Jean-Philippe Antoine

My plan is to write a study of Samuel F.B. Morse’s various careers as painter and organizer of the arts in America, inventor of the electromagnetic telegraph and of the alphabetic code that still bears his name, and daguerreotypist. Morse’s hesitant embrace of painting and technological invention was related to a drastic shift in the economy of signs, as embodied in the partial transfer to other media of functions traditionally ascribed to painting since the Renaissance. Seen in this light, his involvement in telegraphy and in daguerreotypy becomes not so much a flight from painting as an individual attempt to come to terms with the new, democratic and reproductive economy of signs that emerged in nineteenth-century America and to establish new tools for its implementation outside of the fine arts tradition.

This book, which attempts to delineate the shift from imitation to reproduction that underlies Morse’s complex career, should provide a more balanced account of this important figure in American culture. It should as well further the exploration of the changing economy of signs that has governed western societies during the last 200 years—an issue vital to current art history, media theory, and the communication sciences.