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).

Ruth Oldenziel. Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women, and Modern Machines in America, 1870-1945

Ruth Oldenziel. Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women, and Modern Machines in America, 1870-1945. (Amsterdam/Ann Arbor: Amsterdam University Press/Chicago University Press, 1999).

 The book studies the historical shaping of the modern technological world as male through positions of social inclusion and exclusion. Definition of the male (in the US) as having control over the technological world, but also through exclusion and silencing of women.

p. 10: "The public association between technological and manliness grew when male middle-class attention increasingly focused its gaze on the muscular bodies of working-class men and valorized middle-class athletes, but disempowered the bodies of Native Americans, African Americans, and women."

p. 11: "Engineers as... new models of white manliness". Mentions that if women appear in this domain, they are represented as belonging to some other domain: "our contemporary mythologies often produce women as goddesses whose lives are essentially off-stage, who appear to come from nowhere (p. 12) and whose plots are engineered elsewhere."

p. 12: mentions engineers as a new social force that rapidly expanded in American society and became a driving force of its development.

p. 26: "Well into the twentieth century, inentive genius was not necessarily understood to be machine-bound. Inventions included the entire gamut that ran from fabrics, language, arts, and mythology to mechanical devices." It was in the course of the 20th century that non-mechanistic interpretations of inventions were replaced with mechanistic ones.

Starting on p. 100, gives an excellent analysis of how in autobiographies engineers appropriate the labour of the subordinates (workers). Typical for their narratives is "erasure of workers or.. self-conscious identificaion with command, control , and whiteness" (p. 102).

p. 188: (speaking of the later half of the 20th century): "After a century-long contest over their meanings, patents and machinery occupied center stage and stood at the heart of sexual and racial differentiation and class distinctions. Engineers were cast as its sole bearers at the expense of workers, African-Americans, and women."

AHR Conversation: The Historical Study of Emotions

Nicole Eustace et al., “AHR Conversation: The Historical Study of Emotions,” The American Historical Review 117, no. 5 (December 1, 2012): 1487–1531.

An interesting discussion of how to historicize emotions and incorporate them into historical narratives. The most useful thing is their debate of the change of affective regimes (they have several conceptions they play with, such as 'emotional communities', 'emotional habitus', etc.).

A reference to William Reddy: "Emotional control is the realsite of the exercise of power". A very reasonable approach to history of emotions: "I can never know what William Byrd “really” felt (if indeed he himself did), but I can very usefully look for patterns in emotional expression and regulation that reveal much valuable information about social organization and political control." (1504)

On p. 1505 - a very interesting statement that for the 18th century Europeans, the concept of 'personality' was strange, but the concept of 'disposition' was conventional - in this way, the language expressed a very different relationship between people's selves and emotions. " In fact, the eigh- teenth-century notion of “disposition” corresponds closely to the concept of the sub- ject position as articulated by Linda Alcoff. This concept combines in a single term the creation of self and the distribution of power, making it clear that each is in- extricably linked to the other. ".

At some point, start discuss really interesting things: that emotional change in history does not follow societal or political changes (a functionalist view), but rather accompanies them in a dialectical way (1515-1516).

Speaking of emotions, they at some point mention "the primacy of aesthetics and form" in those spheres of social/cultural life that are shaped/interpellated by affects.

Mitchell, W. J. T. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images

Mitchell, W. J. T. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005.

“The book as a whole, then, is about pictures, understood as complex assemblages of virtual, material, and symbolic elements.” (p. xiii) The world, at least according to Heidegger, has become a picture. In the contemporary world dominated by representations, pictures are “ways of worldmaking, not just world mirroring.” (xv) “A picture, then, is a very peculiar and paradoxical creature, bot concrete and abstract, bot a specific individual ting and a symbolic form that embraces a totality.” (xvii)

So, Mitchell discusses pictures as “vital,” as possessing “the agency, motivation, autonomy, aura, fecundity, or other symptoms.” (6) And it is humans that make pictures vital and drive them “by desires and appetites.” (6) Therefore, his analysis is anthropological in the sense that it doesn’t move beyond pictures into those presumable forces that drive them.

Here’s a good point: Mitchell explains why he discusses images through the concept of desire: “The question of desire is ideally suited for this inquiry... To ask, what do pictures want? Is not just to attribute to them life and power and desire, but also to raise the question of what it is they lack, what they do not possess, what cannot be attributed to them. To say, in other words, that pictures ‘want’ lie or power does not necessarily imply that they have life or power, or even that they are capable of wishing for it.” (p. 10)

“What do the images want rom us? Where are they leading us? What is it that they lack, that they are inviting us to fill in? What desires have we projected onto them, and what form do those desires take as they are projected back at us, making demands upon us, seducing us to feel and act in specific ways?” (p. 25)  As Mitchell argues, perhaps, images are “weaker” than they seem, “that is why I shift the question from what pictures do to what they want, from power to desire, from the model of the dominant power to be opposed, to the model of the subaltern to be interrogated or (better) to be invited to speak.” (p. 33) His answer is that “above all they [pictures] would want a kind of mastery over the beholder... The paintings’ desire, in short, is to change places with the beholder, to transfix or paralyze the beholder, turning him or her into an image for the gaze of the picture... The power they want is manifested as lack, not as possession.” (p. 36)

Mitchell differentiates between two types of desire: “we might contrast these two pictures of desire (psychological and ontological, or Freudian-Lacanian and Blakean-Deleuzian) as based respectively on lack and plenitude, in the longing for an object and the possession that surpasses any object. Desire as longing produces fantasies, evanescent specular images that continually tease and elude the beholder; desire as possession produces (or is produced by) Deleuzian “assemblages.” (p. 66)

“Images both "express" desires that we already have, and teach us how to desire in the first place.” (p. 68) “The picture wants to hold, to arrest, to mummify an image in silence and slow time.” (p. 72) – on the difference between an image and a picture: “the picture as a concretely embodied object or assemblage and the image as a disembodied motif, a phantom that circulates from one picture to another and across media.” (ibid)

An idea of scopic drive – from Lacan – as imagery forcing people to do something. (p. 80) “Their [pictures’] main function is to awaken desire; to create, not gratify thirst; to provoke a sense of lack and craving by giving us the apparent presence of something and taking it away in the same gesture.” (p. 80)

“Images are active players in the game of establishing and changing values. They are capable of introducing new values into the world and thus of threatening old ones. For better and for worse, human beings establish their collective, historical identity by creating around them a second nature composed of images which do not merely reflect the values consciously intended by their makers, but radiate new forms of value formed in the collective, political unconscious of their beholders.” (105)

In the second part of his book, Mitchell explores his thesis that “images are embodies in material objects, in things...” (p. 108)  Desire is related to the sought object: “the sought object, the desired object, the sublime or beautiful object, the valued object, the aesthetic object, the produced, consumed, or exchanged object, the given or taken object, the symbolic object, the feared or hated object, the good or bad object, the lost or vanishing object.” (p. 116)

Discusses iconoclasm as an important symptom in understanding cultures and societies, for by rejecting images people reveal and negotiate certain structures of meanings, otherwise hidden from observation (p. 126ff). “When images offend us, we still take revenge by offending them in turn.” (128) In chapter 6, Mitchell discusses in detail “offending images” (swastika, images perceived as anti-religious, etc.). Raises an interesting issue that a fear of imitation is reflected (and reinforce) through the biblical story of the human creation – what could be implications for the soviet story? An example of Offi’s Madonna as an image and a picture which are not perceived as “just” an image and a picture.

Bill Brown, Things

Bill Brown (ed.): Things

Brown in his contribution refers to four interesting points:

(a)    (new scholarship should address the question of) how inanimate objects constitute human subjects, how they move them, how they threaten them, how they facilitate or threaten their relation to other subjects (p. 7). He later refers to Benjamin to argue that “subjects may constitute objects, but within Benjamin’s materialism things have already installed themselves in the human psyche.” (11) – refers to “Dream Kitsch” and “Several Points on Folk Art.”

(b)   Thingness of things discloses the othering of people (p. 12) – referring to Bruno Latour, who also “forcefully and repeatedly insisted that ‘things do not exist without being full of people’ and that considering humans necessarily involves the consideration of things. The subject/object dialectic itself (with which he simply has no truck) has obscured patterns of circulation, transference, translation, and displacement.” (p.12) “Latour has argued that modernity artificially made an ontological distinction between inanimate objects and human subjects, whereas in fact the world is full of ‘quasi-object’ and ‘quasi-subject’, terms he borrows from Michel Serres.” (p. 12) – refers to two works by Latour: “The Berlin Key or How to Do Words with Things,” in Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture, ed. P. M. Graves-Brown (London, 2000) and We Have Never Been Modern.

(c)    Refers to Simmel: “Simmel’s earlier account of the gap between the ‘culture of thigns’ and modernity’s human subject” and “his insistence that the subject’s desire, and not productive labor, is the source of an object’s value” (p. 13) – refers to Simmel, “The Future of Our Culture” in Simmel on Culture (London, 1997). Also mentions that Lukacs, Bloch, Benjamin and Krakauer complicated Simmel’s analysis.

(d)   “Inanimate objects organize the temporality of the animate world.” (15) – refers to W. J. T. Mitchell’s contribution in this volume who explored how the discovery of a new kind of object in the 18^th century, the fossil, enablied romanticism to recognize and to refigure its relation to the mortal limits of the natural world.

W. J. T. Mitchell in “Romanticism and the Life of Things” explores how material things changed human perception of history. Refers to Foucault’s The Order of Things which explored “the historicity of things.”

Georg Simmel, A Chapter in the Philosophy of Value

Georg Simmel, “A Chapter in the Philosophy of Value,” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 5, No. 5 (Mar., 1900), pp. 577-603

p. 577: “The practically effective value is conferred upon the object, not merely by its own desirability, but by the desirability of another object... Not merely the relationship to the receptive subjects characterizes this value, but also the fact that it arrives at this relationship only at the price of a sacrifice.”

p. 578: “Desire and the feeling of the agent stand, to be sure, as the motor energy behind all this, but from this in and of itself this value form could not proceed. It rather comes only from the reciprocal counterbalancing of the objects.” – that is, for Simmel objects acquire value, first, because they are desired and, second, because they exist in ‘assemblages’.

Simmel actually speaks of ‘assemblages’ – in his theory, the exchange value appears only as part of a complex system in which people and things are intrinsically interrelated. (581-583) While he gives certain precedence to people’s desires (speaking of enjoyment and sacrifice as the two driving forces of any economy), exchange value, the basis of economy, does not appear without an object. There is economy even in the cases when “primitive economic people” are not involved in the trade among each other: “the party with whom he contracts is not a sec- ond sentient being, but the natural order and regularity of things, which no more satisfy our desires without a sacrifice on our part than would another person.” (582)

p. 588: “The economic form of the value stands between two boundaries: on the one hand, the desire for the object, which attaches itself to the anticipated feeling of satisfaction from its possession and enjoyment; on the other hand, to this enjoyment itself, which, exactly considered, is not an economic act.”

p. 589: Argues that desire becomes an important economic (and arguably cultural) phenomenon only because satisfaction of desire cannot be immediate and should undergo struggle and diminution. – curiously, this is why Soviet people remember so well everything they had to buy.

p. 590: “Kant once summarized his Theory of Knowledge in the proposition: "The conditions of experience are at the same time the conditions of the objects of experience." By this he meant that the process which we call experience and the conceptions which constitute its contents or objects are subject to the selfsame laws of the reason. The objects can come into our experience, that is, be experienced by us, because they are conceptions in us; and the same energy which makes and defines the experience has also manifested itself in the structure of the objects.”

p. 593: why it is important that things are engaged in economic systems/networks: “The mere desire for an object does not lead to this valuation, since it finds in itself alone no measure. Only the comparison of desires, that is, the exchangeability of their objects, fixes each of the same as a value defined in accordance with its scale, that is, an economic value.”

The fact that any particular object is desired is the driving force of its economic value, but the desire and economic value do not engage into a direct cause-and-effect relationship: there is a whole chain of intermediaries (the system of economy) between them (p. 594): “It is always the relation of the desires to each other, realized in exchange, which makes their objects economic values.” (599)

Simmel ends by discussing the role of scarcity in the establishment of value – might be very relevant for the role of commodities in late Soviet history. Things are so valuable because they are so scarce. Since they are scarce, their values increases – and the Soviet Union becomes a very materialistic (but not in the Marxist meaning of this term) society.