From: Vision & Visuality, Hal Foster, Dia Foundation Publications

Askes the question: How has vision and the techniques and
discourses surrounding the photograph been periodized historically?
(Represented or theorized)

Rather than counter the dominant historical models, Crary wants
to raise some important discontinuities that have not been voiced.

1) That the emergence of photography and cinema is a
fulfillment of a long unfolding of technological and
ideological development in the West.

Two models:

a) The camera is the outcome of renaissance perspective, a
search for the objective equivalent of "natural vision".

b) The camera is an apparatus of power that continues to define
and regulate the status of the observer.

Crary wants to

1) Briefly articulate the camera obscura model of vision in
terms of its historical specificity

2) To suggest how that model collapsed in the early 19th
century - when it was displaced by radically different
notions of what an observer was and what constituted vision.

Camera Obscura

The camera obscura's natural function (light/hole/projection)
also seen as

1) a socially constructed artifact that from 1500 to 1700
coalesced into a dominant paradigm that

2) described the status and possibilities of an observer .

It became a model for how observation leads to truthful
inferences about an external world (objective truth).

Objective Truth (31- )

. Model for
1) by which to observe empirical phenomenon
2) reflective introspection and self-observation

. Locke - a means of spatially visualizing the position of an observing subject

. A juridical function to guarantee and police the
correspondence between exterior world and interior
representation.
. To see is to have power
. To see through the camera is to have an authoritative
representation

. Descartes - The aperture of the camera corresponds to a single
mathematically definable point from which the world can be
logically deduced and re-presented. (32)

(Objectifying through the camera) An infallible vantage point.

. Monocular representation provides a unified, stable, constant
space. ( Binocular vision reveals the provisional, dissimilar
and tentative images presented to each eye).

. Camera -> A metaphysics of interiority. The observer as free
individual in a quasi-domestic space separated from a public
exterior world.

________________________

This objectivity collapses in the 19th century (34)

. Goethe's Theory of Colours - An articulation of subjective
vision in which the body is introduced as the ground on
which vision is possible.

. Vision - a result of physiological processes and external stimulation.

. The discovery of the " visionary " capacities of the body

. Students of vision who went blind staring in the sun: (34)

. David Brewster, invented the kaleidoscope, stereoscope
. Joseph Plateau, studied the persistence of vision
. Gustav Fechner, founder of modern quantitative psychology

. Turner's paintings

Physiology - A new science, 1820-40

. The observer made into a subject of study
. The body as a new continent to be mapped, explored and mastered

. The discovery that "knowledge was conditioned by the physical
and anatomical structure and functioning of the body"

. The body became "a productive body; it existed to be set to work". (36)

. Helmholtz's measurement of the speed of nerve transmission
(ninety feet per second)

. Study of the body in terms of labor/production needs and efficiency

Rapid coordination of hand and eye for repetitive actions
in factory production (37)

. Quantitative studies - the relation between perception and
object became abstract, interchangable and nonvisual.

. Brain and nerve functions identified

. Johannes Muller:

a) The nerves of the different senses were physiologically distinct

b) A uniform cause (electricity) would generate utterly
different sensations from one nerve to another

. Applied to skin triggers sens of touch
. Applied to optic nerve, the experience of light, etc.

c) Different causes will produce the same sensation in a given sensory nerve -

. Muller described a fundamentally arbitrary relationship between
stimulus and sensation

. The experience of sight has no necessary connection with actual light (39)

. The camera obscura model is therefore made irrelevant

. Physiology destroys trust in the sensory experience of vision

. The observer is simultaneously the object of knowledge and the
object of procedures of simulation nad normalization -

The body produces experience for the subject.

. Camera, cinema - technologies of domination & spectacle that
enforce the myth that vision is incorporeal, veridical and
realistic (43),something overthrown in the early 1840's.
Impressionism followed, then abstraction later.