OAC Seminar - "How Knowledge Grows: An Anthropological Anamorphosis" by Alberto Corsín Jiménez

[Stacy A A Hope]

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I am pleased to announce that the second OAC seminar will be presented by Alberto Corsín Jiménez. The title of the paper is "How Knowledge Grows: An Anthropological Anamorphosis," which has been published on the OAC Press's website. (Download Here). This forum will remain closed until the 8th June, which will open once I have introduced the paper and have opened up discussion by posing the first question(s). This is a two-week seminar and will last from 8th-22nd June, 2010. During this time, members of the OAC are welcomed to contribute by posing questions and adding to the dynamism of the discussion. The seminar will unfold at a leisurely pace, as and when participants, including the presenter, find the time to post. After two weeks, the chair will thank the presenter and discussants, announce the next session and close the seminar.

This paper offers anthropological insight into a certain fashion of Euro-American intellectual practice, namely, the operations through which knowledge comes-unto-itself as a descriptive register (of other
practices). I am  interested in the cultural epistemology that enables knowledge to become an enabler itself: what the growth of knowledge – or its rise as an expression of enablement – looks like. What does knowledge need to grow ‘out of’ for such an escalation to become meaningful or, simply, visible?


Alberto has read Economics in Madrid and was previously an economic analyst in both Madrid and London, before he turned his interests towards anthropology. In 1996, he completed an MSc in Social Anthopology at the London School of Economics, then moved to Oxford where he completed his D.Phil, which focused on the relationship between the industrial and labour history, and the urban life within Antofagasta, a mining town in the Atacama Desert of Chile. This fieldwork took place from 1997-1999. He completed his D.Phil in 2001.What emerged from this body of work were questions of political economy and urban space, which led to a critique of anthropological analyses of place and landscape.

His career includes a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in 2001 at St Hugh's College, Oxford, a position in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, where he was also a member of the Executive Committee of the Cultural Theory Institute (September 2003). From 2004-2007  he acted as Media and Public Relations Officer at the
Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Commonwealth, during which he was Book Reviews Editor for Critique of Anthropology (2004-2006). In 2009  he became the Dean at Spain's School for Industrial Organisation in Madrid (2009).  As of June 2009 he has been the Senior Scientist at Spain's National Research Council (CSIC).

His books are "Culture and Well-Being: Anthropological Approaches to Freedom and Political Ethics" (2008) and "Anthropology of Organisations" (2007). Other publications include:

2010. 'The political proportions of public knowledge.' Journal of Cultural Economy, Vol. 3: 1, pp. 69-84.

2009. 'Managing the social/knowledge equation.' Cambridge Anthropology. Vol. 28, No. 3, pp. 66-90. Special issue in honour of Marilyn Strathern, eds. Ashley Lebner and Sabine A. Deiringer.

2005. ‘Changing scales and the scales of change: ethnography and political economy in Antofagasta, Chile.’ Critique of Anthropology, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 155-174

To see a complete list of Alberto's publications, please visit his publications page.

[Stacy A A Hope]

Alberto, I found your paper to be quite profound, as it lends to a theory that transcends disciplines, which exemplifies the nature of the growth of knowledge. The use of illusionism in its dioptric anamorphosis state, whereby knowledge comes onto itself vis-à-vis a distortion of symbols makes me think of modern-day political structures and the state of the present government systems. However, I will not pine on this, even if I am curious as to what an anamorphic analysis of the British coalition, in regards to distorted images of the previous government systems, would amount to. What follows are my thoughts as I read your paper: some coherent, some abstract.

Whilst reading, what came to mind was the comparative modality that is involved in scaling and sizing. However, what is evident is the importance of the act of looking through as opposed to looking at an image/object and the proportions that can be gathered from this act. Here, size and scale allow for representations to have meaning that would otherwise be inconceivable. But, I wonder is it possible to have an object that is unsizable and unscalable—i.e. an entity that has no concrete form, or is constantly changing its state or shape? How can we come up with cultural conclusions if this is the case vis-a-vis anamorphic illusionism?

Initially, I considered this paper to be more of an exploration (rather than an analysis) of how distorted and normal views of a representation contributes to the growth of knowledge and those things needed for knowledge to flourish. However, I have gathered more from this than just an education on the topic. For one, the modernist approach to looking through things in order to establish a meaning that is otherwise 'invisible' has a relational presence with distance. However, this distance is not just in the distance between body and object, but also between the relationships different individuals have with the object. Would it be fair to say this?

As a side-note, I was also quite intrigued to learn more about how religion dealt with this dioptric anamorphosis. Although you mentioned Nicéron, there was no example of how he used this for his own religious quest of finding the visible out of the invisible.

I now wish to invite others to pose questions as the discussion is now open, until the 22nd June.

[Huon Wardle]

‘Not just judgments about analogy but judgments about proportion inform any organization of data.’
– Marilyn Strathern (2004 [1991]: 24)

Alberto, Thanks very much for your paper which I found very helpful in extrapolating Strathern (and in many other areas too). My first encounter with those issues came in the early 1990s when Strathern began to raise the 'problem' of 'complexity and scale' as a primary concern for anthropologists to take up. And of course there has been a lot of discussion since then, some of it rather esoteric. So, it is refreshing to see how clearly you have presented the marshalling points and given new examples and points of departure.

When I first heard about 'complexity and scale' I took it that this was a critique of the then still very prevalent idea of ethnography as the study of 'small-scale' societies. It took me a long time to understand that Strathern was perhaps primarily engaged with debates in the sociology of knowledge (though I quickly came across people flourishing copies of Latour's We Have Never Been Modern). As you show, one key is that, beyond examining the hidden work that analogies or metaphors do in analytical texts (we were already familiar with that idea from Lakoff et al.) analogies 'work' by prefiguring the kinds of proportion that we take into account and which then enable us to explain what is in question. Identifying these, if you will, hidden proportionalising qualifiers becomes a central technique for understanding the way the arguments take form.

Thanks Stacy for opening with thoughtful reflections - I look forward to seeing how the dialogue here moves and which themes foreground themselves - and what analogies and senses of proportion people rely on.

[Alberto Corsin Jimenez]

Hello Stacy, Izabel and Huon

Thanks for your questions and comments, and for your attentive reading of the paper.

I will do my best to answer your questions and engage with your comments. I hope you do not mind if I try roughly to follow the order in which they were made :)

Stacey, you make, I think, three points, about anamorphosis as a sort of false consciousness, or in any case as a device for the political distortion of symbolic structures; about the possibility of imagining objects without size or scale; and about the use of anamorphosis in religion.

1. Some people have described baroque society as the first media society: that is, the first society were the media was properly theorized as a representational form. One only need think of Shakespeare's plays or Velazquez's Las Meninas to realise how self-conscious were baroque artists about their own trade as illusion-makers. This was no doubt extended to courtly politics, of which Machiavelli's Prince is an obvious reference. So in some sense, I suppose you are right, the culture of optical illusionism made its ways to state politics too - and it has probably stayed with us to this day.

However, my interest in the anamorphic lies less in its manipulative use by politicians or others as in its cultural epistemology: that is, in how it enables a reconstruction of western epistemology from within, so to speak, by helping us see how the analytical use of 'perspective', 'proportionality' or 'scale', often deployed unproblematically by many scholars, is in fact loaded with cultural presuppositions and has a long history in western science.

2. Can we imagine objects that have no size? I guess my interest is in why 'size' is a quality that objects must have - why and how it has become a requirement of the epistemic structure of modern knowledge?

3. I am no expert in the history of 16-17th century religion. But I can affirm that many religious orders used the optical playfulness of anamorphic devices as proof of the existence of occult realms and invisible powers. It is no doubt an irony that Hobbes, of all people, resorted to one of Niceron's dioptric devices to illustrate his Leviathan - for there is no political theory in the 17th century more concerned about, and obsessive with, the insidious implications of religious phantasmagoria than Hobbes'.

Izabel, you ask how knowledge can be 'anthropologized' without attending to people's use of it. I suppose in your sense of the word 'anthropology', it can't. My guess, however, is that we have a different understanding of what anthropology can and cannot do. With Ingold (whom you cite approvingly) I would say that anthropology remains such if it retains, at some level, a comparative dimension. You may read my paper as an experiment in comparison: one that takes 'comparison' itself (in the form of scale) as the object to be compared.

Huon, I like very much your summary of my argument: an attempt at making visible how "analogies 'work' by prefiguring the kinds of proportion that we take into account and which then enable us to explain what is in question." That's pretty much it. Much modern knowledge (and contemporary social theory in particular) comes shaped by a proportional imagination; it lays out a repertoire of analytical categories that acquire meaning and valence as proportional objects of one another. For a number of years now I have grown curious about the relative silence surrounding the patent proportionality of social theory - the essay is an attempt at breaking the silence :)

[John McCreery]

A fascinating paper. I wonder, however, if it doesn't, in itself, represent a foreshortening of the relevant historical perspective, a particular anamorphism induced by the focus on the Baroque and early technologies of science. This thought came to me as I read the citation of Malcolm that appears twice in the paper,

When commenting on the illusionary character of Hobbes’ Leviathan, Malcolm described it as ‘the curious structure of argument that requires two different ways of seeing the relation between the individual and the state to be entertained at one and the same time.’ (Malcolm 2002: 228) The relational character of sovereign power emerges thus as another effect of the anamorphic artifice. It is a produce of having to hold simultaneously an internal and external vision on the images of the twelve sultans and Louis XIII’s emblem.

What instantly came to mind is that a "structure of argument that requires two different ways of seeing the relation between the individual and the state" is at least as old as Jesus' reply (Matthew 22:21) to the question of whether believers in his message should pay taxes to Rome: "Then saith he unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's." Here the self is divided between two authorities as Christendom as a whole became divided over the claims of Church and State, requiring individuals to choose, often on pain of torture and death, to treat one as higher than the other.

I haven't yet chased down the citation; but somewhere recently, while surfing the Net, I came across the idea that the Baroque fascination with the lens was due, in part, to its ability to provide a closer to God's perspective (where God is, in effect, the ultimate anamorphic lens through which literally everything falls into place).

One place to start looking is the blog Frames/sing, which, if you troll through the archive a bit has several interesting pieces on the role of the lens and of optics more generally on Spinoza's philosophy, together with some sharp critique of Latour.

[Keith Hart]

Thanks for this elegant and thoughtful paper to our fledgling seminar series, Alberto. I am most interested in the seocnd part on the knowledge economy; but I will return tothat in further posts.

Although the format assumes that all contributors are just individuals engaging intellectually with the paper, in reality a seminar is a social form with its local cast and audience. We haven't achieved that yet and maybe never will, but already some of our players have staked out positions that will be quite familiar to our regular readers (if we have any). I am told that in Britain after the war, there weren't any jobs in social anthropology, so aspiring young stars competed for esteem in the main seminars at Oxford (Evans-Pritchard), LSE (Firth) and Manchester (Gluckman). The style of each was idiosyncratic, with the last resembling a bear-pit, but all were understood to be a rigorous test. By the time I turned up at Cambridge in the 60s, the weekly seminar had become a stage for the three main players (Fortes, Leach and Goody) to argue with each other. For the graduate student audience, the paper giver was largely irrelevant. The question was what would Edmund do this week? In any case, a pattern was established where the substance of the paper came a long way second to theiteration of established positions by th eprincipal players. Of course visitors knew what to expect since these positions were well-known in a small tight-knit profession and that was part of the game. The format of responding instantly to an orally delivered text also favoured the repetition of a standard personal line.

We don't have that excuse, since we have time to read and digest your paper. And we are a very different kind of audience. But, for nostalgia's sake, I am first going to play the game as I learned it, by asking you to move towards what I know rather than the other way round.

For a while now, I have watched the preoccupation with size and scale in STS, with Latour as a bridge to Strathern in anthropology, with some exasperation. Latour has been fairly transparent about his motives, how to wrest power in the academy from the scientists, and he has succeeded personally by any standard. Strathern's objectives are inscrutable, leading to a niche for her interpreters. This reminds me of Husserl who wrote deliberately in an obscure way as a sort of make work for his followers (and then was appalled by Heidegger striking out on his own). But I digress.

First a story. I spent a year in Chicago in the early 80s, much of it in conversation with Marshall Sahlkins. He had just published his Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities on his way to Islands of History (1985). My Political Economy of West African Agriculture came out the previous year. Size came into it in this way: Why does the fact that West Africa contains many millions of people make that region matter more globally than a couple of small Pacific islands? This was linked to a series of lectures on Dumezil and ancient kingship given by the great historian Momigliano in Chicago at the time. Marshall's line here was if you really want to understand kingship, a historical ethnography of Fiji would reveal far more than working over the remains of Roman literature. This was eventually realized as Apologies to Thucydides (2004), one link being that Hobbes was Thucydides' fist English translator. At one level, it was funny: two small men arguing about the size of their projects in a whimsical private conversation. But I wonder if it is related to Latour's project. After all, in their article on Leviathan, he and Callon insisted that a switchboard operator directing an incoming call was in their terms no different from the Renault company designing and launching a new car. A bas Leviathan!

This is an argument about scale not size as such. The rise of discourses hingeing on the notion of scale-free mathematical relationships lies at the core of several important paradigm shifts. In my own case, the new science of networks is based on a move from a statistical assumption ofnormal distribution to one focused on power laws. Relations in the first are specific to scale, in the second scale-free. The result is curves with a long tail on which Amazon base their marketing strategy. My sense is that the STS-derived literature draws on therms of these scientific discourses, but does not engage them directly. But that may be my deficiency of reading.

Of course, facing a long-winded oration in a physical seminar setting, th epaper-giver can smile sweetly, say thank you for your interesting comment and pass on. This option is open toyou too. But I throw in this personakl stuff in case it provides food for conversation.

[Stacy A A Hope]

John McCreery said:

I haven't yet chased down the citation; but somewhere recently, while surfing the Net, I came across the idea that the Baroque fascination with the lens was due, in part, to its ability to provide a closer to God's perspective (where God is, in effect, the ultimate anamorphic lens through which literally everything falls into place).
.

This led to my earlier point on the relevance/importance religion had on developing an anamorphic perspectivalism. Whereby it was not just a scaling between the individual and the state, but the Church and the state, which Hobbes (e.g.) used for his own political theorisation of the state and self. I wonder what further political implications could then be used if we took into consideration these earlier forms of dioptric anamorphosis?

[John McCreery]

A couple of quick thoughts in response to Stacy: (1) Isn't looking for dioptric anamorphosis before the invention of the necessary lenses anachronistic? (2) Looking forward instead of backward, aren't the obvious references Foucault, Orwell's 1984, and allusions to Bentham's panopticon? The lens becomes an earthly equivalent of the ostensibly all-seeing eye of state control in modern nation states. In the earlier religious versions only God has an all-seeing eye; the rest of us, rulers included, are stuck seeing, as scripture puts it "through a glass darkly."

Stacy A A Hope said:

John McCreery said:

I haven't yet chased down the citation; but somewhere recently, while surfing the Net, I came across the idea that the Baroque fascination with the lens was due, in part, to its ability to provide a closer to God's perspective (where God is, in effect, the ultimate anamorphic lens through which literally everything falls into place). .

This led to my earlier point on the relevance/importance religion had on developing an anamorphic perspectivalism. Whereby it was not just a scaling between the individual and the state, but the Church and the state, which Hobbes (e.g.) used for his own political theorisation of the state and self. I wonder what further political implications could then be used if we took into consideration these earlier forms of dioptric anamorphosis?

[Alberto Corsin Jimenez]

Dear Izabel, John, Keith and Stacy

Thanks again for your comments.

Taking up a point made by Keith, thus far I find the e-seminar format a real joy. As you noted, the British seminar tradition no doubt sharpened aspiring young stars’ rhetorical and analytical skills – it was a combative pen one had to display one’s prowess in :) Now the Coop e-format is not without its own complex sociology. For example, I have to admit that not being a native English speaker (despite twenty years in England!) I still labour carefully over each one of my sentences; it is hard work to keep up with the questions! :) But it is a real pleasure to have the opportunity to engage in conversation with people who one would seldom encounter in a Manchester (or Madrid) seminar.

Let me start with Keith’s Sahlins anecdote, which I find most pertinent – and relevant too to both Latour’s and Strathern’s projects. I hope you do not mind my dwelling on it for a moment to elucidate my own case.

In my reading, Latour would say that for your private conversation with Sahlins to become sociologically ‘relevant’ you would need a technology to make it durable and extendable: for example, an online Open Anthro community capable of making your argument into a public matter of concern. Much like the Pasteurisation of France’s farmers, if you can get the topic of your conversation replicated in seminars, lecture halls and online forums across the world, you can properly speak of the issue having ‘scaled-up’. Likewise, the operator directing the switchboard fares as a Leviathan because s/he has the technology to move the world – the switchboard is the Archimedean lever that performs the scale trick. So Latour is not really interested in what Sahlins and Hart are talking about (size as a productive analytical category) but in whether the conversation is sticky and seductive enough to find the means to travel around. There is no scale, until there is: a scale whose sociological visibility, moreover, is a matter of size (conversations being shared by more and more and more people).

On the other hand, Strathern, I think, would find your conversation very interesting in itself. That is, both as a conversation and a conversation about size. The depth and intensiveness of your private exchange with Sahlins probably generated its own scale: new insights about the comparative analysis of kingship forms, new understandings about the historical structures of governance, etc. I speak of scale here because each of these topics opens up or deepens existing domains of understanding: you magnified the detail encompassed within each. On this reading, the occasion of “two small men arguing about the size of their projects in a whimsical private conversation” would fare as a very scale-intensive event indeed.

In this light, I find Strathern’s statement, “not just judgments about analogy but judgments about proportion inform any organization of data”, quite illuminating. For it is pretty obvious that Latour has ‘proportioned’ his sociology so that (a magnitude-related notion of) scale becomes visible at certain junctures and not others. Moreover, his sociology is twice scalar: because he employs a proportional imagination (what Schaffer calls the Archimedean lever) to make a case about certain sociological agencies gaining scalar relevance (e.g. microbes becoming world-changing actors).

My general interest, then, is in the prominence and purchase of the proportion as a modern knowledge category. Although Latour and Strathern make very different uses of what I call the proportional imagination, the pervasiveness of the proportion as an organizing category of thought is there in both authors nonetheless. They both make very sophisticated and original uses of proportionality, sure, but in their different ways the modernity of the proportion still inflects their analyses.

John asks me about the essay’s argument practising a foreshortening of historical perspective. Sure – though am not sure whether it could be otherwise. But I like the formulation :) I also like the Bible citation. You are right: there is a very important spiritual dimension to the conceptualisation of individual – supraindividual relations. Renaissance authors distinguished between perspectiva artificialis (perspective roughly as we know it via painting, of which anamorphosis is a development) and perspectiva naturalis (the law of optics, starting with Euclid). Medieval Christian theologians were fascinated by Euclidean optics, which they used to speculate about the properties of divine light.

Izabel, I like some of the equations you draw (stability / instability; balance / imbalance; form / deformation) because they capture quite nicely the effects of the proportional imagination I was alluding to.

I would like to finish this entry by taking up Stacy’s last question – about novel political applications of anamorphosis – to talk about the other feature of anamorphosis that I pointed out in the paper: reversibility or double vision.

Take the current proliferation of ‘networks’. In The network inside out Annelise Riles resorted to the idiom of ‘double vision’ to describe the simultaneous hold that networks have as both descriptors of sociality and bureaucratic forms. As she puts it, ‘networkers deploy the optical effect of Network form as a “fulcrum or lever” that generates alternative inverted forms of sociality by projecting an image of each – Network and “personal relations” – from the point of view of the other.’ This is a wonderful neo-baroque description, I think, and one that puts the imagery of the anamorphic to full use: levers, optics, inversions, etc. The label ‘neo-baroque’ is mine but I think Riles’ ethnographic analysis brilliantly succeeds in capturing the Hobbesian moment animating the emergence of new liberal forms such as networks.

Another example, and this is my last one, are ‘externalities’. Recent economic theory has redefined externalities as ‘public goods’ (for example, Cornes and Sandler, The theory of externalities, public goods, and club goods). The reason for this is that public goods are goods that lie outside the purchase of the market: they are external to the market. Patents, for instance, are said to ‘internalise’ the externality of innovation spillovers. Now using the imagery of insides/outsides to map the public sphere is a very interesting move. In classical political theory, the public sphere has traditionally been defined as an ‘outside’ of some kind. Hannah Arendt said it was the outside to the oikonomía (household); Habermas said it was the outside to intimate family life. Today, however, the public is defined from within the market, as an externality. It takes, then, a particular kind of Hobbesian double vision to see a good as capable of standing both inside and outside political economy. A vision where political economy has been in fact normalised as a market economy.

Thanks again for all your comments and questions.

[Keith Hart]

Alberto, apart from the prospect of meeting a different -- and hopefully less belligerent, but don't count on it -- sort of person here, we have discovered that having time to read and write carefully (even to do some impromptu fieldwork!) in this format can be liberating. Your wonderfully crafted response sends me away determined to be less cavalier, more careful next time. I would add a caution about raising the bar too high. But thanks so much for that enlightening answer. More later.

[John McCreery]

"Anamorphosis" is a nice term, just strange enough to suggest that something special is being said. We should, however, pause to consider the downside of conflating its meaning with what is, after all, a universal question: Individuals confronted with competing loyalties are forced to ask "Who am I?" As in the case of such familiar examples as "totem" or "taboo," transforming a term with specific nuances in its original context into a label for an abstraction excised from that context may generate theoretical insight. It may also render an analysis vacuous.

Alberto has drawn our attention to a specific historical moment in which the lens was the hot new technology and the use of lenses to produce the effect called anamorphosis became for Hobbes a powerful metaphor for the incorporation of the Many (represented as small and fractious) into the One (represented as huge and omnipotent and literally embodied in the body of the ruler). This metaphor was impossible before the invention of the lens. Whether it remains as compelling in a 21st century world in which the Internet provides a new model for the integration of fractious individuals into larger projects is, I suggest, the moot point.

[Stacy A A Hope]

Izabel stated:
I believe there is cultural anamorphosis since culture is knowledge. I have observed many cultural ambiguities and disambiguations, distortions and proportions, and assymmetries and symmetries. I wonder if anamorphosis itself is an epistemological device anthropologists can use to treat culture as a product of social construction and reconstruction considering the play between imbalance and instability versus balance and stability. What I cannot be sure of is the reality objectified in anamorphosis where a device is used to make the distorted proportionate.

Is anamorphosis, in relation to knowledge, just a mental exercise since an illusion remains an illusion after it is contained as real? For example, outside of Disneyland after a sunday out, Snow White is no longer real. Is anamorphism a temporal change in the construction and reconstruction of knowledge from ambiguous to lucid? If it is, then it is also possible for lucidity to turn back into ambiguity. If my understanding is right, anamorphosis is homeomorphic-- something abstract can be formal and abstract again. I think your ideas about anamorphism, if explored and applied in anthropology, are useful in cultural space and mobility in relation to culture change. Thanks again.

In response to Izabel's comments, I would argue the opposite about applying Snow White within the anamorphosis paradigm. It struck me that you would think that Snow White was not real at any point of time after her creation. Snow White may not be real to someone who has never heard of Snow White and her miniature friends, but the idea and the emotions that children (and some adults) gauge from the name, makes her just as real as the person impersonating the character. Because once we hear the name Snow White, we can imagine her dress, her physicality, and even her voice. If we were to put Snow White as an anamorphosis of what Disney would like to convey about itself, then maybe the anamorphism lies in the culmination of purity, righteousness, kindness, etc that makes up the concept of Snow White. This may then be reflected in cultural ambiguities and distortions as to what embodies humanness. Maybe, we are taking anamorphosis too technically--i.e. as an instrument, rather than an epistemological tactic--as if we were to just take the concept of scaling that one gathers from this 'condition', then maybe some of my (and maybe your) ambiguities can be resignified.

I hope this made some sort of sense.

[John McCreery]

Maybe, we are taking anamorphosis too technically--i.e. as an instrument, rather than an epistemological tactic--as if we were to just take the concept of scaling that one gathers from this 'condition', then maybe some of my (and maybe your) ambiguities can be resignified.

Allow me to disagree. Taking anamorphosis technically is the way to squeeze more value from the metaphor. Start with the observation that anamorphosis is, optically speaking, an effect produced by lenses. Consider the revolution in human knowledge-making that the invention of the lens produced by revealing phenomena invisible without them (the moons of Jupiter or bacteria, for instance). Then note that anamorphosis inverts this effect, transforming in the case that inspired Hobbes, a variety of elements into an image that conceals that original variety (the thirteen Turkish sultans become a single French king). Understanding how anamorphosis works could then be taken as a foreshadowing of the unmasking (a return to the original function of the lens) characteristic of psychoanalysis, Marxist theory, and modernist architecture, all of which invite us to look behind the apparent image to reveal the elements from which it is formed.

I am not claiming that this off the cuff conjecture cannot be corrected or improved. I am suggesting that looking at a model's technical details can be a productive activity.