156THE END OF THE DAYDREAMa classifiable world, which transcended class and language barriers.^55 In
1926, the famous taxidermist Carl Akeley adopted the use of stereoscopic
photography in order to more accurately render the three-dimensional
lifelike quality distinctive of his taxidermy mounts.^56 Similarly to the
taxidermy dioramas produced from the 1890s onward, the stereoscope
proposed a rationalized model of the world that in its construction was
both finite and completely legible from a safe anthropocentric positioning.
The flattening of the animal skin, like the flattening of the photographed
object, required remodeling into three dimensions for the object to occupy
a spatial field of visibility enabling voyeurism, surveillance, and classifica-
tion. The heightened photographic affirmation constructed by the stereo-
scope staged a panoptic relation between viewer and object, and proposed
an ineffable illusion, one in which the flat was passed for three-dimen-
sional, the dead for alive, and the ideological for natural.
By metaphorically removing the stereoscopic lenses—the epistemic
symbol of the Enlightenment’s thirst for ordering the world through the
enhanced primacy of sight—Horn deliberately withholds affirmative
resolution from the viewer. Preventing the two images from merging
into a stereoscopic illusion leaves the viewer to grapple instead with a
troubling tautology. Instead of being translated into words almost imme-
diately, the owl/s are allowed to exist outside of meaning for a short while.
The trompe l’oeil, the view of a single three-dimensional owl that would
have emerged from the intercession of the stereoscopic lens, could
have produced the weightiest burden of affirmation.^57 The result would
have equated to the most solid ruse of a convincing resemblance: the
opposite of the practice of liberty and indeed the epitome of quat-
trocento conventions. It is in this very failure—the deliberate frustra-
tion of the desire to see and say and therefore to possess—that the event
is unleashed.^58
Horn’s allusion to the possibility that the owl in the two images may
be taxidermy further problematizes the tension between resemblance and
similitude. Kitty Hauser noticed that the indexicality proposed by pho-
tography is different from that of taxidermy in that, in the latter, “the sign
has swallowed up its referent.”^59 If photography ambiguously plays with
the notion that that which is photographed might be understood as onto-
logically dead within the economies of the image, taxidermy proposes
the certainty of death. Thus, the taxidermy mount already always is a