Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On vision and ...

Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On vision and modernity
in the 19th Century (1990)
1. Modernity and the Problem of the Observer
book is about the historical construction of vision - cf. McLuhan
computer images are radically different from mimetic capacities of film, tv,
photography - all analog (optical wavelengths of spectrum and spacial, real point of
view)
-digital severs relation of image to human observer
examines new relations between body and discourse/power redefines
status of observing subject in early 19th century
modernism assumes ahistorical observer p.5
p.6 not the history of the visual sense but the forces and rules of the field
in which perception occurs - p.7 dominant model of the observer - not resistances
p.8 17th-18th centuries camera obscura; 19th steroscope - 1810-40
uprooting stable observer of camera obscura before photography p. 14
2. The Camera Obscura and Its Subject
represents observer - p.30 “what constitutes the camera obscura is precisely its
multiple identity, its `mixed’ status as an epistemological figure within a discursive order
and an object within an arrangement of cultural practices” -- EXPLICATE
p.38 ff new model of the subject: camera obscura individuates, separates subject
from world to purify it and separates act of seeing from the body, (p.41) “prevents
observer from seeing his position as part of the representation” (cf Foucault on
Velasquez)
3. Subjective Vision and the Separation of the Senses
Goethe unifies the separation in the camera obscura of interior representation
and exterior reality - p.91 light is severed from reference point or origin and this absence
of reference is basis of new instruments for construction of the observer
4. Techniques of the Observer
1830s phenakistiscope - stroboscope - zootrope -- p.112 spectacle and
surveillance coincide so the production of the observer coincides with new disciplinary
rules -
diorama - early 1820s - immobile observer with unfolding optical experience
kaleidoscope - 1815
stereoscope - planar organization of images, disrupts fixed sense of distance
between objects - disunified field of disjunct objects p. 125 - p.128 redefines “point of
view” of observer in relation to object of vision -- immobilizes observer - eye and
instrument are metonymic
these instruments make no claim that the “real” to which they provide access is
anything other than mechanically produced - p.132 functional relation of body &
machine
photography “defeats” the stereoscope (p. 133) because it perpetuates the fiction of the
free subject of the camera obscura
1

5. Visionary Abstraction
2