Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer provides a dramatically
new perspective on the visual culture of the nineteenth century,
reassessing problems of both visual modernism and social modernity. This
analysis of the historical formation of the observer is a compelling
account of the prehistory of the society of the spectacle.
In Techniques of the Observer Jonathan Crary provides a dramatically
new perspective on the visual culture of the nineteenth century,
reassessing problems of both visual modernism and social modernity.
Inverting conventional approaches, Crary considers the problem of
visuality not through the study of art works and images, but by
analyzing the historical construction of the observer. He insists that
the problems of vision are inseparable from the operation of social
power and examines how, beginning in the 1820s, the observer became the
site of new discourses and practices that situated vision within the
body as a physiological event. Alongside the sudden appearance of
physiological optics, Crary points out, theories and models of
subjective vision were developed that gave the observer a new autonomy
and productivity while simultaneously allowing new forms of control and
standardization of vision.
Crary examines a range of diverse work in philosophy, in the empirical
sciences, and in the elements of an emerging mass visual culture. He
discusses at length the significance of optical apparatuses such as the
stereoscope and of precinematic devices, detailing how they were the
product of new physiological knowledge. He also shows how these forms of
mass culture, usually labeled as realist, were in fact based on abstract
models of vision, and he suggests that mimetic or perspectival notions
of vision and representation were initially abandoned in the first half
of the nineteenth century within a variety of powerful institutions and
discourses, well before the modernist painting of the 1870s and 1880s.
