Jonathan Crary -- Techniques of the Observer
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[META:

Kamera obskura erbjuder en genomskinlig representation; enligt denna modell uppfattades seendet före Kant/1800-talet. Under 1800-talet blir subjektet ett empiriskt-vetenskapligt objekt (Foucault), efter detta måste även seendet uppfattas som kroppsligt; det framstå som en icke-genomskinlig representation, där kroppen "kontaminerar" seendet. Något neutralt inre seende finns inte längre, bara dte fysiologiska som ögat förmedlar(?)]

[1]{seende, rum, observatör}The formalization of and diffusion of computer generated imagery heralds the ubiquitous implantation of fabricated visual "spaces" radically different from the mimetic capacities of film, photography and television [de nya teknologierna/nya medier] are relocating vision to a plane severed from a human observer.

[2]{seende, kropp, rum}Most of the historically important 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. [dvs. observatörens observationer har frigjorts från kroppens position i rummet]

[6]{observatör, gränser, konventioner}Though obviously one who sees, an observer is one who sees within a prescribed set of possibilities, one who is embedded in a system of conventions and limitations.

[6]{observatör, subjekt}If it can be said there is an observer specific to the nineteenth century, or to any period, it is only as an *effect* of an irreducible heterogenous system of discursive, social, technological, and institutional relations. There is no observing subject prior to this continually shifting field.

[14]{ny visuell erfarenhet, rörelse, rotlöshet, hastighet}What takes place from around 1810 to 1840 is an uprooting of vision from the stable and fixed relations incarnated in the camera obscura. [...]in a sense, what occurs is a new valuation of visual experience: it is given an unprecedented mobility and exchangeablity; asbtracted from any founding site or referent.

[18]{optiskt, haptiskt, förenade}the sense of touch had been an integral part of classic theories of vision in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The subsequent dissociation of touch from sight occurs within a pervasive "separation of senses" and industrial remapping of the body in the nineteenth century.

[18]{optiskt, haptiskt, uppdelning, en ny observatör}The loss of touch as a conceptual component of vision meant the unloosening of the eye from the network of referentiality incarnated in tactility and its subjective relation to perceived space. This autonomization of sight, occurring in many different domains, was a historical condition for the rebuilding of an observer fitted for the tasks of "spectacular" consumption. ... The stereoscope is one major cultural site on which this breach between tangibility and visuality in singularly evident.
 
[22]{konsthistoriker, ett osynligjort brott}What is of interest here is the penetrating recognition, subliminal or otherwise, by the founding art historians that nineteenth-century art was fundamentally discontinuous with the art of preceding centuries. Clearly, the discontinuity they sensed is not the familiar break signified by Manet and impressionism; rather it is a question of Why painters as diverse as Ingres, Overbeck, Courbet, Delaroche, Maissonier, von Kobell, Millais, Gleyre, Friedrich, Cabanel, Gerome, and Delacroix (to name only a few)together incarnated a surface of ndimetic and hgural representation apparently similar to but disquietingly unlike what had preceded it. The art historian's silence, indifference, or even disdain for eclecticism and "degraded" forms implied that this period constituted a radically different visual language that could not be submitted to the same methods of analysis, that could not be made to speak in the same ways, that even could not be read. The work of subsequent generations of art historians, however, soon obscured that inaugural intuition of rupture, of difference.

[23]{1800-talets medielandskap, visualitet, Benjamin, Passagenwerk}The circulation and reception of all visual imagery is so closely interrelated by the middle of the century that any single medium or form of visual representation no longer has a significant autonomous identity. The meanings and effects of any single image are always adjacent to this overloaded and plural sensory environment and to the observer who inhabited it. Benjamin, for example, saw the art museum in the mid-nineteenth century as simply one of many dream spaces, experienced and traversed by an observer no differently from arcades, botanical gardens, wax museums, casinos, railway stations, and department stores. Nietzsche describes the position of the individual within this milieu in terms of a crisis of assimilation[...]

[23-24]{sinnen, distraktion, Simmel, Nietzsche}... poses an anti-aesthetic distraction as a central feature of modernity, one that Georg Simmel and others were to examine in detail. When Nietzsche uses quasi-scientific words like "influx," "adaptation," "react," and "irritability," it is about a world that has already been reconfigured into new perceptual components. Modernity, in this case, coincides with the collapse of classical models of vision and their stable space of representations. Instead, observation is increasingly a question of equivalent sensations and stimuli that have no reference to a Spatial location.[]

[24]{juridisk-politisk, disciplinär, syn}What begins in the 1820s and 18305 is at repositioning of the observer, outside of the fixed relations of interior/exterior presupposed by the camera obscura and into an undemarcated terrain on which the distinction between internal sensation and external signs is irrevocably blurred. If there is ever a "liberation" of vision in the nineteenth century, this is when it first happens. In the absence of the juridical model of the camera obscura, there is a freeing up of vision, a falling away of the rigid structures that had shaped it and constituted its objects.

[27]{assemblage, dispositif, föremål, praktik, observatör}For the camera obscura was not simply an inert and neutral piece of equipment or a set of technical premises to be tinkered with and improved over the years; rather, it was embedded in a much larger and denser organization of knowledge and of the observing subject. Historically speaking, we must recognize how for nearly two hundred years, from the late 1500s to the end of the 1700s, the structural and optical principles  of the camera obscura coalesced  into a dominant paradigm through which was described the status and possibilities of an observer. I emphasize that this paradigm was dominant though obviously not exclusive.

[27]{camera obscura, modell}During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the camera obscura was without question the most widely used model for explaining human vision, and for representing the relation of a perceiver and the position of a knowing subject to an external world.

[30]{regularitet} Yet despite the multiplicity of its local manifestations, what is extraordinary is the consistency with which certain primary features of the Camera obscura are repeated throughout this period. There is a regularity and uniformity with which the formal relations constituted by the Camera are stated again and again, no matter how heterogeneous or unrelated the locations of those statements.

[30-31]{identitet, skillnad}For what constitutes the Camera obscura is precisely its multiple identity, its "mixed" status as an epistemological figure within a discursive order and an object within an arrangement of cultural practices? The camera obscura is what Gilles Deleuze would call an *assemblage*, something that is "simultaneously and inseparably a machinic assemblage and an assemblage of enunciation," an object about which something is said and at the same time an object that is used.

[31]{}It is a site at which a discursive formation intersects with material practices. The camera obscura, then, cannot be reduced either to a technological or a discursive object: it was a complex social amalgam in which its existence as a textual figure was never separable from its machinic uses. What this implies is that the camera obscure must be extricated from the evolutionary logic of a technological determinism, central to influential historical surveys, which position it as a precursor or an inaugural event in a genealogy leading to the birth of photography.

[32]{} I will argue, however, that the camera obscura and the photographic camera, as assemblages, practices, and social objects, belong to two fundamentally different organizations of representation and the observer, as well as of the observer's relation to the visible. By the beginning of the nineteenth century the camera obscura is no longer synonymous with the production of truth and with an observer positioned to see truthfully. The regularity of such statements ends abruptly; the assemblage constituted  by  the  camera  breaks  down  and  the  photographic camera becomes an essentially dissimilar object, lodged amidst a radically different network of statements and practices.

[38]{subjektivitet}Above all it indicates the appearance of a new model of subjectivity, the hegemony of a new subject-effect.[]

[38-39]{}First of all the camera obscura performs an operation of individuation; that is, it necessarily defines an observer as isolated, enclosed, and autonomous within its dark confines. It impels a kind of *askesis*, or withdrawal from the world, in order to regulate and purify one's relation to the manifold contents of the now "exterior" world. Thus the camera obscura is inseparable from a certain metaphysic of interiority: it is a figure for both the observer Who is nominally a free sovereign individual and a privatized subject confined in a quasi-domestic space, cut off from a public exterior world.

[41]{}On one hand the observer is disjunct from the pure operation of the device and is there as a disembodied witness to a mechanical and transcendental re-presentation of the objectivity of the world.

[41]{}On the other hand, however, his or her presence in the camera implies a spatial and temporal simultaneity of human subjectivity and objective apparatus. Thus the spectator is a more free-floating inhabitant of the darkness, a marginal supplementary presence independent of the machinery of representation. As Foucault demonstrated in his analysis of Velásquez's Las Meninas, it is a question of a subject incapable of self-representation as both subject and object. The camera obscura a priori prevents the observer from seeing his or her position as part of the representation.

[43]{Rorty, inre öga, apperception}It is in this context that Richard Rorty asserts that Locke and Descartes describe an observer fundamentally different from anything in Greek and medieval thought. For Rorty, the achievement of these two thinkers was "the conception of the human mind as an inner space in which both pains and clear and distinct ideas passed in review before an Inner Eye. The novelty was the notion of a single inner space in which bodily and perceptual sensations were objects of quasi-observation."

[43]{Descartes}In this sense Locke can be linked with Descartes. In the Second Meditation, Descartes asserts that "perception, or the action by which we perceive, is not a vision . . . but is solely an inspection by the mind." He goes on to challenge the notion that one knows the world by means of eyesight: "It is possible that I do not even have eyes with which to see anything."43 For Descartes, one knows the world "uniquely by perception of the mind," and the secure positioning of the self within an empty interior space is a precondition for knowing the outer world. The space of the camera obscura, its enclosedness, its darkness, its separation from an exterior, incarnate Descartes's "I will now shut my eyes, I shall stop my ears, I shall disregard my senses."

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[85]{}[Det nya seendet] is knowledge that simultaneously provided techniques for the external control and domination of the human subjekt *and* was the emancipatin ground for notions of subjective vision within modernist art theory and experimentation. Any effective account of modern culture must confront the ways in which modernism, rather than being a reaction against or transcendence of processes of scientific and economic rationalization, is inseparable from them.

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[139]{turner}In Turner all of the mediations that previously had distanced and protected an observer from the dangerous brilliance of the sun are cast off. The exemplary figures of Kepler and Newton employed the camera obscura precisely to avoid looking directly into the sun while seeking to gain knowledge of it or of the light it propagated. In Descartes *La Dioptrique*, as discussed earlier, the form of the camera was a defense against the madness and unreason of dazzlement. [Den nya observatören har så att säga blivit naken inför sina sinnesintryck]

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