Kaleidoscope

History

Invented by the Physicist Scottish Sir David Brewster in 1816 whereas it made experiments on the polarization of the Lumière, the kaleidoscope was Brevet E in 1817. Initially conceived as a scientific tool, its use quickly deviated so that it becomes a toy nowadays.

A literary Topos

The kaleidoscope inspired by many writers and philosophers. Insofar as it has at the same time a number finished of elements in a space finished (field) and where it however authorizes an indefinite number of combinations, it gives a concrete illustration, symbolic system, way in which one can create something by simple again réagencement of what existed already before. It gives a figure thus reconciling the apparently opposed terms of permanence and the change, the identity and the difference.

This image also makes it possible to illustrate a supporting matter that in fact the elements make the whole, but the form which their combination takes: the whole is not reducible with the sum of its parts. Starting from a finished number of elements, one can create a great number of different figures.

In addition to the references which follow, one can find an example contemporary of this process in Stéphanie Phanistée , novel of Frédérick Tristan (Prix Goncourt 1983), in which the situations and the characters change according to the vision of the characters telling the history.

Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer uses the image of the kaleidoscope to show the form of Métempsycose which characterizes the history: the plants, animals, men and people die and are born unceasingly, and under an apparently ceaseless change, in fact always the same figures reappear: the individuals die, the species always saw. What makes it possible to make sign towards an optimism under this fundamental pessimism: “the species, here what always saw, and, in the conscience of the immutability of the species and of their identity with it, the individuals exist trustful and merry”.

“the history in vain claims to always tell us the new one, it is like the kaleidoscope: each turn presents a new configuration to us, and however in fact, to tell the truth, the same elements always pass under our eyes. ” ( the world like will and representation , chapter XLI)

Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust uses the metaphor of the kaleidoscope to describe the way in which certain companies change with regard to the Juif S:

“similar with the kaleidoscopes which turn from time to time, the company places successively in a way different from the elements which one had believed immutable and composes another figure. I had not made my first communion yet, that ladies well thinking had amazement to meet in Jewish visit elegant. These new provisions of the kaleidoscope are produced by what a philosopher would call a change of criterion. The Dreyfus business brought new, at one a little posterior time with that where I started to go to Mrs. Swann, and the kaleidoscope once more reversed its small coloured rhombuses. All that was Jewish passed in bottom was this the elegant lady, and of the obscure nationalists went up to take his place. The living room more the brilliance of Paris was that of an Austrian prince and ultra-catholic. That instead of the Dreyfus business it had occurred a war with Germany, the turn of the kaleidoscope had occurred in another direction. The Jews having with the general astonishment, shown that they were patriotic, would have kept their situation and nobody would have liked any more to go nor to even acknowledge to be never gone in the Austrian prince. That does not prevent only each time the company is temporarily motionless, those which live there think that no change will take place more, just as having seen beginning the telephone, they do not want to accept the airplane. ” (Marcel Proust, In the shade of the young girls in flowers, “Around Mrs. Swann”, Paris, Gallimard, Fourthly, 1999, p. 412-413.)

Further, in the Side of Guermantes, Proust reconsiders the metaphor of the “social kaleidoscope” (the Side of Guermantes I, ED. Fourthly, p. 891).

Claude Lévi-Strauss

In a famous passage of the wild Thought , Claude Lévi-Strauss uses the image of the kaleidoscope to describe by analogy the “wild” logic, which the ethnologist studies (Claude Lévi-Strauss, the wild Thought , “the logic of totemic classifications”, Paris, Plon, 1962, Pocket Agora, p. 51-52).

“This logic operates the made-to-order of the kaleidoscope a little: instrument which contains also bits and pieces, with the means of which are carried out structural arrangements” (p. 51).

The logic “arranged” by the wild thought, such as Lévi-Strauss conceives it, obeys indeed a certain structural homology with the kaleidoscope:

the elements come from a contingent process of destruction and break: break of glass, or recovery of linguistic signs taken out of their context: “the fragments result from a lawsuit of break and destruction, in itself contingent, but provided its products offer between them certain homologies: of size, promptness of color, transparency. They did not read to be clean, compared to the manufactured objects which spoke a “speech” of which they became the indefinable remains; but, under another report/ratio, they must have some sufficiently to take part usefully in the formation of a being of a new type”;
the whole forms a structure : structure limited by the limits of the kaleidoscope, or structure of the meaning system;
the particular combination that the whole takes is contingent, resulting from the gyration of the kaleidoscope by the observer or certain associations between differential oppositions;
the combination thus formed is projected on the things, and in itself object of an experiment for the observer is not.

External bonds

Manufacture of a kaleidoscope

Category: Toy

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