Invisible Realm Research Articles

Simone Weil and theatre: from attention to the descending way

ABSTRACTTheatre artists and philosophers all over the centuries have often pointed out the existence of two levels within every phenomenon; we call this thought “Dualism”. During the last centuries, many have focused on a specific, although traditional, example of dualism, which envisions a superior, transcendent reality – that is not connected to ours -. The performer can create such a connection, through her work on “verticality”, touching the superior invisible realm, which must then descend back to our everyday dimension. This article analyses one of the main tools used in order to set up a connection between these two dimensions, that is attention, according in particular to one of the main thinkers of the twentieth century: Simone Weil. In this regard, the author explores the last pedagogical work of French actor and theatre pedagogue Louis Jouvet and the last period of research by Jerzy Grotowski and his pupils, both focused on that “attention” and “descending way”, which works on the same line of what is better known as “Verticality”.In the second part, Campo comments on Weil’s selected passages.

Karawari carved crocodiles: From spirit-beings to museum artefacts

The Karawari River region of East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea, is renowned for its lengthy, carved wooden crocodiles. These spirit-beings were kept in men’s houses and had an important role in headhunting and war expeditions, initiation rituals, hunting trips, and during periods of epidemics. Karawari people acted upon the world with and through them. They were also sought by art collectors and found their way into museums around the world. Following the arrival of the Catholic charismatic movement in December 1994 the last men’s houses in Ambonwari village were slowly abandoned as were the carved spirits hidden in them. The existence of these spirit-beings, however, has never been repudiated. In this article I examine an incident in which an outboard motor sank into a creek, and I seek an answer to the following question, posed in terms of Ambonwari cosmological mode of existence: How are the visible and invisible realms of carved spirit-crocodiles intertwined such that they can exist beyond their physical appearance?

The rocking of canoe and custom: Shifts in Ambonwari’s perception of invisible realm, secrecy and village hierarchy

Cet article examine les modes de communication avec les esprits au sein du village d’Ambonwari dans la province de l’East Sepik en Papouasie Nouvelle-Guinee. Ces vingt dernieres annees, la presence de l’eglise catholique et d’un mouvement charismatique a entraine l’abandon de nombreuses pratiques coutumieres. Quelques-unes subsistent encore, dont le kay wurukrarin (le « rocking canoe »), le balancement de la pirogue, qui, suivant la tradition, permettait de demander aux esprits – qui residaient sur la terre et/ou dans les trous d’eau –, si on allait attraper des poissons ou tuer un cochon. Les techniques modernes d’information et de communication – en particulier les telephones portables –, ont bouleverse nombre de pratiques, dont la communication avec les esprits. Outre ce « balancement des pirogues », j’etudie un cas de sacrifice et montre comment les pratiques traditionnelles peuvent etre reinvesties lorsque qu’une personne est souffrante. En modifiant leur perception du monde de l’au-dela, les gens d’Ambonwari reorganisent aussi la hierarchie villageoise.

Invisible Reality: Storytellers, Storytakers, and the Supernatural World of the Blackfeet by Rosalyn R. LaPier

Reviewed by: Invisible Reality: Storytellers, Storytakers, and the Supernatural World of the Blackfeet by Rosalyn R. LaPier Sally Thompson Invisible Reality: Storytellers, Storytakers, and the Supernatural World of the Blackfeet. By Rosalyn R. LaPier. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. ix + 176 pp. Photographs, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $50.00 cloth. Invisible Reality is an unusual book in which the author, a historian and Blackfeet tribal member, brings the early reservation period history to life with embedded family stories and her own reflections, and at the same time manages to ground Blackfeet religious beliefs within the context of their everyday reality. Through stories shared by her elders and those she encountered through her research, LaPier followed one strong thread, that of reliance on supernatural allies to manage the negotiations of life with other people and particularly with nature; in her words, "to make the unpredictable predictable." Readers familiar with the writings of Schultz, Grinnell, McClintock, Wissler and Duvall, among others, will find that LaPier covers some familiar topics, with accounts of the symbolism of painted lodges and the origins and transfer of the Beaver Bundle and Thunder Pipe, but significantly, she grounds them in her own family's stories of Blackfeet life. For example, her discussion of the relationship between Thunder and the people in the context of the northwestern Plains' harsh climate realities [End Page 442] makes explicit the need for supernatural assistance of Thunder to ensure rains feed the grasslands, which in turn support the bison that feed, clothe, and equip the people. The author draws the reader into a grounded reality through her interpretation of ethnographic records regarding settlement and seasonality, painting a picture of hundreds of lodges camped in band clusters along the Marias River throughout the winter until "the ponies shed," contrasted with images of the active summer season when individual bands would follow prescribed routes to particular destinations year after year, coming together each summer for the O'kan, the Blackfeet Medicine Lodge, when the berries were ripe. Place names hold this reality together. LaPier's intertwined narrative takes the reader into the realities of twentieth-century life at Heart Butte, more through government records and photographs than through family stories. Her elders didn't focus on their struggles with assimilation but rather on what was essential to a prosperous life—stories of encounters with the invisible realm. Through-out these accounts, surprisingly, the author uses past tense to describe what the Blackfeet believed and understood about the nature of reality. In the epilogue, she anticipates the question of cultural continuity. Rather than address the subject head-on, she concludes the book with her own story of an encounter with the supernatural that occurred along the edge of the Backbone of the World, where the invisible is still real. Sally Thompson Cultural Heritage Consulting Missoula, Montana Copyright © 2018 The Center for Great Plains Studies and The University of Nebraska Press

Blood Typing: Rudolph Fisher's The Conjure-Man Dies

CLA JOURNAL 165 Blood Typing: Rudolph Fisher’s The Conjure-Man Dies Rachel Watson Witchcraft has no moving parts of its own, and it needs none. The real action creates evidence for the imagined thing. By that route, belief of that sort constantly dumps evidence for itself into the real world. […] There was vast and varied evidence, but of what? Of products of imagining, ‘realised’ in everyday practice. […] Those present do not query assumptions, the nature of available evidence, or the coherence of their reasoning from that evidence. What they know, they know intimately, but not well. Such is the stuff that racecraft is made of. It occupies a middle ground between science and superstition, an invisible realm of collective understandings, a half-lit zone of the mind’s eye.1 The number of instances is of course too small for statistical deductions, but they served to make it clear that no very marked characteristic distinguished the races. The impressions from Negroes betray the general clumsiness of their fingers, but their patterns are not, so far as I can find, different from those of others, they are not simpler as judged either by their contours or by the number of origins, embranchments, islands, and enclosures contained in them. Still, whether it be from pure fancy on my part, or from the way in which they were printed, or from some real peculiarity, the general aspect of the Negro print strikes me as characteristic. […] In short, they give an idea of greater simplicity, due to causes that I have not yet succeeded in submitting to the test of measurement.2 “Some day I’m going to write a murder mystery,” mused Dr. Archer, “that will baffle and astound the world. The murderer will turn out to be the most likely suspect.” “You’d never write another,” said the medical examiner.3 In November of 1927,The Pittsburgh Courier reported two key facts regarding the young Dr. Rudolph Fisher: he had just completed his first novel (The Walls of Jericho, for which he was considering offers from publishers) and that “Dr. Fisher will soon open an office in Harlem and will be the first colored doctor to 1 Barbara and Karen Fields, 21-22. 2 Francis Galton, 195-96. 3 Rudolph Fisher, The Conjure-Man Dies, 155. Noted parenthetically hereafter. 166 CLA JOURNAL Rachel Watson practice the use of radium.”4 In the month prior, The Chicago Defender reported that the well-known writer would open a “well-equipped X-ray laboratory at 2350 Seventh Avenue” in Harlem, New York.5 Soon after, the International Hospital opened,providingstate-of-the-artmedicalfacilitiesforHarlemresidents,including the X-ray lab of Dr. Rudolph Fisher.6 Thus, while imagining and writing the first African American detective novel, Rudolph Fisher also became the preeminent black American with the capacity and wherewithal to see, quite literally, beneath the skin. In a sociopolitical climate still firmly in thrall with nineteenth century ideologies of the human body, in which one profoundly was what one looked like, and in which social and legal rank was explicitly determined by the visible color of one’s skin, the scientific collapsing of such distances between the eye and the body could not help but animate the way Fisher wrote and talked about race ideology in America. Originally published in 1932 by the New York firm of Pascal Covici and Donald Friede—whose roster included John Steinbeck, Wyndham Lewis, Clifford Odets, and Nathaniel West—The Conjure-Man Dies broke new literary ground by featuring an African American police officer working with an African American doctor to solve a pair of murders in 1920s Harlem. While one could argue whether The Conjure-Man Dies was the first African American detective story, it was unarguably the first of its kind to feature an all-black cast.7 For Fisher, the detection story formula itself, and its insistence on engaging readers’“rational”intellect,hadmoretosayaboutracialideologiesandtheirundoing than what may at first meet the eye.8 In his decision to make use of both forensics and contemporaneous hematology as critical evidence in the identification of the murderer and the victim, Fisher used the technical language and cultural power of an emerging medico...

Editor's Column

Editor's Column John Zemke With this issue Oral Tradition returns to its customary miscellany format, offering half a dozen essays that examine as many strands in humanity's complex of verbal traditions: a previously overlooked theme in Old Germanic poetry; a pictorial system for representing narratives devised by the Naxi dongba in Southwestern China that conjugates the oral and the literary in the same vehicle; an illustration of contemporary shamanistic augury and communication with the dead practiced by women from the Vlach minority community in Eastern Serbia; an account of genre classification schemes for Trans-Atlantic Gaelic song traditions; and, finally, the debut in the pages of Oral Tradition of "lexomics," an analytic tool that is brought to bear on a passage of Beowulf to suggest that its antecedents belong to a highly-formulaic unwritten source. First up, we feature an essay from Paul Battles and Charles D. Wright that identifies "The Scop's Repertoire" as an Old English traditional theme, one that associates verse-making with three motifs: copiousness, orality, and antiquity. Close analogues in Old Saxon, Old and Middle High German, and Old Norse poetry suggest that "The Scop's Repertoire" theme originates in an oral Germanic tradition of versification. Thus, the theme sheds light on the myth of the oral poet, depicted either as divinely inspired or bearer of tradition. Douglas Poupard's essay examines the orality of ritual texts written in the Naxi dongba script in southwest China. Historically the inherent orality of these texts was largely overlooked by scholars who instead conceived of them as visual "hieroglyphics." Here, the author makes the case that the Naxi texts represent an intermediary stage between the "oral" and the "written," and calls into question the reality of any sort of stark divide between orality and literacy, that is, the so-called Great Divide theory. Maria Vivod reports on her fieldwork among the fairy-seers of Southeastern Europe, usually women, who are able to communicate with the invisible realm of the fairies. The fairy-seers sometimes fall into trance-like states to establish communication with the fairies. During the trance, the fairy-seers can prophesy future events and bear messages to the living from their deceased relatives. The author's essay relates case studies of two such women belonging to the Vlach community of Eastern Serbia. The essay by Virginia Blankenhorn illustrates the importance of songs and singing in traditional Gaelic society. Revisiting earlier attempts to classify Gaelic song genres, she examines whether or not constructing such typologies remains a worthwhile scientific objective. Finally, the author characterizes the place and role yjsy singing occupies in contemporary Gaelic, particularly in the light of the contextual and aesthetic changes shaping Gaelic song performances in the current commercially-driven "world music" environment. Mary Knight offers a thorough examination of textual features of the Qur'ān that appear to emerge more prominently as a result of hearing the text recited aloud. Such features that may enhance insights that listeners gain during slow or silent readings of the text. Comparison with ancient Greek oral works, such as Homer, and an examination of Classical memory methodologies provide support for the communicative efficacy of some of the oral features identified. In particular, the author analyzes a series of linguistic devices regarding structure, meaning, diction, syntax, and sound. Drout and Smith deploy new "lexomic" methods of computer-assisted statistical analysis to identify a concentration of unusual lexical, metrical, grammatical and formulaic features in lines 607-61 of Beowulf, a scene in which Queen Wealhtheow passes the cup of friendship to the assembled warriors. Although the passage contains a number of proper names, the authors demonstrate that it is highly formulaic and adaptable, and conclude that the Beowulf-poet drew on an unwritten, highly traditional source for these lines. This issue of Oral Tradition arrives in virtual space thanks to the combined efforts of a much reduced staff of the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition—Elise Broaddus, Katy Chenoweth, managing editor, and Evelyn Yamoah. Mark Jarvis, who transforms the edited essays into electronic files available around the world, continues to excel in his new-old role of indispensable consultant. Finally, as is my custom, I recognize...

Writing International Relations from the invisible side of the abyssal line

AbstractThe article discusses the manner in which the story of the international system and the relationship between violence and civilisation that Andrew Linklater tells inViolence and Civilization in the Western States-Systemsremains on the visible side of the absyssal line. Absyssal thinking refers to the distinctions created between visible and invisible realms and it is Eurocentrism as a system of knowledge that sustains and reproduces this abyssal line. The article will focus on two instances of reproducing this abyssal line. The first will be with respect to the way in which histories of Europe and colonialism are detached from each other. The second will be on where political and moral ‘progress’ is being located within the development of the ‘global civilizing process’.

Spirits as technology: tech-gnosis and the ambivalent politics of the invisible in Indonesia

Spirits hold a central but ambivalent position in Indonesian political and social life. Pushed to the margins of public discourse in recent decades by modernism and Muslim piety, spirits remain key to the realm of the invisible or inscrutable (gaib) and continue to have a strong hold on the popular imagination in communities and on TV screens across the archipelago. One kind of spirit combines imagined potential and public ambivalence with particular force: jin spirits (also spelt jinn). Described in the Koran as real spiritual entities with an unfortunate habit of possessing humans, jin spirits are today also associated with heretical forms of Islam for many people with pious Muslim sensibilities and with backward superstition and evil magic for those with modern, secular sensibilities. Dealing with jin spirits, as a result, is always a careful negotiation with these cross-cutting sensibilities. This paper follows Kyai Muzakkin, the leader of an Islamic boarding school or pesantren in East Java, who insists that the one thousand jin spirits at his pesantren are real and effective “tools” at his disposal. I suggest that Kyai Muzakkin’s insistence on spirits as “tools” responds to the repressed and ambivalent reality of spirits in Indonesia. By turning tech-gnosis, the modern fascination with technology, into both ontological proof of and moral justification for the existence of spirits, Kyai Muzakkin harnesses the magic of modern technology – and of tele-technology in particular – in support of the reality of the invisible realm. While tele-technology thereby vindicates the reality of spirits and advocates for alternative ways of seeing Islam and the modern nation of Indonesia, I also argue that this vindication comes at a cost; namely the ambivalent re-inscription of visibility as proof of the real.

An Uncanny Myth of Ireland: The Spectralisation of Cuchulain’s Body in W. B. Yeats’s Plays

This paper addresses William Butler Yeats’s dramatisation of his life-long interest in the invisible realm and an ideal Irish aristocracy in his five Cuchulain plays. I wish to illustrate how Yeats expresses his increasing ambiguities over the cultural and political capacities of the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy through the changes of the Irish warrior-hero Cuchulain’s body and the growing predominance and influence of the spectral world on his bodily integrity. Even though Cuchulain is generally referred to as the embodiment of Irish national identity and the ideal aristocrat in Yeats’s works, I would like to point out those aspects of his Cuchulain-story, where this idealised narrative of Ireland and the Ascendancy seems to be challenged.

The Roots of the Ecological Crisis and the Way Out: Creation Out of ‘no thing’ God Being ‘no thing’

Plato defined the primal dualism of reality: its division into the invisible eternal realm of thought and the unshaped matrix of the visible temporal realm of corporeality. The hierarchy of mind over body is reflected in the hierarchy of male over female, of human over animals, and in the class hierarchy of rulers over workers. Plato adds the alienation from body and earth, as the lowest level of cosmic hierarchy. The interrelatedness and interdependence of all cosmic beings uncover the dualism: soul/body. The idea of creatio ex nihilo promotes the desecration of the created world, lying at the root of the eco-crisis. The patristic idea of creation ‘ἐξ οὐκ ὄντων’ [‘out of non-being’] refers to what in God is envisaged as the pre-ontological nihil from which all proceed, deconstructing the dualism of a spiritual and a materialistic cosmos.

The Ultimate Invisible: The Infinite

The article concentrates, first, on cultural forms of invisibility (in myths, films, novels and in marginal groups in the majority culture) followed by an analysis of some claims that the religions make to disclose an invisible spiritual dimension in our lives. A second section is on forms of rational invisibility opened by mathematics, modern science (especially theoretical physics) and by claims to a realm of philosophical invisibility. Third, invoking the third century C.E. philosopher Plotinus, the article links the Infinite invisible realms to that of the Ultimate Invisible: the Infinite (both the quantitative infinite of number, space and time and the Absolute Infinite of Plotinus� philosophy) is the Ultimate Invisible.

A forest of dreams: Ontological multiplicity and the fantasies of environmental government in the Philippines

How do invisible beings in the forested hinterlands complicate the work of bureaucrats in the capital? What do dreams and the beings who visit them have to do with state power? Despite a deepening commitment to posthumanism, political ecologists have rarely opened our accounts of more-than-human assemblages to what have conventionally been termed “supernatural” or “metaphysical” forms of agency. To counter this lingering ethnocentrism, I argue here for an ontologically broadened understanding of how environmental government is produced and contested in contexts of difference. My argument draws on ethnographic fieldwork on Palawan Island in the Philippines, where the expansion of conservation enclosures has coincided with the postauthoritarian recognition of Indigenous rights. Officials there have looked to a presumed Indigenous subsistence ethic as a natural fit for conservation enclosures. In practice, however, Palawan land- and resource-use decisions are based, in part, on social relations with an invisible realm of beings who make their will known through mediums or dreams. These relations involve contingencies that complicate and at times subvert the designs of bureaucratic conservation. As a result, attempts to graft these designs onto Palawan practices do as much to engender mutually transformative encounters between contrasting ontological practices as they do to create well-disciplined eco-subjects or establish state territoriality. To better understand the operation of environmental government – and to hold it accountable to promises of meaningful local participation – political ecology should, I argue, attend more carefully to the ontological multiplicity of forces that shape spatial practices and their regulation.

Small but Mighty: Cell Size and Bacteria.

Our view of bacteria is overwhelmingly shaped by their diminutive nature. The most ancient of organisms, their very presence was not appreciated until the 17th century with the invention of the microscope. Initially, viewed as "bags of enzymes," recent advances in imaging, molecular phylogeny, and, most recently, genomics have revealed incredible diversity within this previously invisible realm of life. Here, we review the impact of size on bacterial evolution, physiology, and morphogenesis.

How to do things with examples: Sufis, dreams, and anthropology

In this paper I explore how members of a Sufi community in Egypt use dream‐stories as examples to evoke an otherwise invisible realm, and how I, in turn, use their stories ethnographically. My Sufi interlocutors use examples to invite others into the realm of the imagination, to draw listeners into the shaykh's spiritual aura, and to offer a model for emulation that sometimes triggers similar experiences in others. Their approach to examples poses a challenge to the logic of representation, in which a particular stands in for a larger whole. Instead it points to an evocative logic in which examples do not merely represent; they also do things. Whereas ethnographic examples tend to oscillate between representation and evocation, referential language ideologies largely obscure the example's evocative power. I suggest that my interlocutors’ use of, and approach to, examples can help us think about the example as evocative and performative, including the ways in which examples act upon and through anthropologists.

MO‐E‐18C‐06: Enriching Medical Physics Education By Visualizing The Invisible

Purpose:To enhance the understanding of medical physics concepts and develop higher levels of learning relating to invisible physics phenomena such as radiation. To provide medical physics educators in all countries of the world with understanding of knowledge structures in the human brain, the different levels of learning, and the types of knowledge required for higher level functions such as problem solving, creative innovations, and applied clinical applications. To provide medical physics educators with an open access resource (tool) that they can use in their teaching activities to enrich and elevate the level of learning for their students, residents, etc. with respect to the invisible realm of medical physics.Methods:An experienced clinical medical physicist and educator has created and provided with open access three complementary web‐based resources to achieve the purposes described above. One is a module focusing on the medical physics learning process with respect to mental knowledge structures, how they relate to outcomes and applications, and learning activities that are required to develop the required knowledge structures. The second is an extensive set of visuals that educators can use in their activities (classes, small group discussions, etc.) to visualize the invisible. The third is an interactive online simulation where learners can adjust factors and visually observe changes in x‐radiation. These resources are available online at www.BLINDEDFORREVIEW.Results:Medical physics education, especially for non‐physicists, is becoming much more interesting and useful especially with respect to invisible radiation. The global impact is that medical imaging professionals can be more effective in optimizing x‐ray imaging procedures and risk management when they have knowledge levels that enhance problem solving, innovation, and creativity.Conclusion:Medical physics educators in all institutions can be much more effective and efficient in the sharing of their knowledge and experience when enhanced with high‐quality visuals.

Black Catholicism

Black Catholicism

Nietzsche's Apollo

ABSTRACT Nietzsche's account of Apollo and the Apollinian in The Birth of Tragedy contains underappreciated distortions. Apollinian moments in some tragedies are described as Dionysian. The Apollo seen in BT fails to interpret dreams (indeed this book renders dreams impervious to interpretation) and scarcely prophesies. Most important, Nietzsche's vision of the Apollinian as surface and bounded plane image denies Greek uses of sculpture in just the opposite way, namely to effect communication between the visible and invisible realms. It is improbable to suppose that Nietzsche is ignorant of such a prominent aspect of Greek culture, or that he simply wants to keep his aesthetic categories neatly demarcated. More likely, he represses the communicative Apollo in a gesture against modern Europe's nostalgic treatment of antiquity. Thus the familiar question of BT's accuracy sheds unexpected light on the familiar question of its relationship to nostalgia.

Bulgakovʼs The Master and Margarita and the Illusions of Kantʼs Speculative Reason

Philosophical concepts are traditionally used to explain and analyse literary texts. This article tries to investigate the opposite dependency. Namely, how literary texts and characters could illustrate certain philosophical concepts while re-interpreting, extending and changing their original meaning. In Kantʼs context speculative (theoretical) rationality operates within strict limits: the visible tangible nature. Speculative reason may dream of overstepping the borders of nature and reaching for the invisible realm of ideas. However, for Kant, such tendencies lead to illusions and distortion of the proper working of human rationality. The extremes of speculative reason, i.e. this reasonʼs hubris, and its dreams, which are unlikely to be realized, have their illustration in the strange supernatural reality described in Bulgakovʼs novel. This article interprets Satanʼs actions in Moscow as a direct depiction of what Kant considered to be impossible: the unity of sensible nature and ideas under the rule of speculative reason.

Two Modernist Approaches to Linking Art and Science

The Age of Insight , Eric Kandel's masterful account of the advances of neuropsychology over the last 150 years, starts with the nineteenth-century medical-scientific ethos that geminated the University of Vienna. On its journey it refers back frequently, almost exclusively, to Viennese modernist artists, because their painted images, especially those of the expressionists, resisted conventional realism and continue to this day to serve as perceptual intermediaries to realities that cannot be seen: emotions, character, even the processes of the brain itself. This article begins by further historicizing modernist medical research in Central Europe in regard to another visual medium, film, and then turns to the work of early thinkers who posited a similar relationship between moving images and insight. They, too, often called on anti-realist art to clarify their sense of filmic realism over and against what they considered to be pre-fabricated cinema. This discourse recurs throughout the twentieth century and comes to leave traces in non-conventional filmmaking like that of the contemporary Berlin School. These theories and practices offer useful complements to The Age of Insight 's history of art and science; however, they also issue important challenges to the "common sense" conclusion that some of Kandel's readers might reach regarding cognitive hardwiring as an unambiguous model for our approach to representation and to the world. If "the image of the world that is contained within the word gives rise to a seamless, meaningful system," as Béla Balázs put it critically, then the object might be to dust off the old figure-ground image to consider what our cognitive apparatus naturally shuts off from view. This essay concludes by considering an often overlooked, material marker of a perceptual transition point, one that has accompanied film from the fin-de-siècle on down, in order to foster a more ambiguous approach to the question of how the limits of visual systems relate to the invisible realms beneath the surface of things, both in ourselves and in the world around us.

Dust to Dust : The Figure-Ground Problem of Readymade Realism in Film

The Age of Insight , Eric Kandel's masterful account of the advances of neuropsychology over the last 150 years, starts with the nineteenth-century medical-scientific ethos that geminated the University of Vienna. On its journey it refers back frequently, almost exclusively, to Viennese modernist artists, because their painted images, especially those of the expressionists, resisted conventional realism and continue to this day to serve as perceptual intermediaries to realities that cannot be seen: emotions, character, even the processes of the brain itself. This article begins by further historicizing modernist medical research in Central Europe in regard to another visual medium, film, and then turns to the work of early thinkers who posited a similar relationship between moving images and insight. They, too, often called on anti-realist art to clarify their sense of filmic realism over and against what they considered to be pre-fabricated cinema. This discourse recurs throughout the twentieth century and comes to leave traces in non-conventional filmmaking like that of the contemporary Berlin School. These theories and practices offer useful complements to The Age of Insight 's history of art and science; however, they also issue important challenges to the "common sense" conclusion that some of Kandel's readers might reach regarding cognitive hardwiring as an unambiguous model for our approach to representation and to the world. If "the image of the world that is contained within the word gives rise to a seamless, meaningful system," as Béla Balázs put it critically, then the object might be to dust off the old figure-ground image to consider what our cognitive apparatus naturally shuts off from view. This essay concludes by considering an often overlooked, material marker of a perceptual transition point, one that has accompanied film from the fin-de-siècle on down, in order to foster a more ambiguous approach to the question of how the limits of visual systems relate to the invisible realms beneath the surface of things, both in ourselves and in the world around us.