Crary_Jonathan_Techniques_of_the_Observer_1990
JONATHAN CRARY
Techniques of the Observer
On Vision and Modernity in the
Nineteenth Century
An OCTOBER Book
MIT Press
Cam
idge, Massachusetts
London, England
First MIT Press pape
ack edition, 1992
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No pan of this book may be reproduced in any form by any elec-
tronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage
and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book was set in lTC Garamond by DEKR Corp. and printed and bound
in the United States of America.
Li
ary of Congress cataloging-in-Publication Data
Crary, jonathan.
Techniques of the observer , on vision and modernity in the
nineteenth century I jonathan Crary.
p. em.
"October books"-Ser. t.p.
Includes bibliographical references (p.
ISBN XXXXXXXXXXhe.: alk. paper XXXXXXXXXX (pb.: alk. paper)
I. Visual perception. 2. An, Modem-19th century-Themes,
motives. 3. An and society-History-19th century. I. Title.
N7430.5.C7 1990
701 '.1S-
CIP
Illustration creditso Musee du Louvre, Paris (page 44); Stildelsches Kunstinstitut,
Frankfun (page 4S); Myseo Co
er, Venice (page S3); The National Gallery, London
(page S4); private colleaion, Paris, photo by Lauros-Giraudon (page 63); National Gal-
lery of An, Washington (page 6S); photos by L. L. Roger-Viollet (pages 117, 123, 130);
Tate Gallery, London (pages 140, 144).
XXXXXXXXXX
to my father
Acknowledgments
Modernity and the Problem of the Observer
2 The Camera Obscura and Its Subject
3 Subjective Vision and the Separation of the Senses
4 Techniques of the Observer
5 Visionary Abstraction
Bibliography
Index
Contents
ix
25
67
97
137
151
163
Acknowledgments
Among the people who made this book possible are my three friends
and colleagues at Zone Sanford Kwinter, Hal Foster, and Michel Feher. It
would be impossible to suggest all the ways in which I have been enriched
and challenged because of my proximity to their work and ideas. I would also
like to thank Richard Brilliant and David Rosand for their consistent support
and encouragement, especially when these were needed most. Their counsel
was invaluable to me during the formulation of this project. I am particularly
grateful to Rosalind Krauss for her discerning critical suggestions and help of
many kinds. Yve-Alain Bois and Christopher Phillips read early versions of the
manuscript and made probing and highly useful observations. I did much of
my research while the recipient of a Rudolf Wittkower Fellowship from the
Columbia Art History Department. The book was completed while I was on
a Mellon Fellowship in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia,
and thanks go to my friends at the Heyman Center during that time. In pre-
paring the visual material I relied on the assistance of Meighan Gale, Anne
Me nsior of ClAM, and Greg Schmitz. Ted Byfield and my research assistant
Lynne Spriggs provided last-minute editorial help. Finally, I would like to
thank Suzanne Jackson, whose commitment and risk taking as a writer con-
tinually stimulated and strengthened my own work.
Techniques of the Observer
For the
uuerialist historian, every
epoch with which he occupies himself
is only a fore-history of that which
eally concerns him. And that is pre-
cisely why the appearance of repeti-
tion doesn't exist f or him in history,
ecause the moments in the course of
history which matter most to him
ecome moments of the present
through their index as 'fore-history, "
and change their characteristics
according to the catastrophic or
triumphant determination of that
present.
-Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project
1 Modernity and the Problem of the Observer
7be field of vision has always seemed
to me comparable to the ground of
an archaeological excavation.
-Paul Virilio
This is a book about vision and its historical construction. Although it
primarily addresses events and developments before 1850, it was written in
the midst of a transformation in the nature of visuality probably more pro-
found than the
eak that separates medieval imagery from Renaissance per-
spective. The rapid development in little more than a decade of a vast a
ay
of computer graphics techniques is part of a sweeping reconfiguration of rela-
tions between an observing subject and modes of representation that effec-
tively nullifies most of the culturally established meanings of the terms
observer and representation. The formalization and diffusion of computer-
generated imagery heralds the ubiquitous implantation of fa
icated visual
"spaces" radically different from the mimetic capacities of film, photography,
and television. These latter three, at least until the mid-1970s, were generally
forms of analog media that still co
esponded to the optical wavelengths of
the spectrum and to a point of view, static or mobile, located in real space.
Computer-aided design, synthetic holography, flight simulators, computer
animation, robotic image recognition, ray tracing, texture mapping, motion
control, virtual environment helmets, magnetic resonance imaging, and mul-
tispectral sensors are only a few of the techniques that are relocating vision
to a plane severed from a human observer. Obviously other older and more
2 Modernity and the Problem of the Observer
familiar modes of "seeing" will persist and coexist uneasily alongside these
new forms. But increasingly these emergent technologies of image produc-
tion are becoming the dominant models of visualization according to which
primary social processes and institutions function. And, of course, they are
intertwined with the needs of global information industries and with the
expanding requirements of medical, military, and police hierarchies. Most of
the historically imponant functions of the human eye are being supplanted by
practices in which visual images no longer have any reference to the position
of an observer in a "real," optically perceived world. If these images can be
said to refer to anything, it is to millions of bits of electronic mathematical data.
Increasingly, visuality will be situated on a cybernetic and electromagnetic ter-
ain where abstract visual and linguistic elements coincide and are consumed,
circulated, and exchanged globally.
To comprehend this relentless abstraction of the visual and to avoid mys-
tifying it by recourse to technological explanations, many questions would
have to be posed and answered. Some of the most crucial of these questions
are historical. If there is in fact an ongoing mutation in the nature of visuality,
what forms or modes are being left behind? What kind of
eak is it? At the
same time, what are the elements of continuity that link contemporary imag-
ery with older organizations of the visual? To what extent, if at all, are com-
puter graphics and the contents of the video display terminal a funher
elaboration and refinement of what Guy Debord designated as the "society of
the spectacle?"' What is the relation between the dematerialized digital imag-
ery of the present and the so-called age of mechanical reproduction? The most
urgent questions, though, are larger ones. How is the body, including the
observing body, becoming a component of new machines, economies, appa-
atuses, whether social, libidinal, or technological? In what ways is subjectivity
ecoming a precarious condition of interface between rationalized systems
of exchange and networks of information?
Although this book does not directly engage these questions, it attempts
to reconsider and reconstruct pan of their historical background. It does this
y studying an earlier reorganization of vision in the first half of the nine -
I. See my "Eclipse of the Spectacle," in Art After Modernism, Rethinking Representa-
tion, ed. Brian Wallis (Boston, 1984), pp XXXXXXXXXX.
Modernity and the Problem of the Obseroer 3
teenth century, sketching out some of the events and forces, especially in the
1820s and 1830s, that produced a new kind of observer and that were crucial
preconditions for the ongoing abstraction of vision outlined above. Although
the immediate cultural repercussions of this reorganization were less dra-
matic, they were nonetheless profound. Problems of vision then, as now, were
fundamentally questions about the body and the operation of social power.
Much of this book will examine how, beginning early in the nineteenth cen-
tury, a new set of relations between the body on one hand and forms of insti-
tutional and discursive power on the other redefined the status of an
observing subject.
By outlining some of the "points of emergence" of a modern and het-
erogeneous regime of vision, I simultaneously address the related problem
of when, and because of what events, there was a rupture with Renaissance,
or classical, models of vision and of the observer. How and where one situates
such a
eak has an enormous bearing on the intelligibility of visuality within
nineteenth- and twentieth-century modernity. Most existing answers to this
question suffer from an exclusive preoccupation with problems of visual rep-
esentation; the
eak with classical models of vision in the early nineteenth
century was far more than simply a shift in the appearance of images and art
works, or in systems of representational conventions. Instead, it was insepa-
able from a massive reorganization of knowledge and social practices that
modified in myriad ways the productive, cognitive, and desiring capacities of
the human subject.
In this study I present a relatively unfamiliar configuration of nineteenth-
century objects and events, that is, proper names, bodies of knowledge, and
technological inventions that rarely appear in histories of art or of modern-
ism. One reason for doing this is to escape from the limitations of many of the
dominant histories of visuality in this period, to bypass the many accounts of
modernism and modernity that depend on a more or less similar evaluation
of the origins of modernist visual art and culture in the 1870s and 1880s. Even
today, with numerous revisions and rewritings (including some of the most
compelling neo-Marxist, feminist, and poststructuralist work), a core na
ative
emains essentially unchanged. It goes something like the following: with
Manet, impressionism, ancVor postimpressionism, a new model of visual rep-
esentation and perception emerges that constitutes a
eak with several cen-
4 Modernity and the Problem of the Observer
turies of another model of vision, loosely definable as Renaissance,
perspectival, or normative. Most theories of modern visual culture are still
ound to one or other version of