However, I would maintain that reexamining the experience of the moving
image, even in these devices, need not be limited to this lesson. While I resist
describing the moving image as an illusion, I think one might still see it as a
trick, a trope, a turn, a transformation that surprises, partly because we do in-
deed see it, not simply mistake it. The moving image is an illusion only if we
assume our eyes are defective. If we think of seeing as a multifaceted way of
exploring the world (and indeed of delighting in it), then a trick need no more
be an illusion than is a difficult gymnastic or acrobatic turn or a feat of juggling.
While the educational logic of“Philosophy in Sport made Science in Earnest”
labors to transform astonishment and delight into earnest discipline, it also ex-
ceeds its purpose. The dancer pirouettes endlessly and if its visual fascination
may serve the end of seduction into taking one’s place willingly within the ap-
paratus (or before the screen, or at the keyboard), this need not be the only
pleasure produced (nor need pleasure only lead to complicity).
This apparatus, while it subjects our vision and behavior to a specific regi-
men necessary for the transformation into a moving image to take place, also
remains very much in our hands and within our sight. The productive gestures
are highly visible rather than concealed; we operate the Phenakistiscope and
Zoetrope with the flick of our hands or fingers. We see the whole apparatus
and it parts and can observe the still images before we set them into action.
These philosophical toys display what Crary calls“the undisguised nature of
their operational structure,”their evident“mechanical production”based in
“the functional interaction of body and machine.”They lack the concealing of
the operational mechanism that Theodore Adorno would identify with the
Phantasmagoria, and which become part of the regimen of the classical cin-
ema.Mary Ann Doane states it explicitly:“The optical toy is anti-phantasma-
goric in this respect–it does not hide the work of its operation but instead
flaunts it.”
The moving image entered the nineteenth century in peculiar circumstances.
First, it displayed a dialectical relation between still and moving images. But the
educational discourse surrounding philosophical toys remained fixed upon the
primacy of the still image, and describing the“illusion of motion”as the pro-
duct of the rapid presentation of still images before a“defective”eye. This re-
duction of motion to an illusion served philosophical ends. William Carpenter
in hishistory of“the Zoetrope and its Antecedents”claimed that the study
of these devices allowed young people to cultivate a “scientific habit of
thought”founded on a comparison“between theapparentand thereal.”Even
more radically, it was claimed such devices taught young people that the pro-
cess of seeing motion somehow depended on atomistic still images, and then
“cheating”the eye into seeing things that were not actually there. In this scenar-
40 Tom Gunning