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Techniquesofthe Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth

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©1990 Massachusetts Institute of Technology )
All rights reserved. No pan of this book may be reproduced in any form by any elec­ >~~ )
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Ubrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data -'~'!
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Crary,Jonathan.
Techniques of the observer: on vision and modernity in the

nineteenth century / Jonathan Crary.

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p. cm.
1~ )
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"October books"-Ser. t.p,

Includes bibliographical references (p.

ISBN 0-262-03169-8 (HE), 0-262-53107-0 (PB)

1. Visual perception. 2. Act, Modern-19th century-Themes,
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motives. 3. An and society-History-19th century. I. Title.

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N7430.5.C7 1990
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701'.1~c20
90-6164
CIP
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Illustration credits: Musee du Louvre, Paris (page 44); Stadelsches Kunsttnstitut,
Frankfurt (page 45); Museo Correr, Venice (page 53); The National Gallery, London
(page 54); private collection, Paris, photo by Lauros-Giraudon (page 63); National Gal­
lery of Act, Washington (page 65); photos by L L. Roger-VioJlet (pages 117, 123, 130);
•
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Tate Gallery, London (pages 140, 144). .1
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•
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12

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 1 Modernity and the Problem of the Observer

n"
·11
':',~I

For the materialist historian, every

epoch with which he occupies himself . 'il Thefi~I'Lo.Lvi§j9.n has always seemed
:f to me comparable to the ground of
is only a fore-history of that which .~
,c
really concerns him. And that ispre­ an archaeological excavation.
.,i
cisely why the appearClB((£.!?1 repeti­ ~! -Paul Virilio
tion doesn't exist for him in history, ~i i~' r-:
.;;:. "tv .:':0'\[<'­
because the moments in the course of This is a book about vlsion and its historical construction. Although it . \A "- .. i:</.-t
e;f'-: '
history which matter most to him primarily addresses events and developments before 1850, it was written in

become moments of the present

-( the midst of a transformation in the nature of visualiry probably more pro- - r~:~"- '.~
+ -.'
;;.... ',"::' ,1',", ':': ;...~~
through their in~_ as Yore-history," found than the b~~_~~.separate~ medieval imagery from Renaissance per- ..,. ..
and change their characteristics if ~ spective. The rapid development in little more than a decade of a vast array
according to the catastrophic or f of computer ?raphics techniques is part of a sweeping reconfiguration of rela­
triumphant determination of that
:t tions between an observing subject and modes of representation that effec­
present. rf tively nullifies most of the culturally established meanings of the terms
'~
- Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project ~servfj1" and representation. The formalization and diffusion of computer- ,y,pJ::'~"cZ/J
r
i
generated imag~rY'h~-;~ids the ubiquitous implantation of fabricated vi~al "

I
"sP.;ices" radically different from the mimetic capacities of film, photography,
and tel~Yl~on. These laner three, at least until the mid-1970s, were generally
forms of analog media that still corresponded to the optical wavelengths of 0,,,<0:
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.
.. ----
«~;;'~j
r,J'

to a plane severed from a human observer. Obviously other older and more S:'''rrJ ;j...

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2 Modernity and the Problem of tbe Obseruer

familiar modes of "seeing" will persist and coexist uneasily alongside these
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teenth century, sketching out some of the events and forces, especially in the
3

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(".)3:" new forms. But increasingly these emergent technologies of image produc­ ., 1820s~n~!830s, that produced a new kind of observer and that were crucial '" ~~.'"o~;/,,/
.i
_'X',~ (Y\n.rJt~ tion are becoming. the dominant models of visualization
------------ . . ---- .._-- -­
-
according to which preconditions for the ongoing abstraction of vision outlined above. Although ' t
_j(A'~ ~ ,;';r~ primary social processes and institutions function. And, of course, they are the imfIle_di~~glltll!'.<l!.!~~[,<:lIs..sJ.9.!1s of this reorganization were less dra--+ 0)\\-<,)/("'\ •
'"'-;
intertwined with the ne~Qs_()f global inf9rmati()~ industries and with the 'i matic, they were nonetheless profound. Problems of~;;'fof,l then, as now, were'" r~~Q/cvjS' J
'-'J expanding requirements of medical, military, and police hierarchies. Most of :~
,
i
fundamentally questions about the body and the orer;tion of social power. ($...",;'15 11j " I •

the historically important functio~~ofthehumaneye are being supplanted by - C\;G~:",rt,

·~1
Much ofthis book will examine howbeginning
-....
early in the nineteenth cen- .>0;>- .,
r-i'
)." ...
.-­
practices in which visual images no longer have any refer~l}ce to t~eQ£~ition tury, a n~~_~t of rel.i!.tlons b~een the~n one hand and forms of ins_tI: Sen'- y
of an observer in a "real," optically perceived world. If these images can be p'o~eI' on the other redefined the status of an "''R2 .:<:-M \~.,t,.
t-,
,r, Y ~~l
tutional and discursive-
"'~t
saidt~-;:-;f~~-~o anything, it is to millions of bits of electronic mathematical data. ill
observing subject.
'
GX~'
'/
:~
.... ,I' , ,

Increasingly, visualiry will be situated on a cybernetic and electromagnetic ter­ ~;~.

By outIining some 0 f th e "points 0 f emergence"0f a mo d ern and het- + /""",,- ...
0.' ~ •
1'0,5.7

rain where abstract visual and linguistic elements coincide and are consumed, ~ erogeneous regimeof~isi~1Simultaneously address the related problem. ')
circulated, and exchanged globally. :( of.wh~\ and beca:se -;f -;'hat events, there was a rupture with Renaissance, ~,;~ P:::~~iJ:;- )
--' .. _.- .(, ..
:~ --- -
( J ".l. .,(~
To comprehend this relentless abstraction of the visual and to avoid mys­
tifying it by recourse to technological explanations, many questions would
,~
,
t
or classical,
,--.., models of vision and of the observer. How and where one situates
such a break:has an enormous bearing on the intelligibility of ::,i~l!~lity within
-ir'rll-",·i
('.\ .»:~ .: : ~"..
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have to be posed and answered. Some of the most crucial of these questions
,./ ------_.­ . ,t
nineteenth- and twentieth-century modernity. Most existing answers to this :Cr!.0:':' -,!,-::.~ ")1
)~ A :_Jc..:~:' . )
; ~

J r\ .
are historical. If there is in fact an ongoing mutation in the nature of visualiry, question suffer from an exclusive preoccupation With problems of v~.P­

! \ "'; what forms or modes are being left behind? What kind of bre~ is it? At the resentation, the break with classical models of vision in the early nineteenth )

C)(\I..- :-(lj'·'; ~

.-'-- --- - - .-- ­

-"--""-

same time, what are the elements of continuity that link contemporary imag­ century-;;' far more than simply a shift in the appearance of images and an »
ery with older organizations of the vis~o what extent, if at all, are com­ works, or in syst~rn~_of representational conventions. Instead, it was insepa- \\ ,~~~r~~,~»,'

puter graphics and the contents of the video display terminal a further rabl~ fro~ a massive reorganization of know~~dge and sO~ial practic~~ that Ifi) $C';' )

elaboration and refinement of what Guy Debord designated as the "society of fIlodlfied In mynad ways the productive, cogrunve, and desiring capacines of ::.,.c, , c ,
the spectacle?"! What is the relation between the dematerialized digital imag­ the human subject. _.­ .. ' ,'I »
ery of the present and the so-called a~c:?! ~~~~..!.1.~al reproduction? The most In this study I present a relatively unfamiliar configuration of nineteenth- ' , /.- ~ j
r ~_ urgent questions, though, are larger ones. How is the body, including the century objects and events, that is, proper names, bodies of knowledge, and .,
; t;,/",j I
observing body, becoming a CO~nt..offle~~chines, econo~ies,appa­
technological inventions that rarely appear in histories of an or of modern­ )
F
ratuses, whether social, libidinal, or technological? In what ways is subjectivity

- ,'f
becoming a precarious condition of interface between ranonaltzed'sysfems
of exchange and networks of information?
Although this book does not directly engage these questions, it attempts
of the origins of modernist visual an and culture in the 1870s and 1880s. Even
to reconsider and reconstruct pan of their histori~<l!_bac~g!.?~nd.It does this
today, with numerous revisions and rewritings (including some of the m o s t )
;')', by studying an earli<:r reorganization of vision in the first half of the nine­
;:;;!i
1. See my "Eclipse of the Spectacle," in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representa­
tion, ed. Brian Wallis (Boston, 1984), pp. 283-294.
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 I
)
compelling nco-Marxist, feminist, and poststructuralist work), a core narrative )
remains essentially unchanged. It goes something like the following: with
Maner, impressionism, and/or postimpressionism, a new model of visual rep- J
resentation and perception emerges that constitutes a break:with several cen- •

1......
••
-.• ,
4
Modernity and the Problem of the Observer
,.-­ :~J
Modernity and the Problem of tbe Observer 5

•
. ,
f;

" I tunes of another model of VISIon, loosely definable as Renaissance,

1,
whether as a style, as cultural resistance, or as ideological practice---can be

',.):,,,1 - perspeoival, or normative. Mosttheories of modern visual cult.!lLe are still

isolated agai~e background ofa normativevisio~._Modernismis thus pre-j ~~ll~~~d~~),

• // bo~_nd on~~~r~!()no~
to this "rupture." u
sented as the appearance of the new for an observer who remains perpetually S,y(v,Ve
0..­ .oJ

._~ ).0:/
• Yet this nrrrative of the end of perspectival space, of mimetic codes, and the same, or whose historical status is never interrogated. (!~<.'!~) I

of the referential has usually coexisted uncritically with another very different
ofE~~ope~
• periodization bf the history ;isual culture that equally needs to
• be abandoned. This second model concerns the invention and dissemination
." (:" ­ of photography and other related forms of "~m" in the nineteenth cen­
• ­ tury..overwhelmin~IY, these developments have been pre.s~nte~as p~n of the
It is not enough to attempt to describe a di~leaical relati()n between the ­
innovations of avant-garde artists and writers in the late nineteenth century
and the concurrent "r:~glis_m" and positivism of scientific and popular culture. f!) .. ' lY'-I­
Rather, it is crucial to see both of these phenomena as overlapping compo- . I ~iO:J ,iD +=\
nents of a single social surface on ~hich the mod~~~i~~tion of vision had I( ~~\~\;: 0 ~ , _

, , ., COntmuous unfoldIllg_of a Renaiss.3nce-~ased mode of VISIon In which pho­ ___._~_.--- .. , -_. . - ..- - -.--- ..-.,,--------'-- --_. -_. -- . 'f.-)\r'~ r.. . od'o. ~

~, ' :, tography, and eventually -cinema, are simply later:.instances _oJ an ongoing
begun de~~d~s-earlie.r. I am suggesting here that a b~ and far more
important tran~o..!mmlon in the makeup of vision occurred in the early nine­ ;je
.l..
0·0}.r ,
deployment of perspectival space and perception, Thus we are often-left with , -4-- r.-..~(-s-.,'Y""
, : . :! / ,

.-
i
;
.-------­
teenth century. Modernist painting in the 1870s and 1880s and the develop­
. -~'.-------
d:
\c;,\l c,
~. I

-. - a confusingbifurcated model of vision in the nineteenth century: on one level ment of photography after 1839 can be seen as later symptoms or
)• there is a relatively small number of advanced artists who generated a radi­ _.-- -.-',
t'"o·1-v.-l ~r iPr~ t­
consequences of this crucial systemic shift, which was well under way by 1820) rt~-.«:r~p'·~
\­ cally new kind of seeing and signification, while on a more quotidian level But, one may ask at this point, doesn't the history of an effectivelycoln­ S''~I:",,;J -tt.....-- S"

,.
Vision remains embedded within the same general "realist" strictures that had ,,-------, \ .- .
-4

~;32J'~

I.
cide with a hi~ry o~p~~n:? Aren't the changing forms of artworks over
' ,
organized it since the fifteenth century. Classical space is overturned, so it
time the most compelling record of how vision itself has mutated historically?
- - . - - . __- - - - - - . . : : : : - _ ,
, r ; -r>
)1 J )
•
seems, on one hand, but persists on the other. This conceptual division leads II This study insists that, on the contrary, a history of vision' (if such is even pos- ~. , . ', __ . -r .>W"
•• •• - .
to the erroneous notion that something called realism dominated popular
Sible ) dee.~nds on far more tha rl an account of shiftS in representational pra.c­ ~{;'I!- i;1)1'­
'. represen~tionalpractices, while experiments and innoV~ltiOnS occurred in a if) tices. What this book takes as its object is not the empirical data of artworks
dIstInct(If often permeable) arena of modernist an making, \ or the ultimately idealist notion of an isolable "perception," but instead the .
• When examined closely, however, the celebrated "rupture" of modern­ no less problematic phenomenon of the ;bs~~rl For the problem of the ;.t ~
'. iSl11 is considerably more restricted in its cultural andsOcial-i~act
than the observer is the field on which vision in hi~toIy-Ca~ be said to materialize, to I'-! ,'" IJ i :
/,,-', ' [,.­
• fanfare surrounding it usually suggests. The alleged perceptual revolution of become itself visible. Vision and its effects are always inseparable from the ~. ;. :' '" ~
• advanced an in the late nineteenth century, according to its pro~onents, is an \~ ..- . - .'('\ " , .
possibilities
_._.
of an 9I:>se~il1g.subject who is both the hi~~~cal product and ,_:-"'';011('''\
.. ..
~r,),
·, event whose effects OCcur outside the most dominant and pervasive modes of
• seeing. Thus, fOllOWing the I~gk
of this general argument, it is actually a~- the site of certain practices, techniques, institutions, and procedures of '':' -e 0 i--:'" :' .

organi~~i()~
subjecnficatlon.

c. _
•

•
ture that Occurson the margins of a vast hegemonic of the visual
that becomes increasinglypo:;erfui-inthe twe~tieth century, with the diffu­
sion and proli!~ration of photogr~phy, film--,--and television. In a sense, how­
Most dictionaries make little semantic distinction between the words _, -(;1"
"observer" and "spectator," and common usage usually renders them effec­ / -,~",';(:'-:""'"
tiverysynonomous~l-have chosen the term observer mainly for its etymolog­
'~.~
~.Y reali~
· ever, the myth of modernist rupture depends fundamentally on the binary
ical resonance, Unlike spectare, the Latin root for "spectator," the root for
model of vs. experimentation. That is, the essential continuity of
affirmatio~oianaYant-garde
"observe" does not literally mean "to look at" Spectator also carries specific
• mimetic codes is a necessary condition for the
connotations, especially in the context of nineteenth-century culture, that I
• ,J I: breakthrough. The notion of a moderl!.ig vis1.!al~~yQlution depends on the
prefer to avoid-s-namely, of one who is a passive onlooker at a spectacle, as
• presence of a subject with a detached Viewpoint, from which modernism­

••
at an an gallery or theater. In a sense more pertinent to my study, obseruare

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6
Modernity and the Problem ofthe Observer
t{ Modernity and the Problem ofthe Observer 7

I)~//I~ - (J "UI"

",,:r means "to conform one's action, to comply with," as in observing rules, codes,
:t'f
.,
,

unqualified categories as "the o~server in the nineteenth century." Doesn't

•
I
regulations, and practices. Th~~)Ugh -ob;;o~;ly one who sees, an observer is t
5QQ. ,~Y, v,,;,~, more importantly one who sees within a prescribed set of possibilities, one
~. ; this risk presenting something abstracted and divorced from the singularities
A.JS5!O.1 e.\
1 ~
.~
" and immense diversity that characterized visual experience in that century? t
who is embedded in a system of conventions and limitations. Andby "con­ Obviously there was no single nineteenth-century observer, no example that
'~(l,I.I.p/'l~r-~)
\I ~~"'-\\l'J
'1"
ventions" I mean to suggest far more than representanonal practices. If it can li,t
(~cC" -",,"') -r­
can be located empirically. What I want to do, however, is suggest some of the
be said there is an observer specific to the nineteenth century, or to any \\00'/(;'"' I.,.J
period, it is only as an effect of an irreducibly heterogeneous system of dis­
forces that defined
conditions and -_._--_._--.-.,-_.- ..__.._---._-_._
~--_. __
or ..allowed the
-. __ formation. .of a-.-.dominant
._ ... -.-..
.. - _ ' -­ ._­ Ii-J:) o~ "",J ~
e\?""t--o-t ..•
model of what an observer was in the nineteenth century. This will involve
cursive, social, technological, and institutional relations. There is no observ­ d - .-.- ~--------~----'------' ~;-. -J\'<;"-'/t
.r sketching out a set of related events that produced crucial ways in which vision
ing subject prior to this .mlltinually·shifting field." ----,- ­ ,1

~_.-. __.- - ---'--- -, .. -'­ ~ was discussed, controlled, and incarnated in cultural and scientific practices. )
If I have mentioned the idea of a history of vision, it is only as a hypo­
! At the same time I hope to show how the major terms and elements of a pre­ )
"~ .j~.~' "j,rf !.,; thetical possibility. Whether perception or vision actually change is irrelevant, d
-:t vious organization of the observer were no longer in operation. What is .'i9t
""~!~'l J~ fi;!"
for they have no autonomous history. What changes are the pluraljorces,2nd :1 addressed in this study are the marginal and local forms by which dominant
'I
(:'~",~,«'j,
)

dr', . ".)
; v rules. composing
. .._.the.__field in which
... .perception
... .."occurs.
.. And what determines
:\
practices of vision were resisted, deflected, or imperfectly constituted. The II --' , ,
1r"'r-y~/~ (1,.-.... )
vision at any given j,isto'fica:Cm~ment is not some deep structure, economic
~
ltC' -- )..... , '
J/:f,'" .}
history of such oppositional moments needs to be written, but it only )
base, or world view, but rather the functioning of ~ collective assemblage of f
becomes legible against the more hegemonic set of discourses and practices
disparate parts on a single SOcial surface.It may
~v~n be necessary to consider t
in which vision took shape. The typologies, and provisional unities that I use
the observer as a distribution of events located in many different places.' )
~ _.. - -
, --',- ---,----~- are part of an explanatory strategy for demonstrating a general break or dis­ cr·1'Y/ --..
There never was or will be a self-presem beholder to whom a world is trans­ continuity at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It should not be nec­
'},,',
)
parently evident. Instead there are more or less powerful arrangements of )
essary to point out there are no such things as continuities and discontinuities
forces out of which the capacities of an observer are possible.
In proposing that during the first few decades of the nineteenth century t
in history, only in historical explanation. So my broad temporalizing is not in J
the interest of a "true history," or of restoring to the record "what actually hap­ )
a new kind of observer took shape in Europe radically different from the type - ;
pened." The stakes are quite different: how one: periC?dizes and where one ~.-(

of observer dominant in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, I doubt­ ,0(--:' -c > r, )-'.

,
locatesruptures or denies them are all political choices that determine the
less provoke the question of how one can pose such large generalities, such construction of the present Whether one excludes or foregrounds certain )
events and processes at the expense of others affects the intelligibility of the
2, In one sense, my aims in this study are "genealogical." following Michel Foucault:
"I don't believe the problem can be solved by historicizing the subject as posited by the
contemporary functioning of power in which we ourselves are enmeshed.
Such choices affect whether the shape of the present seems "natural" or
»
phenomenologists, fabricating a subject that evolves through the course of history. One has
\to dispense with the constituent subject, to get rid oftnesubjeCiitseIT, that'~'io say, to arrive
J
/t •
':;, whether its historically fabricated and densely sedimented makeup is made
an analysis which can account for the constitution c:!.~e su~,,=~ with~~_~ histor:.i£~
frame. evident.
.-2[k. And this is what 1 would call genealo,w, that is, a form of history which can aCCOUnt
J In the early nineteenth century there was a sweeping transformation in )
for the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects, etc., without having to
,. make reference iOaSlibject which is eiih~-;: transcend~in-relation to a field of events the way in which an observer was figured in a wide range of social pracuces j
F'­
or runs in its empty sameness throughout the course of history." Power/Knowledge (New and domains of knowledge, A main path along which I present these devel­
York, 1980), p. 117 "-' ' ';.' ,. J.
,)-.J \ - •
opments is by examining the significance of certain opucaldevices. I discuss
~!;f.~~ ;If:
3. On SCientificand intellectual traditions in which objects "are aggregrares of relatively
independent parts," see Paul Feyerabend, Problems of Empiricism, vol. 2 (Cambridge,
1981), p. 5
them not for the models of representation they imply, but as sites of both
knowledge and power that operate directly on the body of the individual. Spe­ >'J~ o ;>","" •

J.- __
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•• 8 Modernity and the Problem ofthe Observer
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Modernity and the Problem ofthe Observer 9

•
-.~"P:-' cifically, I pose the camer~~b~~':l~a as paradigmatic of the dominant status of
,(,
t
bution because the visibility itself changes in style while the statements them­

.­
fto\'-:'" .'. c the observer in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while for the nine­ selves change their system. "5
~.: f'~~,1/Jv " r?,
teenth century ~ discuss a number of optical instruments, in particular the I argue that some of the most pervasive means of producing "realistic" rQ.':\.\)'t\c e~!,('c ­
--'--­
~'""O'
~(,~.l.J stereoscope, as a means of detailing the observ~r'stJ"ansformed s~~s. The
~
effects in mass visual culture, such as the stereoscope, were in fact based on 1b~~r.,dlu" ;­
.. opticaldevices in question, most significantly, are points of intersection where a radical abstractiol1 an d n':constructiQo.ofopticale~perience, thus demand­ r ~ (foo.J lv' cw-- c;...

I QDI, r.\ ·~(c'~'" -'€

.~ 0(" phllosophrcal, scientific, and aesthetic discours;;;~~rlap;iili-~~~~ical ing a reconsideration of what "realism" means in the nineteenth century. I also
; ;te~h!1!g~~;-,-i~~Ttu~ional requirements, and socioe~~I1o;ic iQ~~~s~.IEach of
1('.', t"~:--'i j

••
t"
hope to show how the most influential figurations of an observer in the early
'them is understandable not simply as the material object in question, or as nineteenth century depended on the Rriori!}:'~Lf!!.Q95:ls0fsubjective vision, r 5) ~ i 0'+: ,J vb .r
pan of a history of technology, but for the way in which it is embedded in a in contrast to the pervasive suppression of subjectivity in vision in seven­
,&.j oj"-
much larger as...:.e~~~ge of_~e.!1~ and powers, Clearly, this is to counter many teenth- and eighteenth-century thought. Acertain notion of"subjective vision"
~"~

",,"
) _~CJr:;/~'
"",
~
influential accounts of the history of photography and cinema that are char­
acterized by a latent or explicit technological determinism, in which an inde­
,·r
"
~ has long been a part of discussions of nineteenth-century culture, most often
in the context of Romanticism, for example in mapping out a shift in "the role

•-.
·t
.'U"·' ,
1.:,), ,
pendent dynamic of mechanical invention, modific:uion, and perfection
imposes ~~lf onto a social field, transforming it from the outside. On the con-
played by the mind in perception," from conceptions of imitation to ones of
expression, from metaphor of the mirror to that of the lamp.s But central to
- --'-"--- r. 1 ~ '....~~ ~.~ i-~
~~ •• ,r trary,technology is always a concomitant or subordinate part of other forces. such explanations is again the idea of a visio~.~E ~rc~pti~:>n that was somehow
.).:..
Of' I ',-, u~
"-'''-:;/ For Gilles Deleuze, "Asociety is defined by its amalgamations, not.by i!S.Jools unique to artists and poets, that was distinct from a vision shaped by empiricist '?,,~' 'r ~ ....

~'• . • / V· . . . tools exist only in relation to the interminglings iliey'~ake p~~ that or positivist ideas and practices.
,t: \ ,I
•
rO~ make them possible." The point is that a history of the observer is not redu­ I am interested in the way in which concepts of subjective vision, of the
productivtty of the observer, pervaded not only areas of art and literature but

••
cible to changing technical and mechanical practices any more than to the
changing forms of artworks and visual representation. At the same time I were present in philosophical, scientific, and technological discourses. Rather I ' r ~"_
.1 than stressing the separation between art and science in the nineteenth cen- 1.' ..\.1­
t .....v S _.-\
j l

would stress that even though I designate the camera obscura as a key object
:I - . 'lJ r p' d.

•• in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it is not iS0I1!.()!I'hic to the optical

techniques I discuss in the context of the nineteenth century. The eighteenth
and ninet<::t:flJ:h£~I!~1.!ries are not analagous grids on which differentcultural
I
tury, it is important to see how they were both part of a single interlocking . cc.u loC.",/oJ i1 -'
field_ of ...__
~
knowledge
.~, . ..__._._.__. and
~

increasing -.----------.----
--.--.-.-.--..
practice.
. .-...
~ ..-."
,.~,

rationalization and control of the human subject in terms of new

,.

.~~11 0 ' ''''0'1' ­

.J.,l,,'.­
"':.\­0;....'
... The same knowledge that allowed theY-_(r.....o

•
.I ...
r,J~ ~:'

-.'
•••
( ,,:.,­
objects can occupy th~~ereiativepositions. Rathe~,tl;e-pC:;;ition and func­
tion of a technique 'i~'hiStoricallyvariabie; the'camera obscura, as I suggest in
the next chapter, is part of a field ofknOWledge and practice that does not cor­
respond structurally to the sites of the optical devices I examine subsequently.
t
.t

'<}
·f
I
f
institutional and economic requirements was also a condition for new exper- ,,;..?,~. ~.;--
iments in visual representation. Thus I want to delineate an observing subject

who was both a product of and at the same time constitutive of modernity in
the nineteenth century. Very generally, what happens to the observer in the ,:1)
nineteenth century is a proces~_<:?~I?oderniz~~ion; he or she is made adequate r,
.... J­
e.:
•
i
In Deleuze's words, "On one hand, each stratum or historical formation
i
~
implies a distribution of the visible and the articulable
.----_.'--.' --
which acts upon itself;
"-
to a constellation of new events, forces, and institutions that together are

•
-_. .. _---
._---, --' •
l

on the other, from one stratum to the next there is a variation in the distri- loosely and perhaps tautologically definable as "modernity."

•
• 4, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guartari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Scbizo­
phrenia, trans, Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1987), p, 90. -i
it
"

5.
6.
Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis, 1988), p. 48,
M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition
(London, 1953), pp, 57·65,
It :
t, .i,
tI
l
 10 Modernity and the Problem of the Obseruer Modernity and the Problem ofthe Obseruer 11 ••
_oJ,ul'\:lrJ~
Modernization becomes a useful notion when extracted from teleolog­
'ical and primarily econoIT\ic determinations, and when it encompasses not lt
"".
k:-<:'l" of the nineteenth century, an observer increasingly had to function within dis­
I
~
~f(';';)-'.·c.Q.\
. f
•
••
junct and defamlllarized urban spaces, the perceptual and temporal dislo­ \ , '
)(:j('O,......,~ i, i : -t-~-"""lJl' :;"..\

~g(j)'\,7Q\,G'f\ Qr"
only structural changes in political and economic formations but also the 'H' cations of railro<liLtravel, telegraphy, industrial production, and flows of \
o • I '
j\Q( <T\"'I­ I

~)~~IJ :--J
immense reorganization of knowledge, languages, networks of spaces and .it~:t typographic and visual information. Concurrently, the discursive identity of
I .
-t ~"(I ,~Lq~t
'

~_l :~../ !.
communications, and subjectivity itself. Moving out from the work of Weber, ,l!; the observer as an object of philosophical reflection and empirical study
Lukacs, Simmel, and others, and from all the theoretical reflection spawned ;xi t
•
'-.\.
underwent an equally drastic renovation.
by the terms "rationalization" and "reification,"
._--'..
it is possible to pose a logic
~
::rl. The early work of'jean Baudrillard details some of the conditions of this
'of modernization
d -----.. -.-,-,-.. -'.that is radically severed
.,__ . ."._ _'.idea__._._'
from the of progress or ~
devel­ ;:~ t new terrain in which a nineteenth-century observer was situated. For Bau­ )
bPfl.:l~.!1~"aQcltl1atentaiis nonlinear transforIl1~ti~ns.For Gianni Vattirno, mod­
.,,1
ernity has precisely these "post-historical" features, in which the continual
-:a drillard, one of the crucial consequences of the bourgeois political revolu­
»
--
production of the.- .. new is what allows. -
things to stay the
.. _- --~-.-"
--
sarne.? It is a logic of
.. - .._- ­
:t!~
:~f
tions at the end of the 1700s was the ideological force that animated the ~hs
of ther!ghts ofman, the right to equality and to happiness. In the nineteenth
pt
t
.i1· ~t'
- '-',­

the same, however, that exists in inverse relation to the stability of traditional O:O:!fJ".JL· ~.
~­ century, for the first time, obs~~a~l~pr<:>ofbecameneeded in order to dem­
e.o.~'.lI":";'"
,0
forms. Modernization is a process by which capitalism uproots and makes ,i
onstrate that happiness and equality had in fact been attained. Happiness had IV
,
":','
)
~l
mobile that which is grounded, clears away or obliterates that which impedes t to be "measurable in terms of objects and signs," something that would be .~! )
v \~"
circulation, and makes exchangeable what is sing~8 This applies as much
A.
i
evident to the eye in terms of "visible criteria. "10 Several decades earlier, Walter
to bodies, signs, images, languages',kinship relations, religious practices, and
,f )
Benjamin had also written about the role of the commodity in generating a
nationalities as it does to commodities, wealth, and labor power. Moderniza­ .~ "phantasmagoria of equality." Thus modernity is inseparable from on one
_; ~ 'r\1f'-\ ",}r~·C.~,)1 )
,

·)r
I

e)(j')<·'~'"
,,' j (
t' , . ,,-":'-1' tion becomes a ceaseless and self-perpetuating creation- of ne~ds, new hand a remaking of the observer, and on the other a proliferation of circu­ ')
,/('(l:£f L.l~·
co l1sumption, and new production. 9 Far from being exterior to this process, lating signs and objects whose effects coincide with their visualiry, or what )
the observer as human subject is completely immanent to it. Over the Course Adorno calls Anschaulichkeit. 11
3_ .) f ~I.':~:-,l""-··
)
Baudrillard's account of modernity outlines an increasing ~iza­ 0
(v-,~ II (.A, .J;' )
7. Gianni Vattimo, The End 0/ Modernity, trans. Jon R. Snyder (Baltimore, 1988),
tion and mobility of signs and codes beginning in the Renaissance, signs pre­ 5':, r1 ;.... (Q J ,~:'
pp,7-8.
viously rOOcedtC;~I;;veiy secure positions within fixed social hierarchies. )
8. Relevant here is the historical outline in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,Anti-Oed­
ipus. Capitalism andSchizopbrenia, trans, RobenHurley et, aI., (New York, 1978), pp. 200­ )
261. Here modernity is a continual process of "deterritorialization," a making abstract and There is no such thing as fashion in a society of caste and rank,
interchangeable of bodies, objects, and relations. But, as Deleuze and Guartari insist, the since one is assigned a place irrevocably. Thus class mobility is )
new exchangeability of forms under capitalism is the condition for their "re-terrtrortali­
zation" into new hierarchies and institutions. Nineteenth-century industrialization is dis.
non-existent. An interdiction protects the signs and assures them )
cussed in terms of deterritorialization, uprooting (deracinement), and the production of )
flows in Marc GUillaume, Eloge du desordre (Paris, 1978), pp. 34-42.
9. See Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York, 1973), pp. 408-409:
10. Jean Baudrillard, La societe de consommation (Paris, 1970), p. 60. Emphasis in orlg­
inal. Some of these changes have been described by Adorno as "the adaptation [of the »
"Hence exploration of all nature in order to discover new, useful qualities in things; uni­
versal exchange of the products of all alien climates and lands; new (artificial) preparation
observer] to the order ofbourgeois rationality and, ultimately, the age of advanced industry,
which was made by the eye when it accustomed itself to perceiving reality as a reality of »
of natural objects, by which they are given new use values. The exploration of the earth in objects and hence basically of commodities." In Search o/Wagner, trans. Rodney Living, j

all directions, to discover new things of use as well as new useful qualities of the old; ...
likewise the discovery, creation and satisfaction of new needs arising from society itself;
the cultivation of all the qualities of the social human being, production of the same in a
form as rich as possible in needs, because rich in qualities and relations-production of
this being as the most total and universal possible social product."
,•
stone (London, 1981), p. 99.
11. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C Lenhardt (London. 1984), pp. 139-140:
"By denying the implicitly conceptual nature of an, the norm of visuahry reifies visualiry
into an opaque. impenetrable quality-a replica of the petrified world outside, wary of
everything that might interfere with the pretence of the harmony the work puts forth." I

..!.. ...
••
 "
e'
•• 12 Modernity and tbe Problem oftbe Observer Modernity and tbe Problem of the Observer 13

f a total clarity; each sign refers unequivocally to a status.... In caste

::ell (.,' )'0'7'.'0' r:

.~
Within this new field of serially pr~dlJ<:'<:9 objects, the most significant, \f .
j)"-"{ "-:(("J-~,
societies, feudal or archaic, cruel societies, the signs are limited in

•
in terms of their social and cultural impact, were photography and a host of
I.
~ \"...
(·"""'.'!le-~,~''':.'
number, and are not Widely diffused, each one functions with its
related techniques for the industrialization of image making. The photo­

full value is interdiction, each is a reciprocal obligation between

~~'~) Jl:' (i/ J graph becomes a central element not only in a new commodity econ~f!lY but -(0 r-, ~,Li.(., e»-:

castes, clans, or persons. The signs are therefore anything but arbi­ in the reshaping of an' entir~ territory_QQ_'\:'!lich si~s and i~ges, each effec- - l " : " y,'.: (J.

• =...... trary. The arbitrary sign begins when, instead of linking two rsons
nvely severed from a referent, circulate and proliferate, Photographs may

¥
• in an unbreakable reciprocity, the signifier starts referring back to ,~ have some apparent similarities with~l~er .2'Pes of images, such as perspec­
• the disenchanted world of the signified, a common denominator
tival painting or drawings made with the aid of a camera obscura, but the vast

• of the real world to which no one has any obligation. 12

systemic rupture of'YI1i.c:.h photography is a part renders such similarities

• Thus for Baudrillard mOdernity is bound up in the capacity of n~~~w- insignificant. Photography is an element of a new and homogeneous terrain -:,., 0' J -) ~e.<- ....

---- ~'~ro.j....'r,~J1• -ur->

• ered soci;).L<;Ia5§es and groups to overcome the "exclusiveness of signs" and of con"s!Jmption and~tion in which an observer becomes lodged. To .!- ;~~-;l!"'-
to initiate "a proliferation of signs on demand." Imi~ions, copies, counter­ I understand the "photography effect" in the nineteenth century, one must see .
~~. ' incl~
I
it as a crucial component 'of a new cultural economy of value and exchange, ... ~,~ cd -i " r,"

I
felts, and the techniques to produce them (which would the Italian
i ' . ; ) '/0 theater, linear p~-r~pe~and the camera obscura) were all challenges to the not as part of a continuous history oi'~isual representation.
-_.~'~ '-.'
~ca "0-""1
: . .: aristocratic monopoly_~~ co!!trs>l(lLS!gns. The problem of mimesiJ here is I Photography
-...._~-=:..._
... ---
and .__
mone}?become homologous forms of social power in i'.,' ) -":T\(;.:) '"-'-'. \-­
0'_ _ ' . . ¥.~

~.. > not one of aesthetics but of sQ~iaIR9.Fer, a power founded on the-capaCity to the nineteenth century." They are equally totalizing systems for binding and I.".' " J

; .. produce equtvalences. !I unifying all subje~~'~ithin a single global network of valuation and desire. As .:." ~v')~, ~?

~-_.. For Baudrillard and many others, however, it is clearly in the nineteenth
'j
1 Marx said of money, photography is also a great leveler, a dem()~_ratizer, a ..;.:..;: ~,'-'_' 5\ ';~~ "

,I.. century, alongside the development of new indu~!:ial-.!ech!!!~es

and new
;!
I
"mere symbol," a fiction "sanctioned by the so-called universal consent of 'J '',.-.4''';1 t» '

,~• • :J
I .
~ 1/ forms of political power, that a new kind of sign emerges. These new signs,

"potentially indentical objects produced in indefinite series," herald the

]
, mankind. "16 Both are!?!gical forms that establish a new set of abstract. rela- fl,-IJ c.,.- ;: '2.; ) r:

tions between individuals and things and impose those relations as the real.' j ~> ,'C:" r"loci-I"

••
~.o;
moment When the problem of mimesis disappears.

The relation between them [identical objects] is no longer that of

an original to its c()':l.~feit. The relation is neither analogy nor
It is through the distinct but interpenetrating economies of money and pho­
tograehy that a whole social world is represented and constituted exclusively

as signs..

Photography, however, is not the subject of this book. Crucial as pho­

•• retlection, but equivalence and indifference. In a series, objects

become undefined Simulacra of each other.... We know now that
f
f
~
tography may be to the fate of visuality in the nineteenth century and beyond,

•'.
is on the level of reproduction, of fashion, media, advertising, I~ 14. The most important model for serial industrial production in the nineteenth century
information, and communication (what Marx called the unessen­ j was ammunition and military spare parts. That the need for absolute similarity and

tialsectors of capitalism) ... that is to say in the sphere of the simu­ ! exchangeability came out of the requirements of warfare, not out of developments in an
economic sector, is argued in Manuel De Landa, War in the Age of Intelligeru Machines

•• lacra and the code, that the global process of capital is held
together»
i
!
r
(New York, 1990).
15. For related arguments, see John Tagg, "The Currency of the Photograph," in Tbinh­
ing Photography, ed. Victor Burgin (London, 1982), pp. 110-141; and Alan Sekula, "The

•,.•
Traffic in Photographs," in Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works 1973­
12. Jean Baudrillard, L'echangesymbo/ique et la mort (Paris, 1976), p. 78; Simulations,
1983 (Halifax, 1984), pp. 96-101.
trans. Paul Foss (New York, 1983), pp. 84-85.
13. Baudril1ard, L'ecbange symbottque et ta mort, p. 86. i 16. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York,
I 1967). p. 91.
i
!
tI

1...
 · ~.
,,
lr
;I

-. .}¥::'';';"

14 Modernity and the Problem ofthe Observer :,. . ".';".i~.· ~,".

Modernity and the Problem ofthe Observer 15
:;,
, " ' ,

its invention is secondary to the events I intend to detail here. My contention

.

Michel Fo~lt has been crucial for its delineation of processes and insti­
~~I~-
--;/'"

y01~~cCJ ­
•
t
'':f ~" 7': .~::..0""1\ is that a r~~g<lnization of the observer occurs in the nin~entury ! tutions that rational!zed and modernized the §ubj<:.ct, in the context of social ~'''_ ~iJ1/" ..~ ",,},"­
-.

:,Jr'r'/ j' ,~j iii

before the appearance of photography, What takes place from around 1810 to '1 and economic. transformations.!" Without making causal connections, Fou­ '-; ~c>,•. J - € C '- •
1d. ()'r:Ci:~:tr / ~ll'--"""
, 1840 is an uprootil1g-2~~i~i()n from th,e stable and fixed ~~?ns incarnated ,.~ cault demonstrates that the industrial revolution coincided with the appear­
J
in the camera obscura. If the camera obscura, as a concept, subsisted as an
objective ground of visual truth, a variety of discourses and practices--in phi­
losophy, science, and in procedures of social normalization-tend to abolish ~
f
ance of "new methods for administering" large populations of workers, city
dwellers, students, prisoners, hospital patients, and other groups. As individ­
uals became increasingly torn away from older regimes of power, from agrar­
•
)

J \/./.1/1/
,.' 'UJ,I'
0:
N~
the foundations of that ground in the early nineteenth century. In a sense, what
OCcurs is a new valuation ofviSu<llexperi~~~e: it is given an unprecendented
mobility and exchangeability, abstracted from any founding site or referent.
, ;,',:
.'.-,
:,'Ir
ian and artisanal production, and from large familial setups, new
decentralized arrangements were devised to control and regulate masses of
relatively free-floating subjects. For Foucault, n~~~~eenth-c_~~turyfi1~?~~ni:r r/ ,d-"1 ' ,.' - » •
\," .,.,'C' ".;",,1,1 In ch~pt~;3, I describe certain aspects of this revaluation in the work of
j'. ~
is inseparable from the way in which dispersed mechanisms of power coin­ .,..,...;c'r"'
"-' t­
/:;~\ Goethe a'Od Schopenhauer and in early nineteenth-c~~~urypsycpology and cide with new modes ofsubjectivity, and he thus details a range of pervasive
;::..0..... ~ "
,t
-j;;r ~~ physiology, where the very nature of sensation and p<:rception takes on many
n and local techniques for controlling, maintaining, and making useful new
~ J~,"'.-­
l"
'")
~1IY':" of the features of eC}uJvalt::.f!c~_<lnd!~cii!ferencethat will later characterize pho­ :r mulnplicities of individuals. Mo~izati;;-~onsists in this production of 1~:0:,(,r )
--.
i.k~ )".1 !:"c"( tography and other networks of commodities and signs. It is this visual;.mhil­
-_._.~---­
r
manageable subjects through what he calls "a certain policy of the body, a cer­ J..J,J ~
1
r' I ~) ,­
)'
I I
.' ism" that is in the forefront of empirical studies of subjective vision, a vision tain way of rendering a group of men docile and useful. This policy required
• I,) t,\ \.\ ~ «'
that encompasses an autonomous perception severed from any external
,I
the involvement of definite relations of power; it called for a technique of
)
~
,.Y;:~"tr, 'J,
,,... ')<)

referent. What must be emphasized, however, is that this new autonomy and overlapping subjection and objectification; it brought with it newprocedures )
;abstraction of vision is not only a precondition fo; ~od~r~ist pairlting 0}he of individualization. "18 ')
,
i'J-1 ~
,
J'
'Ilater nineteenth century but also for forms of visual mass culture appearing
I ­
Although he ostensibly examines "disciplinary" institutions like prisons, )
,, .:'.' II much earlier. In chapter ~, I discuss ho~ ()ptical <.!~~~~.~hatbecame forms J schools, and the military, he also describesthe role of the newly constituted ~
" \ '- .
~
''''-i' ',},,' of mass entertainment;su~h as the stereo~~opeand the phenakistjscope, orig-
_ 'rl[r ,,-....

hllm~~_:~i~f1.ces in regulating and modifying the behavior of individuals. The

inally derived from n~~_emyiric~l}~rl0Vv'.!~geof the physi~19gicatstatusof
'" ....
management of subjects depended above all on the a~cumulati()fl.gLknowl­ ~~",).

•
; •.';-' ' ,r ,­ -, .-.,<J.,4'} '" •

,. J'" the observer and of vision. Thus certain forms of visual experience usually edge about them, whether in medicine, education, psychology, physiology,
(,12. uncritically categorized as "~m" are in fact bound up in non-veridical the- '!
the rationalization of labor, or child care. Out of this knowledge came what ,)

•»
~, (". : r 'j .C·,_
-'. '.... ories ofvision that effectively al1njl!ilate a realworld, Visual experience in the
Foucault calls "a very real technology, the technology of individuals," which
!~d, Ii ,
. :.,' ~." nineteenth century, despite all the attempts to authenticate and naturalize it,
he insists is "inscribed in a broad historical process: the development at about
no longer has anything like the apodictic clatrns ~i ~ camera obSCura to
the same time of many other technologies-agronomical, industrial,
»
.
i-" ,._
establish its truth. On a superficial level the fictions of realism operate undis­ economical. "19
~, (j~ (d '. ~ turbed, but the processes of modernization in the nineteenth century did not
depend on such illusions. New modes of circulation, communication, pro­

Crucial to the development of these new disciplinary techniques of the

subject was the fixing of quantitative and statlsncal nQrms of beh,!viQr.20 The
s.r:
"'~
-',
,"',) ;. .... j}
."­
'(» c-:.....

'~duCtion, consumption, and rationalization ~T demanaed~-;;d shaped a new

/
<I! J r:
.;'J'·~lr.....J/
\ kind of observer-consumer.

'- _"_
17.
18.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977).
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 305.
»
What I call the observer is actually just one effect of the construction of I
••
~--~ 19. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 224-225.
,;/
a new kind of subject or individual in the !!!!1~~~~_n_~~ntury.The work of 20. For Georges Canguiihem, processes of normalization overlap with modernization
l!:,.." .­

L.
•
 "
•• 16
Modernity and the Problem of the Observer Modernity and the Problem of the Observer 17

•
'_~~/I' 9!."~ I) assessment of "normalhy" in medicine, psychology, and other fields became
~ (('ok........ o~ ,

I
f',. ':..:-:

""CE'dC~ ,
j\:'J~'" t ,..~z,Jft-

.­ teenth-century "realism," of m~s_vi~u~l culture, prececied the invention of ,~,;;.;;;. J .~~(

"~
., Ji,
h"j',-,. r- », '-'
an essential part of the shaping of the individual to the requirements of insti­ photography and irz_no wlry required photographic procedures or even the \' '

~,.,
("\1.;')"
.....J 'J~ ( -
tutional power in the nineteenth century, and it was through these disciplines
that the subjecr in a sense became visible. My concern is h?~~ual
as observer became an object of investigation and a locus o(~owled~begin­
f.r development of mass production techniques. Rather they are inextricably
dependen~ on a n~~!r~gement ~~_~()~l.e~ge about the body and the con­
,.I)i,'
stitutive relation of that knowledge to social power. These apparatuses are the: -,

ning in the first few decades of the 1800s, and how the statll~!.!!:t~_observing :) C/:~f'

I
/,y -­

~'/ outcome of a complex remakiES_ of t:J:le i£l~~v~d.u_&~.obse(\'er into something rf'1~)" ~r(~·.Q.

.1,1'
('~1~·J )~

I.
subject was transformed. As I have indicated, a key object of study in the
'empirical sciences then was subjective vision, a vision that had been taken out
,I calculable and regularizable and of human vision into something measurable ~ v'),,­
_ .. -- - ------ ~ t>- ~r....:.:j(d "~)
and thus exchangeable." The stat1.9a~d~~ti()~_of visual .iE!,!g~ry in the nine- ~ kh :c:'.J..
1"-',1 11' \ / "
'~
-- ..
of the incorporeal relations ofthe camera obscura and relocated in the human
". - ' - '-- --,/

' teenth century must be seen then not simply as part of new forms of mech- - - - - ---­

'.,:

:.~~",..,l
I
body. It is a shift signaled by the passage from the geometrical optics of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to physiological optics, which domi­
fti I
(1' I anized reproduction but in relation to a broader process of normalization and S:~'r; ,d ;,, :' :r~":

subjection ofjhe observer. If there is a revolution in the nature and function" r

Vi
c~ ::J{.,d,c~ j~
.J " ,-.A.J v \

.: /»: nated both scientific and philosophical discussion of vision in the nineteenth

•
of the sign in the nineteenth century, it does not happen independently of the rdCdool r • J (",or).
I

century. Thus knowledge was accumulated about the -~ constitutive role of the J 4- "'0 (,;";~.-ILJ1ld-;t_
remaki~~_.?-~c:.subject.22 ~ rtr-:;''--''-; )~~,bf<tt
body in ,~a~~!J.~I1_si911 of a visible world, and it rapidly became obvious
--------
! Readers of Discipline and Punish have often noted Foucault's categor­

.
" that efficiency and rationalization in many areas of human activity depended t
i
\• •" y
ical declaration, "Our society is not one of spectacle but of surveillance.... We ,
.",I~
on information about the cap~~~~~.!1UmaJ1_eye. One result of the new ----
are neither in the amphitheatre nor on the stage but in the Panoptic ­
("'.J(J-":-" '('V'C~

physiological optics was to expose the idiosyncrasies of the "no!_m~l"~e. Ret­ machine."23 Although this remark occurs in the midst of a comparison
,',,'
inal afterimages, peripheral Vision, binocular vision, and thresholds of atten­ between arrangements of power in antiquity and modernity, Foucault's use of

• tion all were studied in terms of determining quantifiable norms and the term "spectacle" is clearly bound up in the polemics of post-1968 France.

.­•.
,

,- ,
ac ,
parameters. The Widespread preoccupation with the defects of human vision
defined ever more precisely an outline of the normal, and generated new
technologies for imposing a normative vision on the observer.
In the midst ofsuch research, a number ofoptical devices were invented
'21. Measurement takes on a primary role in a broad range of the physical sciences
between 1800 and 1850, the key date being 1840 according to Thomas S. Kuhn, "The Func­
tion of Measurement in Modern Physical Science," in The Essential Tension: Selected Stud­

•
-' ies in Scientific Tradition and Change (Chicago, 1979), pp. 219-220. Kuhn is supported by
that later became elements in the mass visual culture of the nineteenth cen­

'J
---------------- Ian Hacking: "After 1800 or so there is an avalanche of numbers, most notably in the social
tury. The phenakistiscope, one of many machines designed for the illusory sciences. _.. Perhaps a turning point was signaled in 1832, the year that Charles Babbage,
~

."•
;

Simulation of movement, was produced in the midst of the empirical study of" inventor of the digital computer, published his brief pamphlet urging publication of tables

of all the constant numbers known in the sciences and the arts." Hacking, Representing and

retinal afterimages; the stereoscope, a dominant form for the consumption of Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy ofNatural Science (Cambridge, 1983),

photographic imagery for over half a century, was first developed within the pp. 234-235.

•• effort to quantify and formalize the physiological operation of binocular

vision. What is important, then, is that these central components of nine­
22. Baudrillard's notion of a shift from the fixed signs of feudal and aristocratic societies
to the exchangeable symbolic regime of modernity finds a reciprocal transformation artic­
ulated by Foucault in terms of the individual: "The moment that saw the transition from

•• in the nineteenth century: "Like pedagogical reform, hospital reform expresses a demand
for rationalization which also appears in politics, as it appears in the economy, under the
historico-ritual mechanisms for the formation of individuality to the scientifico-disciplinary
mechanisms, when the normal took over from the ancestral, and measurement from status,
thus substituting for the individuality of the memorable man that of the calculable man, that
moment when the sciences of man became possible is the moment when a new technology

•
Ioi
effectof nascent industrial mechanization, and which finally ends up in what has since been
called normalization." The Normal and the Pathological, trans. Carolyn Fawcett (New York,
1989), pp. 237-238. Canguilhem asserts that the verb "to normalize" is first used in 1834.
of power and a new political anatomy of the body were implemented." Discipline and Pun­
ish, p. 193.
23. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 217.

.,l; L
,n • $b.", ~-~--~""":'~"""""""'~--""'~I"!···':""""""'::I'.''I''f''~'''-·'''''''··~''''.''''''''<,_.,y" ..... ,.,~".,"'.'''
 ,

· - ~
"
.~4. ~

18 Modernity and the Prob/em ofthe Obseruer .~ ,~~~>,

"I'
._- .......-.0.::
. ~ ")~:.~.
,'. ,",t'
:~;"
. ",

'
Modernity and the Prob/em of the Observer 19

Glt o[.dJ'~ 0;',.

r
~"eY""'- <:
•
•

When he wrote the book in the early 1970s, "spectacle" was an obvious allu­ ''ii.t-­
··.:.' f-­ notes on its prehistory, on the early background of the spectacle, Debord, in t
sion to analyses of contemPorary capitalism by Guy Debord and others." One ~:~.t a well-known passage, poses one of its main features: •
can well imagine Foucault's disdain; as he wrote one of the greatest medita­ 1:1
"f Since the spectacle's job is to cause: ~_worl9 that is no longer t
tions on modernity and power, for any f~cil~ ()r superfi~ia!_~_s~_ of "spectacle" directly perceptible to be seen via different specialized media­ t
•
/1 d
as an explanation of how the masses are "controlled'~.9L:'d~p'~ci"by_~edia tions, it is inevitable that it should elevate the human sense of sight
images." -~---- - . ----~-­

to the special place once occupied by touch, the most abstract of

" t "
But Foucault's opposition of surveillance and sp~c~ag_e seems to over­ the senses, and the most easily deceived, sight is na~~ the
't
t.JI Jt'­
.) . , look how the effects of these two ;~8i-~~;~f p;-wer~an coincide. Using Ben­ <------- - .
t
9~-:<--~-'­ most readily adaptable to present-day society's generalized

.I
tham's panopttcon as a primary theoretical object, Foucault relentlessly abstraction. 27 )

Ycrt"J! ;\::.,,,
emphasizes the ways in which human subjects became objects..9f~ation,
(fr,-'
!. , ,
':i.C<l".,1 '. ~
-- -------_._-~,. -,---­

in the form of institutional control or scientific and behavioral study; but he Thus, in my delineation ~f a modernization and revaluation of vision, I indi- '; . :'2)
t
t?'~~; I) ~ neglects the new forms by which vision itself became a kind of discipline or Ji: care how the ~~~of.€~<:.~'had been an integral pan of classical theories of I) $... ~e_.?L~':...~

:,
vision in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The subsequent dissocia- + I--\..~.";>"' 0 )

':;,:,:' ;c-, I''''''

,mode of work. The nineteenth-century optical devices I discuss, no less than "­
'.':".',1
~-::-~
,.~,-, v\~ \ (,
-"~ M";": [') ithe• panopticon, involved arra:flgements of bodies in~I2~c:~' regulations of tion of touc:b'from~i~~.t occurs within a pervasive "~~r>aE~~ion of the senses" --l :e'D)(;--YJ~ );.. )
_~ ~-t.-,-"r 0/ crL
~'l
• --- - . ----.------. ----'-- -.-.~-....
activiry, and the deployrnenr
- -~ -of individual
.
bodies, __
which codified and nor­ f·r ro,f t= and industrial remapping of the body in the nineteenth century. The loss of S'-S~ , )
,
Q.
.......
'-------_.
---- .~
I touch as a conceptual component of vision meant the unloosening of the eye,
(r-"~; l.~I(I>( malized the observer within rigidly defined systems of visual consumption. '~0.jf}":.
They were techniques for the ~anageme~~-of a~e-~;i~n~f-;ri~posing-fu>m­ from the network of referentiality incarnated in tactility and its subjective rela- I, . c _~
(P.:: ogeneiry, anti-nomadic procedures that fixed and isolated the observer using tion to perceived space. This autonomization of sight, occurring in many dif- ~J;~" -C"'. ~ )

,... ~.:r,'
"partitioning and cellularity ... in which the individual is reduced as a polit­ ferentdomains, was a historical condition for the rebuilding of an observer~'L" ",r.' c., - )

ical force." The organization of mass culture did not proceed on some other fitted for the tasks of "spectacular" consumption. Not only did the empirical •~:,;~J;~~:;' ')
inessential or superstructural area of social practice; it was fully embedded isolation of vision allow its quantification and homogenization but it also .., 'C~I~~'~"­
Within the same transformations Foucault outlines. enabled the nc:~..<:>.~~~ts ofv!~~n (w~ether
commodities, photographs, or the \H r'~'. ~ ~.::~;:, ;),.
I am hardly suggesting, however, that the "society of the spectacle" sud­ act of perception itself) to assume ~ my~~fi_e_d and abstractidentity, sundered rl.\ f'o J
denly appears alongside the developments I am detailing here. The "spec­ from any relation to the observer's position within a cognitively unified field. )
~0e ." c
The s~r~o_s£ope is one major cultural site on which this breach between tan- )
tacle," as Debord uses the term, probably does not effectively take shape until
',):
several decades into the twentieth century." In this book, I am offering some gibiliry and visuality is singularly evident. ...... '. H .. ' •

", ~..,- .i.. • .:..

-- - .I} I, ..' le--r·~ .v ~
24. Guy Debord, TheSociety ofthe Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York, If Foucault
-
describes some
-
of the epistemological
j
and institutional
" •
con- "~"::_'" i~/'
1990). First published in France in 1967.
-;, 25. On the place of vision in Foucault's thought, see Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, pp. 46­
ditions ofthe observer in the nineteenth century, others have detailed the t
69. See also john Raichrnan, "Foucault's Art of Seeing," October 44 (Spring 1988), pp. 89­ actual .s~aEe and d~nsity of the field in which perception was transformed. c- )
117. -­ J< )f' ~.~{ t:
Perhaps more than anyone else, Walter Benjamin has mapped out the het­ ,>"-~, •. , "
-I

26. FollOWing up on a brief remark by Debord, I have discussed the case for placing the ~IJ:l c', ~ f,jJ . " .
~_._-,-­

__

,
erogeneous texture of events and objects out of which the observer in that
onset of the "society of the spectacle" in the late 1920s, concurrent with the technological f-"-~ Q.-yV'" ~
and institutional origins of television, the beginning of synchronized sound in movies, the century was composed. In the diverse fragments of his writings, we encounter Db2.-ff) J/ '
use of mass media techniques by the Nazi party in Germany, the rise of urbanism, and the
political failure of surrealism in France, in my "Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory,"
October 50 (Fall 1989), pp. 97-107. 27. Debord, The Society ofthe Spectacle, sec. 18.
I

••
I
.1..._

 '"
•• 20 Modernity and the Problem of the Observer Modernity and the Problem of the Observer 21

• ,' 'Ji
'+-,
,I r ~ ....

I
~L.f'l,~ / 0'£,,', t e'C..Q.
, ,.l~·Y·
I..~ /!; J (', 'I'­
an ambulatoryobserver shaped by a convergence of new urban_spaces, tech­ century was inseparable from trans~nce-that is, from new t~~e~£a}.i,~ies, -4 f",v./ ), "''f}'''':'

:I

nologies, and new economic and symbolic functions of images and prod­ speeds, experiences of flux and obsole~,~en~e-,-a new density and sedimen- 'J ')U ~\ ,-.-J~ "'1

.)'0";
.f -r­ ucrs---forms of artificial lighting, new use of mirrors, glass and steel tation ofthe structure ofvisual memory. Perception within the context ofmod- p R/{~ tf".[- --!

e architecture, railroads, museums, gardens, photography, fashion, crowds. Per­ erniry, for Benjamin, never disclosed the worldas presence. One mode was f~ ;"":'cQ..

e::Y,· ,.~~". " ception for Benjamin was acutely tem12Qral and ~inetic; he makes clear how the observer asjldn!!!!r, a mobile consumer of a ceaseless succession of i1lu- _ ~'f",,· ~J/

.'•-
.«'~
"",.
modernity subverts even the possibility of a contemplative beholder. There
is nevera pure access to a single object; visi~J? is al~ays ~.~tiple, adjacent to
and overlapping with other objects, desires, and vectors. Even the congealed
space of the museum cannot transcend a world where everything is in
i
i

I
sory commodity-like Irnages.w But the destructive dynamism of moderniza- -Jc~. (,,',_, :kt0­
tion was also a condition for a vision that would resist its effects, a revivifyin~

perception of th~ pr~sent caught up in its own historical afterimages. Ironi-

cally, "the standardized and denatured" perception of the masses, to which

.'.'
• circulation. ,I
Benjamin sought radical alternatives, owed much of its power in the nine­
Itshould not go unremarked that one topic is generally unexamined by .f r. i ~),
,

.~ 0'
Benjamin: ninete~~th-century painting. It simply is not a significant part of the i ~'1U~ I
teenth century to the empirical study and quantification of the retinal after­
image and its particular temporality, as I indicate in chapters 3 and 4.
'.A -'; ; ,.,...-..... p

to-''-IJ~ ~,lIL~
fieldof which he provides a rich inventory. Of the many things this omission i
I
Nineteenth-century painting was also slighted, for very different reasons,
i',~ (:~ •. ~)c
implies, it certainly indicates that for him painting was noLapnmary element ,{ by the founders ofmosi~~n art .b.i~tory, a generation or two before Benjamin. ~(';..- "C') (,'

.;')'~ in the reshaping of perception in the nineteenth century.P The observer of It is easy to forget that art history as an academic discipline has its origins

•
••
paintings in the nineteenth century was always also an observer who simul­
taneously consumed a proliferating range of optical and sensory experiences.
In other words, paintings were produced and assumed meaning not in some
within this same nineteenth-century milieu. Three nineteenth-century devel- ',~,S ~i:"}i,:i.~-.'-"
oprnents inseparable from the institutionalization of art historical practice are:).' ~. ~', ,:".:'10.'
________ ~___ .

0) his~and evol':lti.,onary modes of thought allowing forms to be, :\

_I/-

.'\j /1 ~ ')- +- y'

impossible kind of aesthetic isolation, or in a continuous tradition of painterly arrayed and classified as an unfolding over time; (2) sociopolitical transfor- " :"JQ :,/"J"~"'~.

•• codes, but as one of many consumable and fleeting elements within an

expandingchaos of images, commodities, and stimulation.
mations involving ~he creation of leisuretjrne and the cultural enfranchise- :V:,:,);)
ment ofmore sectors of urban populations, one result ofwhich was the public ~,
rr v r i'~
j

r.J-·

••
I ' -.....' . -11'1:
One of the few visual artists that Benjamin discusses is Charles Meryon, art museum; and (3) new serial modes of image reproduction, which per- ~ r.:.' "., ..> ,~:..
. ----. ,J.'. J'
mediated through the sensibiltry of Baudelaire. 29 Meryon is important'OOtfor mitted both the global circulation and juxtaposition of highly credible copies ' ,_',re ~{["J(J".
theformal or iconographic content ofthis work, but as an index of a damaged

•• sensorium responding to the early shocks of modernization. Meryon's dis­

turbingimages of the mineral inertness of a medieval Paris take on the value
of disparate artworks. Yet if nineteenth-century modernity was in part the
matrix of art history, the artworks of that modernity were excluded from art
history's dominant explanatory and classifying schemes, even into the early

•• of"afterimages" of an annihilated set ofspaces at the onset of Second Empire

urban renewal. And the nervous crosshatched incisions of his etched plates
bespeak the atrophy of artisanal handicraft in the face of serial industrial
twentieth century.
For example, two crucial traditions, one stemming from Morelli and

•• reproduction. The example of Meryon insists that vision in the nineteenth

another from the Warburg School, were fundamentally unable or unwilling
to include nineteenth-century art within the scope of their investigations. This
in spite of the dialectical relation of these practices to the historical moment

•• 28. See, tor example. Benjamin, Rtif/ections, trans. Edmund]ephcott (New York, 1978),
p. 151: "With the increasing scope of communications systems, the significance of painting
in impaning information is reduced."
of their own emergence: the concern of Morellian connoisseurship with

•
,~
29. WalterBenjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era ofHigh Capitalism,
trans. HarryZohn (London, 1973), pp. 86-89,
30. See Susan Buck-Morss, "The Flaneur, the Sandwichman, and the Whore: The Politics
of Loitering," New German Critique 39 (Fall, 1986), pp. 99-140,
 22 Modernity and the Prob/em ofthe Observer
'r'
: - :-:,..
,:r~
...•..... .....
;;~ .
/~ \
.,¥
..:
,:.'- ~.~:,
'
.

Modernity and the Prob/em ofthe Observer 23 ••

•
T

authorship and originality Occurs when new technologies and forms of

exchange put in question notions of the "hand," authorship, and originality;
and the quest by WarburgSchool scholars for symbolic forms expressive of
were transferred to nineteenth-century artists, but beginning in the 1940s , , "JA.~-'( ' .
notions like class content and popular imagery became surrogates for tradi- C~\,~I ,"-S
tiona I iconographY"BY inserting ~~~;rh-centurypainting into a continu- rf\J ' .
'1

the spiritual foundations of a unified culture coincides with a collective cul­ ous history of an and a unified discursive apparatus of explanation, however"

turaldespair at the absence or impossibility of such forms in the present. Thus

something of its ess:,ntial differe~~<:_wa:-~t)rO recover that difference one Vvd'(Ir-:/

must re~ognize how the ~~g, the co~I:>tion, and. "" effectiven~s~ of ~f(-~:;:'!~~:(J'

theseoverlappingmodes of an history took as their privileged objects the fig­

urative an of antiquityand the Renaissance.
that an IS dependent on an o~~r-and on an organlza~lon of the v~ble dQ'0&!'.u-~ 0.' )

I'
i(j i~ -i~,j,'-
: ' What isof interest here is the ~etrating recognition, subliminal or oth­ that vastly exceeds the domain conventionally examined by an history. The 6b ":,X/-J ~/'.

~ d'~(.1 r,~\ (j(J(; 'J erwise, by the founding an historians that nineteenth-century an was fun­ isolation of painting after 1830 as a viable and self-sufficient category for study (j(~-\::.. c",':' y •

damentally disc~nt~nuous with the an of 2r~ct:ci~.ng centuries. Clearly, the

.,y;I,., u/tr-2t?)r<J,/ '/1 '., ~
i becomes highly problematic, to say the least. The Circulation and reception ')~-' rook' •
·l
;I~
discontinuity they sensed is not the familiar break signified by Manet and
of all visual imagery is so closely interrelated by the middle of the century that
impressionism; rather it is a question of why painters as diverse as Ingres, any ~in-gle-~;dium or form ofvisual representatlonno longer has a significant ( not);,;, c1,,· )
.,s.
Overbeck, Courbet, Delaroche, Meissonier, von Kobell, Millais, Gleyre, Fried­ autofl~mous
-
id~ntity.
-
The meanings and effects of any single image are always 161.--\1+--1 )
rich, Cabanel, Gerome, and Delacroix (to name only a few) together incar­
adjacent to this ove!J_()~decl_ and plural sensory environment and to t h e )
'. nateda surfaceof mimeticand figural reRresentation apparently similar to but
observer who inhabited it. Benjamin, for example, saw tI:!e an ~u~eum in the
I disqu~et.i-ngly unlike-;h;-t-_~ad ~r;ededi~~h~-~n historian's silence, indif­ mid-nineteenth century as simply one of many dream spaces, experienced :~1rr., .. 7i)c.:'·'.
ference, or even disdain for eclecticism and "degraded" forms implied that and traversed by an observer no differently from arcades, botanical gardens, )
this period constituted a radically differentvisuallanguage that could not be
wax museums, casinos, railway stations, and department stores.v )
submitted to the same methods of analysis, that could not be made to speak Nietzsche describes the position of the individual within this milieu in r),~' ,~:,- )
in the same ways, that even could not be read." terms of a crisis of assimilation: ..., :r' ~~; 0":, ~, '~)
The work of subsequent generations of art historians, however, soon
obscured that inaugural intuition of rupture, of difference. The nineteenth Sensibility immensely more irritable; ... the abundance of d~~~ )
~:_i~Er~ssions greater than ever: cosmopolitanism in foods, lit­
CO)r"'-.i)1'-;")~~- )
centurygradually became assimilated into the mainstream of the discipline
through apparently dispassionate and objective exaJTlirl.'l~on, similar to what eratures, newspapers, forms, tastes, even landscapes. The tempo of

hadhappened earlier With the an of late antiquity. But in order to domesticate this influx prestissimo, the impressions erase each other; one »

that strangeness from which earlier scholars had recoiled, historians instinctively resists taking in anything, taking anything deeply, to »

explained nineteenth-ce1ltury_~rt_<l:.c_o.r:9ing to models [aJsen fro!1L[hJ~_.study "digest" anything; a weakening of the power to digest results from
t
32
of older art. Initially, mainly formyLgtegQries from Renaissance painting
_.-~. ,
this. A kind of adaptation to the flood of impressions takes place:
men unlearn spontaneous action, they merely react to stimuli from
»
31 The hostility [0 most COntemporary art in Burckhardt, Hildebrand, Wblftlin, Riegl, the ourside.> »
and Fiedler is recounted in Michael Padro, The Critical Historians of Art (New Haven,
1982), pp, 66-70. Like Benjamin, Nietzsche here undermines any possibiliryof a contemplative
»
32. One of the first influential attempts to impose the methodology and vocabulary of
j
beholder and poses an anti-aesthetic distraction as a central feature of mod­
earlier art history Onto nineteenth-century material was Walter Friedlaender, David to
Delacroix, trans. Robert Goldwater (Cambridge, Mass., 1952); original German edition,
1930. Friedlaender describes French painting in terms of alternating classical and baroque
33. See Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, vol. 1 (Frankfurt, 1982), pp. 510-523.
I
,
••
phases 34. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and RJ, Hollingdale
(New York, 1967), p. 47

 24 Modernity and the Problem of the Observer

2 The Camera Obscura and Its Subject

i!. iLl"

emity, one thatGeorg Simmel and others were to examine in detail. When
".'
• •c,

•
Nietzsche usesquasi-sdentificwords like "influx," "adaptation," "react," and

"irritability," i~ is about a world that has already been reconfigured into new

·, • \J. (fY ' t:!

I. perceptual components. Modernitv in this case, coincides with the collapse
, .--' -t» ~=
• ~ l.I',,~R o~, ! ofclassl~al mo~els of~iSjon and their stable space ofrepr~Sentation~.Ins~ead,
• ell) j (.,' "edl),y observation IS mcreasmgly a question ofequivalenr sensations and stirnuh th~t

IJ\) I' have no reference to a spatiallocation. What begins in the 1820s and 1830s IS
,• rip::>7,41''5'j, / ar~positioning of the observer, outside of the fixed relations of interior/exte­
·• ,r"~~j ( / ~j-"y riorPresupposed bythe camera obscura and into an undemarcatedterrain on
• which the distinction between internal sensation and external sig~is irrev­
•• ocably blurred. If there is ever a "liberation" of vision i.n t~~ nineteenth cen­
This kind of kmounedge seems to be
,· C! jJ.I(,. 00 5' ,v<, tury, this IS when Jl firsthappens. In the absence of the ll!ndiCal model of the
,. J~" A, t, ",J1' came_~obscura,there isa freeing up ofvision, a falling away of the rigid struc­ the truest, the most authentic, for it
has the object before itself in its
,',. turesthat hadshaped it and constituted its objects.
:e .. But almost simultaneous with this final dissolution of a transcendent :;.1-0 r
entirety and completeness, This bare
fact of certainty, however, is really
'. r~~~!' '"" ~:c>J~ foundation forvision ""?" a plurality of means torecQd~th~ ~e j~._~
act.. i.Vity.
and admittedly the abstractest and
:• •,.~.J'J'.' 1- ere, to regiment It, to heighten its productivity and to prevent Its distraction, '::tJ the poorest kind of truth,
; \ . '1_ Thus theimperatives of capitalist modernization, while demolishing the field
'.'0", goo,,,,,,,, t"cJ>;;q;;;;' f~;' imposing visualattentiveness,
I '.e :(lJ "'.' :, "::", ol classical ---G. W. F. Hegel
' •_'{O'\,4..
. ~~~ ~'::I- .11' '
rationalizing
•
sensation, and rnannging
._~ _
perception, They were disciplinary
, • r s 0
_l't\~y,"J"'-
techniques thatrequired a notion of visual experi~rn:eas instrumental, mod- A prevalent tendency in methodo­
'. ~or':'-'J":J ifiable, andessentially abstract,and that never allowed, a real wOr/.d,to a~qUire logical discussion is to approach
'1'·J.Il~"'~ 'C,c;'~'. solidity or permanence, Once vision became located 10 the empirical imme­ problems of /mowledge sub specie
:!~.\r:tr"L' ,'; diacy of the observer's body, it belonged to ti~e, to flux, to de_~th, The guar­ aeternitatis, as it were, Statements are
•e"ly'! ::,/" - antees ofauthoricy, ident~cy, and universality supplied by the camera obscura compared with each other without

'••.
;• areofanotherepoch,

IJ
r
regard to their history and without
considering that they might belong to
different bistorical strata.
-Paul Feyerabend

•• . I

I
Most attempts to theorize vision and visualiry are wedded to models that
emphasize a continuous and overarchinR\Vestei-n\lis~~1tradition. Clearly it
'J'..- '/\..;'.(;"
(u,.r I

rj.~(f.)_~r~
).}'j
,L'

•,;
.'
is often strategically necessary to map the outlines of a dominant Western
I speculative or scopic tradition of vision in some sense continuous, for
{;.,), ,..,',".­

r instance, from Plato to the present, or from the quattrocento into the late nine­

,~
I'
L 1