Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer

Crary, Jonathan. “Techniques of the Observer,” October, 07/1988, Volume 45, pp. 3–35.

Crary argues that since the nineteenth century, human knowledge of the visual perception and on one’s ability, as an observer, to perceive the world objectively, becomes increasingly challenged (starting with Kant). “From the beginning of the nineteenth century a science of vision will tend to mean increasingly an interrogation of the makeup of the human subject, rather than of the mechanics of light and optical transmission.” (5) Understanding that visual experience can be not correlated with the outside world, but rather originate from one’s body (bodily position?). The rejection of the idea of optical illusions: “For Goethe and the physiologists who followed him there was no such thing as optical illusion: whatever the healthy corporal eye experienced was in fact optical truth.” (9) It determines Crary’s agenda: “My concern here is how the individual as observer became an object of investigation, a locus of knowledge in the first half of the 1800s, and how the nature of vision was thus modified. One feature of this period is the widespread effort by researchers from a variety of fields to establish the bounds of "normative" vision and to quantify forms of optical and other sensory response.” (15) In sum, the new knowledge about the nature of visuality opens the way to shape human subjectivity by manipulating one’s position as an observer through popular visual culture.

Crary then explores different forms of mechanical production of visual illusions (such as diorama, kaleidoscope, Phenakistiscope, stereoscope). He argues that these inventions were dialectically both the product of new visual knowledge and the means by which general public was taught to see in new ways. New forms of optical tangibility, brought by these new forms of visual production, soon “turned into a mass form of ocular possession.” (29) Crary argues that this process was similar to the one that Marx described as a change between use of tools (18^th century) and use of machines (19^th century): where’s in the first case, tools extended human’s “innate powers,” in the latter it reduces human to be part of a machine. New optical devises make observer passive, promising, as a reward, to show him “the real.” “Even though they provide access to "the real," they make no claim that the real is anything other than a mechanical production.” (33) Development and spread of these new models “collapsed… older model of power onto a single human subject, transforming each observer into simultaneously the magician and the deceived.” (35)