EpilogueArrival of a Train

I began this book with Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1896), a film that many historians read as heralding the arrival of cinema. The actuality films of Auguste and Louis Lumière could be read as a fusion of many of the forms of virtual aesthetics that I have explored across chapters 1–5 of this book. While cinema's debt to magic and spectacle is more commonly traced through the work of early film pioneer Georges Méliès, a Lumière actuality like Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat is also styled as an illusion: its deep staging reminiscent of stereoscopic photography, its deeply realized ethnographic sense of time and place as transporting as the mirror of ink, even its projection a kind of rational recreation or magic trick because showmen liked to begin with a still image on the screen that suddenly leaps into motion. Early film projection formats also challenge what we tend to think of as the linearity, the finality of the train's arrival. In the variety show programs that were among cinema's first exhibition contexts, films were often repeated and could even be screened both forward and backward. Thomas Elsaesser notes that the Lumière films were designed “to be seen over and over again,” formally constructed “to be experienced as both ‘closed’ and ‘open’ at the same time, thus improving on, but also commenting on the loops of Thomas Edison's kinetoscope.”¹ Or, we might say, Joseph Plateau's phenakistoscope.

For instance, a Lumière film like Horse Trick Riders (1896–1897) replicates the serial format of the phenakistoscope by depicting a sequence of men trying to jump on the back of a horse. The attraction of the film lies in its repetitions. We see some version of the trick twenty times: most performers land sitting on the horse, some smash into the horse, others break form by performing cartwheels next to it. Because the men are identically dressed, it is difficult to tell how many of them there are—whether there are twenty men or a smaller number who each repeat the trick several times. Like the women on the roundabout in Thomas Hardy's “On the Western Circuit” (1891) who transform under Raye's gaze into a single, composited, virtual woman, or the moving images of the phenakistoscope represented in sequential pictures, the horse trick riders are at once one man and many men, cycling through the film as the film cycles through the sprockets. Horse Trick Riders reimagines the circular and repeating format of the phenakistoscope for a new medium that could combine narrative development with the attractions of the loop. Read in this same way, Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat is at once a straight shot across the tracks and a circuit. The train arrives and is always in the process of arriving.

In his famous essay, “The Myth of Total Cinema,” the film theorist André Bazin made a similar claim about cinema in the twentieth century. Cinema, he wrote, is not a technological form but a myth, an imagined medium for the “total and complete representation of reality,” for “the recreation of the world in its own image,” that technology has imperfectly realized.² Cinema's technological development does not take the medium farther from its nineteenth-century origins but paradoxically “nearer and nearer” to the totalizing illusion technological pioneers like Plateau and Eadweard Muybridge dreamed of. “In short,” Bazin declares, “cinema has not yet been invented!”³ I do not think of cinema as a proleptic invention, imagined decades before its appearance on the world stage, or of the nineteenth-century showmen and inventors I have covered in this book as its prophets. Instead of the birth of cinema in nineteenth-century media culture, I am arguing for virtual experience—for seeing things—as a modern aesthetic and cultural paradigm that emerged in the nineteenth century. In a sense, this book reimagines Bazin's myth of total cinema by displacing cinema from its own history. Virtual aesthetics is a Victorian invention that is still in the process of arriving because it continues to be reconstituted through new technological forms and imaginaries in the present. Like Bazin, I have represented virtual aesthetics as an ideal that transcends its technological instantiations. When I say that virtual aesthetics emerged in the nineteenth century, what I mean is that thinkers, writers, inventors, and scientific practitioners from George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell to David Brewster and John Henry Pepper were engaged in a cultural project of imagining it into existence.

To call Victorian virtuality imagined is not to say that it is unreal. Rather, it is to take seriously what the methods of literary study offer to the field of media history: the rigorous analysis of the cultural imaginary that underlies and gives shape to technological forms. From a visual portal to another time and place made out of ink to a mesmeric diamond that penetrates consciousness, from a magic lantern show that raises the dead to a moving-picture toy that remotely controls human bodies, it would be easy for me to announce: virtuality has not yet been invented! But I do not see these Victorian media imaginaries as dreams meant to be realized in technological form. They are simply the ideas, discourses, and practices that make media experiences like attending a phantasmagoria show, looking through a stereoscope, or spinning a phenakistoscope culturally meaningful. They may drive technological innovation, but they are also attempting to make sense of technology—through technology. What I am calling a media imaginary could also be described as a media theory, an explanatory framework for the cultural relevance of media experiences and forms. To approach nineteenth-century virtual aesthetics as imaginary and theoretical; as plural and messy; and as appearing in partial form across a diverse range of texts, objects, and performances, is to refuse the narrative of media history as neutral technological development. It is to recognize instead the ways that the virtual is deeply embedded in and inextricable from the century's dominant cultural and political formations—at once shaped by and giving shape to imperialism, industrial capital, and civilizational ideology.

In the opening to this book, I promised an analysis of what the virtual was—a history of virtual aesthetics before the arrival of the Lumière train. I have avoided transhistorical comparisons between nineteenth-century media forms and discourses and the contemporary models you may have been thinking of as you read these chapters: open world video games, virtual reality headsets, augmented reality, video calls, interactive television shows. But I know that history does not belong in the past. My hope is that this relentlessly nonpresentist approach to the nineteenth century will enable you to consider how we are still imagining the virtual today. I hope that you will take this book as an invitation to ask how we might still be dreaming a Victorian dream: a dream of imaginative transportation and control, of visual derangement and epistemic sovereignty, of immersion and detachment, and of the individual perceptual management of illusion as a civilizational ideal.