Archaeology of projection and economy of the real
Two recent books find common ground in radically rethinking the projective function of media technologies. The first is Pasi Väliaho’s Projecting Spirits: Speculation, Providence, and Early Modern Optical Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022), a detailed media archaeological investigation into the role of optical and projection devices in reorganising the concept of the world at the turn of the 18th century; the second is Francesco Casetti’s Screening Fears: On Protective Media (New York: Zone Books, 2023), a wide-ranging theoretical exploration of the protective/projective function of media from the 19th century to the present. Both books share a similar underlying concept: the world is chaotic and indomitable, but projection devices render it somehow rational and addressable. By what properties does projection achieve this task?
Following the path traced by these two scholars, we approach the idea of projection from a radically different perspective than the one historically dominant in 20th-century film and media theory. Indeed, a long tradition, stretching from Edgar Morin to the dispositive theories of the 1970s, has relied on the techno-psychic polysemy of the term, linked to the externalisation of the image – proceeding as much from the device to the screen as from the unconscious to the Other. In contrast, the media-archaeological investigations of Väliaho and Casetti demonstrate how projection processes are instead intertwined with the economy of the world. This reconceptualisation of projection’s function is achieved through alternative readings of the relationship between archaeology and media, alongside a shared Foucauldian legacy – particularly concerning the idea of the apparatus or dispositive.
For Foucault, the dispositive is a broader concept than the purely discursive notion of the episteme found in his Archaeology of Knowledge (1969): it connects and assembles ‘discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions – in short, the said as much as the unsaid’.[1]
For the media archaeologist, whose inquiry begins with the material dimensions of technologies, the problem is quite the opposite: to recognise how the identity of a medium is also shaped by the network of discourses encircling it, including imaginary ones.[2] The balance established in archaeological inquiry between discourse analysis and the investigation of the material aspects of media experience can give rise to diverse narrative strategies.
Optical devices as figures of thoughts
Considering the archaeological strategy adopted by Väliaho, we observe how it focuses on a specific and limited historical horizon – between 1650 and 1720 – examining the two most prevalent techno-aesthetic practices of projection at the time: the magic lantern and the camera obscura. These devices are analysed as ‘medial conditions of thinking […], based on the assumption that the movements of the intellect are embedded in and hinged on the objects, techniques, and visualizations that the intellect is surrounded by’ (p. viii). In Väliaho’s perspective, representative of the branch of media archaeology closely aligned with visual culture (e.g. Jonathan Crary, Stefan Andriopoulos), optical devices bridge discursive and material elements. They function as ‘tropes and metaphors, noetic analogues, as well as figures of thought’ (p. ix), reflecting the perception and cognition of an era.
The magic lantern and the camera obscura emerge as central to systems of thought that signify an irreversible historical transformation. This shift involves a transition from the conception of a stable universe governed by theological laws and oriented toward an ultimate goal to a chaotic, shifting, and fortuitous reality shaped by commercial flows, as emerged at the turn of the 18th century. The conceptual power of these optical media lies in their ability to frame the instability of reality within a manipulable cognitive structure, albeit through divergent paths: ‘While the camera obscura enhanced the observer’s powers to circumscribe the world visually, the magic lantern challenged the mind’s grasp of the complexity of things and events’ (p. 24).
The magic lantern, with its changing succession of slides, its capacity for anamorphic image distortion depending on the device’s positioning, and its flickering projections, adheres to this new conception of the world. At the same time, it confines this shifting reality within the perceptual boundaries of the screen. In this sense, both media are fundamentally tied to the idea of an economy of the world – that is, the cognitive and relational management of an elusive reality.
Väliaho identifies traces of this economy across various intellectual horizons entwined with these optical media metaphors: Leibniz’s ontology, the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher’s theology of light, scientific revolutions, geographical discoveries, and emerging financial systems and values. Through his methodology, the cultural role of optical media becomes a subject of archaeological inquiry insofar as the devices are translated into concepts that recur within the discursive formations of their era, albeit through varied interpretations.
The techno-aesthetics of fears
In contrast, the media archaeological approach adopted by Casetti operates on an exploded temporality that resists being confined to a single historical context. It also presents a distinct articulation of the relationship between discourses, media materiality, and their experiential dimensions. When considering the narrative strategies employed by film and media theory, Screening Fears might be compared to a sweeping postmodern novel, where three distinct media epochs resonate and reflect upon one another, intersecting in a rhizomatic – and not merely anti-teleological – historical arrangement. Robertson’s 18th-century Phantasmagoria, the cozy movie theaters of the early 20th century, and the experiential bubbles generated by digital platforms and devices are brought together as manifestations of a submerged complex. This complex expresses not so much the essence of media but the immanent rules by which they organise themselves: the projection/protection complex.
To the canonical McLuhanian conception of media as ‘extensions of man’, Casetti opposes the idea of media’s protective function. This function, however, hinges on a paradoxical balance: the need to erect barriers against the threats of the surrounding world (protection) while simultaneously connecting subjects to that world in a secure form (projection). Projection, therefore, translates the chaotic universe into manageable forms, not merely as a cognitive organisation but as an affective and emotional one, deeply rooted in ancestral feelings such as anxiety and fear.
Casetti’s focus is less on the use of technical devices as conceptual figures and more on their ‘optical-spatial’ dimensions – the disciplinary techno-aesthetic environments established between media and subjects. This does not mean Casetti bypasses discourse analysis. From Antonello Gerbi’s Iniziazione alle delizie del cinema [Initiation into the Delights of Cinema] (1926), recalled in the book’s opening, to 18th-century accounts of phantasmagoric spectacles, to the cinephobic Joseph Roth’s Antichrist (1934), and cinematic theories of the close-up (archaeologically tied to the arrangement of faces in teleconference grids), Casetti explores a rich variety of textual regimes. He views these texts as emanations of technologically and historically determined spatial organisations. His analysis shifts from the role of the dispositive in the text to the role of the text within the dispositive.
Audiovisual texts are also part of the inquiry. Films such as Joe Dante’s Matinee, Irving Pichel and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s The Most Dangerous Game, Gary Ross’s Pleasantville, and Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests serve as intermezzos, each anchoring a discussion of a specific media era. In their fictional transfigurations – movie theaters as bunkers, caves enabling unobserved observation, idyllic sitcom-like diegetic worlds rendered permeable and inhabitable – Casetti identifies discursive traces of the subterranean projection/protection complex.
The book’s deepest Foucauldian legacy lies in its exploration of how the order of the world and its emotions are mediated through the disciplinary organisation of spaces. Robertson’s Phantasmagoria, staged in the Couvent des Capucines, becomes a ritualised environment where three previously unfathomable universes (natural, otherworldly, and inner) are rendered addressable and manageable. The movie theater is presented as an immunised milieu, governed by rules of comfort that include the gestural discipline of ushers. Digital bubbles are shaped by the dynamic processes through which subjects organise their peripersonal spaces, incorporating digitally proximate yet physically distant others while excluding the surrounding physical reality that remains marginal to the media experience.
In a world dense with threats, of which the recent pandemic is a vivid historical variation, media – Casetti even includes the sanitary mask used during lockdown – demonstrate their capacity to create safe spaces. These spaces provide a ‘protective shield’, a concept borrowed from Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, enabling the reestablishment of relationships and affects amidst the chaos.
The phantasmagorical economy
Both books make it evident that the concept of an economy of the real, established through the projective function, acquires distinctly political dimensions – after all, the archaeological method inherently addresses the present and its social configurations. This political resonance is exemplified, as are the methodological differences between the two archaeological investigations, in the treatment of Phantasmagoria within each work.
In Väliaho’s Projecting Spirits, the dispositive emerges in the conclusion as a conceptual figure borrowed from Marx’s Capital to describe commodity fetishism. Here, it represents the culmination of a process of financialisation and the virtualisation of commodities – a trajectory theoretically prefigured in the 18th-century projections of the magic lantern. In contrast, in Casetti’s Screening Fears, Phantasmagoria serves as a genealogical point of departure: ‘the first modern medium to refer to this complex [the projection/protection complex], becoming part of a peculiar lineage’ (p. 49). This lineage underpins government technologies rooted in immunising processes of exclusive inclusion and inclusive exclusion, characteristic of contemporary biopolitics.
Through the dialogue between these two archaeological perspectives – and their distinct approaches to the dispositive (as figures of thought in Väliaho vs. optical-spatial arrangements in Casetti) – a shared conception of optical media and the function of projection emerges. Both works converge on the notion of an economy that manages an unstable and threatening real by enclosing it within the boundaries of a screen, one that is as much conceptual as it is affective.
Giancarlo Grossi (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan)
References
Albera, F. and Tortajada, M (eds). Cine-dispositives: Essays in epistemology across media. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015.
Andriopoulos, S. Ghostly apparitions: German Idealism, the Gothic novel, and optical media. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.
Cary, J. Techniques of the observer. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990.
Elsaesser, T. ‘Media Archaeology as Symptom’, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 14, 2: 181-215.
Foucault, M. ‘The Confessions of the Flesh’ in Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, edited by C. Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980 (orig. in 1977): 194-228.
McLuhan, M. Understanding media: The extensions of man. London: McGraw-Hill Education, 1964.
Morin, E. The cinema, or the imaginary man. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005 (orig. in 1956).