Jonathan Crary. Techniques of the observer

Jonathan Crary. Techniques of the observer.

Crary studies “historical construction of vision” – more exactly, “reconfiguration of relations between an observing subject and modes of representation” (p. 1).

He speaks of the modern (or post-modern) subject: subjectivity as “a precarious condition of interface between rationalized systems of exchange and networks of information” (p. 2).

There was “a massive reorganization of knowledge and social practices that modified in myriad ways the productive, cognitive, and desiring capacities of the human subject” (p. 3).

“An observer is… the one who sees within a prescribed set of possibilities, one who is embedded in a system of conventions and limitations.” An observer is a product of specific historical conditions and therefore exists “only as an effect of an irreducibly heterogenous system of discursive, social, technological, and institutional relations” (p. 6).

Crary makes a statement, referring to Foucault, that “to historicize a subject” is an impossible, artificial and implicitly wrong agenda from the very beginning. Instead, what is possible is to describe the positions of the subject, the ways in which the subject is called into life – those zones and regimes that are prescribed for the subject to emerge and exist. The quote is to Foucault: “I don’t believe the problem can be solved by historicizing the subject as posited by the phenomenologists, fabricating a subject that evolves through the course of history. One has to dispense with the constituent subject, to get rid of the subject itself, that’s to say, to arrive at an analysis which can account for the constitution of the subject within a historical framework And this is what I would call genealogy, that is, a form of history which can account for the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domians of objects, etc., without having to make reference to a subject which is either transcendental in relation to a field of events or runs in its empty sameness throughout the course of history.” Power/Knowledge (New York, 1980), p. 117.

“[W]hat determines vision at any given historical moment is not some deep structure, economic base, or world view, but rather the functioning of a collective assemblage of disparate parts on single social surface. It may even be necessary to consider the observer as a distribution of events located in many different places” (p. 6).

Crary then says that “an observer of the nineteenth century” is an abstraction that cannot be “located empirically”. “What I want to do, however, is suggest some of the conditions and forces that defined or allowed the formation of a dominant model of what an observer was in the nineteenth century” (p. 7). So, Crary aims to describe “a sweeping transformation in the way in which an observer was figured in a wide range of social practices and domains of knowledge” (p. 7). He is in particular interested in optical devises that acted as “sites of both knowledge and power” (p. 7).

“Foucault’s opposition of surveillance and spectacle seems to overlook how the effects of these two regimes of power can coincide. Using Bentham’s panopticon as a primary theoretical object, Foucault relentlessly emphasizes the ways in which human subjects became objects of observation, in the form of institutional control or scientific and behavioral study; but he neglects the new forms by which vision itself became a kind of discipline or mode of work” (p. 18).

In conclusion, Crary argues that the shift was from a model of a “free”, private an individualized subject of the camera obscura to the knowledge that vision belongs to the field of illusion, rather than a “real world”. This becomes a precondition for the emergence of photography, cinema and, finally, computer graphics, in which “”visual images no longer have any reference to the position of an observer in a ‘real,’ optically perceived world” (p. 2). So, in the early nineteenth century, “[a] more adaptable, autonomous, and productive observer was needed in both discourse and practice – to conform to new functions of the body and to a vast proliferation of indifferent and convertible signs and images. Modernization effected a deterritorialization and a revaluation of vision” (p. 149).