of how sensory perceptions might cross the gap from matter to ineffable mind (and how, in turn, desire may be put into action); it solves these problems by shifting them up one level, to a mystical relationship between the mind and its ideas. The difficult conception of how ideas are received by the eye is shifted into the difficult question of how ideas are received by an internal eye. The critical question is not solved, however (see Locke’s remarks in Exhibit 19); it is merely kicked down the road, deferred perhaps until more precise instruments are available to unpack the mind’s strange commerce.
The homunculus thesis is typically understood as a fallacy. But we might look at the problem slightly differently; rather than looking at Locke or Hooke’s claims as profound dualisms, it makes sense to think about the networks that produce them, the patterns of modeling that express more profound entanglements. The mind finds itself in its environment through a heuristic twist. Experience models a mind through a readily available technical object, one that, as the engraving of Hooke’s gadget makes clear, swallows up and enwraps even the work of the hand. The value of models is not their exhaustive explanatory power; their value lies precisely in the thinking they make possible, an excess potential arising out of an initial metaphorical conjunction.28 The analogical hunch takes on a life of its own, giving way to a whole host of possibilities and realizations; this is precisely why models are good to think with.29 It is not that the eye of the understanding merely contemplates images; the work of the hand to design, to cut the world back to recognizable objects, distinctions, and lines is shifted into the process of witnessing. In this sense, the homunculus fallacy is not a fallacy at all; it is the natural extension of a mind being crafted in its environment. It is the proof that thinking is an ecological product—even when that product slashes an ecology into subject/object, viewer/view, mind/matter, but also understanding/memory, conscious mind/ materials of thinking.
Gadgets like the camera obscura, as metaphors and analogies, helped shape and make sense of the texture of experience. Locke remained skeptical, however, of the extent to which the materiality of the metaphor could be extended. When one thinks of the cathedral church at Worcester, Locke elsewhere remarks, no actual cathedral church pops into one’s head, nor any material similitude; when one thinks of a dark room, no actual dark room carves its way into the stuff of the brain. “When our ideas are said to be in our memories,” Locke remarks, “indeed they are actually nowhere.”30 But, precisely because it organizes a way of speaking, of what can be “said to be in our memories,” Hooke’s design or Willis’s “chamber” with its dioptric glasses offers a neurophysiology of epistemic dualism: “in” versus “out.” It offers a vocabulary, a way of speaking. How else would the mind speak of itself, other than through images that it had experienced? How else to speak about what is “in” the mind or “in” the senses, other than through a figure that was incorporated there? And so Locke can comfortably speak of contemplation as “bring[ing] in sight,” or ideas as “objects … imprinted” in memory, despite his suspicion that there are no materially isomorphic changes in the brain.31 In this sense at least, Locke is like Willis, characteristic of the mainstream epistemology of his moment. Like Willis, Locke adapts a physical space as the basis for reimagining the mind as an entity within and depending upon the “crankling … superfices” of the brain—with (in Willis’s words) its many “Cells” or “Store-houses.”32 Locke’s contribution is to gain control of the metaphor, insisting that it must be learned in the same way as anything else; it is acquired through the senses—by “experience,” which stocks the mind with its vast store—though no actual space seems to be present there.
This is how the camera obscura reigns as a metaphor, once for the eye, and again for the understanding. It is a metaphor for metaphor, metaphor’s model. But just as metaphor was important to poets, authors, and artists for the way it enabled a reverse flow, returning ideas to their haptic ground, so, too, Hooke’s camera obscura was clearly less intended to model a mental process than to enable a certain kind of practical activity. It was a device designed to allow the capturing of ideas in images, of, in other words, designs. This is to say that it was built less as a model of the mind (this in some ways was merely an accidental effect of the object), than it was built as a practical gadget useful to a process of thinking already imagined to be taking place within the head. It isn’t enough that it 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
