Techniques of the observer : on vision and modernity in the nineteenth century / Jonathan Crary.
Series: An October bookPublisher: Cambridge, Mass. ; London : MIT, 1992Description: [ix], 171p. : ill. ; 23 cm001: 28373ISBN: 0262531070 (pbk.) :; 9780262531078 (pbk.) :Subject(s): Visual perception | Art, Modern -- 19th century | Art and society -- History -- 19th centuryDDC classification: 701.15 CRA LOC classification: N7430.5 | .C7 1992Item type | Current library | Collection | Call number | Copy number | Status | Date due | Barcode | |
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Book | MAIN LIBRARY Book | 701.15 CRA (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | 1 | Available | 100378 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer provides a dramatically new perspective on the visual culture of the nineteenth century, reassessing problems of both visual modernism and social modernity. This analysis of the historical formation of the observer is a compelling account of the prehistory of the society of the spectacle.
In Techniques of the Observer Jonathan Crary provides a dramatically new perspective on the visual culture of the nineteenth century, reassessing problems of both visual modernism and social modernity.
Inverting conventional approaches, Crary considers the problem of visuality not through the study of art works and images, but by analyzing the historical construction of the observer. He insists that the problems of vision are inseparable from the operation of social power and examines how, beginning in the 1820s, the observer became the site of new discourses and practices that situated vision within the body as a physiological event. Alongside the sudden appearance of physiological optics, Crary points out, theories and models of "subjective vision" were developed that gave the observer a new autonomy and productivity while simultaneously allowing new forms of control and standardization of vision.
Crary examines a range of diverse work in philosophy, in the empirical sciences, and in the elements of an emerging mass visual culture. He discusses at length the significance of optical apparatuses such as the stereoscope and of precinematic devices, detailing how they were the product of new physiological knowledge. He also shows how these forms of mass culture, usually labeled as "realist," were in fact based on abstract models of vision, and he suggests that mimetic or perspectival notions of vision and representation were initially abandoned in the first half of the nineteenth century within a variety of powerful institutions and discourses, well before the modernist painting of the 1870s and 1880s.
Originally published: 1990.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 151-162) and index.
Reviews provided by Syndetics
CHOICE Review
In this study of the 19th-century ideas about vision (encompassing art, science, and philosophy) Crary pursues the problem of artistic modernity, arguing that it began in the early part of the 19th century--not, as is customarily assumed, in the latter decades. This idea is not original, but what Crary does contribute to the discourse is an expansion of material engaged in the argument, for he draws upon diverse individuals (Goethe, Ruskin, Schopenhauer, Fechner, Marx) and artifacts (painting, photography, optical-illusion devices). In doing so, he bypasses conventional concepts, such as Romanticism, which is barely mentioned. His thesis is that from the late Renaissance to the 19th century the dominant metaphor of vision (and, accordingly, artistic praxis) was the camera obscura. But the separation between the subject and object entailed in this model broke down in the 1820s and 1830s when geometrical optics was replaced by physiological optics. The metaphor for the visual process then became the stereoscope--ubiquitous as both a serious optical apparatus and a popular parlor toy. Unfortunately, the book is written in a verbose style; yet, on penetrating the prose, one finds a discussion that is provocative, often insightful, but also sometimes frustrating for a reader who does not believe in Zeitgeists. -D. Topper, University of WinnipegThere are no comments on this title.