Oi a Art Foundation

Discussions in Contemporary Culture

Number 2
VISION AND VISUALITY
Edited by Hal Foster
BAY PRESS SEATTLE 1988

, ..
r1 f.-'
t
1988 Dia Art Foundation
All rights resened. No part of this book may be reproduced in any
form without permission in writing from the publisher and author.
Printed in the United States of America
99 98 97 96 95 7 6 5 4 3
Bay Press
I I 5 West Denny Way
Seattle, Washington 981 19
Design by Bethany Johns
Typesetting by Sarabande, New York
Printed by Walsworth Publishing Company, Marceline, Missouri
Set in Perpetua
library of Congress Cataloglng-in-Publlcatlon Data
(Revised for vol. 2)
Discussions in Contemporary Culture.
No. 1-2 edited by Ha! Foster.
Includes bibliographies.
Contents: no. I [without special title ]-no. 2.
Vision and Visuality.
I. Art and society. 2. Aesthetics, Modern-20th century.
I. Foster, Ha!. 11. Dia Art Foundation.
N72.S6D57 1987 700'.1'03 87-71579
ISBN 0-941920-10-0 (no. 2: pbk.)
IX I
31
291
51 1
ns[
CONTENTS
Hal Foster
(
c; C'),('l
\ 1.... 'l. _.
PREFACE
Martin Jay
SCOPIC REGIMES OF MODERNITY
Jonathan Crary
MODERNIZING VISION
Rosalind Krauss
THE IM/PULSE TO SEE
GENERAL DISCUSSION
Norman Bryson
THE GAZE IN THE EXPANDED FIELD
Jacqueline Rose
AND VISION : SOME QUESTIONS SEXUALITY
GENERAL DISCUSSION
texts. This book also reflects the careful production work of Ph"!
Mariani, Bethany Johns, and Ellen Foos, and of Thatcher Baile I
at Bay Press. Y
We look forward to a series of e\ents in I 988-89 centered
critical discussion and to additional volumes of this ub-
hcatiOn series. P
Charles Wrlght
Executi,e Director
Dia Art Foundation
V I ll
Hal Foster
PREFACE
Why vision and visuality, why these terms? Although vision sug-
gests sight as a physical operation, and visuality sight as a social
fact, the two are not opposed as nature to culture: vision is so-
cial and historical too, and visuality invokes the body and the
psyche. Yet neither are they identical : here, the difference be-
tween the terms signals a difference within the visual- between
the mechanism of and its historical techniques, between
the datum of vision and its discursive determinations-a dif-
ference, many differences, among how we see, how we are able,
allowed, or made to see, and how we see this seeing or the un-
seen therein. With its own rhetoric and representations, each
scopic regime seeks to close out these differences: to make of its
many social ,isualities one essential vision, or to order them in a
natural hierarchy of sight. It is important, then, to slip these su-
perimpositions out of focus, to disturb the ghen array of Yisual
facts (it may be the only way to see them at all), and this little
book suggests ways to do this for the modern period. Thus the
general project in which it partakes: to thicken modern Yision,
to insist on its physiological substrate (Jonathan Crary) and on its
psychic imbrication (whether this is seen in terms of Yicissitude
Uacqueline Rose] or subversion [Rosalind Krauss]); to socialize
this ,ision, to indicate its part in the production of subjectiYity
(all the authors) and its own production as a part of intersubjec-
ti,ity (a dialectic of the gaze in which, according to one "para-
noid" model, the subject is menaced by its other [Norman
Bryson ]); and, in general, to historicize modern ,ision, to spe-
cify its dominant practices and its critical resistances (Martin Jay
I X
Hal foster /
explicitly, the others implicitly). To complicate matters, there
emerged in the a criticism of this general critique,
and a call for an alternati,-e to the search for alternati\e ,isual

Hut "hy this topic, or these takes, now? This is more diff-i-
cult to ans\\er, for "causes" are too little or too much
and "preconditions" too thick or thin. lt is, howe,er, no
cret that several strong critiques of modern(ist) models of ,ision
have de,eloped: e.g., critiques of the "Cartesian perspectivalism"
which separates subject and ohject, the first transcen-
dental and the second inert, and so suhtends metaphysical
thought, empirical science, and capitalist logic all at once; or cri-
tiques of the categorical separation of artistic expression which,
complicit with this modern rationalism e\en as it is critical of it
pri\ileges the purely optical in ,isual art, to which formal prin-'
ciple painting is periodically disciplined. Here, in turn, Martin
Jay points to cracks within traditional perspecti,e-conflicts in
practice, paradoxes in logic (e.g., perspective seen as
true and uni,ersally ,-alid ,ersus perspective as comentional and
contingent- "a symbolic form," in the famous phrase of Pan-
he also poses critical variants, even countertraditions: an
"art of describing" (the term is Svetlana Alpers's) which emerges
in se,enteenth-century Dutch painting hased on cartographic
principles; and a "madness of ,ision" (or folie du ..-oir) which is
de,cloped in baroque art that flaunts the opacity of sublime sub-
jects and underscores the rhetorical comentionality of sight. For
Jay, each practice extends heyond its own historical formation:
not only is the first said to operate in certain modernist forms
hut the second is \een nO\\ to challenge Cartesian perspectiva;-
ism for cultural in the postmodern West.
Jonathan Crary also rejects any reading of Cartesian per-
specti\alism consistent or continuous. In fact, he locates its
theoretical displacement in the early nineteenth century, with
the shift from geometrical optics to a physiological account of
X
PREFACE
dsion-from the paradigm of the camera obscura, of a ,eridical
dsion of hi polar subject and object, to the model of the body as
producer of a nonveridical dsion relati\ely indifferent to worldly
reference. Immediately this history estranges familiar others: one
is forced to revise or reject, on the one hand, any linear narra-
ti\e of technical progression (from camera obscura to photogra-
phv) and, on the other hand, any simple concept of historical
(as if modernist abstraction had heroically, on its own and
from abo,e, voided perspecti,alism). Moreo,er, one is left to
wonder at the sheer perse,erance of perspectivalism as an epis-
temological model. Howe,er, rather than celebrate the phys-
iological account-as, say, a precondition of the modernist
autonomy of the dsual, or abstractly as a basis for a new free-
dom higher truth-Crary refers it to the construction of
the modern subject, the reconfiguration of dsion, of the senses,
of the body as objects of science and agents of work. (Inciden-
tallv, this discussion implies a crucial theoretical caution for art
his;ory: not only, on the one hand, not to presuppose an essen-
tial viewer but also, on the other hand, not to historicize the
,iewer too strictlv in terms of cultural forms-as if the ,-iewer
had no other site 'of formation, as if these forms somehow
existed prior to the subject, as if they were not also complexly
produced.)
In her paper, Rosalind Krauss explores an optical uncon-
scious in modernism, here as tapped by Duchamp, Ernst,
Giacometti, and others. This intuition about the visual is sensi-
ti,e to its imohement with corporeal desire; it thus runs coun-
ter to the relative rarefaction (or reification) of dsion, e\ident
elsewhere in modernism, as a domain "of pure release, of pure
transparency, of pure self-knowledge." In effect, Krauss con-
siders the ramifications, for this countertradition, of the phys-
iological concept of the ,isual detailed by Crary, as well as of the
psychoanalytical concept of its mises-en-scene discussed by Bryson
and Rose. In particular, she argues that there exists a beat, pulse,
X I

Hal Foster I
or rhythm, a "matrix" of the ,isual which, not restricted to
space or time, to high culture or low, serves to confound such
categories of form, to undo such distinctions of vision dear to
much art and cultural history. In her portrait of Picasso, this
dysmorphic aspect of ,ision is exposed in an oeuvre celebrated
for its formal imention.
. With Norman Bryson, ,ision is again regarded as corro-
sl\e-to subjecti,ity. In its guise as the gaze of the other, vision
according to Sartre and Lacan, decenters the subject; yet in this,
scheme, Bryson argues, the centered subject remains residual-
in protest, as it were. This threatened remainder leads Sartre
and Lacan variously to present the gaze in paranoid terms as an
event which persecutes, even annihilates the subject. In
philosophies, Bryson maintains, the decentering of the
subject IS more complete. More importantly, it is welcomed
resisted; thus the gaze is not regarded as a terror.
Th.s has consequences for the construction of subjec-
tl\"lty and Its spaces, for the conception of art and its techniques
some of Bryson explores. He does not, however, pose this,
tradition as an alternathe open to our appropriation
(which was nonetheless a contested tendency of the d" . )
ISCUSSIOn ,
but rather as a way to denature our habitual practices of the vi-
sual-to prepare, in short, a politics of sight. For, finally, it is
not that the gaze is not experienced as menace in our culture
but that this menace is a social product, determined by
and a natural fact. "To think of a terror intrinsic to sight
makes It harder to think what makes sight terroristic, or
otherwise."
. Jacqueline Rose also finds a psychic trope operative in dis-
cussions of ,ision, particularly in accounts of postmodernism
that propose as its prime attribute a new formation of space.
These accounts (she mentions Jameson, Deleuze and Guattari,
Lyotard} present postmodernism in terms of a crisis in social to-
tality; whether celebrated or lamented, this crisis is often figured
XII
PREFA, CE
in terms of a breakdown in psychic life: the social as schizo-
phrenic. Rose questions this use of psychoanalysis; specifically,
she argues, no sooner is its notion of schizophrenia e\oked than
its negati\"ities evaporate: sexual difference tends to be elided
(with feminism "disenfranchised") and psychic life to be distilled
(with its "anguish" taken as our "pleasure"). This "innocenting"
of the sexual and the psychical, R_ose maintains, imohes an in-
nocenting of the \"isual, as if there existed some immediate vi-
sion before this schizoid sight. Theoretically problematic, the
schizo-trope, she concludes, may also be politically dangerous,
especially in the face of a repressi,e right which taps the uncon-
scious for its own fantasms of terror and desire.
No one set of preconditions governs this range of argu-
ment; there are, however, discourses held in common. Certainly
the entire discussion draws on analyses of the subject and the
image derived from poststructuralism and psychoanalysis; in fact,
vision is investigated as a structure instrumental to the
(dis)placement of both these terms. In this regard, the feminist
attention to the psychic imbrication of the sexual and the visual
is especially important, as is the semiological sensiti\"ity to the
visual as a field of signs produced in difference and ri,en by de-
sire. These insights have begun to produce, as is evident here, a
deconstruction of "perceptualist" art history in general and

"formalist" art theory in particular. In this respect, the discus-
sion is also allied with a certain "anti-foundational" critique,
i.e., a critique of the historical concepts posited by a discipline
(e.g., art history, for instance) as its natural epistemological
grounds. The contemporary rage to historicize is also crucial,
for the sine qua non of this discussion is the recognition that vi-
sion has a history, that there are different regimes of visuality.
(The concern with a "political unconscious" of ,ision and an
"archaeology" of its formations may suggest the contested influ-
ences of Jameson and Foucault.) One hesitates to speculate on
more worldly conditions; they will be specific to each reader.
X Ill
Hal Foster I
Howe,er, the virulence in the Western metropolis of sexist, het-
erosexualist, and racist gazes, deepened by a reactive patriarchy
and a divisive political economy, cannot help but inflect the dis-
cussion and inform its reception. The same is true of the visual
technorama which envelops most of us with new technologies of
the image and new techniques of the subject-in-sight.
One last comment. The critique of perspectivalism, the
concern with corporeal ,ision, the analysis of the gaze-these
things are not new. Decades have passed since Panofsky pointed
to the comentionality of perspective, and Heidegger to its com-
plicity with a subject willed to mastery; years since Merleau-
Ponty stressed the bodiliness of sight, Lacan the psychic cost of
the gaze, and Fanon its colonialist import. Yet significant dif-
ferences distinguish the present discussion; one is its partial
questioning of these prior analyses. Thus Rose asks what positi,e
terms are set up by such critique (e.g., do we want to seek an
alternati,e visual realm in the unconscious if this is to privilege
psychic disturbance?), and Jay cautions against the celebration of
a postmodern folie du voir (e.g., what is lost with the distance
granted by perspecti,e?). Such questioning is not intended to
correct modern analyses of dsion but precisely to keep them
critical- to not turn partial tendencies into whole traditions,
plural differences into a few static oppositions. On th1s point,
too, there emerged a critique of the search for alternative visu-
alities, whether these are to be located in the unconscious or the
body, in the past (e.g., the baroque) or in the non-West (e.g.,
Japan), and it emerged for similar reasons: not to foreclose such
differences, but to open them up, so that alternatives might not
be merely appropriated as the same or strictly distanced as
other-so that different visualities might be kept in play, and
difference in vision might remain at work.
xl v
VISION AND VISUALITY

Martin Jay
SCOPIC REGIMES OF MODERNITY
The modern era, it is often alleged,
1
has been dominated by the
sense of sight in a way that set it apart from its premodern pre-
decessors and possibly its postmodern successor. Beginning with
the Renaissance and the scientific revolution, modernity has
been normally considered resolutely ocularcentric. The invention
of printing, according to the familiar argilment of McLuhan and
Ong,
2
reinforced the privileging of the visual abetted by such in-
ventions as the telescope and the microscope. "The perceptual
field thus constituted," concludes a typical account, "was funda-
mentally nonreflexive, visual and quantitative."
3
Although the implied characterization of different eras in
this generalization as more favorably inclined to other senses
should not be taken at face value,
4
it is difficult to deny that the
visual has been dominant in modern Western culture in a wide
variety of ways. Whether we focus on "the mirror of nature"
metaphor in philosophy with Richard Rorty or emphasize the
prevalence of surveillance with Michel Foucault or bemoan the
society of the spectacle with Guy Debord,
5
we confront again
and again the ubiquity of vision as the master sense of the mod-
ern era.
But what precisely constitutes the visual culture of this era
is not so readily apparent. Indeed, we might well ask, borrowing
Christian Metz's term, is there one unified "scopic regime"
6
of
the modern or are there several, perhaps competing ones? For,
as Jacqueline Rose has recently reminded us, "our previous his-
tory is not the petrified block of a single visual space since,
looked at obliquely, it can always be seen to contain its moment
3
Martin Jay I
of unease. "
7
In fact, may there possibly be several such mo-
ments, which can be discerned, if often in repressed form, in the
modern era? If so, the scopic regime of modernity may best be
understood as a contested terrain, rather than a harmoniously
integrated complex of visual theories and practices. It may, in
fact, be characterized by 9- differentiation of visual subcultures,
whose separation has allowed us to understand the multiple im-
plications of sight in ways that are now only beginning to be ap-
preciated. That new understanding, I want to suggest, may well
be the product of a radical reversal in the hierarchy of visual
subcultures in the modern scopic regime.
Before spelling out the competing ocular fields in the mod-
ern era as I understand them, I want to make clear that I am
presenting only very crude ideal typical characterizations, which
can easily be faulted for their obvious distance from the complex
realities they seek to approximate. I am also not suggesting that
the three main visual subcultures I single out for special atten-
tion exhaust all those that might be discerned in the lengthy and
loosely defined epoch we call modernity. But, as will soon be-
come apparent, it will be challenging enough to try to do justice
in the limited space I have to those I do want to highlight as
most significant.
Let me begin by turning to what is normally claimed to be
the dominant, even totally hegemonic, visual model of the mod-
ern era, that which we can identify with Renaissance notions of
perspective in the visual arts and Cartesian ideas of subjective
rationality in philosophy. For convenience, it can be calledCar-
tesian perspectiv"alism. That it is often assumed to be equivalent
to the modern scopic regime per se is illustrated by two remarks
from prominent commentators. The first is the claim made by
the art historian William lvins, Jr., in his Art and Geometry of
1946 that "the history of art during the five hundred years that
have elapsed since Alberti wrote has been little more than the
story of the slow diffusion of his ideas through the artists and
4
SCOPJC REGIMES OF MODERNITY
peoples of Europe."
8
The second is from Richard Rorty's widely
discussed Philosopf?,v and the Mirror of Nature, published in 1979:
"in the Cartesian model the intellect inspects entities modeled on
retinal images .... In Descartes' conception- the one that be-
came the basis for 'modern' epistemology-it is representations
which are in the 'mind.' "
9
The assumption expressed in these
citations that Cartesian perspecti\alism is the reigning visual
model of modernity is often tied to the further contention that
it succeeded in becoming so because it best expressed the "natu-
ral" experience of sight valorized by the scientific world view.
When the assumed equivalence between scientific obserntion
and the natural world was disputed, so too was the domination
of this visual subculture, a salient instance being Erwin Pan-
ofsky's celebrated critique of perspective as merely a conven-
tional symbolic form.
10
But for a very long time Cartesian perspectivalism was
identified with the modern scopic regime tout court. With full
awareness of the schematic nature of what follows, let me try to
establish its most important characteristics. There is, of course,
an immense literature on the discovery, rediscovery, or invention
of perspective- all three terms are used depending on the
writer's interpretation of ancient visual knowledge-in the Ital-
ian Quattrocento. Brunelleschi is traditionally accorded the
honor of being its practical inventor or discoverer, while Alberti
is almost universally acknowledged as its first theoretical inter-
preter. From lvins, Panofsky, and Krautheimer to Edgerton,
White, and Kubovy,
11
scholars have investigated virtually every
aspect of the perspectivalist revolution, technical, aesthetic, psy-
chological, religious, even economic and political.
Despite many still disputed issues, a rough consensus seems
to have emerged around the following points. Growing out of
the late medieval fascination with the metaphysical implications
of light-light as divine lux rather than perceived lumen -linear
perspective came to symbolize a harmony between the mathe-
5
matical regularities in optics and God's will. Even after the re-
ligious underpinnings of this equation were eroded, the favorable
connotations surrounding the allegedly objective optical order
remained powerfully in place. These positive associations had
been displaced from the objects, often religious in content, de-
picted in earlier painting to the spatial relations of the perspec-
tival canvas themselves. This new concept of space was geo-
metrically isotropic, rectilinear, abstract, and uniform. The velo
or veil of threads Alberti used to depict it conventionalized that
space in a way that anticipated the grids so characteristic of
twentieth-century art, although, as Rosalind Krauss has re-
minded us, Alberti's veil was assumed to correspond to external
reality in a way that its modernist successor did not.
12
The three-dimensional, rationalized space of perspectival
vision could be rendered on a two-dimensional surface by fol-
lowing all of the 'transformational rules spelled out in Alberti's
De Pittura and later treatises by Viator, Diirer, and others. The
basic devit:e was the idea of symmetrical visual pyramids or
cones with one of their apexes the receding vanishing or centric
point in the painting, the other the eye of the painter or the be-
holder. The transparent window that was the canvas, in Alberti's
6
School of Piero della Francesca. View if an Ideal City, 1470(?). Urbino, Palazzo Ducale.
(Courtesy Art Resource, N.Y.)
famous metaphor, could also be understood as a flat mirror re-
flecting the geometricalized space of the scene depicted back
onto the no less geometricalized space radiating out from the
viewing eye.
Significantly, that eye was singular, rather than the two
eyes of normal binocular vision. It was conceived in the manner
of a lone eye looking through a peephole at the scene in front of
it. Such an eye was, moreover, understood to be static, unblink-
ing,. and fixated, rather than dynamic, moving with what later
scientists would call "saccadic" jumps from one focal point to
another. In Norman Bryson's terms, it followed the logic of the
Gaze rather than the Glance, thus producing a visual take that
was eternalized, reduced to one "point of view," and disem-
bodied. In what Bryson calls the "Founding Perception" of the
Cartesian perspectivalist tradition,
the gaze cf the painter arrests the flux cf phenomena, contemplates the
visual field from a vantage-point outside the mobility cf duratiof!, in
. an eternal moment cf disclosed presence; while in the moment cf view-
ing, the viewing subject unites his gaze with the Founding Perception,
in a moment cf peifect recreation cf that first epiphany.
13
Marlin Joy j
A number of implications followed from the adoption of this vi-
sual order. The abstract coldness of the perspectival gaze meant
the withdrawal of the painter's emotional entanglement with the
objects depicted in geometricalized space. The participatory in-
mlvement of more absorptive visual modes was diminished, if
not entirely suppressed, as the gap between spectator and spec-
tacle widened. The moment of erotic projection in vision-what
St. Augustine had anxiously condemned as "ocular desire"
14
-
was lost as the bodies of the painter and viewer were forgotten
in the name of an allegedly disincarnated, absolute eye. Although
such a gaze could, of course, still fall on objects of desire-
think, for example, of the female nude in Di.irer's famous print
of a draftsman drawing her through a screen of perspectival
threads
15
-it did so largely in the service of a reifying male look
that turned its targets into stone. The marmoreal nude drained
of its capacity to arouse desire was at least tendentially the out-
come of this development. Despite important exceptions, such as
Caravaggio's seductive boys or Titian's Venus if Urbino, the nudes
themselves fail to look out at the viewer, radiating no erotic en-
ergy in the other direction. Only much later in the history of
Western art, with the brazenly shocking nudes in Manet's De-
jeuner sur l'herbe and Olympia, did the crossing of the viewer's
gaze with that of the subject finally occur. By then the ra-
tionalized visual order of Cartesian perspectivalism was already
coming under attack in other ways as well.
In addition to its de-eroticizing of the visual order, it had
_ also fostered what might be called de-narrativization or de-tex-
tualization. That is, as abstract, quantitatively conceptualized
space became more interesting to the artist than the qualitatively
differentiated subjects painted within it,. the rendering of the
scene became an end in itself. Alberti, to be sure, had empha-
sized the use of perspective to depict istoria, ennobling stories,
but in time they seemed less important than the visual skill
shown in depicting them. Thus the abstraction of artistic form
8
SCOPIC REGIMES OF MODERNITY
from any substantive content, which is part of the cliched his-
tory of twentieth-century modernism, was already prepared by
the perspectival revolution five centuries earlier. What Bryson in
his book Word and Image calls the diminution of the discursive
function of painting, its telling a story to the unlettered masses,
in favor of its figural function,
16
meant tht; increasing autonomy
of the image from any extrinsic purpose, religious or otherwise.
The effect of realism was consequently enhanced as canvases
were filled with more and more information that seemed unre-
lated to any narrative or textual function. Cartesian perspectival-
ism was thus in league with a scientific world view that no
longer hermeneutically read the world as a divine text, but
rather saw it as situated in a mathematically regular spatia-tem-
poral order filled with natural objects that could only be ob-
served from without by the dispassionate eye of the neutral
researcher.
It was also complicitous, so many commentators have
claimed, with the fundamentally bourgeois ethic of the modern-
world. According to Edgerton, Florentine businessmen with
their newly invented technique of double-entry bookkeeping may
have been "more and more disposed to a visual order that would
accord with the tidy principles of mathematical order that they
applied to their bank ledgers."
17
John Berger goes so far as to
claim that more appropriate than the Albertian metaphor of the
window on the world is that of "a safe let into a wall, a safe in
which the visible has been deposited."
18
It was, he contends, no
accident that the invention (or rediscovery) of perspective vir-
tually coincided with the emergence of the oil painting detached
from its context and available for buying and selling. Separate
from the painter and the viewer, the visual field depicted on the
other side of the canvas could become a portable commodity
able to enter the circulation of capitalist exchange. At the same
time, if philosophers like Martin Heidegger are correct, the nat-
ural world was transformed thr<cmgh the technological world
9
/
Martin Joy I
view into a "standing reserve" for the surveillance and manip"
ulation of a dominating subject.
19
Cartesian perspectivalism has, in fact, been the target of a
widespread philosophical critique, which has denounced its priv-
ileging of an ahistorical, disinterested, disembodied subject en-
tirely outside of the world ii: claims to know only from afar. The
questionable assumption of a transcendental subjectivity charac-
teristic of universalist humanism, which ignores our embedded-
ness in what Maurice Merleau-Ponty liked to call the flesh of the
world, is thus tied to the "high altitude" thinking characteristic ,
of this scopic regime. In many accounts, this entire tradition has
thus been subjected to wholesale condemnation as both false and
pernicious.
Looked at more closely, however, it is possible to discern
internal tensions in Cartesian perspectivalism itself that suggest
'it was not quite as uniformly coercive as is sometimes assumed.
Thus, for example, 'john White/distinguishes between what he
terms "artificial perspective," in which the mirror held up to
nature is flat, and "synthetic perspective," in which that mirror
is presumed to be concave, thus producing a curved rather than
planar space on the canvas. Here, according to White, Paolo
Uccello and Leonardo da Vinci were the major innovators, offer-
ing a "spherical space which is homogeneous, but by no means
simple, and which possesses some of the qualities of Einstein's
finite infinity."
20
Although artificial perspective was the domi-
nant model, its competitor was never entirely forgotten.
Michael Kubovy has recently added the observation that
what he calls t h ~ "robustness of perspective"
21
meant that Ren-
aissance canvases could be successfully viewed from more than
the imagi?"ed apex of the beholder's visual pyramid. He criticizes
those who naively identify the rules of perspective established by
its theoretical champions with the actual practice of the artists
themselves. Rather than a procrustean bed, they were practically
subordinated to the exigencies of perception, which means that
10
SCOPIC REGIMES OF MODERNITY
denunciations of their failings are often directed at a straw man
(or at least his straw eye).
Equally problematic is the subject position in the Cartesian
perspectivalist epistemology. For the monocular eye at the apex
of beholder's pyramid could be construed as transcendental and
universal- that is, exactly the same for any human .viewer oc-
cupying the same point in time and space-or contingent-
solely dependent on the particular, individual vision of distinct
beholders, with their own concrete relations to the scene in
front of them. When the former was explicitly transformed into
the latter, the relativistic implications ~ f perspectivalism could
be easily drawn. Even in the nineteenth century, this potential
was apparent to thinkers like Leibniz, although he generally
sought to escape its more troubling implications. These were not
explicitly stressed and than praised until the late nineteenth cen-
tury by such thinkers as Nietzsche. If everyone had his or her
own camera obscura with a distinctly different peephole, he
gleefully concluded, then no transcendental world view was
possible.
22
Finally, the Cartesian perspectivalist tradition contained a
potential for internal contestation in the possible uncoupling of
the painter's view of the scene from that of the presumed be-
holder. Interestingly, Bryson identifies this de\elopment with
Vermeer, who represents for him a second state of perspectival-
ism even more disincarnated than that of Alberti. "The bond
with the viewer's physique is broken and the viewing subject,"
he writes, "is now proposed and assumed as a notional point, a
non-empirical Gaze."
23
What makes this last obsenation so suggestive is the open-
ing it provides for a consideration of an alternative scopic regime
that may be understood as more than a subvariant of Cartesian
perspectivalism. Although I cannot pretend to be a serious stu-
dent of Vermeer able to quarrel with Bryson's interpretation of
his work, it might be useful to situate the painter in a different
11
Martin Jay I
context from the one we have been discussing. That is, we might
include him and the Dutch seventeenth-century art of which he
was so great an exemplar in a visual culture very different from
that we associate with Renaissance perspective, one which
Svetlana Alpers has recently called The Art if DescribinB.
24
According to Alpers, the hegemonic role of Italian painting
in art history has occluded an appreciation of a second tradition,
which flourished in the seventeenth-century Low Countries.
Borrowing Georg Lukics's distinction between narration and de-
scription, which he used to contrast realist and naturalist fiction,
she argues that Italian Renaissance art, for all its fascination with
the techniques of perspective, still held fast to the storytelling
function for which they were used. In the Renaissance, the
world on the other side of Alberti's window, she writes, "was a
stage in which human figures performed significant actions
based on the texts of the poets. It is a narrative art. "
25
Northern
art, in contrast, suppresses narrative and textual reference in
favor of description and visual surface. Rejecting the privileged,
constitutive role of the monocular subject, it emphasizes instead
the prior existence of a world of objects depicted on the flat can-
vas, a world indifferent to the beholder's position in front of it.
This world, moreover, is not contained entirely within the frame
of the Albertian window, but seems instead to extend beyond it.
Frames do exist around Dutch pictures, but they are arbitrary
and without the totalizing function they serve in Southern art.
If there is a model for Dutch art, it is the map with its un-
apologetically flat surface and its willingness to include words as
well as objects in its visual space. Summarizing the difference
between the art of describing and Cartesian perspectivalism,
Alpers po_sits the following oppositions:
attention to many small thinss versus a Jew larse ones; lisht reflected
?if objects versus objects modeled by lisht and shadow; the suiface if
objects, their colors and textures, dealt with rather than their place-
12
,I
SCOPIC REGIMES OF MODERNITY
ment in a lesible space; an unframed imase versus one that is clearly
framed; one with no clearly situated viewer compared to one with such
a viewer. The distinction follows a hierarchical model if distin&uishin&
between phenomena commonly riferred to as primary and secondary:
objects and space versus the suifaces, forms versus the textures if the
world.
26
If there is a philosophical correlate to Northern art, it is
not Cartesianism with its faith in a geometricalized, rationalized,
essentially intellectual concept of space but rather the more em-
pirical visual experience of observationally oriented Baconian
empiricism. In the Dutch context Alpers identifies it with Con-
stantin Huygens. The nonmathematical impulse of this tradition
accords well with the indifference to hierarchy, proportion, and
analogical resemblances characteristic of Cartesian perspectival-
ism. Instead, it casts its attentive eye on the fragmentary, de-
tailed, and richly articulated surface of a world it is content to
describe rather than explain. Like the microscopist of the seven-
teenth century-Leeuwenhoeck is her prime example-Dutch
art savors the discrete particularity of visual experience and re-
sists the temptation to allegorize or typologize what it sees, a
temptation to which she claims Southern art readily succumbs.
In two significant ways, the art of describing can be said to
have anticipated later visual models, however much it was subor-
dinated to its Cartesian perspectivalist rival. As we have already
noted, a direct filiation between Alberti's velo and the grids of
modernist art is problematic because, as Rosalind Krauss has ar-
gued, the former assumed a three-dimensional world out there
in nature, whereas the latter did not. A more likely predecessor
can thus be located in the Dutch art based on the mapping im-
pulse. As Alpers notes,
Althoush the arid that Ptolemy proposed, and those that Mercator later
imposed, share the mathematical uniformity if the Renaissance perspec-
tive arid, they do not share the positioned viewer, the frame, and the
13
r
Gerrit Dou. A Poulterer's Shop, c. 1617. London, National Gallery of Art. (Courtesy of
the Trustees, The National Gallery, London)
:' (
I
'I
'!
; I
I
'!
I
SCOPIC REGIMES OF MODERNITY
dpnition if the picture as a window through which an .external viewer
looks. On these accounts the Ptolemaic grid, indeed cartographic grids
in general, must be distinguished from, not corifused with, the perspec-
tival grid. The projection is, one might say, viewed from nowhere. Nor
is it to be looked through. It assumes a flat working swjace.
27
Secondly, the art of describing also anticipates the v'isual experi-
ence produced by the nineteenth-century invention of photogra-
phy. Both share a number of salient features: "fragmentariness,
arbitrary frames, the immediacy that the first practitioners ex-
pressed by claiming that the photograph gave Nature the power
to reproduce herself directly unaided by man. "
28
The parallel
frequently drawn between photography and the anti-perspec-
tivalism of impressionist art, made for example by Aaron Scharf
in his discussion of Degas,
29
should thus be extended to include
the Dutch art of the seventeenth century. And if Peter Galassi is
correct in Bifore Photography, there was also a tradition of
topographical painting -landscape sketches of a fragment of
reality- that resisted Cartesian perspectivalism and thus pre-
pared the way both for photography and the re-
turn to two-dimensional canvases.
30
How widespread or self-
consciously appositional such a tradition was I will leave to
experts in art history to decide. What is important for our pur-
poses is simply to register the existence of an alternative scopic
regime even during the heyday of the dominant tradition.
Alpers's attempt to characterize it is, of course, open to
possible criticisms. The strong opposition between narration and
description she posits may seem less firm if we recall the de-har-
rativizing impulse in perspectival art itself mentioned above. And
if we can detect a certain fit between the exchange principle of
capitalism and the abstract relational space of perspective, we
might also discern a complementary fit between the valorization
of material surfaces in Dutch art and the fetishism of com-
modities no less characteristic of a market economy. In this
15
Martin Jay I
sense, both scopic regimes can be said to reveal different aspects
of a complex but unified phenomenon, just as Cartesian and
Baconian philosophies can be said to be consonant, if in dif-
ferent ways, with the scientific world view.
If, however, we turn to a third model of vision, or what
can be called the second moment of unease in the dominant
model, the possibilities for an even more radical alternative can
be discerned. This third model is perhaps best identified with
the baroque. At least as early as 1888 and Heinrich Wofflin's
epochal study, Renaissance and Baroque, art historians have been
tempted to postulate a perennial oscillation between two styles
in both painting and architecture.
31
In opposition to the lucid,
linear, solid, fixed, planimetric, closed form of the Renaissance,
or as Wolfflin later called it, the classical style, the baroque was
painterly, recessional, soft-focused, multiple, and open. Derived,
at least according to one standard etymology, from the Por-
tuguese word for an irregular, oddly shaped pearl, the baroque
connoted the bizarre and peculiar, traits which werenormally
disdained by champions of clarity and transparency of form.
Although it may be prudent to confine the baroque largely
to the seventeenth century and link it with the Catholic Counter
Reformation or the manipulation of popular culture by the
newly ascendant absolutist state-as has, for example, the Span-
ish historian Jose Antonio Maranll
32
-it may also be possible to
see it as a permanent, if often repressed, visual possibility
throughout the entire modern era. In the recent work of the
French philosopher Christine Buci-Glucksmann, La raison baroque
of 1984 and La folie du voir of 1986,
33
it is precisely the explosive
power of baroque vision that is seen as the most significant al-
ternative :o the:hegemonic visual style we have called Cartesian
perspectivalism. Celebrating the dazzling, disorienting, ecstatic
surplus of images in baroque visual experience, she emphasizes
its rejection of the monocular geometricalization of the Carte-
sian tradition, with its illusion of homogeneous three-dimen-
16
SCOPIC REGIMES OF' MODERNITY
sional space seen with a God's-eye-view from afar. She also
tacitly contrasts the Dutch art of describing, with its belief in
legible surfaces and faith in the material solidity of the world its
paintings map, with the baroque fascination for opacity, unread-
ability, and the indecipherability of the reality it depicts.
For Buci-Glucksmann, the baroque self-consciously revels
in the contradictions between surface and depth, disparaging as
a result any attempt to reduce the multiplicity of visual spaces
into any one coherent essence. Significantly, the mirror that it
holds up to nature is not the flat reflecting glass that commenta-
tors like Edgerton and White see as vital in the development of
rationalized or "analytic" perspective, but rather the anamor-
phosistic mirror, either concave or convex, that distorts the visual
image-or, more precisely, reveals the conventional rather than
natural quality of "normal" specularity by showing its depend-
ence on the materiality of the medium of reflection. In fact, be-
cause of its greater awareness of that materiality- what a recent
commentator, Rodolphe Gasche, has drawn attention to as the
"tain of the mirror"
34
- baroque visual experience has a strongly
tactile or haptic quality, which prevents it from turning into the
absolute ocularcentrism of its Cartesian perspectivalist rival.
In philosophical terms, although no one system can be seen
as its correlate, Leibniz's pluralism of monadic viewpoints,
35
Pas-
cal's meditations on paradox, and the Counter Reformation mys-
tics' submission to vertiginous experiences of rapture might all
be seen as related to baroque vision. Moreover, the philosophy it
favored self-consciously eschewed the model of intellectual clar-
ity expressed in a literal language purified of ambiguity. Instead,
it recognized the inextricability of rhetoric and vision, which
meant that images were signs and that concepts always contained
an irreducibly imagistic component.
Baroque vision, Buci-Glucksmann also suggests, sought to
represent the unrepresentable and, necessarily failing, produced
the melancholy that Waiter Benjamin in particular saw as
17
/ ~
Martin Jay
characteristic of the baroque sensibility. As such, it was closer to
what a long tradition of aesthetics called the sublime, in contrast
to the beautiful, because of its yearning for a presence that can
never be fulfilled. Indeed, desire, in its erotic as well as meta-
physical forms, courses through the baroque scopic regime. The
body returns to dethrone the disinterested gaze of the disincar-
nated Cartesian spectator. But unlike the return of the body
celebrated in such twentieth-century philosophies of vision as
Merleau-Ponty's, with its dream of meaning-laden imbrication of
the viewer and the viewed in the flesh of the world, here it gen-
erates only allegories of obscurity and opacity. Thus it truly pro-
duces one of those "moments of unease" which Jacqueline Rose
sees challenging the petrification of the dominant visual order
(the art of describing seeming in fact far more at ease in the
world).
A great deal more might be said about these three ideal
'typical visual cultures, but let me conclude by offering a few
speculations, if I can use so visual a term, on their current sta-
tus. First, it seems undeniable that we have witnessed in the
twentieth century a remarkable challenge to the hierarchical
order of the three regimes. Although it would be foolish to claim
that Cartesian perspectivalism has been driven from the field,
the extent to which it has been denaturalized and vigorously
contested, in philosophy as well as in the visual arts, is truly re-
markable. The rise of hermeneutics, the return of pragmatism,
the profusion of linguistically oriented structuralist and
poststructuralist modes of thought have all put the epistemologi-
cal tradit:ion derived largely from Descartes very much on the
defensive. And, of course, the alternative of Baconian observa-
tion, which periodically resurfaces in variants of positivistic
thought, has been no less vulnerable to attack, although one
might argue that the visual practice with which it had an elec-
tive affinity has shown remarkable resilience with the growing
status of photography as a nonperspectival art form (or, if you
18
SCOPIC REGIMES OF MODERNITY
prefer, counter-art form). There are as well contemporary artists
like the German Jewish, now Israeli painter Joshua Neustein,
whose fascination with the flat materiality of maps has recently
earned a comparison with Alpers's seventeenth-century
Dutchmen.
36
Still, if one had to single out the s c o p i ~ regime that has fi-
nally come into its own in our time, it would be the "madness of
vision" Buci-Glucksmann identifies with the baroque. Even pho-
tography, if Rosalind Krauss's recent work on the Surrealists is
any indication,
37
can lend itself to purposes more in line with
this visual impulse than the art of mere describing. In the
postmodern discourse that elevates the sublime to a position of
superiority over the beautiful, it is surely the "palimpsests of the
unseeable,"
38
as Buci-Glucksmann calls baroque vision, that seem
most compelling. And if we add the current imperative to re-
store rhetoric to its rightful place and accept the irreducible lin-
guistic moment in vision and the equally insistent visual moment
in language, the timeliness of the baroque alternative once again
seems obvious.
In fact, if I may conclude on a somewhat perverse note, the
radical dethroning of Cartesian perspectivalism may have gone a
bit too far. In our haste to denaturalize it and debunk its claims
to represent vision per se, we may be tempted to forget that the
other scopic regimes I have quickly sketched are themselves no
more natural or closer to a "true" vision. Glancing is not some-
how innately superior to gazing; vision hostage to desire is not
necessarily always better than casting a cold eye; a sight from
the situated context of a body in the world may not always see
things that are visible to a "high-altitude" or "God's-eye-view."
However we may regret the excesses of scientism, the Western
scientific tradition may have only been made possible by Carte-
sian perspectivalism or its complement, the Baconian art of de-
scribing. There may well have been some link between the
absence of such scopic regimes in Eastern cultures, especially the
19
L_
I
Martin Jay I
former, and their general lack of indigenous scientific revolu-
tions. In our scramble to scrap the rationalization of sight as a
pernicious reification of visual fluidity, we need to ask what the
costs of too uncritical an embrace of its alternatives may be. In
the case of the art of describing, we might see another reifica-
tion at work, that which makes a fetish of the material surface
instead of the three-dimensional depths. Lukics's critique of nat-
uralist description in literature, unmentioned by Alpers, might
be applied to painting as well. In the case of baroque vision, we
might wonder about the celebration of ocular madness, which
may produce ecstasy in some, but bewilderment and confusion
in others. As historians like Maravall have darkly warned, the
phantasmagoria of baroque spectacle was easily used to manipu-
late those who were subjected to it. The current vision of "the
culture industry," to use the term Maravall borrows from
Horkheimer and Adorno in his account of the seventeenth cen-
tury, does not seem very threatened by postmodernist visual ex-
periments in "la folie du voir." In fact, the opposite may well be
the case.
Rather than erect another hierarchy, it may therefore be
more useful to acknowledge the plurality of scopic regimes now
available to us. Rather than demonize one or another, it may be
less dangerous to explore the implications, both positive and
negative, of each. In so doing, we won't lose entirely the sense of
unease that has so long haunted the visual culture of the West,
but we may learn to see the virtues of differentiated ocular ex-
periences. We may learn to wean ourselves from the fiction of a
"true" vision and revel instead in the possibilities opened up by
the scopic regimes we have already invented and the ones, now
so hard to &nvision, that are doubtless to come.
20
SCOPlC REGIMES OF MODERNITY
Notes
I. See, for example, Lucien FebHe, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century:
The Religion ?f Rabelais, trans. Beatrice Gottlieb (Cambridge, Mass.: Hanard Uni-
versity Press, 1982) and Robert Mandrou, introduction to Modern France,
1500-1640: An Essay in Historical trans. R. E. Hallmark (New York:
Holmes & Meier, 1975).
.
2. Marshal! McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Ne\\ York:
McGraw-Hill, 1964); Waiter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomenafor
Cultural and Religious History (New Ha,en: Yale UniYersity Press, 1967); see also
Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and
Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe, 2 Yols. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1979).
3. Donald M. Lowe, History ?f Bourgeois Perception (Chicago: UniYersit; of Chi-
cago Press, 1982), p. 26.
4. For an account of the positiYe attitude towards Yision in the medieYal
church, see Margaret R. Miles, image as Insight: Visual Understanding in Western
Christianity and Secular Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985). Contrary to the ar-
gument of Febvre and Mandrou, which has been ,ery influential, she sho"s the
extent to which sight was by no means widely demeaned in the Middle Ages.
5. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1979); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison,
trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979); Guy Debord, Societr of
the Spectacle, rev. ed. (Detroit: Black and Red, 1977).
6. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans.
Celia Britton et al. (Bloomington: Indiana UniYersity Press, 1982), p. 61.
7. Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986),
pp. 232-233.
8. William M. lvins, Jr., Art and Geometry: A Study in Space lntuitions (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1946), p. 81.
9. Rorty, p. 45.
10. Erwin Panofsky, "Die Perspektive als 'symbolischen Form,"' Vortriige der
Bibliothek Warburg 4 ( 1924-1925): 258-331.
11. William M. lvins, Jr., On the Rationalization ?f Sight (New York: Metropolitan
Museum of Art, 1938); Panofsky, "Die PerspektiYe als 'symholischen Form'";
Richard Krautheimer, "Brunelleschi and Linear Perspective," in Brunelleschi in
Perspective, comp. lsabelle Hyman (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974);
Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr., The Renaissance Discovery ?f Linear Perspective (New York:
Basic Books, 1975); John White, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space, 3rd ed.
(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1987); Michael Kubmy, The Psychology of Per-
spective and Renaissance Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
21
Martin Jay
12. Rosalind E. Krauss, The On[Jinality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths
(ambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1985), p. 10.
(i 3\ Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale
.....___.r .
University Press, 1983), p. 94.
14. Augustine discusses ocular desire in Chapter 35 of the Confessions.
15. For a discussion of the gender implications of this work, see Svetlana Al-
pers, "Art History and its Exclusions," in Feminism and Art History: Questioning the
Litany, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harper and Row,
1982), p. 187.
16. Norman Btyson, Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Regime (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981 ), chapter I.
17. Edgerton, p. 39.
18. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: BBC, 1972), p. 109.
19. Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology," in The Question
Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper
and Row, 1977). Heidegger's most extensive critique of Cartesian perspectival-
ism can be found in his essay "The Age of the World Picture," in the same
volume.
20. White, p. 208.
21. Kubovy, chapter IV.
22. Sarah Kofman, Camera Obscura, de l'ideologie (Paris: Editions Galilee, 197 3 ),
treats this theme in Nietzsche.
23. Bryson, Vision and Painting, p. 112.
24. Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Durch Art in the Cenrwy
(Chicago: Uni,ersity of Chicago Press, 1983).
25. Ibid., p. xix.
26. Ibid., p. 44.
27. Ibid., p. 138.
28. Ibid., p. 43.
29. Aaron Scharf, Art and (London: Alien Lane, 1968; reprint, New
York: Penguin Books, 1986), chapter VIII.
30. Peter Galassi, Before Painting and rhe lmenrion of Photography (New
York: Museum of Modern Art, 1981 ).
31. Hcinrich Wiilffiin, Renaissance and Baroque, trans. Kathrin Simon (lthaca,
N.Y.: Corndl UniH'rsity Press, 1966). See also the systematic de,-elopment of
the contrast in Principles of Ate fhe Problem of the Derelopment of Ssrle in
Later Art, trans. M; D. Hottinger (London: G. Bell & Sons, Ltd., 1932).
32. Jos<' Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Anatrsis of a Historical Structure,
trans. Terr: Cochran (Minneapolis: Uniwrsit: of Minnesota Press, 1986).
33. Christine Buci-Glucksmann, La raison baroque: de Baudeloire a Benjamin (Paris:
22
'i
I.
SCOPIC REGIMES OF MODERNITY
Editions Galilee, 1984) and La folie du voir: de l'esthetique baroque (Paris: Editions
Galilee, 1986) .
34. Rodolphe Gasche, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of R'!fiection
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986).
35. As Buci-Glucksmann recognizes, Leibnizian pluralism retains a faith in the
harmonizing of perspectives that is absent from the more radically Nietzschean
impulse in the baroque. See La folie du voir, p. 80, where she identifies that im-
pulse with Gracian and Pascal.
36. See lrit Rogoff, "Mapping Out Strategies of Dislocation," in the catalogue
for Neustein's October 24-November 26, 1987 show at the Exit Art gallery in
New York.
37. Krauss, "The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism," in The Originality of
the Avant-Garde. See also her work with Jane Livingston, ['amour fou: Photography
and Surrealism (New York: Abbeville Press, 1985).
38. Buci-Glucksmann, La folie du voir, chapter VI.
23

Jonathao Crary
MODERNIZING VISION
My starting point is the various Ways in which vision and the
techniques and discourses surrounding it have been periodized
historically. It is interesting that so many attempts to theorize
vision and visuality are wedded to 'models that emphasize a con-
tinuous and overarching Western visual tradition. Obviously at
times it is strategically necessary to map out and pose the out-
lines of a dominant Western speculatiye or scopic tradition of
vision .that is continuous or in some sense effective, for instance,
from Plato to the present, or from the Quattrocento into the
twentieth century, or to whenever. My concern is not so much
to argue against these models, which have their own usefulness,
but rather to insist there are some important discontinuities that
such hegemonic constructions have prevented from cOming into
view. The specific account that interests me here, one that has
become almost ubiquitous and to be develOped in a
variety of forms, is that the emergence of photography and cin-
ema in the nineteenth century is a fulfillment of a long unfolding
of technological and/or ideological development in the West in
which the camera obscura evolves into the photographic camera.
Implied is that at each step in this evolution the same essential
presuppositions about an observer's relation to the world are in
place. One could name a dozen or more books on the history of
film or photography in whose first cha(>ter appears the obliga-
tory seventeenth-century engra,ing depicting a camera obscura,
as a kind of-inaugural or incipient formon a long evolutionary
ladder.
These models of continuity are used in the serdce of both
1
29
for lack of better terms, the right and the left. On the one hand
are those who pose an account of ever-increasing progress to-
ward verisimilitude in representation, in \\'hich Renaissance per-
spective and photography are part of the same quest for a- fully
objective equivalent of .. natural \'ision." On the other are those
who see, for example, the camera obscura and cinema as bound
up in a single enduring apparatus of po,ver, elaborated over sn-
eral centuries, that continues to dt:;,fine and regulate the status of
an observer.
WHat I want to do are essentially two related things: ( 1) to
briefly and very generally articulate the camera obscura model of
vision in terms of its historical specificity, and (2) to suggest
how that model collapsed in the early nineteenth century-in
the 1820s and 1830s-when it was displaced by radically dif-
ferent notions of what an observer was and of what constituted
vision. So if later in the nineteenth century cinema or photogra-
phy seem to invite fortnal comparisons \Vith the camera obscura,
or if Marx, Freud, Bergson, and ?thers refer to it, it is within a
social, cultural, and milieu in which there had already
been a profound rupture with the conditions of Yision presup-
posed by this device.
For at least two thousand years it has been known that, when
light passes through a small hole into a dark, enclosed interior,
an inverted image will appear on the wall opposite the hole.
Thinkers as remote from each other as Euclid, Aristotle, Roger
Bacon, and Leonardo noted this phenorr1enon and speculated in
y.arious ways how it might or might not be analogous to the
:', functioning of human vision.
But it is crucial to make a distinction between the empiri-
cal fact that an image can be produced in this way (something
that continues to be as true now as it \\o'as in antiquity) and the
camera obscura as a socially constructed artifact. For the camera
obscura was not simply an inert and neutral piece of equipment
..
MODERNIZING VISION
or a set of technical premises to be tinkered upon and imprmed
over the years; rather, it was embedded in a much larger and
denser organization of knowledge and of the observing subject.
If we want to be historical about it, 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.
lt became a model, ob\'iously elaborated in a \'ariety of
ways, for how obserntion leads to truthful inferences about an
external world. 1t was an era when the camera obscura was
simultaneously and inseparably a central epistemological figure
within a discursi\'e order, as in Descartes's Dioptrics, Locke's
Essay on Human Underscandina, and Leibniz's critique of Locke,
and occupied a major position within an arrangement of techni-
cal and cultural practices, for example in the work of Kepler and
Ne\\'ton. As a complex technique of power, it a means of
legislating for an obser\'er what constituted percJptual "truth,"
and it delineated a fixed set of relations tO whicJ an obser\'er
!
was made subject. 1
What I \Vill argue is that ,ery early on in tlle nineteenth
century -the camera obscura collapses as a model !for an observer
and for the functioning of human vision. There is a profound
shift in the way in which an observer is described, figured, and
posited in science, philosophy, and in new techniques and prac-
tices of vision. Here I want briefly and \'ery sketchily to indicate
a few important features of this shift.
First, a bit more about the camera obscura in the se\'en-
teenth and eighteenth centu.ries. Abo,e all, whether in the work
of scientists or artists, empiricists or rationalists, it was an appa-
ratus that guaranteed access to an objecthe truth about the
world. lt assumed importance as a model both for the obsena-
tion of empirical phenomenon and for reAective introspection
and self-observation. In Locke, for example, the camera is a
"
Jona11111 Crary I
means of spatially visualizing the position of an obsening sub-
ject.1 The image of the room in Locke takes on a special signifi-
cance, referring to what it meant in the se,enteenth century to
be in camera, that is, within the chainbers of a judge or person of
title.
2
Thus he adds onto the obser\'cr's passhe role a more au-
thoritati\'e and juridical function to guarantee and to police the
correspondence between exterior world and interior representa-
tion and to exclude anything disorderly or unruly.
Richard Rorty has pointed to Locke and Descartes as key
figures in establishing this conception of the human mind as "an
inrl.h space in which clear distinct ideas passed in rniew
before an inner Eye ... an inner space in which sen-
sations were themselves the objects of quasi-obserntion. "
3
For
Descartes, the camera obscura was a demonstration of how an
observer can knO\v the \ovorld "uniquely by per.ception of the
mind." The secure positioning Of the self with this empty inte-
rior sPace was a precondition for knowing the outer world. Its
, enclosedness, its darkness, its categorical separation an ex-
terior incarnates Oescartes's announcement in the Third Medita-
tion, "I will now shut my eyes, I shall stop my ears, I shall
disregard my senses."
4
If part of Oescartes's method implied a
neeod to escape the uncertainties of mere human vision, the cam-
era obscura is compatible with his quest to found knowledge on
a purely objecthe view of the world. The aperture of the camera
to a single mathematically definable point from
which the world could be logically deduced and re-presented.
Founded on laws of nature-that is, geometrical optics-the
camera pro,ided an infallible vantage point on the world. Sen-
sory evidence that depended in any way on the body was re-
jected in favor of the representations of this mechanical and
monocular apparatus, whose authenticity was placed beyond
doubt.
Monocular, not binocular. A single eye, not two. Until the
nineteenth century, binocular disparity, the fact that we see a
11
MODI:IIIIIIIIZING VISION
slightly different image with each eye, was never seriously ad-
dressed as a central is_sue. It was ignored or minimiZed as a
problem, for it implied the inadmissible physiological and ana-
tomical operation of human vision. A monocular model, on the
other hand, precluded the difficult problem of having to recon-
cile the dissimilar and therefore provisional and tentative images
presented to each eye. Monocularity, like perspective and geo-
metrical optics, was one of the Renaissance codes through which
a ,isual world is constructed according to systematized con-
stants, and from which any inconSistencies and irregularities are
banished to insure the formation of a homogeneous, unified, and
fully legible space.
Finally to wind up this extremely compressed outline, it
should also be suggeSted how closely the camera obscura is
bound up with a metaphysic of interiority. It is a figure for the
observer who is nominally a free sovereign individual but who is
also a privatized isolated subject enclosed in a quasi-domestic
space separated from a public .exterior world. Jt defined an ob-
server who was subjected to an inflexible set of positions and di-
,isions. The ,isual world could be appropriated by an autono-
mous subject but only as a private unitary consciousness de-
tached from any active relation with an The monadic
\'iewpoint.of the individual is legitimized by camera obscura,
but his or her sensory experience is to an external
and pre-given world of objecthe truth.
What is striking is the suddenness anJ thoroughness with which
this paradigm collapses in the early nineteenth centUry and gives
way to a di,erse set of fundamentally different models of human
. \"ision. I want to discuss one crucial dimension of this Shift, the
insertion of a new term into discourses and practices of vision:
the human body, a term whose exclusion was one of the founda-
tions of classical theories of ,ision and optics as I have just sug-
gested. One of the most telling signs of the new centrality of the
..
--...
JoulfNI11 Crary I
body in vision is Goethe's Theory of Colours, published in 1810,
\'lrhich I have discussed at length elsewhere.
5
This is a work cru-
cial not for its polemic with Newton over the composition of
light but for its articulation of::.. model of subjective vision in
which the body is introduced in all its physiological density as
the ground on which vision is possible. In Goethe we find an
image of a newly productive observer whose body has a range of
capacities to generate visual experience; it is a question of visual
experience that does not refer or correspond to anything exter-
nal to tht.: observing subject. Goethe is concerned mainly with
the associated with the retinal afterimage and its
chromatic transformations. But he is onlv the first of manv re-
, '
searchers who become preoccupied with the afterimage in the
1820s and 1830s throughout Europe. Their collecti,e study de-
fined how vision was an irreducible amalgam of physiological
processes and external stimulation, and dramatized the produc-
tive role played by the body in ,-ision.
Although we are talking about scientists, what is in ques-
tion here is the discmery of the .. visionary" capacities of the
body, and we miss the significance of this resear<;h if we don't
recall some of its strange intensity and exhilaration. For what
was often involved was the experience of staring directly into
the sun, of sunlight searing itself onto the body, palpably dis-
turbing it into a proliferation of incandescent calor. Three of the
most celebrated students of ,-ision of this period went blind or
permanently damaged their eyesight by repeatedly staring at the
sun: David Brewster, who imented the kaleidoscope and stereo-
Joseph Plateau, who studied the so-called persistence of
'vision; and Gustav Fechner, one of the founders of modern
quantitative psychology. Fechner's biography provides an account
of the almost addictive fascination with which he persisted in
this activity. At the same. time in the late 1830s and early 1840s
we have the visual expression of these attempts in the late paint-
ings of Turner, in which there is that piercing confrontation of
"
MOOI!:RNIZING VISION
eye and sun, paintings in which the strictures that pre\'iously
had mediated and regulated vision are abandoned. Nothing now
protects or distances the observer from_ the seductive and sen-
sual brilliance of the sun. The symbolic of the camera
obscura have crumbled.
Obviously afterimages have been noted and recorded since
antiquity, but they had always been outside or on the margins of
the domain of optics. They were considered illusions-decep-
tive, spectral, and unreal. In the early century such
experiences that previously had been an expression of the frailty
and the unreliability of the body now constituted the posithity
of vision. But perhaps more importantly, the privileging of the
body as a \isual producer began to collapse the distinction be-
tween inner and outer upon which the camera obscura de-
pended. Once the objects of vision are coexteji,e with one's
own body, vision becomes dislocated and dep itioned onto a
single immanent plane. The bipolar setup nni hes. Thirdly, sub-
jective ,ision is found to be distinctly tempora, an unfolding of
processes within the body, thus undoing notions of a direct cor-
respondence between perception and object. By the 1820s, then,
we effecti,ely have a model of autonomous ,ision.
The subjective vision that endowed the obsenir with a new per-
ceptual autonomy and producthity was simultjneously the result
of the obsener having been made into a subject of new knowl-
edge, of new techniques of power. And the terrain on which
these two interrelated observers emerged in the nineteenth cen-
tury was the science of physiology. From 1820 through the
1840s it was ,ery unlike the specialized science that it later he-
came; it had then no formal institutional identity and came into
being as the accumulated work of disconnected individuals from
diverse branches of learning. In common was the excitement
and wonderment at the body, \-vhich now appeared like a new
continent to be mapped, explored, and mastered, with new re-
"
cesses and mechanisms uncovered for the first time. But the real
importance of physiology lay in the fact that it became the arena
for new types of epistemological reflection that depended on
new knowledge about the eye and processes of dsion. Physiology
at this moment of the nineteenth century is one of those sci-
ences that stand for the rupture that Foucault poses between the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in which man emerges as a
being in whom the transcendent is mapped onto the empirical.
6
lt was the discovery that knowledge was conditioned by the
physical and anatomical structure and functioning of the body,
and' in particular of the eyes. At the same time, as Georges Can-
guilherp has noted, for the new sciences in the nineteenth cen-
tury the body was a priori a producthe body: it existed to be set
to work.
7
E,en in the early 1820s the study of afterimages quickly
became the object of a more rigorous and quantitarin! scientific
research throughout Europe. Studied was the persistence and
modulation of afterimages: how long they lasted, \\hat changes
they went through, and under \\"hat conditions. But instead of
recording afterimages in terms of the Ji,ed time of the body as
Goethe had generally done, they were studied as part of a com-
prehensi,-e quantification of the irritability of the eye. Re-
searchers timed how long it took the eye tri become fatigued,
how long dilation and contraction of the pupil took, and mea-
sured the of eye mmements. They examined con-
,ergence and accommodation in binocular ,ision and the
relation of image to retinal curnture.
The physical surface of the eye itself became a field of sta-
.. tistical information: the retina was demarcated in terms of how
calor changes hue depending on where it the eye. Also
measured were the extent of the area of visibility, of peripheral
,ision, the distinction between direct and indirect vision, and
the location of the blind spot. Classical optics, which had stud-
ied the transparency of mechanical optical systems, ga,e way to
"

MOD!:ANIZING VISION
a mapping of the human eye as an opaque territory with ,arying
,zones of efficiency and aptitude and specific parameters of nor-
mal and pathological vision. Some of the most celchratcd of
these experiments were Joseph Plateau's calculation, in the
1830s, of the a,erage duration of an afterimage, or persistence of
vision, which was about one-third of a second, and later,
Helmholtz's measurement of the speed of m:nc transmission,
which astounded people by how slow it was, about ninety feet
per second. Both statistics heightened the sense of a temporal
disjunction between perception and its object and suggested new
possibilities of interYening externally in the process of ,ision.
Clearly this study of the eye in terms of reaction time and
thresholds of fatigue and stimulation was not unrelated to in-
creasing demand for knowledge about the adaptation of a human
subject tO productiYe tasks in which optimum .lttention spa.n was
indispensable for the rationalization of human labor. The eco-
nomic need for rapid coordination of hand and. eye in perform-
ing repetiti,e actions required accurate knowledge of human
optical and sensory capacities. In the context of new industrial
models of factory production the problem of ,isual inattention
was a serious one. But what de,eloped was a nqtion of ,ision
that was fundamentally quantitathe, in which terms con-
stituting the relation between perception and object became ab-
stract, interchangeable, and nondsual. One of most
paradoxical figures of the nineteenth century is Gustav Fechner,
whose delirious and even mystical experiences \Vith solar after-
images led to his mathematization of perception, in which he es-
tablished a functional relation between stimulus and sensation.
8
Sensory perception was given a measurable magnitude solely in
terms of the known and controllable magnitudes of external
stimulation. Vision became studied in terms of abstract measur-
able regularities, and Fechner's famous equations were to be one
of the foundations of modern stimulus-response psychology.
Another dimension of the collective achievement of phys-
"
iology in the first half of the nineteenth century waS the gradual
parcelization and diYision of the body into increasingly separate
and specific systems and functions. Especially important were
the localization of brain and nerve functions, and the distinction
between sensory nerves and motor nenes. Finally, by 1826 it
was determined that sensory nenes were of fi,e distinct types,
corresponding to the five senses. All of this produced a new
"truth" about the body which some haYe linked to the so-called
.. separation of the senses" in the nineteenth century, and to the
idea that the specialization of labor was homologous to a special-
iZation of sight and of a heightened autonomous ,ision, some-
thing that Fredric Jameson de\'elops briefly but provocatively in
The Political Unconscious.
9
I belie,e, howe,er, that such a homol
ogy doesn't take account of how thoroughly ,ision was recon
cei\'ed in the earlier nineteenth century. lt still seems to pose
obsenation as the act of a unified subject looking out onto a
world that iso the object of his or her sight, only that, because the
of the world ha,e become reified and commodified, Yi
sion in a sense becomes conscious of itself as sheer looking.
But in the first major scientific theorization of the separa-
tion of the senses, there is a much more decishe break with the
classical obser\'er; and what is at stake is not simplr the height
ening or isolating of the optical but rather a of an oh
ser\'er for whom \'ision is concei,ed without any necessary
connection to the act of looking at all. The work in question is
the research of the German physiologist Johannes MUller, the
single most important theorist of Yision in the first half of the
nineteenth century.
10
Tn his study of the physiology of the
senses, Mi.iller makes a comprehensi\'e statement on the subdi\'i-
sion and specialization of the human sensory apparatusi his fame
was due to his theorization of that specialization: the so-called
"doctrine _of specitiC ncne energies." It was a theory in many
ways as important to the Dineteenth century as the Molyneux
problem was to the eighteenth century. It was the foundation of
"
MODERNIZING VISION
Helmholtz's Optics, which dominated the second half of the
1800s; in science, philosophy, and widely pro
pounded, debated, and denounced even into the early tweritieth
century. (Also, I believe Marx was paraphrasing this work when
he discussed the separation of the senses in his! I 844 Manu-
scripts.11) In short, this is a major way in which! an observer was
figured in the nineteenth century, a way in which a certain
"truth" about sight was depicted.
The theory was based on the discovery that the nerves of
the different senses were physiologically distinct. lt asserted
quite simply-and this is what marks its epistemological scan-
dal-that a uniform cause (e.g., electricity) would generate
utterly different sensations from one kind of nhve to another.
Electricity applied to the opiic nerve produces! the experience of
light, applied to the skin the sensation of Conversely,
Miiller shows that a variety of different causes will produce the
same sensation in a given sensory nerve; in other words, he de-
scribes a fundamentall) arbitrary relation betWeen stimulus and
sensation. lt is a description of a body with an innate capacity,
one might eYen say a transcendental faculty, to .. misperceive, of an
'
eye that renders differences equivalent. !
HiS most exhaustive demonstration conce ns the sense of
sight, and he concludes that the observer's exp. rience of light
has no necessary connection with any actual light. M tiller enu-
merates the agencies capable of producing the sensation of light.
"The sensations of light and calor are produced where,er parts
of the retina are excited 1) by mechanical influences, such as
pressure, a blow or concussion 2) by electricity 3) by chemical
agents, such as narcotics, digitalis 4) by the stimulus of the blood
in a state of congestion."
12
Then last on his list, almost be-
grudgingly, he adds that luminous images also can be produced
by "the undulations and emanation which by their action on the
eye are called light."
Again the camera obscura model is made irrelnant. The
..
Jonalltall Crary I
experienct' of light hecom{'s from any stable point of rt>f-
eren<.:e or from any sourc.t or origin around which a world could
be constituted and appreht.nded. And or course the ,ery inde-
pendent identity or light had been undermined as a new
wa,e theory of light became part of a science or electro-mag-
netic phenomena.
Sight here has heen separated and specializt:d certainly, hut
it no longer resembles any classical models. The theory of spe-
cific nene energies presents the outlines of a ,isual modernity
in which the !\referential illusion" is laid bare. The
Yeiy absence or referentiaJity is the ground Or\. which 0{'\\' in-
Strumental techniques will construct for an obsenet:, a new
"real" world. It is a question of a percci\'er whose empiri-
cal nature renders identities unstable and mobile, and for whom
sensations are interchangeable.And remember, this is roughly
1830. In effect, the doctrine of specific ner\'e energies redefines
\'ision as a capacity for being affected sensations that ha,e no
necessary link to a referent, thus threatening any coherent
tem of meaning. M tiller's theory was potentially so nihilistic that
it is no wonder that Helmholtz and others, who accepted its em-
pirical premises, were impelled to iment theories of cognition
and signification which concealed its uncompromising cultural
implications. But what was at stake and seemed so threatening
was not just a new form of epistemological skepticism about the
unreliability of the senses but a positi,e reorganization of per-
ception and its objects. The issue was not just how does one
know what is real, but that new forms of the real were being
" fabricated and a new truth about the capacities of a human sub-
, \.)ect was being articulated in these terms.
The theory of specific nerve energies eradicated distinctions he-
hveen internal and external sensation, so that interiority was
drained of the meanings it once had for a classical obsern:r, or
..
MODEANIZING VISION
for the model of the camera obscura. In his supposedly empirical
description of the human sensory apparatus, MUller presents the
subject not as a unitary "tabula rasa," but as a composite struc-
ture on which a wide range of techniques and forces could pro-
duce a manifold of experiences that are all equally "reality." If
John Ruskin proposed reclaiming the "innocence of the eye,''
this was about as innocent as one could get. The observer is
simultaneously the object of knowledge and the object of pro-
cedures Of stimulation and normalization, which ha,e the essen-
tial capacity to produce experience for the subject. Ironically the
notions of the reflex arc and reflex action, '"hich in the se,en-
teenth century referred to vision and the optics of reflection,
begin to become the centerpicce of an emerging technology of
the subject, culminatilig in the work of Pavlov.:
In his account of the relation between and sensa-
tion, Miiller suggests not an orderly and functioning of
the senses, but rather their recepti,ity to calcJlated management'
and derangement. Emile Dubois-Reymond, a colleague of
Helmholtz, seriously pursued the possibility of electrically cross-
connecting nenes, enabling the eye to see sounds and the ear to
hear colors, well before Rimbaud. lt must be emphasized that
M tiller's research and that of psychophysics in nineteenth
century is inseparable from the resources a\'ailable by con-
temporary work in electricity and chemistry. $ome of the em-
pirical eYidence by Miiller had been a,ailable since antiquity, or
was in the domain of common-sense knowledge. However, what
is new is the extraordinary priYilcge ghen to a complex of elec-
tro-physical techniques. What constitutes "sensation" is dramat-
ically expanded and transformed, and it has little in common
with how it was in the eighteenth century. The adja-
cency of M tiller's doctrine of specific nerve energies to the tech-
nology of nineteenth-century modernity is made particularly
dear by Helmholtz:
..
,,
-'
CrDrJ [
Nen"es in the human bod_y have been occurate!v compared to celearaph
wires. Such a wire conducts one sinale kind of elctric current and no
other; it may be scronaer, it may be weaker, it may ma,e in either di-
rection; it has no ocher d!IJerences. accordina
to the d!!Jerent kinds cj apparatus with which we proride its termina-
tions, we can send telegraphic dispatches, rin9 bells, explode mines, de-
compose water, move maanecs, maanecize iron, light, and so
on. The same thing with our nerves. The condition if excfcemenc
which can be produced in them, and is conducted by them, is ...
everywhere the same.
1
3
Far from the specialization of the senses, Helmholtz is explicit
about the body's indifference to the sources of its experience
and of its capacity for multiple cOnnections ....-ith other agencies
and machines. The percei\'er here becomes a neutral conduit,
one kind of relay among others to allow optimum conditions of
circulation and exchangeability, whether it be of commodities,
energy, capital, images, or information.
V
The collapse of the camera obscura as a model for the status of
an obsener was part of a much larger process of modernization,
e\en as the camera obscura itself was an element of an earlier
modernity. By the early 1800s, ho"''e\er, the rigidity of the cam-
era obscura, its linear optical system, its fixed positions, its cate-
gorical distinction between inside and outside, its identification
of perception and object, were all too inflexible and unwieldy
for the needs of the new century. A more mobile, usable, and
productive obsen-er was needed in both discourse and prac-
tice-to be adequate to new uses of the body and to a \ast pro-
liferation of equally mobile and exchangeable signs and images.
Modernization entailed a decoding and deterritorialization of
,ision.
What 1\e been trying to do is give some sense of how rad-
ical Was the reconfi.guration of ,ision by 1840. If our problem is
42
MODEFINIZING VISION
vision and modernity we must"look first at these early decades,
not to modernist painting in the 1870s and 1880s. A new type
of obserYer was formed then, and not one that we can see
ured in paintings or prints. We'\'e been trained to assume that
an obscner will always \'isible tracks, that is, will be identi-
fiable in terms of images. But here it's a question of an obsener
..vho takes shape in other, grayer practices and discourses, and
whose immense legacy will be all the industries of the image and
the spectacle in the twentieth century. The body \\:hich had
been a neutral or invisible term in vision now was the thickness
from which knowledge of vision was derhed. This opacity or
carnal density of the observer loomed so suddenly into ,-je"v-1hat
its full consequences and effects could not be immediately real-
ized. But it "vas this ongoing articulation of ,-ision as nonveridi-
cal, as lodged in the body, that was a condirion of possibility both
for the artistic experimentation of modernism ard for new .
forms of domination, for what Foucault calls the "technology of
individuals."
14
Inseparable from the tcchnologie of domination
and of the spectacle in the later nineteenth and twentieth cen-
tury were of course film and photography. Paradoxically, the in-
creasing hegemony of these two techniques helped recreate the
myths that vision was incorporeal, ,eridical, and "realistic." But
if cinema and photography seemed to reincarnate the camera
obscura, it was only as a mirage of a transparent set of relations
that modernity had already overthrown.
Notes
I. John Locke, An Conctrnina Human Undcmandina (New York: Dowr Pul-l-
lications, 1959), ,ol. 2, xi, 17.
2. Ibid., \'0\. 2, iii, I.
3. Richard ond 1he .ltirror t?f .\"o1urc (Princrton: l,rinC('tOn Uni-
Press, !979), pp. 49-SO.
4. Renl? Dcscartes, The Philo:wphicol Writin,qs ?f Dcscorrcs. trans. John Cottingham
"
et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge Unhersity Press, 1984), ,al. 2, p. 24.
5. Johcmn Wolfgang ''On Goefhe, Theot}' tf Colours, tnns. Charles lock Eastlake
(Cilmbridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1970), my "Techniques of the
O('lobcr, nO. 45 (Summer 1988).
6. Mic he! Foucault, The Orckr if Thinas (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971 ),
pp. 318-310.
7, Georges Canguilhem, que le psychologie," jn his Erudes d'hisrolre er
de pMosophle des 5th ed. (Paris: J. Vrin, 1983), pp. 377-378.
8. See Gusta\' Fcchner, Elemenu if PsJchophpics, trans. Helmut E. Adler (New
York: Halt, Rinehart and 1%6).
9. Fn:dric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Norralll't dS o An
(!thaca, N.Y.: Comell University Press, 1981), pp. 62-64.
10. See Johannes MUller, Handbuch der des Menschen (Coblenz:
Hol:scher, 1838); f.lemenu tfPhplologle, trans. William Baly (London:
Walton, 1848).
11. See Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophir Manuscripts tf IBH ed. Dirk J.
Struik, trans. Martin Milligan (New York: International Publishers, 1964),
pp. 140-141.
12. MUller, p. 1064.
13. Hermann \'On He\mholtz, On 'tht Se-nsations t?f Tont as a &sis for the
Thtor:.r of Music, 2nd cd., trans. Alexander J. Ellis (New York: Oo\'er Publications,
1954), pp. 148-149.
14. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: Tht Birrh ?[the Priwn, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), p. 225.
..
DISCUSSION
Martin Jay I found your paper ,ery rich, but I want -to push one
aspect cif it-the binary opposition between \'eridical and non-
veridical sight-more than you did. It might be argued that the
Cartesian perspecti\'ai tradition- your tradition of the camera
obscura-was aware to some extent of the constitutin:-. rather
than the merely reflectiw, nature of \'isual experience. For ex-
ample, John Yolton, in his book Perceptual Acquaintance from
Descarces to Reid, deals with the semantic element in Descartes's
OptiCs; and here he argues (against Richard Rorty) that e\'en in
this "mirror of nature" tradition there is a constituti,e moment
that has to do with a natural geometry of the mind which is not
simply "out there" -that e,en in this most Ycridical' tradition of
\'ision there is a non\'eridical element or at one that is not
simply mimetic. Now I think you are right to isay that the intro-
duction of the body emphasizes this constituti\'e that was
hitherto relatiYely forgotten. But I want to ask if the result is
completely nomeridical or rather a complex mixture of the con-
stituthe and the reflectiYe, so that ,ision does not simply be-
come reduced to the stimulation of nenes but also has to do
with an external reality which is in a complicated way re-
produced-so that there is a mimetic momen_t that suni\es e\'en
after this reyo}ution that you described so .nicely. In short, does
the binary opposi_tion of the \'eridical and the non\'eridical hold
up? Or are there qualities of each in the two epochs that you
sketched?
Jo11athan Crary My use of these two \'ery distinct typologi'es sim-
plifies many of the complexities of the theories of \'ision in ques-
tion. In the nineteenth century, ,ision was most often described
in terms of mimetic and subjectiYe elements. Some theorists af-
ter Miil1er sought to reintroduce a dependable repreSentational
..
structure onto mere sensory data, for instance Helmholtz's no-
tion of "unconscious inference" and Hermann Lotze's "theory of
local signs." Nonetheless, I still insist that what is new in the
nineteerlth century is the emergence of_the body as a productive
physiolOgical apparatus; and if vision in the nineteenth century is
thought of as ''constituti,e,'' this means something radically dif-
ferent from what John Yolton means. The articulation of subjec-
tive vision in the 1830s and I840s-that is, of the subject's
productive role in the process of vision-coincided with a new
network of techniques and institutions by which visual experi-
ence could be produced for a subject. So the emergence of theo-
ries of nonveridical perception should be considered in relation
to processes of modernization that are specific to the nineteenth
century. That is, the abstraction and exchangeability of Yisual
experience is not unconnected to economic and social
transformations.
Joc:quellne Rose I ha\'e a question about the accusation of psychol-
ogism lAunched against the theories you described. As far as I
understood it, this could be seen simply in terms of perceptual
misapprehension. Did this psychologism, in either its positive or
its negative renderings, contain a theory of sexuality or of psy-
chic life, or was it entirely confined to the realm of perception
accurately or inaccurate!)' registered?
Crary It depends what you mean by "psyche." In a sense, some
of what I was talking about in the nineteenth century comes un-
der the general label of "psychophysics," and yes, it was very
, .-much a theory of psychic life and functioning. This is lodged in
a more general deYelopment of empirical theories of an uncon-
scious from J. F. Herbart to Fechner and Wilhelm Wundt. But
all of this is probably very different from what you mean.
Rose And no concept of sexuality is present either?
..
CISCU!!I$10N
Crary Certainly not in a major way. 1\e been speaking mainly
about de,elopments between 1820 and 1840. We would ha\"C to
talk about just what a "concept of sexuality" would mean at that
historical moment. Probably not what it does for us nmv.
Rose I'm just looking for a trace. Is this particular theory of
physiological misapprehension with its multiplicity of registers
and its lack of coherent inference-is model of "nenes and
brains" e\er a sexualized notion of psychic functioning? In eight
eenth- and nineteenth-century discussions of hysteria, the dis-
tinction between function and organic disorder is immediately
bound up with a of specifically feminine disorder. Does
anything of that kind occur in this realm as well?
Crary No.
llor11an Bryson You made one Yery suggestiYe reference to Turner.
I wonder whether the legacy of the obserYer constructed in the
nineteenth century is to be located mainly in cinema and pho-
tography, or whether there are traces in painting (other than
Turner) where one might find this construction at work.
i
Crary I was a bit reluctant to eYen mention because he is
so O\'erused as an example. Rut in the context the discussion
this morning, part of Turner's work represents the triumphant
reemergence of a kind of countertradition to geometrical optics
and perspectiYe, that is, the practice born out of the ifumaco of
Leonardo. Yet Turner's \Vork is bound up, as Michel Serres has
shm-.;n, in a whole new scientific paradigm. In general, there is
no immediate homologous relation between science and artistic
practice; there is a lag, a phase in \ .. hich older conventions and
techniques )?se their cffecthcness.
Your larger question- that is, whether we should look for
a nineteenth-century obsener in filrtv'photography or painting-
..
raises a set of other issues. I'm very deliberately trying to re-
frame the whole of the obsener by severing it from the
kinds of questions art history has usually asked. Rather than let
a history of an observer be defined in terms of the changing
forms of visual representations (which gives art "''arks a kind of
ontological priority); I think of an observer as an amalgam of
many disparate and forces. If it could be said that there is
an observer specific to the nineteenth century, it is only as an
ejJecE of a heterogeneous network of discursive, social, tech-
nological, and institutional relations. There is no observer prior
to this continually shifting fidd; the_ notion of an observer has
meaning only in terms of the multiple conditions under which
he or she is 'possible.
Hal Foster Jonathan, on the one hand, you say that in the nine-
teenth century vision comes to be known as produced in the
body, that it becomes regarded as somehow autonomous, sepa-
rated from any referent, and you suggest that this is a precondi-
tion of the modernist mo\"e that culminates in abstraction. On
the other hand, this modernist move is usually seen in terms of
a disembodiment of vision. Is there a way to clarify this, or is it
not really a contradiction?
Crary I wanted to sketch out in a more general way some of the
preconditions for modernism, one of which was the breakdown
of the representational model of the camera obscura on many
different lel"els in nineteenth-century culture. It is part of a
modernizing of vision which begins very early on-a kind of
away, a casting ofT of old encwnbrances that allows for
new notions of what is possible for a viewer. And various ideas
of autonomous vision and abstraction are certainly part of this .
. Of course, you are right that many modernist articulations of au-
tonomous vision or of pure visuality totally excluded the body,
..
DISCUSSION
though the t:xtent to which thC'y "dis-embody" \"ision really de-
pends on the specific cast in question. Van Gogh is a different
problem from Pissarro; Theodor Lipps is different from Maurice
Den is. But t,hey still depend on the models of subjectin dsion
and of nonveridical perception that emerged earlier, and these
models were h<;>Und up in massive transformations to the notions
both of subjecthityand of production.
..