(Re)incantare il visuale: l'opera d'arte all'epoca della sua riproducibilità medianica

The essay discusses the relevance of ‘occulture’ and magic thought to modern and contemporary visual cultures. Spurred by today’s critical debate on the notions of ‘vibrant matter’, ‘embodiment’, and the ‘nonconscious’, it explores the genealogies of these concepts in modernity’s rejected knoweledge, i.e., in a variety of nineteenth-century discourses and practices understood as ‘forms of enchantment’: from W.B. Carpenter’s “unconscious cerebration” to G. Allen’s physiological aesthetics or W. James’s theory of “ideo-motor” action, down to mediumistic séances and telepathic transmissions. While the body-as-medium suggested, at the time, an evolutionary entanglement between psycho-physiology and technology, its magic potentialities were taken up transversally by artists and visual makers as diverse as E. Munch, J. Epstein, S. Eisenstein, J. Itten or T. Marinetti, bridging avant-garde movements that are often deemed incompatible by conventional art history. The re-enchantment of the visual suggested by the article is thus proposed as a critical tool for an alternative archeology of modern visual culture.