Unconscious Optics

This is from the Norton Anthology of English Literature headnotes to “The Sixteenth Century”:

Renaissance literature is the product of a rhetorical culture, a culture steeped in the arts of persuasion and trained to process complex verbal signs. (The contemporary equivalent would be the ease with which we deal with complex visual signals, effortlessly processing such devices as fade-out, montage, crosscutting, and morphing.)

If I were to distill modernity into one quality it would be the overabundance of morphing. I bet things are morphing into other things right in front of me – cats into dogs, regular people into powerful rangers – so much that I don’t even notice. It makes you wonder whether our culture has become so saturated with morphing that morphing has lost its affective power.



I can process this image with amazing ease; much like how a sixteenth-century person would have processed an elaborate peroration.