Administering the ether, and the aesthetic of the absolute.

摘要

The ether, synonymous with the idea of absolute space and time, is an ancient concept which continually has determined how we perceive our environment, our relations to each other, and ultimate truths. Because the absolute and the ether have fallen into general disuse, an entire occult history which underpins our present technological revolutions has gone unexamined. When the ether became a term of science some three-hundred years ago, it would serve to explain electricity to Enlightenment thinkers and technologists. But even though this scientific revolution was a rational one, modern advances still maintained connections to a supernatural, irrational past through the substance of the ether. The more unruly pre-history of the scientific ether is irrepressible. Even today, the ethereal imagination is still lively. This is remarkable given that the ether was officially debunked in the 1880s, and supplanted in the early twentieth century by the theories of Einstein. Whether as stylish retro-science or as an alternative form of cosmic consciousness, the street has found its uses for this antique model of physical reality.; The ether is not a timeless substance. It seems that each period has its own ether, determined by historical relations between technology, science, and spiritualism. In tracing the history of the last three-hundred years of the ether, one encounters the variety of scientific, semiotic and spiritual shifts that the ether undergoes and effects. Not least are the shifts forged by communication technologies, which, beginning with the telegraph in the 1840s, would turn this immaterial realm into a veritable place of commerce. Communicating across the ether would start to seem an everyday event, even though many thinkers with occult affiliations would remind us of just how difficult ethereal congress, and indeed communication itself, is. This dissertation concentrates more on the noisy, fragmented, pained but, at times, luminous simulations of the ether in a variety of artistic contexts. The legacy of absolute art—in literature, film, and other media—is the conceptualization of an ethereal aesthetic.