Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century (October Books) Review

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(More customer reviews)HUGE thumbs up. Crary historicizes technological vision and illuminates an underrepresented point: things we're taught to think of as objective, such as cameras and vision, are in fact quite subjective and historical. They're ideas first, which means social/cultural ideas, from design to usage. Gradually these cultural ideas plus economic and technological possibility fuse into 'things'. The social aspects get invisibly embedded into these 'things' through myths of objectivity and modern people's desire to be taken care of by machines. When cultural values become things we are conditioned not to see the subjective part. Why? Our primary way of thinking is still the way of the Enlightenment -- from the 18th century -- which loves measuring and equating and separates 'myth' from 'science'. [Which is which? as Roger Waters asks, Do you think you can tell?] Western high culture privileges thinking and seeing over affect and body, imagining they are separate and valuing one over the other. Really it's just an excuse for laziness and cultural arrogance.
Read this book along with Eric Michaels' _Bad Aboriginal Art_ and Adorno and Horkheimer's _Dialectic of Enlightenment_ to begin to see glimpses of Western cultural values and narratives embedded in today's supposedly 'objective' media such as photography, video, TV, vision, etc. Do the work and eventually technology will be a mirror of your own social/historical context.

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In Techniques of the Observer Jonathan Crary provides a dramatically newperspective on the visual culture of the nineteenth century, reassessing problems ofboth visual modernism and social modernity.Inverting conventional approaches, Craryconsiders 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 theproblems of vision are inseparable from the operation of social power and examineshow, beginning in the 1820s, the observer became the site of new discourses andpractices that situated vision within the body as a physiological event. Alongsidethe sudden appearance of physiological optics, Crary points out, theories and modelsof "subjective vision" were developed that gave the observer a new autonomy andproductivity while simultaneously allowing new forms of control and standardizationof vision.Crary examines a range of diverse work in philosophy, in the empiricalsciences, and in the elements of an emerging mass visual culture. He discusses atlength the significance of optical apparatuses such as the stereoscope and ofprecinematic devices, detailing how they were the product of new physiologicalknowledge. 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 thatmimetic or perspectival notions of vision and representation were initiallyabandoned in the first half of the nineteenth century within a variety of powerfulinstitutions and discourses, well before the modernist painting of the 1870s and1880s.Jonathan Crary is Assistant Professor of Art History at Barnard College andColumbia University. He is a founding editor of Zone and Zone Books.

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