is accustomed to see it—when the observer is to be recognized in the image itself.³⁹

      We are prepared to see, then, that the engraving of Hooke’s design is a function of the machine it represents; as we gaze at it, we should imagine ourselves gazing at a sheet hung up in the darkness, with an oculus projecting light onto its reverse side. We are looking at the design of a camera obscura. It offers part of a network to think with, and it therefore involves us in a host of peculiar implications. Any way you look at it, the screen is the critical thing, serving, like a slash, as the figure for separating then linking subject and object, thinker and thought. Part of this is purely optical. As Hooke puts it, in thinking about optics, there are always “two different cones” to be considered—one emerging from the projecting or “inlightning body,” and one condensing upon the “Body inlightned.”⁴⁰ Naturally crossing, like a three-dimensional chiasmus, the work of the screen is in effect to slice these competing cones one from another. Blank paper, razed tablet, or white linen (see also Exhibit 19): the screen stands or appears to stand between the object and the viewer, between, in the language of the device, the oculus of the camera and the eye of the beholder. But this slicing is also epistemological. Meeting on the screen of the camera obscura are pairs of principles, brought automatically into alignment. Crossing on this screen are things like object and idea, nature and design, the tangled aesthetic impulses of the arts under the empiricist regime. That is the side of nature, of the order of the things projected on the back of the page. If there is a design on that side of the sheet, it is the design of natural law, ordered by Creation. Nature is in this sense not what is visible on the screen; it is what is behind it—the design of things in the absence of design—and it is for this reason that nature, personified, is often represented as though it were behind a veil, curtain, or screen (see Exhibits 17–20). This is the side of the lens-like eye guiding the hand of the artist and author;⁴¹ this is the realm of design, which flows from ideas to a field of view. It is the special work of the screen continually to hold these concepts in tension and alignment. The camera obscura, remarked Samuel von Hoogstraten, offered a “truly natural painting.”⁴² When John Cuff in 1747 undertook to sell a new batch of camera obscuras, he hired a Grub Street poet to write copy; this poet pitched it as a special device for making visible the key terms in the exchange between objects and ideas. “Say, rare Machine,” the poet begins, “who taught thee to design? / And mimick Nature with such Skill divine?”⁴³ Design and nature are continually crossed and confounded on the same screen that seems to keep them apart: in the world of the camera obscura, nature is crossed with art, object with idea.

      This case puts design on display, which is another way of saying that it is interested in attempts to make visible the nature of things. “Design” makes its way into English through two routes. On the one hand, the word arrives through the Continental tradition of the visual and literary arts, in which the “design” is a rough sketch or disposition of parts. Design, in this sense, means a pattern. As a schematic, the engraving of Hooke’s camera obscura is just such a design. It is not interested in precisely what such a machine would be made of, how it would be built, or where it could be carried. It does not concern itself with particulars and it is incapable of failure.⁴⁴ On the other, “design” arrives to eighteenth-century England with a borrowed French meaning of an intention. For instance, Hooke’s camera obscura was imagined with just such a design in mind; lurking behind the object is a desire to capture and collect accurate images of things. It is motivated by the general project of collecting and cataloguing. Taken in this mixed sense, rediscovered in the mixed sense of “plan,” “scheme,” and other closely allied concepts, “design” means the arrangement of things according to an idea. As Locke himself puts it, design means an arrangement of things “by reference to those adjacent things which best serve to their present purpose.”⁴⁵ If we return to the engraving of Hooke’s instrument, which is clearly also a plan or blueprint, we may see this schematic impulse at work; presented here is the arrangement of components—a lens, a white sheet, an observer, a curved deal board, an eye, a hand, and so on—that isolates and makes possible the essential function of the device.⁴⁶ It is the arrangement of things according to an intention. Like so much else in the age that produced it, this little anonymous engraving is a product of the philosophical device that it displays; it is the world as seen through a camera obscura.

Exhibit 5. Raphael’s The Judgment of Paris

      According to the standard account, theories of “design” emerged in and among the trades, especially as new native crafts made their way into the market. Prior to the blossoming of consumer culture in the mid-eighteenth century, as this account has it, England had no established craft tradition of design. The patterns of things like textiles arrived from Paris or Italy, and were only subsequently applied in domestic production.⁴⁷ But when the history of design is broadened to include “wider cultural concerns with the related concepts of ordering, planning and scheming,” a different tradition emerges.⁴⁸ A glance at art historical manuals, like Jonathan Richardson’s Two Treatises, or the Earl of Shaftesbury’s remarks on the