Las fantasmagorías de Robertson en Madrid (1821) y la historia natural del signo = Robertson’s phantasmagoria in Madrid (1821) and the natural history of the sign

Although phantasmagoria established a specific way of organizing audiovisual discourse and served to consolidate the magic lantern as a medium for social communication, it has often been forgotten as an object of scientific study by the sectoral histories of the communication media, the plastic arts and the stage arts. With the aim of overcoming this conceptual lack of definition, or in other words, to try to endow it with the cultural relevance it deserves, the present article makes an attempt to explore phantasmagoria as an instrumental mediation, in the sense that this concept is understood in the historical-cultural approach, to then be able to assimilate it to the context of a 'natural history of the sign' in the terms posited by L.S. Vygotsky. Si se trasciende el caso madrileño de la fantasmagoría de Robertson -y se tiene en cuenta en qué medida pudo acentuar el compromiso del espectáculo con su contexto social-, es posible afirmar que la fantasmagoría tuvo el mérito de participar en la 'construcción' de un nuevo espectador, en el sentido que lo planteó Crary (3): "The break with classical models of vision in the early nineteenth century was far more than simply a shiftin the appearance of images and art works, or in the systems of representational conventions". Crary sostiene que en el primer cuarto del siglo XIX se produjo un cambio social e individual profundo cuya naturaleza "it was inseparable from a massive reorganization of knowledge and social practices that modified in myriad ways the productive, cognitive, and desiring capacities of the human subject" (1992: 3).